Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia’s Global Influence on Islam. Edited by Peter Mandaville. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 342p. $99.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

fear military or economic prevention, under shelter if it enjoys temporary protection from a major power, or in hiding if it does not. This theory of why states choose a particular strategy for seeking the bomb is a major contribution. Previous theoretical work on proliferation mostly treats it as all or nothing: States either pursue the bomb or do not. One partial exception is my own research withMuhammet Bas, which theorizes that states might develop an advanced nuclear program as leverage with outside states, rather than to build weapons, paralleling Narang’s delineation of hedging from active pursuit (see, most recently, “Give Peace a (Second) Chance: A Theory of Nonproliferation Deals,” International Studies Quarterly, 2018). This book goes further, however, in identifying variation within hedging and active pursuit and showing how this variation is driven by factors like the speed versus stealth trade-off. The theory considers only the effect of the state’s political environment on its choice of proliferation strategy. Of course, a state’s choice can also affect its political environment. A nuclear weapons program, if detected, can create an acute threat where none previously existed, or lead a security patron to rescind its protection, and the international reaction can undermine domestic political consensus for the bomb. Neglecting this strategic interaction sometimes leads to odd interpretations of cases, as when the book argues that Iran switched from hiding to hard hedging because its domestic political consensus for the bomb fractured. A more straightforward explanation would be that Iran switched because it got caught, and had to make a deal with the United States to avoid continued sanctions and a possible attack. Across 29 countries that sought the bomb, the book identifies and codes 46 choices of strategy, and finds that the theory is confirmed in 40 of those choices, or about 85 percent. The bulk of the book is given over to 16 case studies of particular states’ choices of proliferation strategy. Declassified documents, interviews with relevant policy makers, and prior case histories are used to code each state’s strategy and demonstrate that the theory’s proposed mechanisms played a role in determining that strategy.The book’s treatment of each case is thorough and provides an excellent synthesis of the available primary and secondary sources. The coding of some of these cases, and the corresponding interpretation of the evidence, however, is not always convincing. Israel is plausibly coded as a sheltered pursuer, but with France rather than the United States as its protector. China is coded as sprinting and South Africa as hiding, even though each was arguably sheltered by a superpower that acted to stop the other superpower from attacking their programs. Perhaps most controversially, North Korea is coded as being sheltered by China, despite the fact that China did not stop the United States from threatening comprehensive sanctions and preparing to launch an attack on North Korea’s program in the early 1990s. Still, even if one were to hold these and other ambiguous cases against the theory, it would be supported more than 60 percent of the time. None of these concerns should distract from the very substantial step forward that this book represents. Its novel categorization of proliferation strategies, clear theory for states’ choices of strategy, and careful dissection of the empirical evidence on these choices all distinguish it as one of the most important works on the politics of nuclear weapons. Indeed, an initiate to this field could do much worse than to begin by reading this book in conjunction with Narang’s previous book, about the strategies states choose for their nuclear weapons once they have acquired them (Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict, 2014).