Worldviews of Aspiring Powers

Worldviews of Aspiring Powers provides a serious study of the domestic foreign policy debates in five world powers who have gained more influence as the US's has waned: China, Japan, India, Russia and Iran. Featuring a leading regional scholar for each essay, each essay identifies the most important domestic schools of thought--nationalists, realists, globalists, idealists/exceptionalists--and connects them to the historical and institutional sources that fuel each nation's foreign policy experience. While scholars have applied this approach to US foreign policy, this book is the first to track the competing schools of foreign policy thought within five of the world's most important rising powers. Concise and systematic, Worldviews of Aspiring Powers will serve as both an essential resource for foreign policy scholars trying to understand international power transitions and as a text for courses that focus on the same.

Henry Nau is Professor of Political Science, George Washington University, and author of The Myth of America's Decline (Oxford UP). Deepa Ollapally is Associate Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University, and author of The Politics of Extremism in South Asia (Cambridge UP)