Changing Aspirations, Limited Attention, and War

Abstract

The authors present a theory of the general enabling conditions for war which predicts that war is possible, though not inevitable, when the conditions of the theory are satisfied. Whether a war will actually occur depends upon the idiosyncratic situational factors that are outside the scope of the theory. Three conditions make war possible: (i) Aspirations do not match achievements: governments only initiate wars when their achieved share of global capabilities differs from their aspired share of capabilities. (2) Salience: governments only initiate wars against other governments when there is a history of substantial interaction. (3) Power: governments never initiate wars against other governments that have a substantially greater military capacity. These conditions may be viewed as a series of three filters that identify pairs of countries between which war is possible. The theory predicts that wars will not occur in any dyad that does not pass through all the filters. In testing this theory for all nations between 1816 and 1980, the authors allowed for the fact that governments may preemptively initiate wars against other governments that meet these conditions.