Addressing the question of whether war is a rational decision or a mistake is important to understand the causes of war and explain the reduction in the number of wars fought among countries in today’s nuclear era. The argument, under which war is a mistake, is a normative claim about what action states should have chosen, based on the outcomes that have been produced. That is, for a decision to be good, it needs to have produced the actor’s preferred outcome. However, the mistake perspective is problematic under the uncertainty and competitiveness of the anarchic international political system.
The rational theory provides a better alternative. In this paper, the rational theory of war will unfold by beginning with an understanding of states, consistent with the realist’s perspective and the expected utility theory, to be maximizing utility. This perspective will then be confronted with three different characteristics of the system, leading to a theory of states’ rationality in the form of strategic interaction. According to this theory, the reason for the reduction in the number of wars fought among countries under today’s nuclear era is caused by the nature of rational states, interested in maximizing their power under anarchy, being constrained by the relative balance of power in the system, the systemic nature of warfare and the system’s payoff structure requiring certain strategic behaviour. Firstly, the concept of mutual assured destruction has increased the costs of war and shifted the rational utility-maximizing states’ policy from winning to avoiding wars. Second, today’s ‘balanced multi polarity’, stabilized by nuclear technology, makes international relations more secure and thus less prone to wars between states n...
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Clausewitz emphasizes that “war is a branch of political activity, that it is in no sense autonomous” (Clausewitz, 605). This principle is especially applicable to the post-war period of World War II. The political struggle between the ideologies of democracy and communism would entail global focus for the next 50 years, and the events that brought about the defeat of Germany shaped the landscape of this political struggle.
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The realism that will be the focus of this paper is that of Kenneth Waltz. Kenneth Waltz presents his theory of realism, within an international system, by offering his central myth that, “Anarchy is the permissive cause of war”. Kenneth Waltz’s central myth helps answer the question as to why war happens in the first place. During the cold war, there was a heightened sense of insecurity between Russia and the United States due to presence of nuclear weapons. The Movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb used cold war tension between the two countries to tell the story of a general who went crazy and decided to unleash his fleet of nuclear bombers onto Russian military bases.
The purpose of this essay is to inform on the similarities and differences between systemic and domestic causes of war. According to World Politics by Jeffry Frieden, David Lake, and Kenneth Schultz, systemic causes deal with states that are unitary actors and their interactions with one another. It can deal with a state’s position within international organizations and also their relationships with other states. In contract, domestic causes of war pertain specifically to what goes on internally and factors within a state that may lead to war. Wars that occur between two or more states due to systemic and domestic causes are referred to as interstate wars.
People’s ideas and assumptions about world politics shape and construct the theories that help explain world conflicts and events. These assumptions can be classified into various known theoretical perspectives; the most dominant is political realism. Political realism is the most common theoretical approach when it is in means of foreign policy and international issues. It is known as “realpolitik” and emphasis that the most important actor in global politics is the state, which pursues self-interests, security, and growing power (Ray and Kaarbo 3). Realists generally suggest that interstate cooperation is severely limited by each state’s need to guarantee its own security in a global condition of anarchy. Political realist view international politics as a struggle for power dominated by organized violence, “All history shows that nations active in international politics are continuously preparing for, actively involved in, or recovering from organized violence in the form of war” (Kegley 94). The downside of the political realist perspective is that their emphasis on power and self-interest is their skepticism regarding the relevance of ethical norms to relations among states.
The assumption of rational choice theory in the political system and hence, foreign policy, is that politicians and policy decision makers behave in a ‘rational’ manner. However, rational in this situation does not mean that individuals always calculate the costs and benefits of
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