Globel politics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that one should "never read a book that is not a year old." With the appearance of this Third Edition, Global Politics will have been around for eight years, and so, I hope, is worthy of consideration even by readers more cautious than Emerson. I hope also that those readers familiar with the previous editions will share my opinion that Global Politics is getting better as well as older.
This edition retains the three major thrusts of the original edition. First, it gives students in an introductory course in world politics a basic understanding of the history of the international system from the First World War up to the present. Second, it helps readers understand the current issues and crises in the global political system that are likely to have the greatest impact on the future. Finally, it demonstrates to students the possibility of developing generalizations about and discovering patterns in the foreign policies of states, the behavior of other important political entities (such as multinational corporations or terrorist groups), and the operation of the global system. Any one of these themes, and sometimes two, can be found in most current texts for introductory courses in international relations. What I hope to have accomplished here is an integration of all three (the historical, the contemporary, and the scientific) that is more difficult to find. A failure to achieve such an integration will deprive students in one of several ways. Historically oriented texts usually ignore the possibility of discovering patterns in foreign policies and international relations. Books that emphasize such patterns often entangle students in methodological jargon or assume that students know much more about recent history and current events than they actually do. Texts that emphasize contemporary topics tend to become outdated quickly and create the impression that the past is irrelevant to an understanding of the future.