ABSTRACT
The neorealist school has held sway over international relations (IR) thinking since World War II. According to neorealist theory, foreign policy is the practice of states, which possess fixed and stable identities, in their external relations with other states. The foreign policy of a particular state is formulated to defend the clearly definable “rational” interests and security of that state. Therefore, conventional foreign policy analysis has been extremely state-centric, since it is based on the assumption that states are homogeneous actors representing and perfectly coinciding with unproblematic, undifferentiated, unitary entities. However, this book asserts the importance of state identity in determining foreign policy and the specific understanding of security that framed this trilateral entente.
