A history of power politics from the construction of the German battlefleet to Gorbachev's 'new thinking'. The unwillingness of all the Great Powers to recognise that war, in Ivan Bloch's 1899 phrase, had become 'impossible except at the price of suicide', resulted in two unprecedentedly great wars. These in turn gave impetus to a decline of power politics which gathered pace after 1945. Nuclear weapons imposed a straitjacket which Soviet revisionism was unable to break out of. Moral revulsion, technological advance and economic growth facilitated the emergence of a norm-based 'accomodatory' culture, which now offers a basis for a wider post-Cold War order.

PETER MANGOLD read English and history at King's College, Cambridge, and completed a PhD at the London School of Economics. He worked in the Research Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1972-1975 and then as a scriptwriter and producer and Head of the Language Section with the BBC World Service from 1975-97. He is the author of Superpower Intervention in the Middle East and National Security and International Relations.