Jenel Virden's brief but ambitious book attempts to place American wars of the twentieth century in a broad framework. Virden examines the causes and some of the consequences of these wars on both the foreign and domestic spheres and, more originally, seeks to frame these within the context of the just-war tradition.

Virden is surely right to suggest that US Presidents generally sought to justify American entry into the wars in question (World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam) by using the language of just war, and she sets this up quite nicely in the brief introduction (1–7). There follows a general examination of the four wars; each is given its own chapter, with discussions of the background and the way the war was fought and a section on its consequences at home and abroad.

She laudably outlines the international factors that led to the wars, as well as tackling their wide-ranging impact on the United States, arguing that “just war theory needs to be applied to the home front in order to formulate a complete theory” (6). She describes the home front as “as important as the battlefront” in World War I because it was “the first modern, total war” (21), leading to racial tensions and suppression of perceived subversives. In contrast, in the case of Korea, Virden suggests that the domestic front was of far less importance because it was not a “total war,” meaning the government did not institute mass mobilization and organized labour refused to make concessions on such issues as demands for better pay and conditions (105).

This is certainly a compelling argument, yet each chapter could at times have done with a fuller discussion of the implications of just-war theory – in most cases it is only implicit in the analysis. As a result, it is not always clear how the wars directly affected the political and social changes discussed. Moreover, while the conclusion returns to the main theme, it also leaves some areas unexplored and begs questions about the focus. Virden seems to ignore the high degree of subjectivity that inevitably pertains to just-war theory. She accepts uncritically, for example, that Woodrow Wilson fought World War I in order to gain a just peace (159), although the question might equally well be “just for whom?” Moreover, she makes the questionable claim that the wars in Korea and Vietnam ended more justly than either of the two world wars, because the protagonists eventually sat down at the negotiating table to bring about a compromise (162). She therefore seems to ignore the consequences of war for both North and South Korea and the newly united Vietnam, as though enemy states were outside the ambit of just-war theory. This seems anomalous when she does discuss the international impact of World War II (76–9).