Why Nations Cooperate: Circumstance and Choice in International Relations (review)

186 SAISREVIEW process, combined with the Contras' ever-dwindling credibility as democrats, ultimately rendered the Reagan Administration's policy untenable. Elizabeth Cobbs' entry, "U.S. Business: Self-interest and Neutrality," provides the most provocative essay in the volume. She argues that, contrary to general perception, U.S. business had a stronger commitment to consistent, constructive relations with Latin America than did the U.S. Government. She argues that the interventionist activities of United Fruit Company in Guatemala in the 1950s, International Petroleum Company in Peru in the 1960s and ITT in Chile in the 1970s were aberrations. Most American business did not have a particular preference for dictatorships, she argues. What they wanted was favorable, untroubled relations. Even in the deviant cases, Cobbs maintains that evidence indicates that the U.S. Government instigated the military interventions for its own ideological and geopolitical reasons, not primarily to protect U.S. business interests. A common criticism runs through nearly all the case studies in this book. Namely, that U.S. efforts to promote democracy failed largely because the goal of promoting democracy was continually subordinated to other policy objectives—anticommunism being the most prevalent. John Sheahan predicts in his essay that a fundamental change in U.S. policy is now possible because there is no longer a need to continue anti-communist policies. Such a prediction may unfortunately be premature. The United States has yet to give serious attention to fostering strong democratic institutions in Latin America beyond focusing on free elections. And, despite the changes in the world, the Bush administration appears disturbingly committed to continuing the same anti-communist policies towards China. The question mark that this work places on U.S. efforts to foster democracy in Latin America is an important one. It is a question mark that, unfortunately, still looms over U.S. policy for the immediate future. Why Nations Cooperate: Circumstance and Choice in International Relations . By Arthur A. Stein. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. $29.95/Hardcover. Erik Jones, Ph.D. Candidate, SAIS. Why Nations Cooperate is UCLA Professor Arthur Stein's explanation of the relationship between circumstance and choice in state behavior. He argues that realist and liberal theories share a common set of assumptions: the state is a unitary and purposive actor; the purpose of state action is the maximization of utility; and the arena for state interaction is anarchical. It is circumstance that determines the nature of "strategic interaction" between states, and it is this interaction that predetermines whether states will cooperate or come into conflict. Because both realism and liberalism ignore the role of strategic interaction between states, the two schools of thought consistently arrive at mutually exclusive depictions ofthe world—one based on conflict and the other on cooperation . If strategic interaction is properly accounted for, however, either paradigm BOOK REVIEWS 187 (liberal or realist) can support either outcome (cooperation or conflict) depending on the circumstances. In Stein's argument, the term strategic interaction is analogous to the conditional interdependence of national utility functions—more simply, the situation wherein that which is good or bad for one nation is either good or bad for the other. A positive correlation of utility functions (meaning what is good for one is good for the other) suggests a natural environment for cooperation, even under realist assumptions. Iftwo states engage in a mutually destabilizing arms race, a negotiated outcome is entirely consistent within a realist paradigm. Stein makes a similar case for the possibility of conflict in a liberal framework. He rejects the liberal belief that conflict results from misperception and argues that a better explanation can be found in the inverse correlation of national utility functions (what is bad for one is good for the other). Under such conditions, the decision rule switches from one of absolute maximization to difference maximization: being better off than the other takes precedence over simply being well off. Thus liberal assumptions are consistent with the mutual defection from a trading relationship (trade war) given that neither side is willing to tolerate the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the other. The strength of Stein's argument lies in its flexibility. Its weakness can be found in its...