In his book, Kevin Narizny develops and tests a partisan model of grand strategy. His model presents a unique bridging of political economy and security studies, the cases are rich and clearly articulate historical events, and he engages a number of important relative power and ideational arguments. Narizny's intent is to advance Innenpolitik, or the domestic determinants of international security—a field that if narrowly defined remains heavily state-centric, such as offensive realism, or relies on structural modifiers, such as defensive realism, to account for departures, pathologies, and anomalies from expected state behavior. In both instances, the state is mostly autonomous from societal constraints and is assumed to have a unified conception of the national interest. The author's domestic political economy model challenges these assumptions. In advancing a bottom-up or partisan explanation for grand strategy, he highlights the competing and divergent societal preferences over the definition of the national interest and security policy toward great powers and weak states alike. By examining preference formation and aggregation, he can answer why the same state might pursue different security policies given similar circumstances.

Narizny's dependent variable is grand strategy, which reflects the “general principles” by which a state pursues its international goals. For the author, grand strategy varies along three dimensions: activism, geographic locus (in the core toward other great powers and in the periphery toward weak powers), and the degree of force. In ascending order of force, the alternative grand strategies are isolationism, cooperation, coercion, and conquest. These grand strategies take on different meanings whether in the core (conquest becomes supremacism) or the periphery (conquest becomes imperialism). These strategies also reflect different alignment patterns, such as collective security, realpolitic, and counterbalancing.

Narizny's independent variable is sectoral interests, reflecting a sector's involvement (rather than exposure) in the international economy. This includes domestic interests, which have little or no involvement in the international economy; core interests, which rely on trade with the great powers; and peripheral interests, which rely on income from secondary and weaker states (though, during the period of study, U.S. merchandise exports as a share of national income rarely exceed 4% [Fig. 2.2], in contrast to the much higher numbers in the British case [Fig. 5.1]). Narizny's unique conceptual bridge is that a sector's international commercial involvement translates into general grand strategic preferences due to the subsequent domestic distributional and electoral consequences. Domestic interests prefer isolation and minimal foreign engagement in either the core or the periphery; core interests prefer internationalism and cooperation with the great powers (over coercion or conquest); peripheral interests prefer interventionism and coercion toward weaker states, and in some instances imperialism and conquest (over internationalism and cooperation). Different sectors and combinations thereof will favor a different grouping of grand strategies, some involving compromises (but none result in contradictory, incoherent, or stalemate security strategies, nor is there any attempt to discuss partisan politics as an obstacle that can impede states from behaving in a rational manner). Two intervening variables, international and domestic constraints, act as modifiers on a sector's grand strategic preference.

In aggregating these sectoral interests, each sector or coalition selects an executive whose strategic beliefs reflect his or her core constituency and advance their economic interests—thereby connecting domestic preferences to executive behavior. Narizny recognizes the potential for pitfalls, such as principal-agent problems and the selection of a representative leader that can result in departures from the expectations of his theory.

The cases Narizny analyzes are the grand strategy of a rising America (1865–1941) and a declining Great Britain (1868–1939). Each case is divided into three chapters and numerous subcases: discussion of the constellation of partisan interests, the ruling party's or coalition's preference in the periphery, and its preference in the core. For the United States, American grand strategy reflects the partisan competition between the industrial Northeast (domestic and peripheral interests) and the agricultural South (core interests). Republicans were the party of the former, which favored a strategy of intervention and in some instances imperialism in the periphery, and realpolitik in the core. Democrats were the party of the latter, but to win the presidency, they also required support from the Northeast, resulting in a compromised grand strategy of intervention in the periphery and internationalism in the core.

The case studies are especially rewarding. Narizny deftly tests his political economy model against realist (offensive, defensive, state-centered) and ideational arguments. He concedes when grand strategies do not correspond to his predictions. Moreover, one gets a clear picture of the financial trade-offs across grand strategies, the grand strategic preference of core interests in the periphery and peripheral interests in the core, and the nature of a compromised grand strategy within a partisan coalition.

There are some shortcomings in the model and cases. First, Narizny's unit of interest aggregation, sectoral politics, while parsimonious, is too broad to take full advantage of the richness of political economy. Missing in his account is the intense politics behind the construction of a broad and log-rolled winning coalition from narrow interests, and the resulting internal pulling and hauling over the definition of the national interest. Moreover, state bureaucracies are disregarded. There is no role in the sectoral competition for the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Commerce Department, the State Department, or the Federal Reserve or private actors such as the Bank of England. Second, Narizny's division of American and British grand strategy between the core and the periphery is artificial and neglects their interrelationship. For instance, London's retrenchment prior to World War I from parts of the periphery (including army bases and the naval concentration in the home waters and the Mediterranean), and especially from the Americas and the Far East, is at least partly driven by events in the core—France and Russia's alliance, and later by Germany's naval construction. Third, the application of the model in the U.S. case has a tendency to be static. While in a post–Civil War United States manufacturing dominates the North and agriculture the South, events like World War I and the Great Depression contribute to important changes, such as the rise of income from international banking, finance, and investment (and their advocacy for the Dawes and Young Plans, which are ignored), and the decline of income from agriculture as a share of national income (Fig. 2.2).

These points do not detract from Narizny's contribution. His book is a wonderful addition to the debate on the sources of grand strategy. His model answers a number of important questions that defy realism and challenge ideational arguments, such as the recurring cycles in American history between a foreign policy of isolationism and activism; why at the peak of their power the United States and Great Britain were not more expansionist; and why a declining Britain engaged in territorial expansion in the periphery.