Polities and Peace

Abstract

In recent months, the Clinton administration has begun to advocate replacement for the doctrine of containment that drove U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. According to Anthony Lake, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, the leading candidate to succeed containment is a strategy of enlargementenlargement of the world's ... community of market democracies.' President Clinton concurs, noting that strategy of enlargement serves U.S. interests because democracies rarely wage war on one another.2 Several empirical analyses suggest that the Clinton administration's advocacy of enlargement is well-grounded. They conclude that democratic states do pursue distinctive foreign policies. Perhaps the most intriguing among their findings is that democratic states rarely, if ever, wage war against other democratic states. Indeed, some observers consider this finding to be close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.3 Yet doubts remain about whether the observed association reflects causal relationship.4 In this paper, we attempt to resolve these doubts. In order to do so, we reexamine both the logic and the empirical basis of the claim central to