By Ankit Panda
What will it take for either the U.S. or China to decide to go to war with the other?
Last week, Alex Ward discussed the potential for a great power war between the United States and China. He framed his argument in terms of prominent international relations scholar Robert Gilpin’s “three preconditions,” as presented in his book War and Change in World Politics. Ward convincingly demonstrates that each of Gilpin’s preconditions is either close to being met in today’s world or has already been met, making the probably of a great power war between the U.S. and China, if not high, certainly non-zero. Ward notes that ” Gilpin’s framework serves as a good rubric by which to measure the current global climate,” noting further that “by all measures, this is certainly a dangerous time.”
Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics is certainly an important work on state-centric realism, but it might be somewhat more useful to consider the work as a whole rather than just focusing on Gilpin’s three preconditions. While Gilpin does lay out the preconditions for war in chapter five, he frames his argument in the book more in terms of traditional economic theory, particularly expected utility theory.
Gilpin’s goal in the work is to explain why the global system sometime changes, often through the means of war between great powers. At the core of Gilpin’s argument is the idea of an existing international equilibrium. This equilibrium reflects the current distribution of power and interests in the global system and is achieved when no state can gain from changing the system (at least will gain less than it would cost that state to bring about the desired change). Empirically, our current global system largely reflects the interests of the allied powers that emerged victorious following the Second World War: the United States and Europe (largely Western Europe). In “equilibrium,” we have a rules-based liberal order that manifests itself via institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.
Read the full story at The Diplomat