Acknowledgments

Academia is a team sport. And I certainly would not have made it to the finish line without the backing of my team. My graduate committee, colleagues, friends, and family have provided me with encouragement, inspiration, and an occasional kick in the behind to make this book possible.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my mentors at the University of Chicago. John Mearsheimer remains the most supportive mentor a scholar could have. He bore with me through numerous attempts to settle on a research topic and ultimately convinced me that I do have what it takes to do this. Robert Gulotty dedicated hours of his time to arguing with me about even the most inconsequential aspects of the theory to stress test its internal consistency. Paul Poast tirelessly pointed out that in addition to developing the ideas, I also had to communicate them to the rest of the field, which might not be as enamored by higher-level abstract thought as I am.

Key portions of this book were developed at the International Security Studies Program at Yale University, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. The stimulating intellectual conversations and generous support of the people who make these institutions the places we all seek to study were instrumental. Not even the global pandemic could stop these individuals from building community and encouraging academic growth.

MIT has been an ideal environment to complete this book. Before I even joined the department, the junior faculty invited me into their research working group and provided not only excellent comments on working projects but also advice on all aspects of academic life. With the Security Studies Program, I have found the most welcoming and supportive group of colleagues; my thanks to Taylor Fravel, Vipin Narang, Richard Nielsen, Ken Oye, Roger Petersen, Barry Posen, and Richard Samuels for giving me a new academic home. I am most grateful to Erik Lin-Greenberg, my comrade in arms who has to bear the burden of laying the path forward yet nonetheless dispenses excellent gastronomical recommendations for just about any city in the world. It goes without saying that without the support of Laura Kerwin nothing would ever function.

The ideas in this book have benefited greatly from the scrutiny and exceptional feedback from participants of countless workshops. These include Anjali Anand, Nick Anderson, Mariel Barnes, Stephen Brooks, Nick Campbell-Seremetis, Bonnie Chan, Alexandra Chinchilla, Debak Das, Mark Deming, Jeffrey Friedman, Alex Haskins, David Holloway, Eliza Gheorghe, Rebecca Gibbons, Kelly Greenhill, Isaac Hock, Daniel Jacobs, Sana Jaffrey, Tyler Jost, Colin Kahl, Morgan Kaplan, Joe Karas, Stephanie Kelly, Paul Kennedy, Do Young Lee, Chad Levinson, Jennifer Lind, Katy Lindquist, Charles Lipson, Jason Lyall, Daniel Magruder, Ramzy Mardini, Michael Mastanduno, Nicholas Miller, Steven Miller, Asfandyar Mir, Nuno Monteiro, Robert Pape, Steven Pifer, Michael Poznansky, Daryl Press, Michael Reese, Ken Schultz, Yubing Sheng, Mattias Staisch, Paul Staniland, Michael Tomz, Harold Trinkunas, Ben Valentino, Stephen Walt, Kevin Weng, and William Wohlforth. I am grateful to Freya Hahn, Antonia Huth, Isabelle Kern, Ioana M. Niculescu, and especially Wright Smith for excellent research assistance. All remaining errors in this work are my own, and they are considerably fewer for the hard efforts of the people listed above.

I would like to extend a special thanks to the participants of Lone Star National Security Forum, especially John Schuessler, Alan Kuperman, and Stefano Recchia for providing the opportunity to workshop huge portions of the book manuscript and Erik Gartzke for providing detailed feedback. This book would not be what it is now without the sometimes painful guidance of the participants of my book workshop: Jeff Colgan, Dale Copeland, Ben Fordham, and Jonathan Kirshner. I am especially grateful to Jennifer Erickson, Tyler Jost, and Erik Lin-Greenberg for volunteering to read the full manuscript and to sit through the daylong workshop. Nicholas Ackert compiled excellent notes; Olivia White ensured that the trains stayed on their rails. This project was greatly facilitated by the editors and staff of the Cornell University Press and the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs series. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewer for engaging with the manuscript, Jackie Teoh for ensuring the process ran smoothly but quickly, and Alex Downes for his in-depth comments and for giving chapter 1 a chance. Some of the material in chapters 2 and 4 appeared in “Wartime Commercial Policy and Trade between Enemies,” International Security 46, no. 1 (2021): 9–52, which is reproduced courtesy of the MIT Press.

I am also grateful to the friends who withstood my company through the many long hours of arguing beside a whiteboard or listening to Wagner’s operas at the Chicago Lyric, which I’m told are equally painful. Through endless witticisms, sarcasm, and quotes from classic films, Anjali Anand and Kevin Weng ensured that graduate school was not the place where fun comes to die. Alex Haskins laboriously persevered through many attempts to turn me into an optimist; his failure is entirely my loss. Debak Das, my fellow human through the emptiness of the pandemic, guaranteed that nothing always continued to happen. And, not at all least, I want to thank the members of the Monday Lunch Group for keeping the intellectual spirit alive.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. Though they frequently tell me that they do not understand why I do what I do, the fact that they are happy to help regardless means the world to me. Keeping with tradition: the practice of dedicating long works to the people most affected by their torturous creation being highly bizarre, this one is dedicated to you.