From Fire to Frying Pan: The Impact of Major-Power War Involvement on Major-Power Dispute Involvement, 1816-1975

This paper sought to plug a gap in the literature on war, by exploring its impact on subsequent dispute involvements. The present effort was confined to an examination of the major powers, and only their major power-major power experiences were studied. This may limit the generalizeability of the results. Nevertheless, there is some tendency for major powers to decrease their dispute involvement, even though the drop may not be large, particularly over the first ten years after the war involvement. In most cases, the trend is for the major power to become involved in one less dispute over the next ten years than in the previous decade. Although it is disheartening to observe that major powers do not learn more from their war behavior (i.e., experience a quicker and more dramatic drop), and that World War II was followed by an increase in dispute involvement by the superpowers, we can also interpret these results as showing that most major power governments are not imprisoned by their past wars. That is, these results indicate that the government of a major power generally views each possible dispute involvement as a separate situation. Coupling the results of this paper with earlier results showing a lack of periodicity and cycles in major power war involvements, we may take the optimistic view that in any situation that a government contemplates dispute involvement, it may be possible to dissuade it from crossing this conflict threshold, since it is not necessary to overcome the effect of past war experiences. The research findings are somewhat dull, but they do offer hope for conflict containment.