Like most books, this one owes several profound debts of gratitude. The argument presented here – and my interest in analogical reasoning in foreign policy analysis generally, the subject of this book – owes a great deal to the work of Yuen Foong Khong. Reading Khong's Analogies at War, which is a study of how the Vietnam decision-makers reasoned analogically about whether to escalate America's involvement in that disasterous war, got me thinking about other areas of American foreign policy to which Khong's theoretical insights might be applied, and the book proved a constant source of guidance and inspiration. A similarly formative influence was Richard Neustadt and Ernest May's Thinking in Time, whose title, I learned later on joining the faculty of the Department of Government at Essex, was provided by Anthony King. This work also obviously owes an intellectual debt to a great many people whose prior research in this and related areas has inspired my own efforts. Apart from those already mentioned, Alexander George, Robert Jervis, Ole Holsti and Yaacov Vertzberger in particular have all contributed powerful insights to the study of foreign policy decision-making and/or the investigation of the role that analogizing plays in the policy-making process, and without their sterling work in these fields this book would almost certainly never have been written.