I am interested in the problems of war, peace and international stability during what has been called "the long crisis of the twentieth century" beginning in 1905 and lasting until 1950. Within this area, my research is focused on several projects dealing with the period between the two world wars. The most important have dealt with 1) the role of diplomacy in first creating and then undermining the short-lived international stabilization achieved in Europe during the second half of the 1920s, and particularly the objectives and methods of German and British foreign relations during that era; 2) the strategies pursued by French policy makers in the years immediately following the First World War in an effort to sustain French predominance on the European continent when confronted with potential German resurgence and the breakdown of war time inter-allied cooperation; 3) the beginnings of the Soviet Union's historic rise to world power and the contributions of both the ideological-revolutionary mode and the normalizing-commercial-diplomatic mode of Soviet foreign relations to the stability and instability of the international system of the 1920s.

I have also been concerned with 4) the possibilities and the problems of writing "the new international history" --both in theory and in practice. In particular I am interested in the prospects for combining an expanded conception of the politics and economics of international relations with an integrated analysis of policy on an international scale. My work on the USSR, for example, examined the imperatives of national security, economic development, and socialist revolution in the making of Soviet foreign policy and the strategies developed to further those objectives.