Alex Weisiger (Penn University)

Ending Wars of Competitive Intervention

This seminar is part of the The Logics of War … and Peace Workshop

Abstract: How might great power war arise today, and if it were to develop, how might it end? Most discussions of great power war focus on either territorial aggression (such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan) or inadvertent escalation (such as a war arising from jockeying in the South China Sea). In an era of nuclear deterrence and nationalist and normative resistance to territorial revision, however, great powers will tend to pursue their interests through encouraging strategically important secondary states to align with them. This observation thus highlights an alternate pathway to war, in which rival great powers escalate their interventions in important secondary states that are experiencing regime crises, creating the risk that one side will find itself facing a choice between conceding an important state to its rival or escalating to great power war. I couple a theoretical explanation of this pathway to war with illustrations drawn from the Pacific component of World War II, in which Japanese efforts to prevent a hostile government from consolidating power in China and counterefforts by Japan’s rivals ultimately opting for the gamble of great power war over acquiescing in a humiliating defeat in China. How then might these wars end? A review of several centuries of interstate wars of competitive intervention reveals three broad patterns, albeit all with exceptions: wars of competitive intervention are typically protracted; initiators rarely manage to install their preferred government in the contested state; and war termination nonetheless typically requires significant concessions to the political interests of the intervener.