Just over a decade ago, Gideon Rose coined the term “neoclassical realism” to describe an emerging body of work in the realist tradition that attempted to marry the structural worldview of neorealism with the foreign policy analysis of classical realism. The name stuck, and neoclassical realism has become a distinct and discrete research tradition within the broader rubric of realist theory. While there are many scholars working on specific theories within this tradition, however, there has to date been no clear attempt to systematically define neoclassical realism, to determine its core assumptions, and to review the state of, and breadth of, the tradition. Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey Taliaferro set out to do just that in this volume. As such, Neoclassical Realism is a state-of-the-art review of this approach, with chapters by many of the key figures in the tradition. It is thus necessary reading for students both of realism and of foreign policymaking.

Neoclassical realism begins from the neorealist premise that the international system, and anarchy, constrain the foreign policy options of states, and that states that do not respond to the security imperatives of the system are punished by the system. But it also accepts Kenneth Waltz's dictum that neorealism is not a theory of foreign policy. The key question for neoclassical realists is how we explain foreign policy behavior that diverges from the demands of system structure. This book argues that in order to understand the actual foreign policy of states, we need to look at domestic-level variables, and, in particular, at the interaction between what Lobell calls the “Foreign Policy Executive” and sectoral interests within the country. In a way, then, neoclassical realism can be understood as a meeting of Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979) and Robert Putnam's two-level games.

The introductory chapter, authored by the volume editors, identifies three core principles of realism. The first of these is tribalism, the assumption that people engage in politics as members of groups, rather than as individuals. The second is that politics is a perpetual struggle under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty. And the third is that power is the currency of politics. To this is added a neorealist conception of the international system, and a neoclassical realist theory of the state. As represented by the Foreign Policy Executive, the state has varying degrees of autonomy from society, and can be expected to think in terms of the national interest. Society, which includes both sectoral interests and legislators who represent them, can conversely be expected to think in terms of the effects of foreign policy on their particular interests. Neoclassical realism, then, looks at the extent to which, and the conditions under which, society is able to constrain the Foreign Policy Executive from acting in the national interest in response to the imperatives of the international system. The concluding chapter, by the same authors, argues that neoclassical realism is most useful in explaining foreign policy outcomes when the international system presents clear information on threats to national security, but does not provide clear information about what would be the best policy responses to those threats.

The various chapters flesh out this analytical structure in different ways. Two of the chapters, by Lobell and Ripsman, construct general models of neoclassical realism, Lobell's concerning the question of how states perceive threats and Ripsman's offering a general model of when and how domestic interests groups will have the greatest effect on foreign policy. Both models are intended as descriptive rather than predictive—they describe key variables as a preliminary step to the construction of specific theories of foreign policy outcomes. Chapters by Mark Brawley and Colin Dueck focus on the temporal effects of domestic politics on foreign policy. Brawley argues, in the context of the failure of interwar Britain, France, and the Soviet Union to balance against Germany, that policy decisions that made sense in the 1920s created path dependencies that constrained balancing behavior in the 1930s when the threat from Germany became more immediate. Dueck looks at the Vietnam and second Iraq wars, arguing that while the decision to go to war was driven by leaders' views of the international system, questions of the timing of escalation and implementation were driven by domestic political considerations. Taliaferro and Schweller look at questions of resource extraction, problematizing the neorealist assumption that states are capable of internal balancing to the extent that the Foreign Policy Executive feels is necessary.

The final two chapters, by Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Benjamin Fordham, are at the same time part of the neoclassical realist research tradition and internal critiques of the tradition. Sterling-Folker argues, in the context of trade and security relations between Taiwan and China, that we cannot understand the national interest without looking at social constructions such as identity. Fordham argues that systemic and domestic interests interact and must be understood as interactive rather than as exogenous. Both chapters question the extent to which systemic balancing is useful as an analytical starting point for understanding foreign policy, because it is so underspecified. This is the case both because it is rare that the system identifies an ideal policy response and because generally there is content to the national interest beyond simple state survival. As Sterling-Folker notes on page 111, “realist structural expectations are so broad that most of the heavy explanatory lifting must be done by constructivism instead, which is why neoclassical realist scholarship typically produces historical narratives.”

A related critique is that there is a tension between the realist assumption of tribalism and the neoclassical realist model of the state. This model can be seen either as an interest-based or a bureaucratic model of the state—people act in either their personal or immediate bureaucratic interests. The Foreign Policy Executive is the only group of actors in the model truly concerned with the national interest because it is the only group bureaucratically responsible for it. But the realist assumption is that the state matters in part because its population sees itself as part of the state as a corporate political actor. The assumption suggests competition over control of foreign policy by different visions of what the national interest should be, rather than neoclassical realism's model of competition by parochial interests for control of foreign policy.

This volume succeeds well in realizing its stated goals: to specify the assumptions and analytical structures of neoclassical realism, and to identify some of the limitations of the approach. It provides an excellent starting point for considering the current state and future trajectories of the research tradition. It may best serve the research tradition if it succeeds in communicating the point of the internal critics in this volume—that understanding domestic processes of foreign policymaking is both a contextual and a sociological undertaking, and that these factors, rather than the microeconomic premises of neorealism, might be a better starting point for scholars interested in explaining the foreign policies of states.