The Price of Power

"The Price of Power" was written to change the way people think about international politics. Alan Lamborn analyzes international relations through a lens that integrates theory with principles of how domestic and international politics actually work. The result is a book that not only advances our understanding of many central theoretical issues in modern scholarship, but also reveals the continuity between these contemporary issues and the classic questions that have occupied political thinkers since Thucydides. Lamborn argues that the core of power in international politics is actually resource-dependent statecraft. Shifting the theoretical focus to the domestic politics of international power and foreign policy choice, he constructs a framework for evaluating the effects of political and policy risks on foreign policy choice. To use domestic financial and human resources for foreign policy objectives, policymakers must pay the domestic political price of overcoming opposition. To reduce that domestic price of power, policymakers often alter their foreign policies or bargaining strategies in ways that increase the risks to policy and create a diplomatic price of power.
Lamborn uses this framework to examine the history of British, French and German foreign policymaking from the 1870s to the 1980s.