What is Contemporary Interstate Conflict About?

Professor James Fearon from Stanford University will speak at the MIT Security Studies Program's Wednesday Seminar.

According to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (and many others), “the post-Cold War world is over.” One reason for this view is the increase in interstate conflict involving major powers in the last 10 years -- both actual, as in the Russia-Ukraine war, and feared, as in the case of possible war over Taiwan. The return of major power military conflict should be surprising and puzzling. Even from a “Realist” perspective, current military and economic conditions are such that the countries with the most military capability have little to fear or gain from each other, in terms of invasion or attack. In this seminar, Professor Fearon will stress two main sources of contemporary major power conflict: Competing nationalist claims on territory, and the intrinsic threat that democracies and dictatorships pose to each other, as it is common knowledge that powerful democratic states would typically prefer to see dictatorships transition to democracy, and vice versa. In the contract-poor environment of international politics, these forms of revisionism create incentives for arms build ups that can in turn create incentives for preventive wars. Combined with facts about technological and economic change and US foreign policy (in particular) over the last 25 years, this account applies to some major post-Cold War conflicts and to the return of serious military competition between major powers.