A Critical Review on the Book Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition

Although Jack Snyder is a defensive neo-realist, he has kept himself faithful to Waltz's structuralism; his big difference in this work is in his attention to the factors that were compared to the level of the international system and are placed at the reductionist levels. By combining the mentioned levels, the author presents a clearer picture of some countries' causes of war and unjustified expansionism. Among the structures mentioned in Snyder's work, we can mention the differences in the political systems of nation-states and the impact of these differences on their distinct foreign policy behaviors. The author searches for many roots of expansionist decisions in the psychological dimension and examines the possible causes of expansionist thinking in structural impositions, which, from his point of view, are not the primary cause in most cases. In the end, it is important to mention that the expansionist groups of a country often use these impositions to move towards unbridled expansionism with the use of propaganda techniques and exaggerating external risks to mobilize political resources.