To hear some analysts tell it, the venerable "realist" view of international politics has become obsolete. No longer do we live in an anarchic world of self-interested states concerned with power and security. Since the Cold War ended, international politics supposedly has been transformed by the spread of liberal democracies and the rise of economic interdependence and international institutions. Waltz, the noted political theorist who is now an adjunct professor at Columbia University, begs to differ.

The spread of democracy, he says, does not alter the essentially anarchic character of international politics, in which, without "an external authority, a state cannot be sure that today’s friend will not be tomorrow’s enemy." This would be so even if all states were to become democracies. It is true that democracies seldom have fought other democracies (though it has happened), but that is no guarantee that wars will not break out. When a liberal democracy goes to war, he points out, it is likely to call the enemy’s democratic standing into question. That happened when democratic England and France went to war in 1914 against a Germany that had seemed to some American scholars "the very model of a modern democratic state," but now "turned out not to be a democracy of the right kind," at least in British, French, and American eyes. At other times, democracies wage war in the name of democracy, as America did, for instance, in Vietnam. The spread of democracy, Waltz says, may not mean "a net decrease in the amount of war in the world."

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