Scott Silverstone is an ASU Future of War Fellow at New America and a professor of international relations at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His new book, "From Hitler's Germany to Saddam's Iraq: The Enduring False Promise of Preventive War."
This book challenges conventional wisdom about the value of preventive war. Beginning with the rise of German power and the French and British response to the Rhineland crisis leading to World War II, Silverstone overturns the common impulse to point an accusing finger at British leadership for its alleged naïveté, willful blindness, or outright cowardice.
Silverstone argues that the Rhineland crisis is a critical case for studying a central dynamic of world history - power shifts among states - and the preventive war temptation that power shifts frequently produce.
