Dr. Sharp argues that two fundamental strategies are necessary to create lasting peace in the world: facilitating the spread of democracy and maintaining comprehensive deterrence mechanisms targeted at individual world leaders. He surveys conventional approaches to avoiding war and presents evidence to validate the democratic peace principle (the notion that democracies are inherently more peaceful than nondemocracies) and the incentive theory of war avoidance, formulated by John Norton Moore. Dr. Sharp proposes a mathematical formula that can be used to predict the probability of peace for a given nation. Comprehensive tables collate data from multiple sources on freedom and human development in nations around the world.