From its origins in ancient political philosophy, the field of international relations has dealt with excessive “securitization” of individual and group behavior that is central to the logic of threat exaggeration. Particular emphasis has been paid to the pervasiveness – if not supreme utility – of fear and mistrust amidst stated intentions for peace. “Who wants peace must prepare for war” has been a policy prescription consistent with political realism since antiquity. In “The Melian Dialogue,” Thucydides (1972: 403, 408) articulated the importance of preemptive power enhancement under uncertainty, pointing out that military weakness exposed any society to reckless behavior, slaughter, and enslavement by any hitherto unsubdued state or group of outsiders. In modern political science, this problem has been extensively theorized as the security dilemma. This theoretical perspective has provided parsimonious and nontrivial insights into the logic of interstate behavior underlying World War I (Snyder 1985) and the nuclear arms race during the Cold War (Herz 1966; Jervis 1976, 1978), as well as into the logic of violent interethnic conflict in the post–Cold War era (Collins 2004; Glaser 1997; Kaufman 1996, 2001; Lake and Rothchild 1996; Posen 1993; Roe 1999, 2000; Snyder and Jervis 1999). At its core, the security-dilemma theory in all its variants focuses on perceptual and behavioral implications of anarchy – understood as the lack of central authority and enforceable rules among either states or nonstate actors that may credibly serve to punish rule violators and to compel allies and friends to come to one's assistance.