This book reframes U.S. constitutional war powers by looking beyond the familiar question of which branch may start a conflict. Conventional accounts focus on moments when U.S. forces enter combat – most notably President Truman’s decision to fight in Korea without congressional approval in 1950 – and treat those episodes as the central test of constitutional limits. This book argues that such moments capture only part of how war powers operate in practice. Decisions to go to war are rarely isolated acts; they are shaped by earlier choices about force structure, troop deployments, alliances, and threats, often made jointly by Congress and the Executive. The book opens by pairing Truman’s Korea intervention with a less examined but equally consequential decision: the stationing of large U.S. forces in Western Europe to deter Soviet aggression. That peacetime deployment sparked constitutional debate and helped establish practices that continue to underpin American alliances. From there, the book traces how war powers evolved alongside American strategy from the early republic through the Cold War, the Global War on Terror, and today’s security challenges. Rather than offering a fixed constitutional formula, the book treats war powers as an adaptive system shaped by law, strategy, and institutional practice.

Throughout its history, the United States has promoted the legal norm, doctrine, and policy of freedom of navigation. America’s relative isolation from markets and alliances in Europe and Asia has reinforced a philosophical preference for a liberal order of the oceans, itself a natural extension of a liberal legal order at home. After World War II, the United States was dispositive in entrenching freedom of navigation into the rules-based international order to ensure that the seas and oceans remain open to all nations for trade, travel, and security, governed by commonly agreed-upon principles rather than the arbitrary decisions of individual coastal states. This policy has supported global stability, economic growth, and peaceful cooperation and deterrence, which are foundational to the rules-based international system. Preventing arbitrary or excessive maritime claims ensures that no one state can unilaterally control or restrict access to the maritime global commons. The United States has also advocated freedom of navigation for military mobility and the projection of naval power to maintain a global alliance structure in Asia and Europe.

This introduction outlines the core puzzle of “insincere coercion” in international relations: why do states frequently issue ultimatums they expect, or even intend, to be rejected? Conventional wisdom holds that coercion is difficult and often fails, yet this book argues that it is frequently an instrumental step toward broader foreign policy goals. The chapter introduces the concept of insincere coercion, distinguishing it from bluffing or domestic diversion. It outlines two variations, expected and intentional failure, where coercion is deliberately utilized despite the unlikelihood of a negotiated settlement. Four primary rationales for this behavior are identified: mobilizing international and/or domestic support, making an example of a target, restoring deterrence, and moving the goalposts by increasing demands. To support these claims, the author introduces the Coercion in Interstate Militarized Conflict (CIMC) dataset, which demonstrates that while coercion alone succeeds less than half the time, coercers ultimately achieve their foreign policy objectives in 59 percent of cases when utilizing violence. By reframing coercion failure not as a diplomatic miscalculation but as a designed, strategic choice, the introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive reevaluation of how the threat and use of military force function in modern statecraft.

Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical foundation for understanding why states engage in insincere coercion by making compellent demands they expect and/or intend to be rejected. It introduces a sequential militarized conflict model detailing the strategic interactions between a coercer and a target, incorporating options for accommodation, brute force, and coercion. While conventional explanations, such as asymmetric information, commitment problems, and cognitive biases, help to understand why coercion inadvertently fails, they cannot account for why a state would intentionally pursue a coercive strategy designed to fail. To resolve this puzzle, the chapter relaxes standard unitary actor and limited time horizon assumptions to develop a four-part typology of insincere coercion. States intentionally court coercion failure to: mobilize international and/or domestic support for subsequent brute force or containment policies; make an example of the target to deter others; restore long-term deterrence by imposing costs that alter the target’s future calculations; or move the goalposts by increasing demands once the initial conflict reveals a favorable balance of power. Ultimately, this theoretical framework reveals how coercion failure serves as a rational instrument for achieving broader foreign policy success.

Debtors’ prisons played a vital – albeit seemingly paradoxical – role in early modern society. In many cases, those incarcerated could not or would not pay their debts. Instead, they languished in prison and racked up new debts to their gaolers. Chapter 2 addresses this seemingly self-contradictory system by showing that, even when it prevented the repayment of debts, imprisonment helped to protect wider social and economic interests, balancing those of landed wealth and emergent capital. It analyses the social, economic, legal and ideological shifts that underwrote this convoluted system, excavating emergent carceral ideologies. In turn, it considers the array of measures taken to alleviate the pressure that growing numbers of insolvent debtors placed on England’s prisons, mitigating the worst effects of the structural weakness of debt incarceration. These attempts to relieve an overburdened system – which ultimately stabilised the debtors’ prison into the eighteenth century – were essential because prisons had developed disciplinary purposes that proved vital to early modern social relations, even when its coercive functions failed.

Potential immigrants do not even apply for a visa because they also confront social forces from the community bearing on their families that deter them from leaving. Many young adults become deterred from migrating not merely from visa requirements, but also due to opposition and pressure from the family. Despite how most of China has a patrilocal kinship system and culture that more strongly sanctions men from marrying outside their bloodline, Chinese parents are much more likely to oppose women going abroad than men, even if this opposition decreases as they age. Aside from overt opposition children may face, many women specifically are discouraged from migrating abroad or even traveling abroad due to concerns about their daughter’s physical safety, socioeconomic dependence on their parents, and societal peer pressure. Such concerns are particularly strong in the patriarchal context of China as it is mediated by a traditional filial duty amongst the one-child-only generation toward their parents and the intense influence that parents exercise over the educational, career, and marital choices of their adult children – both of which have a stronger deterrent effect on daughters than on sons.

Deterrence also operates through a belief among potential immigrants that they need time to build sufficient socioeconomic status (SES) and social ties in their country of origin with which they can prove to foreign governments, family, and others in the country of origin they will return to their country when applying for an NIV and therefore enhance the opportunities they have to travel abroad. Many repeatedly defer migrating abroad because they devote time accumulating SES and social ties to meet several expectations of society, like the expectation that adult children complete a college education, obtain a “respectable” and stable job, purchase a home with a mortgage, marry, have and raise children, work enough to afford paying for the mortgage and sending their child to university, and increasingly take care of their parents as they age – all of which effectively tie up and therefore ground many individuals from going abroad. Others deterred from applying for a visa later often become especially eager to intentionally provide their children with preimmigration support to go abroad as what I conceptualize as second-generation emigrants.

The study of interstate influence has a long tradition. Yet it continues to struggle with seemingly insurmountable issues regarding its logic of inquiry, the requirements of valid inference, and the necessary evidence to support empirical claims. This chapter discusses various conceptions of influence, the logic of selection, and the relevance of counterfactual reasoning. It also presents a preview of the chapters to follow that analyze China’s influence attempts and their outcomes in different countries and at various times. It also places these studies in a comparative context to advance a more general understanding of the exercise of interstate influence attempts and their outcomes.

This concluding chapter applies the findings of the book to recent developments in the Middle East, which are embedded in broader relational networks. It then focuses on questions of US foreign policy and the role that its security assistance has played in the formation, maintenance, and erosion of international order in the shadow of the enmenshed intergroup and intragroup security dilemmas. The chapter offers lessons learned that inform US foreign policy going forward, with a focus on the two rules of deterrence under the security dilemma: maximizing the credibility of one’s threats and promises while minimizing the sense of threat that others perceive from one’s security investments.

This chapter argues that disproportionate police brutality against Black people is a fact of every American generation because the systems of oversight are not designed to deter it. The history of unchecked misconduct shows that criminal charges are almost unheard of because police criminality is not perceived as criminal. Civil constraints also face numerous structural obstacles--from a failure to monitor to a range of doctrinal roadblocks judges have imposed on federal civil rights laws. Many cases never get to court because of administrative hurdles drafted into collective bargaining agreements. Despite a small number of exceptions, the consistent result is a mutual lack of trust between Black communities and the public safety officers they count on and a systemic lack of deterrence when policing goes wrong.

Beccaria of Milan was a member of a group of high-powered intellectuals, the self-styled ‘Academy of Fisticuffs’, headed by his patron and mentor Pietro Verri. Unlike the milieu of Pelli, his group was committed to the principles of the European Enlightenment. He admired and was strongly influenced by leading French philosophers, in particular, Montesquieu (the Persian Letters) and Helvétius. Of earlier authorities he was particularly drawn to Francis Bacon and Heineccius, and was influenced by preceding natural jurists including Hobbes. His attack on the death penalty begins with an individual interpretation of the social contract. His argumentation is multi-faceted. It involves, among other things, an in-depth analysis (after Helvétius) of human nature, and a forthright argument in favour of perpetual hard labour as the ultimate penalty, based on the claim that this (long-drawn-out) punishment would be a more effective deterrent than (quick) execution.

Plato was the initiator, in the philosophical literature, of the idea that punishment should look to the future, not to the past. It must be beneficial and serve some useful purpose. Beneficial to whom? The first part of Plato’s answer is striking: ‘to the offender’. Punishment should be directed at reforming offenders rather than simply penalizing them because they had offended. This idea was accepted by a succession of (non-abolitionist) thinkers. It is still with us today. Plato was presumably unaware that he was opening a loophole that could be exploited by later reformers who sought a reduction, and then finally abolition, of the death penalty: an offender sentenced to a programme of rehabilitation was not a prime candidate for execution. However, a further possible answer to Plato’s question might be: ‘(beneficial) not for the criminal but for society as a whole’. Plato also held that punishment might serve as a deterrent, and this opened the door to harsh treatment, including death, of some offenders, namely, those who were judged ‘incurable’. One might kill a murderer, or a disparager of the gods, to deter others.

The chapter surveys various papers in the literature that specifically analyze deterrence and preemption policies from the perspective of game theory. Emphasis is given to certain classes of models in order to highlight key aspects and characteristics of the policies studied. For example, when countries engage in deterrence against terrorist organizations, it is likely that they may simply deflect terrorist attacks to other countries. Preemptive policies on the other hand, provide positive benefits to other countries and therefore any benefits stemming from this policy, may be underprovided due to the problem of free riding.

The notion that people with psychopathy traits do not respond positively to treatment efforts may sound intuitive. If people are inflexible, uncaring towards others, manipulative, and just generally difficult to get along with, it follows that treatment might be ineffective. However, what is intuitive and what is accurate do not always overlap perfectly. The analyses in this chapter contribute to a growing body of literature indicating that individuals with psychopathy traits can change and respond in expected ways to intervention strategies (Bernstein et al., 2021; Wong et al., 2015). The analyses in this chapter identified that people with psychopathy traits who spent more time incarcerated, thereby increasing access to rehabilitative services, experienced a subsequent decline in offending. It is possible that these findings reflect the efficacy of the risk-need-responsivity model, wherein intensive intervention strategies reduce criminal behaviour for high-risk persons. Treatment modalities for people with psychopathy traits are discussed.

The primary conceptual underpinning of understanding offender decision making is that they are rational actors. This chapter applies rational-choice approaches that are used to understand everyday criminals to the problem of lone-actor terrorism. The first section poses the question: who are the lone actor terrorists? It is established that they are a broad set of individuals; no profile exists, and they are varied in terms traits and pathways into terrorism. The second section discusses the rationality of lone actor terrorists in terms of the decision-making processes surrounding choosing a target and hostile reconnaissance. Decisions about when, where, and how to carry out a particular attack derive from simple cost-benefit analyses, including anticipated and unexpected costs. The next section discusses how cost-benefit analyses can be used to disrupt lone-actor terrorism through detection and deterrence. The final section consists of several illustrative examples. This is followed by suggestions of basic prevention mechanisms to counter lone-actor terrorism based on the situational qualities of their behaviour.