Since the publication of Kenneth N. Waltz's (1979) Theory of International Politics, it has been a cliché for books and articles to begin by stating that neorealism is the dominant school of international relations theory. While the veracity of that statement is debatable, neorealism, specifically Waltz's balance-of-power theory (later called defensive realism), and its offshoots, such as John Mearsheimer's offensive realism, offers a convenient target for political scientists advancing rival international relations theories, as well as for historians who are deeply skeptical about parsimonious theories in the first place. History and Neorealism is the latest entry in the three-decade-old debate between the neorealists and their various critics.

This collection—edited by a leading international relations theorist, Richard Rosecrance, and two distinguished historians, Ernest R. May (who died before the book's release) and Zara Steiner—poses the question (pp. 2–3): Do neorealist balance-of-power theory and offensive realism actually explain the grand strategic choices of rising and declining great powers across different geographic regions and across time?

The succeeding chapters seek to determine whether leaders behaved according to what the editors and contributors identify as core tenets of neorealism: All states strive to maximize relative power. Consequently, leaders must make rational cost–benefit calculations; must eschew long-term cooperation with other states for fear of exploitation; are largely immune from domestic political constraints, ideological filters, and cognitive biases in foreign policy decision making; and ultimately pursue diplomatic and military strategies consistent with an objective measurement of their state's military and economic capabilities (or what May, Rosecrance, and Steiner call their “power line”). Instead, the contributors find that when leaders made decisions to go to war, sparked international crises, initiated rearmament programs, forged alliances, engaged in multilateral cooperation, or made unilateral concessions to opponents, they often did so for reasons far removed from the international balance of power. Thus, concerns for international status, dictators' idiosyncratic beliefs in national will or military prowess, bureaucratic rivalries among military services, domestic instability and coalition politics, and sometimes the deliberate suppression of intelligence often trumped Realpolitik calculations.

The tendency for great powers to pursue strategies well below or well above their power line is a recurrent theme in the case chapters written by five historians and three political scientists. Thus, as Steiner's chapter shows, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's determination to avoid war in September 1938 over the fate of Czechoslovakia, only to reverse course and declare war in September 1939 ostensibly in defense of Poland, stemmed from a gross miscalculation of the military balance between Nazi Germany and the Anglo-French coalition. Similarly, Niall Ferguson contends that Adolf Hitler's willingness to risk war in 1938, despite the unpreparedness of the Wehrmacht, the mounting strains on the German economy caused by the Four Year Plan, and the perceived strength of the French army, constitutes an anomaly for offensive realism, which might expect more caution given Germany's power position at the time. Bureaucratic rivalry between the Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy, not a sober assessment of relative power, led Japan to embark upon a campaign of expansion in China and Southeast Asia between 1931 and 1940 and ultimately to initiate war against the United States in December 1941 without any plausible theory of victory, according to Michael Barnhart.

Samuel R. Williamson shows that in July 1914, the leaders of Austria-Hungary set out to punish Serbia for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in order to ensure the survival of their multinational empire, and not out of a desire to maximize relative power in the Balkans. Sherill Brown Wells and Samuel F. Wells argue that, contrary to offensive realism, since 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany has sought to enhance its security and prosperity by surrendering sovereignty to NATO and the European Union. May contends that U.S. grand strategy after both world wars was more restrained than the objective power line would have expected. Robert S. Litwak argues that the “overuse of hard power” during the George W. Bush administration—specifically the Iraq war—was contrary to a realistic assessment of U.S. strategic interests, an argument that most self-described realists (most notably Waltz and Mearsheimer) also made in 2002–3. Rounding out the volume's empirical section are case studies of China's entry into the Korean War in the fall of 1950 by Richard B. Kennedy and the Soviet Union's unilateral concessions to the United States on nuclear arms control, German reunification, and membership in NATO, between 1985 and 1990, by Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko.

Other chapters address more general themes. John M. Owen makes some telling criticisms of the limitations of neorealism relative to other theories that posit a causal role for certain domestic-level variables. Jonathan Haslam, a historian of realist thought, exposes some of the inconsistencies in Mearsheimer's offensive realism and the policy prescriptions he draws from it.

There are some major weaknesses in the volume. Several chapters, such as historian Paul W. Schroeder's examination of the coexistence of warfare with tentative efforts to create a European “society of states” in the period from 1648 to 1789 or Rosecrance's examination of transformation of power over the past century, merely repeat arguments made in earlier books or journal articles. Robert O. Keohane and Lisa Martin's spirited (and previously published) defense of institutionalist theory as exemplifying Imre Lakatos's criteria for a “progressive problem shift” is too abstract and narrowly methodological to add much to this volume's objective. Since there is not much new scholarship, the volume as whole does not really advance theoretical debates or identify new areas of cross-fertilization between the international relations subfield of political science and the field of international history.

The underlying conclusion that neorealism and offensive realism do not explain much history is hardly surprising, given the fact that the editors and contributors present versions of both theories far more deterministic than anything Mearsheimer or Waltz actually wrote. Additionally, several contributors, including Rosecrance, Keohane, Martin, and Owen, rose to prominence as critics of realism and have spent their careers advancing the decidedly nonrealist theories of commercial liberalism, complex interdependence, institutionalism, and the democratic peace. The proverbial deck was stacked against neorealism and offensive realism from the start.

A final weakness of the volume is its failure to engage or even acknowledge neoclassical realism. Neoclassical realism arose in the mid-1990s because younger scholars saw the need to combine the insights of Waltz, Mearsheimer, Robert Gilpin, and other neorealists about the constraints of the international system with the practical insights about state–society relations and the dilemmas confronting leaders in measuring relative power and mobilizing resources for national security found in the classical realism of Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, Klaus Knorr, and Arnold Wolfers. While the international system sets broad parameters for states' likely grand strategies, the causal path between systemic pressures and observable policy outputs is complex, indirect, and problematic. To establish a causal connection, therefore, detailed case studies and process tracing are necessary (Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, eds., Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy, 2009). Furthermore, in the past 15 years, neoclassical realists have produced book- and article-length studies of each of the historical cases examined in this volume.

Unfortunately, History and Neorealism is less than the sum of its parts. While some of the chapters are well done, the volume is unlikely to encourage more historians to embrace international relations theories or more neorealists to undertake detailed historical research.