"It's A Mistake" (Updated)

I'll probably get some eye-rolls for quoting from an old Men At Work song as my title, but its seems apropos for this article from the Hoover Institute called "War: The Gambling Man's Game." The key point:

[Geoffrey] Blainey argues that assessments of relative power drive decisions on war and peace, and that war occurs when nations misjudge their relative power. He writes, “War is usually the outcome of a diplomatic crisis which cannot be solved because both sides have conflicting estimates of their bargaining power.” Disputes about issues central to states’ interests can be negotiated when there is a clear hierarchy of power—the weaker compromises to prevent war. When there is doubt about the weaker party, compromise is elusive and wars occur, because “war itself provides the most reliable and most objective test of which nation or alliance is the most powerful...war was therefore usually followed by an orderly market in political power, or in other words, peace.”

... Blainey is no determinist; he sees the historical specifics as important in each war. But looking across 300 years of war and peace, he sees the greatest incidence of wars when states are confident about their future, even when others in the international order rate their futures less optimistically. World War I is, as he so wonderfully phrases it, “the haven of the theory.” Blainey quotes Bethmann Hollweg, chancellor of Germany at the outbreak of the war: “Our people had developed so amazingly in the last twenty years that wide circles succumbed to the temptation of overestimating our enormous forces in relation to those of the rest of the world.”

In other words, war can be the results of mistakes in assessing the relative power (or, I would add, the presumption on how an opponent will react to provocation). David P. Goldman has noted in his writings that war is not limited to rational causes, but that nations will go to war when they have nothing to lose--such as a collapsing culture.

We sit at an interesting time when we can actually watch these theories play out in the real world. Right now, China and Japan are assessing their relative strengths and weaknesses. China is currently an ascendant power--i.e., a confident power. I suspect that both have a good idea of their positions. The unknown is how the United States would react. Japan, obviously, hopes that the U.S. would come to its aid in any conflict (and probably expects so given the treaties between the two nations). China, however, will heavily base its decisions on whether it believes the United States will stay out of a conflict. (Germany made the same estimate in WWI as to Great Britain coming to the aid of the French, and guessed wrong). If we had a Reagan or Bush as President, there would be no question of as to how the United States would react. But given our current President's history of abandoning and insulting allies, I would not even hazard a guess.

Goldman's caveat is also at play here as we look at the Middle-East and, in particular, Iran. They can't possibly be optimistic that they could successfully challenge the United States militarily. However, they could be desperate, or hopeless enough, to do so.

H/t Instapundit

Update: Some comments from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph:

He [Japan's PM] went on to tell Gideon Rachman at the FT that China and Japan were in a "similar situation" to the German and England in 1914, caught in dangerous process of great power escalation – even though their economies were intertwined by trade. 

As readers know, I have been writing about this parallel for a long time. China is exploiting incidents to test the willingness of the United States to stand behind its treaty alliance with Japan, just as Kaiser Wilhelm provoked spats to test England's willingness to stand behind its entente with France. It was a self-reinforcing process before 1914, and it is self-reinforcing now. All it takes to produce a catalyst is some "damn fool thing in the Balkans" to borrow a term. 

Yet it is not just a calculated policy by China's Communist Party, a stirring up of revanchiste nationalism to replace the dead ideology of Maoism. Emotions are also running out of control, and Mr Abe is of course a red-flag for a bull. 

The Japanese leader is a hard-core nationalist. Despite his pitch yesterday that Japan has "sworn an oath never again to wage a war", his government is in fact rearming fast. Japan has increased spending on military equipment by 23pc last year and is launching its largest ship since the Second World War, a helicopter carrier that can be used for hybrid jets. 

Listening to the raw passion in the voices of Shinzo Abe and Wang Yi over the last 24 hours, I think there is an astonishing level [of] complacency about the world's most dangerous fault-line.