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Why Wars Break Out
I’ve undertaken the unhappy task of arguing that the probability of the outbreak of a major war in the next president’s term or terms is greater than it has been since the end of the Cold War, and greater than at many points during the Cold War.
An interesting argument ensued at the tail end of the comments on my Trump–>Armagedon post. Beginning at comment 88, Joseph Kulisics and Chuck Walla debated whether it was possible to disambiguate my predictions about the probability of this kind of event from my unfounded opinion.
This, roughly, was my answer (I’ve rewritten it to make it clearer):
I in no way believe I can predict the future well enough to offer a formal proof that Trump–>Armageddon. I’m responding to Genferei’s request that I sketch out scenarios under which this might happen without leaving out steps, handwaving, amateur psychology, or appeals to authority.
Predicting the behavior of dynamical systems is very tricky, and prone to modelling and initial-condition errors. I make no claim of an ability to predict the future of international relations to a degree of accuracy that would satisfy the standards of a climate scientist, no less a physicist. Nor do I wish to dress up “my opinion” in purely ornamental mathematics.
Leave all claims about Trump aside for the moment.
The first part of the task is to satisfy readers that no matter who is elected, the likelihood of major war is greater than it has been since the end of the Cold War, and greater than at many points during the Cold War. And to do so in a way that’s an improvement on “unfounded opinion.”
First question: Do you think anyone has an unusually good record of making generally reliable predictions about when war is apt to break out and why? Many have tried, that’s for sure. Volume upon volume has been written by international relations theorists who have tried to find patterns in the history of warfare that might suggest how better to predict wars. We’ve discussed, for example, Graham Allison’s work on China and the Thucydides trap at length here.
For another example, my father recently wrote what amounts to an extended review of Stephen Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker, as you probably know, Whiggishly argued that the world is getting more peaceful by the day. My father didn’t think much of Pinker’s skill as a historian.
If you read it, you’ll understand the question I’d put to Joseph Kulisics: Does he believe wars have causes, or do they just break out, as Lewis Fry Richardson proposed, following a Poisson distribution?
I suspect they have causes. I think they’re more likely to break out under — roughly — these circumstances:
Would you agree that such a model could be empirically tested? If not, then perhaps you’re defining the question as unanswerable.
But assume it can be, and that it’s a generally reliable heuristic. If I could demonstrate that to your satisfaction, would you agree that my first paragraph isn’t an unfounded opinion, but a reasoned one?
Published in General
Ah, it only took three posts to get to the meat of the matter. Trump stinks.
What do you mean by ‘major war’?
If a war involving the US/allies and single large enemy (the Axis Powers, the Soviet Union) I would argue that it’s unlikely, because while multipolarity may increase instability, the US is still vastly stronger militarily than the other poles (Russia, China, not Poland), and I don’t think they’d go there if push came to shove.
If you mean widespread lower level conflicts by different poles of power using proxies (which is how this stuff usually starts) then it’s already here in Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and maybe Yemen, isn’t it?
I’ll in due course make the case that we’re more confident about this than we ought to be.
Yes. Very much so. And throughout Europe.
Here’s an interesting article:
The number is quite large and actually well understood. I commented here regarding it. But I’ll reproduce the whole comment just to be sure.
So – to understand the real number needed, we need to know what countries he means when he says “Middle East” – then it is a matter estimating the native population and the proportion of native forces that will be used.
Claire,
I apologize in advance for my less than rigorous attitude. I’m just not really in the mood for a full thesis level treatment involving regression analysis. Well actually, one can’t rule out the possibility of cold calculation being the cause of a war in the first place. One should never underestimate the deviousness of man’s mind.
There that wasn’t so rigorous was it.
Regards,
Jim
It seems most catastrophes result from a series of bad events, any one (or at least a few) of which if they had not happened would have “broken the chain” and prevented the final blowup.
I wonder if your run-up is too long; that is, you are starting too far back in the causal/rhetorical chain. There seem to be two distinct strands to your argument:
You need both of these to be true to conclude “The world is ending!!!11eleventy!”, but strand 2 seems to me the harder to prove. I wonder if strand 1 is really necessary to your project…? Unless it is the combination of the particular way in which the world is on the precipice and the particular way Trump is likely to (encourage others to) act that leads to your conclusion.
I guess I’m saying that I did not mean to set you a series of dissertations, just get you to make your fears concrete. This might move some of us into your column. But it might also help allay your fears somewhat: “you know what, Armageddon is coming no matter who is the CiC…”
PS. Although I’m probably the (second?) last person you want to see, I will be in Paris at least Thursday through Monday.
Who’s the first?
I’d love to see you! Anyone else coming through town? We could have a proper Ricochet meet-up.
The argument on the other thread spent a long time trying to characterize my position over my explicit objections. I didn’t take a position on probability as a useful tool for modeling systems. I took the position that whether systems are deterministic or probabilistic, for an argument about the danger posed by our current situation to be convincing it must be rigorous. It can’t be built on a simple opinion about either Trump’s personality or the state of the world and be objective in the sense of eliminating opinion as opposed to modeling decisions. (The interlocutor’s posts spent wasted time trying to eliminate the concept of objectivity by confusing it with philosophical notions of the difference between objects and objects as apprehended by the mind, and I stopped the discussion because it was obviously an attempt to force me off topic and into positions in which I have no stake or interest.)
My point about your project is that it appears to be a very roundabout and long way of stating a pure opinion. For example, I don’t think that the thesis that we are closer to nuclear confrontation passes the smell test. In fact, the thesis seems so off base that it strikes me as completely hysterical. Do you really believe that we are closer to confrontation than we were in the Cuban Missile Crisis or Able Archer 83? Read the articles.
(continued)
In the case of Able Archer 83, all of the general and specific prerequisites for a war were clearly in place. The United States stood in a continuous state of alert against an enemy at rough nuclear parity, and the opponents had settled into a policy of mutual assured destruction. Both prepared to be targeted for a preemptive first strike because their defense policies required anticipating and preparing for it. At the time, the United States deployed new nuclear weapons systems to Europe, in particular, the Pershing II. Soviet analysts expected that the most promising scenario for a preemptive first strike by the United States would take the form of a military exercise in the west. The enemies were practically isolated from each other. Able Archer 83 specifically tested command and control in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union and moved all leaders to protected sites. The Soviets even experienced a false launch warning. As you can see, avoiding disaster in the episode depended on personalities right up and down the line. One man didn’t make the difference.
Are we isolated from the major nuclear powers? I’ve been to Moscow recently, but visiting Moscow in 1983 was practically impossible. Until recently, I lived in Beijing for over four years, and in 1983, living in Beijing was practically impossible.
(continued)
Who are our most alien or estranged opponents now? Iran? North Korea? They are not even close to parity, and we don’t have to worry for a long time. If they are rational actors, they won’t try to throw their weight around until they can survive a preemptive first-strike, which means that nuclear war isn’t close, and if they aren’t rational actors, then whoever occupies the presidency really has little control over when and where nuclear war occurs with Iran or North Korea. As a result, a scenario for global nuclear war seems so unfounded compared to any point the cold war as to be completely hypothetical. (To be otherwise, you need to contrast today with the circumstances of something like Able Archer 83 and make the comparison in a rigorous way. I’ve given you concrete examples of the differences with the world of Able Archer 83. Concrete comparisons with that world would be a good point to start your argument.)
Your outlined argument seems then to turn on Trump’s personality, but I’ve seen no evidence of real instability. On the contrary, he has shown incredible tactical discipline. (For example, he has only threatened lawsuits at points instead of filing them, which is a valid tactic. Filing lawsuits when filing would be counterproductive would be a sign of instability, but threatening to file to test an opponent in a campaign and not filing is completely rational and legitimate.)
(continued)
Anyway, you can choose your model for the causes of war. I’m not binding you to a choice. I would like to see something like rigor once the choice is made.
(I’ll be honest. I don’t think that the project is realistic. It really strikes me as a very, very long way to say that you don’t like Trump. As I mentioned before, I don’t like Trump. I think that many responsible public figures lining up behind him don’t particularly like Trump. They have to all be overlooking something that his strident opposition sees without any modeling whatsoever, and I doubt the possibility of so many missing something so intuitively obvious.)
One last point: in the last thread, the point deliberately ignored by the interlocutor was that given your proposal to base the argument on probabilities related to Trump and the state of the world, for the argument to avoid circular reasoning, attempt to eliminate pure opinion, and be objective, you have to base the probabilities on something and discipline the probabilities by reality.
I wasn’t ignoring the question, so please don’t take the lack of a direct response as unresponsive. I meant for my response to say that stipulating to the model in the article and its ability to be tested doesn’t settle the argument. The argument is over exactly what kind of world we inhabit. I honestly have no idea how you’d describe our world, and I don’t think that any of the arrangements obviously and inarguably fit. How does the model define poles? Are poles supposed to be at rough technical, economic, or military parity in a multi-pole characterization?
Let me end with this question: how are you describing the world? (I suspect that we are going to have very different conclusions about the description, and the model’s level of granularity isn’t going to be of use to settle the question. Much like the psychopathy comment in the original post, the model’s conclusions probably depend on subjective answers to a series of questions. If one already thinks that Trump is shallow, which is bad, one is going to conclude that he’s bad. No surprise. The Psychopathy scale doesn’t justify your answers. Your answers justify the scale’s score.)
Do you feel that any of the usual words we use to describe political situations or personalities have any useful and objective meaning beyond “I feel good about x,” “I feel bad about x” or something in between? Do you feel the following words are meaningful, for example: communism, oligarchy, feudalism, petrostate, youth bulge, arms race, military strength, militarism, rational, irrational, empire, city-state, monarchy, wise, unwise, learned, stupid, powerful, powerless, charming, passive, pacifist, reckless, chaotic, stable? Or do you think these are just pseudo-statements, and Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen?
Claire, what an interesting question! I too am interested in hearing Joseph’s answer.
I think there is one huge flaw in your argument Claire timing. So if we apply what we know about markets and predictive models and then apply them to political predictions you might know an event is going to happen because the fundamentals are overwhelming. They both study human behavior, the one advantage markets have over political projections is a larger population of people are making the decisions.
However timing it and knowing when it going to happen and how bad it will be is impossible to due.
I due budgets for a living and at one time was doing capital project cash flow estimates on multi year projects. Lets put it this way about the only thing somewhat predictable was the overall project cost. I never tried doing cash flow prediction using Monte Carlo Simulations but I tried most other methods. When you have a limited number of players there is just not enough datapoints to be able to have anything usfule when it comes to predictions.
So even when you do case studies the same lessons apply. If you look at empires like the Roman empire it was easy to see something was rotten, however it took a lot more longer for that rottenness to destroy the empire than anyone looking at the data beforehand could of predicted.
So I really think the the data shows we will get into another war. Knowing when and if it will be a large war is just not possible unless you have Wisdom from G-d, and him letting you in on it. The question is not that we will get into wars nor that at some time in the future we will get into a large war, the only questions is the frequency and the various severity of each war over a few hundred year period. I personally think a Civil war is more likely than a large external war. We already have had two in the last 240 years.
How come?