Indirect Rule is the latest of three books by David Lake on hierarchy in international politics. In Lake's account, indirect rule is ‘a primary mechanism of international hierarchy’ (p. 216). It involves an alliance between a dominant power and a sympathetic elite faction in a subordinate state. The dominant power provides political support to this faction, enabling it to control the state and implement its preferred policies. While this may secure a preferable policy outcome, indirect rule can be costly. Keeping the allied faction in power may be expensive, and the ally may entangle the dominant state in unwanted domestic or international conflicts. Manipulating the domestic politics of the subordinate state is also likely to generate hostility toward the dominant state because it makes the opposition faction worse off. Indirect rule may be employed by any major power, but Lake's empirical focus is the United States. He applies his theory to three regional case studies of US foreign policy: Central America and the Caribbean in the early 20th Century, Western Europe after 1945, and the Arab Middle East since 1979. This valuable book persuasively lays out this mechanism of international hierarchy and illuminates and links together many puzzling phenomena such as anti-American sentiment in states that are ostensibly allies and the half-hearted nature of American democracy promotion. While indirect rule appears to be the central pillar of US international hierarchy, the book's rich case studies suggest that it is not the only process at work and that there is substantial variation in important outcomes, such as the form of resistance to American power. There is ample room for more work on these relationships.