Competitive Intervention and Great Power War

• In Event: Great Power Competition

Abstract

What is the most likely path to contemporary great power war? Discussion of great power wars in contemporary politics relies heavily on analogies to the World Wars, in which a revisionist power attacked its neighbors in an effort to revise borders. This analogy thus raises concerns about a Sino-American war over Taiwan or disputed territory in the South or East China Seas, or a war between Russia and NATO triggered by a Russian attack on the Baltic states, Ukraine, or Georgia. By contrast, this article argues that great power war is most likely to occur in the context of competitive interventions in strategically salient states that experience regime collapse. After reviewing recent predictions of how great power war would begin to demonstrate the neglect of competing interventions as a pathway to great power war, the article notes reasons – derived from literature on the decline of interstate war – to doubt that the World War analogy is relevant to contemporary great power competition, while also showing that these obstacles to war are less relevant in the context of competing interventions in strategically salient states. I then demonstrate the historical relevance of the competing intervention pathway through a review of great power wars over the past five centuries and a closer examination of the origins of World War II in the Pacific, which is best understood as arising from competing interests over the future of China. The final section applies this argument to a possible great power (Sino-American or Sino-Indian) war arising from competing interventions following major domestic instability in Pakistan.

Author

• Alex Weisiger, University of Pennsylvania