THE end of the cold war is arguably the most momentous event in
international politics since the end ofWorld War II and the dawn
of the atomic age. Paraphrasing John F. Kennedy on the advent of nuclear
weapons, one scholar sees the end of the cold war as changing "all
the answers and all the questions."1 Another scholar, however, denies
that there have been any "fundamental changes in the nature of international
politics since World War II" and asserts that states will have to
worry as much about military security as they did during the cold war
(Mearsheimer, in Allison and Treverton, 214, 235). Most of the fifty or
so authors whose work appears in the books reviewed here take the
more moderate position that the end of the cold war changes some of
the questions and some of the answers, but they disagree over which
questions and answers are at issue.