Arms and Influence

“This is a brilliant and hardheaded book. It will frighten those who prefer not to dwell on the unthinkable and infuriate those who have taken refuge in stereotypes and moral attitudinizing.”—Gordon A. Craig, New York Times Book Review

“A grim but carefully reasoned and coldly analytical book. . . . One of the most frightening previews which this reviewer has ever seen of the roads that lie just ahead in warfare.“—Los Angeles Times

Originally published more than fifty years ago, this landmark book explores the ways in which military capabilities—real or imagined—are used, skillfully or clumsily, as bargaining power. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new introduction to the work shows how Schelling’s framework—conceived of in a time of superpowers and mutually assured destruction—still applies to our multipolar world, where wars are fought as much online as on the ground.

The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series

Author Biography

Thomas C. Schelling (1921–2016) was Distinguished University Professor, Department of Economics and School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland. He was corecipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics. Anne-Marie Slaughter is president and CEO of New America, former director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department, and former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.