Carlos Escude explains the rationale for dramatic changes in Argentina's foreign policy following the inauguration of President Carlos Menem in 1989. After decades of confrontation with the West, Argentina has abandoned an intermediate-range ballistic missile project, left the nonaligned movement, thrown in with the United States in the Gulf War, reestablished friendly relations with Britain, and undertaken a course of unilateral disarmament.

Escude argues that these changes reflect Argentina's recognition that citizens of poor and vulnerable nations are asked to pay the price of attempts to engage in power politics and that those attempts often endanger the nation's citizens and increase its subordination in world affairs. Moreover, he argues that mainstream international relations theory tends to obscure such processes by dealing with states as if they were individuals whose ultimate priority is "survival," or political independence.

The state-as-person fiction generalized in I-R discourse obscures the fact that in a democracy the citizens and not the state are paramount. Following this distinction to its logical consequences, Escude undertakes a thorough deconstruction of I-R theory from a "citizen-centric" perspective - the perspective, he argues, that has inspired the Menem government's dovish foreign policies.