World politics in the twenty-first century looks set to unfold in the context of major shifts in the distribution of power between leading states. How rising states act on the world stage is thus a pressing concern of international relations theorists and foreign-policy practitioners alike. Under what circumstances do rising powers implement revisionist grand strategies to upend the international status quo? When will rising powers adopt predatory behavior, perhaps pursuing territorial expansionism at the expense of weaker neighbors? And is it ever possible for the leaders of rising powers to exercise restraint on the world stage?

In Power and Restraint, Jeffrey W. Meiser addresses these and related questions through a detailed study of U.S. grand strategy between 1898 and 1941. He argues that the United States exhibited a remarkable disinclination for territorial expansion during this period—albeit with some notable exceptions—and that the country’s domestic institutions were largely responsible for its underexpansion. The lesson, then, is that burgeoning material power does not inevitably lead to expansionism on behalf of rising states: With the “right” sort of domestic configuration, rising powers can be expected to abnegate the potential fruits of their newfound strength.

At its core, this book sets out to establish two things: the descriptive inference that the United States exercised broad strategic restraint toward its neighbors during the period 1898–1941; and the explanatory argument that domestic institutions (the separation of powers, elections, public opinion, and federalism) and strategic culture hindered the cause of would-be expansionists (pp. xvi, 9–20). In order to establish the former, Meiser provides case studies of 34 instances where expansionism was a serious possibility for U.S. decision makers. He focuses in particular on territorial expansion as a key measure of revisionist behavior—thus, cases in which the United States had a legitimate prospect of acquiring new territory and when at least some domestic actors were calling for expansion. Sometimes, these cases did result in expansionist foreign policies—the annexations of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, for example, or Woodrow Wilson’s occupations of Veracruz, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. But more often than not, the author finds that the United States opted for less ambitious foreign policies than its international advantages would have allowed for: either the United States declined to annex new territory (as with Cuba in 1898) or its leaders pursued interventionist foreign policies that were limited, delayed, or temporary.

Overall, Meiser’s descriptive argument finds support in the historical record. While some readers might challenge the coding of certain cases—was it really an example of “restraint” for the United States to end its military occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic?—and while some cases of expansion are conspicuously absent from the analysis (most egregiously, perhaps, the annexation of American Samoa in 1899–1900 and the purchase of the Danish West Indies [U.S. Virgin Islands] in 1917), it does seem true that the United States could have acquired more territory during the period 1898–1941 but declined to do so. The case studies are well written, accessible, and tightly organized. Meiser relies mostly upon the secondary historical literature to code his case studies—an understandable choice, given that the sheer number of cases under investigation would have made original archival work impracticable—although there is liberal reference to official documents released as part of the Foreign Relations of the United States series.

Meiser’s empirical work also helps to establish the plausibility of his causal argument regarding the importance of domestic institutions and strategic culture. However, the brevity of each individual case study means that it is difficult for him to fully test for observable implications of his theory’s causal mechanism across all 34 cases. Instead, each case study presents the reader with evidence to justify the coding of the dependent variable (i.e., as a case of expansionism, restraint, or something in between), followed by a condensed, but uniformly impressive, historical narrative to explore the domestic context of the period. The persuasiveness of the argument suffers somewhat from the fact that Meiser only tests for two alternative explanations: defensive realism and what he calls “economic interest group theory” (pp. 22–23). Students of shifting power might wonder why power-transition theory and the bargaining model of war were left underexplored, given that both schools of thought provide prominent explanations for why states sometimes decline to pursue revisionist behavior. Even so, few readers will be left unconvinced by his broad argument that US political institutions and anti-imperialist norms militated against Washington undertaking ambitious foreign policies of expansion during this period.

One issue warrants mentioning, however. Meiser pitches his argument as an explanation of (non)expansionist behavior by states undergoing major increases in power, but he does not persuasively demonstrate why his theory should not also be capable of explaining instances of nonexpansionist behavior per se. As he acknowledges, the United States undertook massive territorial expansionism between 1776 and the Civil War and pursued a different sort of expansionist behavior after 1941 (the period between 1865 and 1898 was marked by relative underextension). But all of the causal factors identified by the author remained relatively constant across these time periods: Certainly, there was nothing unique about America’s major political institutions during 1898–1941, and anti-imperialist norms have existed alongside expansionist tendencies ever since 1776. This raises the question of why domestic politics should have smothered the U.S. expansion during 1898–1941, when the United States was a rising power, but not during any other period of the nation’s history. Despite some effort, Meiser does not offer a compelling response (pp. xxix–xxx).

This question mark notwithstanding, Power and Restraint does succeed at lending ballast to the literature on the domestic sources of foreign policy. Through his case selection and historical work, Meiser provides ample evidence of the need for an analysis of domestic politics in conjunction with international-level factors when explaining politics among great powers. While he does not pigeonhole himself into any one theoretical tradition, his approach bears obvious similarities with several of them. For example, there is a close resemblance to neoclassical realist theories of foreign policy, which hold that states will fail to respond optimally to the international environment when there is a pathology in the domestic system (in this case, divided political institutions and a strategic culture of nonexpansion). Yet Meiser’s findings are also compatible with liberal arguments that strategic restraint is an optimal strategy for great powers (and especially the United States) to pursue, an orientation that is both rational (self-interested) and normatively desirable. While his goal is not to provide an answer to this puzzle of whether restraint is a good or bad thing (and the related matter of whether America’s domestic institutions serve the country well in terms of foreign policymaking), readers are given abundant opportunity to come up with their own conclusions to these important questions.

Finally, it is worth returning to the point that this is a timely book. In the coming years, it is surely inevitable that questions of shifting power and the durability of international settlements will become more and more prominent in the field of international relations. Power and Restraint will make an excellent addition to any syllabus dealing with international change in general and U.S. foreign policy in particular. Undergraduates, graduate students, and advanced researchers alike will find it readable, enjoyable, and instructive.