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concept into a strategy. The concept identifies only the general logic—that is, the desired impact that certain means can have on the adversary’s calculations and behavior—that needs to be achieved if a strategy is to be successful. But it does not indicate precisely what the policymaker must do to induce that reasoning into the adversary’s behavior. To achieve the goal of containment, deterrence, coercive diplomacy, or détente, etc., the policymaker must convert the abstract concept into a specific strategy for the particular situation at hand, carefully taking into account the behavioral characteristics of the particular adversary.608

Gaddis’ study is an effort to show how the general concept of containment was converted into five distinctive types of containment strategy during the course of American foreign policy. An important objective of his study is to explain “the successive mutations, incarnations, and transformations that concept [containment] has undergone through the years.”609

Gaddis identifies “five distinct geopolitical codes” among American foreign policy specialists since the beginning of the Cold War. He uses these codes (beliefs) to explain the choice of particular containment strategies over time by different U.S. leaders. The choice of a new containment strategy was influenced also by lessons drawn from the experience with preceding versions of containment, by efforts to adapt the strategy to new geopolitical developments, and by constraints of domestic and international politics.

The analytical and methodological issues embedded in this study of containment strategies has broad relevance for the study of the other strategic concepts already mentioned and also for the contemporary discussions of engagement as an alternative to containment. Engagement, too, is a general concept that must be developed into one or another specific strategy of engagement. We are not aware of any systematic study of various ways in which the general concept of engagement can be converted into alternative strategies of engagement.

JACK SNYDER, THE IDEOLOGY OF THE OFFENSIVE: MILITARY DECISION MAKING AND THE DISASTERS OF 1914. ITHACA: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1984.

Snyder foregoes an effort to study offensive military strategies in all times and places. He restricts his inquiry to a quite circumscribed but important subclass: the offensive strategic doctrines of France, Germany, and Russia, and the role they played in World War I. He addresses an important historical puzzle: “why did the military strategists of Europe’s major continental powers choose to defy the inexorable constraints of time, space, and technology, which so heavily favored the defensive?”610 A secondary research objective addresses the question whether these offensive strategies, and not some other factors, caused the offensive disasters of 1914.611

We do not attempt a full description of Snyder’s rather complex research strategy, but note that Snyder makes explicit use of the method of structured, focused comparison and relies heavily on process-tracing. He found that an effort at controlled comparison of the three countries occasionally proved useful, “but it provides a generally inferior method of testing causal relationships because so many variables are left uncontrolled.” 612 For this reason, Snyder concluded that the method of controlled comparison, which attempts to achieve the functional equivalent of an experiment, was not serviceable and that it was necessary to engage in what we have called within-case analysis that makes use of process-tracing. Snyder is not at all apologetic about using this alternative method: “Methodologists tend to denigrate single case studies, because they allegedly provide no controls on the operation of the variables. This claim is false. Given the difficulty of finding two cases that are similar in all respects except the variable to be tested, comparisons within cases are likely to be better controlled than comparisons between cases.”613

ARIEL E. LEVITE, BRUCE W. JENTLESON, AND LARRY BERMAN, EDS.,