In this lucid and theoretically sophisticated book, G. John Ikenberry focuses on the oil price shocks of 1973-74 and 1979, which placed extraordinary new burdens on governments worldwide and particularly on that of the United States. Reasons of State examines the response of the United States to these and other challenges and identifies both the capacities of the American state to deal with rapid international political and economic change and the limitations that constrain national policy.

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is coeditor of three other books from Cornell University Press: End of the West?: Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order, The State and American Foreign Economic Policy, and America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power. He is the author of Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System and After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (winner of the 2002 Schroeder-Jervis Award given by the American Political Science Association).