Dan Reiter is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is the award-winning author of several books and the recipient of the 2002 Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association for the world's leading international relations scholar under forty or within ten years of receiving the Ph.D.

• 1. Introduction: tied hands and the search for credibility; 2. Keeping hands untied to avoid the wrong war; 3. Brinkmanship: why states do not play Russian roulette; 4. The absence of brinkmanship success; 5. The flexibility of alliance commitments; 6. The flexibility of America's Cold War alliances; 7. Tripwire force deployments; 8. Leaders without reason and machines without souls; 9. Conclusions.

'This is a definitive book about international relations. Conventional wisdom holds that countries gain bargaining advantages by making it impossible or too costly to back down. Challenging decades of scholarship, Reiter persuasively demonstrates that countries rarely tie their hands. Untied Hands should be read alongside Thomas Schelling's 1960s-era classics.' Matthew Fuhrmann, Texas A&M University and author of Influence Without Arms