Richard Ned Lebow, "Why Nations Still Fight" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

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Visit TXU.com for more information at rep #1004. Cozy season is ahead, and you'll be spending way more time inside. Is your home ready? Don't worry. With Wayfair, you can upgrade your space without breaking the bank. Score up to 70% off during their Labor Day clearance, on furniture, area rugs, mattresses, and more. Plus, surprise flash deals you can't miss. Whether it's one room or the whole house, Wayfair has pieces for every style and budget. Shop Wayfair's Labor Day clearance now through September 7th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair every style, every home. Welcome to the new book's network. Hello, welcome to the new book's network. I am Sashi Kumar Sundaram, Sashi, Senior Lecturer in Foreign Policy and Security at City, St. George's University of London. I'm also the Director of the Global Disorder Group here at the University, and I chair the Global South Caucus of the International Studies Association. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Professor Ned Lebow. Ned is a Emeritus Professor of International Political Theory in the Department of War Studies, King's College London. He's also honorary Fellow of Bembroke College at the University of Cambridge, and James O. Friedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He's a Fellow of British Academy and a Member of the Athenium. Ned is one of the world's most distinguished scholars of international relations. I would not really know anybody who studies international relations is not aware of Ned's work that spans from international relations theory, political psychology, and his remarkable academic career for over six decades now has transformed the field of international relations studies of conflict and security by combining history, philosophy, psychology, ethics, and political theory in ways that challenge conventional thinking about international politics. Every student in international relations is aware that Ned has produced some landmark works, including the tragic vision of politics, a cultural theory of international relations, the politics and ethics of identity and why nations fight among several other books and articles. He's the most quoted scholar of our times, and his books have won some of the highest honors in the field. I am here to talk with Ned about his new book, Why Nations Still Fight. So, thank you very much Ned for joining this conversation. My great pleasure, Sashi. Yeah, so we're going to start with the continuity and change from your previous book. So, your previous work, Why Nations Fight, asked one of the most urgent questions of the time, why countries go to war? And now you're again revisiting with the same old question, but adding more depth and detail. The book offers a profound challenge in many ways to conventional explanation, but before we go into that, we'd like to sort of know what sort of intervention that you're making in this book since you made in the last book, Why Nations Fight. The obvious question to begin with, Why Nations Fight? My goal was to show that security and material well-being were not the major causes for in the modern era. Collectively, they accounted for less than a quarter of the motives of states that started war. Now, mind you, if you're the state that's attacked, security is your dominant concern, but I did this with a particular data set. And a data set, this is that had wars that involved on both sides, at least one rising power or great power. And I did this because power transition, for example, argues that rising and great powers go to war with one another. By limiting my data set to great powers and rising powers, I could also address realist theories of war because they're intended to apply to the big guys. So I wanted to engage these theorists on their own pitch as it were. And I did try to code my data set as carefully as possible, but also to lean over backwards in favor of codings for those whom I'm arguing against. And interestingly, in all the criticism that I've received from realist Marxist, rationalist, nobody's accused me of cooking the data. The other point that I wanted to make in that book, that book should really be seen as an extension of a cultural theory of international relations. And in a cultural theory of international relations, I argued that we had theories of war based on fear, realism, obviously, and also based on material interests, both liberalism and Marxism do that in very different ways. If we go back to Thucydides, voicing a common Greek understanding, he has the Athenian spokesman in Sparta, attribute their actions and everybody else's to fear interest and honor. But honor had dropped out of the philosophical lexicon in the West, and there's a reason for that. And certainly, it hasn't been prominent in international relations theory with the possible exception of Marx's favor. So I wanted to bring this back and create a paradigm of international relations based on what the Greeks called Thumos. And Thumos is framed by Plato and Aristotle as a fundamental human drive, equal and often superior in its demands to appetite. People want to feel good about themselves. This is a fundamental human need. We do so by excelling in activities that are valued by our Peter group or our society, winning their approbation and in turn basking in the praise of others. I tried to show how this motive was an incentive for aggressive foreign policies and war in particular, as it was in 62% of my cases covering these 400 years. I differed in another way from all of these other paradigms in that each of them says my paradigm explains international relations. I'm not claiming that. I'm arguing that states' leaders, peoples, sometimes they're driven by fear. Sometimes material interest is paramount in their minds and other times it's either standing or revenge, which is how Thumos finds expression in international relations. So we need to consider all of them and see the different distributions over historical areas, cultures, and states. And that gives us a far better handle and a more complex account of international relations than any single paradigm could do alone. So that was my agenda in Y nations fight. In Y nations still fight, I was motivated in the first part by anger and sadness say that war continues. And I must say I chose to write the book and you could either say very good or a very bad time because no sooner had I started it than Putin invaded Ukraine. And no sooner had I finished it that Hamas and Israel went after each other. with Donald Trump joining in and the war escalating to what it has now become. I asked a somewhat different set of questions with a very different data set. And this data set, it differs in two ways. I started in 1945. I'm only interested in looking at the post-war era. I include, well, I guess it differs in three ways. I include all wars that were fought, whether they had great powers or rising powers or not. If Libya attacked Chad, it counts in the data set. And the other thing I did was to lump together interventions with wars. And it's quite interesting that this distinction is widely used in our profession. But if you look at it, it was initially a rhetorical move invented by the great powers in the 19th century when they invaded a state or occupied its capital. Often to reclaim debts that weren't paid as with the British and the French occupying Egypt briefly. By calling it an intervention and not a war, they intended to signal other great powers that they were not trying to upset the status quo that their aims were limited in the hope that others would not interfere. So it's a rhetorical political category, not an analytical one. What we routinely call interventions consider the Americans and Vietnam as a case in point. We find that interventions and wars overlap considerably in the numbers of people involved, the numbers of people killed, the numbers of months or years that it goes on. There's no effective way of making an analytical distinction between them. So I haven't included every kind of military action. So I'm periodically North Korea, Shell, South Korea. But I'm looking at things that I consider substantial and I justify them in the data set. Constructing the data set, I then asked a more comprehensive set of questions. I asked in the first place who was the initiator, who was the defender and were their third parties. I then asked what their goals were on two levels, what their immediate goal was and the extent to which I could explain this goal in terms of my underlying categories of analysis of fear interest in honor. I asked if they succeeded. And here I used two meshes, which I also did in "Why Nations Fight." The first day achieved their military goals. But as classmates made us all aware that war is an extension of politics by other means that we use force to achieve political goals. So the real measure of success or failure is does the state that initiates force achieve its political goals? If not, and that if not is the default, I believe that I had about 30% of the cases the initiator achieved its military goals. But in 18% or less it achieved its political goals. So clearly there was something wrong. And as these leaders did not go to war to lose quite the reverse, they miscalculated. And I then focused on miscalculation. I said, what kinds of miscalculations did they make? And where does one begin to look for explorations for these miscalculations? That's in the book itself, not in the dataset. And finally to deal with rationalists who could readily come back and say, yeah, of course leaders lose wars because the international environment is opaque. And people take risks and you can never know what's going to happen. Or they had no choice because public opinion or important constituencies were compelling them to draw their swords. So I have a category in the dataset pertaining to compulsion. The extent to which leaders believed that they were being significantly pushed by domestic constituencies or foreign ones to use force. And I also ask that they make this assessment properly because we know that they don't. As an aside here, a couple of years back, I co-edited a book with Ludwig Norman on the robustness and fragility of political orders. One of the things that we asked our authors to do was to look at the extent to which leaders in the cases they examined thought their countries or their political regimes were robust or fragile. And how that perception influenced how they responded. And it turned out to be important, but what also turned out to be important was the greatly inaccurate beliefs of leaders about the robustness or fragility of their regimes. They tended to exaggerate in both directions. So that same is true with compulsion, so we need a double measure of it. The book itself differs in fundamental ways because of the questions I asked. In "Why Nations Fight," I followed other authors in making assessments about the likely future of war. Would we see an increase roughly a continuation of what we had or a decline? In this book, I argue that such general estimates are not very meaningful, that we have to make them within categories of states. I had identified types of states, again, from the data set that were most prone to use force, and far and away the greatest offenders are the great powers. They're not as the Americans would claim about themselves, the upholder of hegemony and with it of global political and economic order. They're a principal source of disorder, as is Russia and China. So type of state is important. Great power is the leading offender, but also second come rump states. A rump state being a once great power that's lost lots of territory in the aftermath of a war or a breakup of its empire. In the 1945 period, Germany is a rump state, but for the second time, 'cause it was in 1918, they'd learn the lesson this time around. Serbia and Russia and Serbia and Russia have been very aggressive states, partition countries and divided nations, partition countries developed early a beginning with the division of Ireland after all or one. But the other partitions, Palestine, Israel, India, Pakistan, Cyprus, most recently, Armenian Azerbaijan, these are all post-1945 phenomena, as is divided nations. The two Koreas, the two Germany's, the two Chinas have two Vietnam's and wars in very much associated with these divisions and the remaining divisions of China and Korea are hotspots that everybody recognizes under some circumstances could lead to war. So I go through the list of types of states identifying which ones are the most violent and then look at why they're the most violent, but look at them historically, because the likelihood of war has in type of state has not remained constant across the year since 1945. Colonial and post-colonial conflicts have all but disappeared. Whereas in the '50s and '60s, they were far and away the dominant form of violence. Looking at it, this way gives me a much shorter handle. on making forecasts about what's likely to happen in the future. When it then comes to success and failure, what I argued, and I've already told you so striking, is the degree of failure. And much of the book attempts to develop theory to explain, first, to identify the common kinds of miscalculations that lead to failure. And it causes at different levels and in different types of states for those miscalculations. And then finally, the purpose of the book is to pull it together and ask if we understand war in this very different way. What are the theoretical and substantive contributions or conclusions? It's very clear in my mind that rationalism is an oxymoron when it comes to explaining war because war is almost by definition an irrational activity. And any leader in all but the most extreme circumstances would recognize this and not go to war and look for some other way of addressing whatever problem or opportunity it was. So a rationalist theory of war initiation is indeed an oxymoron. When it comes to realism, the variables or the causes of war that realism looked at don't seem to matter very much. But their key one is the balance of power. What's clear is that leaders didn't pay much attention to the balance of power or completely misjudged it in their favor. So this too reflects back on rationalists because rationalists assume that it's what their models are about that leaders conduct a careful cause calculus of possible gains and losses. But one of the striking findings in my book was they don't, that in more than half the cases they did not sit down, meet with colleagues and advisors, ask for evidence, discuss the pros and cons, they never had a plan B. And in the case of Trump and Iran, he never even had a plan A. So neither of these paradigms takes you very far with respect to war. And the liberal liberalism is not a theory about war, more of a theory of peace. But in my data set at democracies that have gone to war. And of course, democracies turn out to be the most violent of all states against non-democracies. So the democratic peace is an ideology, not a science. And who takes it seriously, mostly Americans. And like hegemonic theory, whether people are consciously doing this, I don't want to pass judgment on others motives. But the effects of it is to justify aggressive American foreign policies. American international relations theory has become the handmade new American imperialism. So I then come to the substantive conclusions and ask what can be done. And here the kinds of suggestions I make are completely different, even orthogonal to those made by realists, liberals, and rationalists. I'll rest my case here. That was a mouthful. 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That was really interesting to hear and get the comprehensive picture of what the book is about. And to a large extent, it is indeed a continuity from the larger questions that you've been asking about the rationality and rationality of war. And I also understand that your next book, which is currently going to print, is about an irrational theory of war. And effectively across these overs of work, you've been asking this puzzle that can one device a rational theory to account for fundamentally irrational behavior. And as a treeology, if I can see, why nations fight, why nations still fight, and an irrational theory of war, which will be forthcoming, enables us to ask some deeper questions about the problems of war. And in that sense, I think the timing of the book cannot be more prudent and important, because not only we see the advent of large-scale wars returning with much vengeance. We also see the return of geo-economics, geo-politics in its own ugly face, the return of cultural racial narratives, including radical right arguments. And at the same time, we also see the problems that are coming and resurfacing again, as if that really has always gotten it right. And in many ways, your research actually dispels these enduring myths about the problems of war. So you've talked and given a comprehensive understanding of the problems that your book is sort of asking, let us slowly unpack each of these things and go through it in some detail. First of all, before we do my interrupt for one second, the title of the hopefully forthcoming book is an irrationalist theory of war. It's an irrationalist theory of war. It's an attempt to create a rational theory about an irrational behavior. And it's not going to print. It just was sent out for review. All right. I think it's gross. So it's not over the last hurdle yet. Yes. Congratulations on actually having it done, which is big. And I'm honestly anybody. So let us start with the fundamental sort of, the focus from the post 1945 period, one of the most interesting things that, when I've read this book, is this different categories of conflict that you bring in, rather than to see all conflicts in one single light, you're able to show that there are multiple different categories of conflict. There's colonial conflict, post-colonial conflict, partitioned countries, as you mentioned, but also regional rivals, ramp states, proxy wars, spillover conflicts, you know, and civil wars with and without outside interventions, humanitarian interventions and so on. In effect, I think these sort of extensive categories also enables us to sort of see the world in a much more complex picture as you pointed out in a few minutes back. But one of the sort of methodological questions that I had is that you effectively, this is a study that went about creating and building a data set and your data set contains about, contains precisely eight cases of intervention and war and 126 initiators. And your arguments follow from this, a strong dataset that you built from 1945 onwards. Can you take us through on your methodological focus on why did you first decide to sort of build the dataset in the way you did, particularly looking at intervention and war together, and how through an inductive analysis, if I may say so, that you're looking at these dataset, looking at what is going on in this data, in this different categories, that you're then able to come back and forth, as you say, in your book as well, in terms of its analysis, both in contributing to a theoretical analysis of its connection to fear, interests and honour, but also much more careful understanding of these categories itself, and how they enable us to have a better understanding of war. Can you help us unpack the sort of methodology behind your way of presenting the book? I will. I think the best way of putting it is that it is a recursive, deductive and inductive process. I started with some questions about war that I wanted to answer, and no knew that I needed a dataset to do so. And the dataset I should add that I could analyse when appropriate quantitatively, but also qualitatively, and the two really need to do both. So, my questions led to categories. As I started coding cases, two things happened. I began to discover that it wasn't so easy to code in some of the categories. For a start, it was obvious at the outset that in many cases, you couldn't code either or. You had to code degrees of things. That's with, for example, compulsion on leaders to use force. It was also apparent to me that there was a difference between how leaders framed or would have answered these questions, and how I did. In many cases, leaders convinced themselves that they were facing threats they had to respond militarily. In many of these cases, I don't think this was true at all. I mean, if you just take a well-documented case of American intervention in Vietnam, the Johnson and his advisors all believed that the Vietcong was controlled by an off-Vietnam who was controlled by Moscow. That the insurgency was a test of American resolve. That if the Americans didn't intervene to uphold an anti-communist government in South Vietnam, that the Soviets and the Vietnamese and communists everywhere would become more aggressive. That dominoes would fall. I mean, all of this, in retrospect, in fact, it was obvious to some of us at the time, it was paranoia. It wasn't reason analysis in any way. So we have this varying degrees of disconnect between coatings of leaders and coatings of an analyst, and both are relevant because to understand how somebody behaved, you have to understand how they saw the world and whatever mattered to them. But to make sense of what they did, you have to have your own judgments about what they did and why and where they miscalculated. So that became a complicated issue. So periodically in the process of coating, I would go back and think that my protocols aren't working as well as I like. I need to roof eyes my protocols to do a bit of coating, this or that category. And when I did that, I then had to go back and recode all the earlier cases. So it was constantly reiterative going back and forth. So inductive, inductive, etian forming the other. And this was true as well about what cases to include because defining a war is problematic. And this is useful by take a few minutes to talk about it, a correlates of war, which is the data set most commonly used for the study of war. Does things that most of the data said to do as well that I reject completely out of hand? It comes up with a definition of war in terms of casualties. This is meaningless. And it's meaningless because war is the use of force to achieve political ends. Coming up with some technical measure of casualties that doesn't address what war is about is not the right way of doing things. Secondly, our statistics of casualties are deeply questionable. I mean, they have a figure of what a thousand or above states greatly exaggerate or deliberately underestimate and lie about the casualties they've suffered and inflicted on others for obvious political reasons. They count people killed or what's the distinction between a soldier and a civilian. It's changed and the nature of war has changed and with it the percentage of civilians that get killed versus soldiers, we yet all of this is held constant. So, too, totally ignored are all the advances in medicine, which means that less than a third of the people who used to die in wars do because of modern medical interventions. But on the other hand, we also have weapons that reach to different places and do things that other weapons didn't. So, having this one figure that you hold constant across a very changing political military environment is not very helpful. So, I dispense with that and I offered my own account of a military action authorized by central authorities intended to achieve a political goal. And I had to draw the line someplace. As I said, we have any number of cases or just take the Middle East with Israel and Palestinian militias, almost every week. For all the years since 1947, something violent has happened. Where do we draw the line between nothing and an intervention and an intervention and a war? So, I tried to offer some judgments about it, but recognizing the fuzzy nature of any category. But what I've done in the data set is I have included degrees of uncertainty and confusion. Where is it that somebody could readily make an opposing argument for including a case or excluding it or interpreting it differently? And I discuss this rather than making, this is what I say is the case. And I'm hoping that by doing a data set this way, I could make a contribution to the field and encourage people to be more sophisticated and thoughtful and open in a different kind of way about the data set and their construction. It is. And I think that is a very important intervention in my view because to a large extent, I do see the constructivist impulse in actually saying, I'm starting at the abductive level, going from induction to deduction and back. And the role of reflexivity of the researcher doing the coding to a large extent also stands in parallel to how leaders themselves see a problem. So there is a connection between how leaders see the world, how observers of leaders see the world, and how both are necessary to have a proper coding and this going back and forth is part of an acknowledgement of messy methods, which do a large extent straightforward empirical accounts that possibly has an understanding of an objective view of the world, slightly dismisses. They probably would say, well, we are going to stand back and just observe as if things just automatically unfold. And I think that is where the contribution of the book really in methodological terms is to say, it is actually possible to build a data set. Data should not be this code word, this jargon that's been outsourced only to the so-called quantitative and real world sort of researchers coming from American academia. Data is also something that can be appropriated and understood and deeply debated and contributed to from those who are coming from the critical side as well. And in that sense, it is an important intervention for those who are trying to replicate some of the same ideas by building a data set through a reflexive methodology, looking at the connections between how political leaders do certain things and how observers do certain things and how coding is always a messy enterprise that goes back and forth. And in terms of messy, the word that you use is the political aspect of understanding war and coding certain categories and so on. And as I mentioned, there are several different categories that you bring into your book. But one thing that reads to doubt, for me, at least when I was reading the book, is my own interest on this topic, particularly on the notion of traps, ethical traps, has you put it. And the category of ethical traps to a large extent shows in your book how it is possible for some actors to win a military war and lose the peace or to lose the war and win it politically. And this sort of elaboration comes from a detailed understanding of cases, but also through a reflexive methodology that is quite evident in the book. Can you elaborate a little bit on this category of ethical trap? And what do you mean by it? And how interesting it is to sort of understand the different complexities through which war unfolds. The success in failure of war is not foretold or to some extent easily categorized. Well, you did such a fine job now of describing ethical traps that all I can do is offer a little commentary on your explanation. The notion here is that conflicts are often between parties that have greatly varying military capabilities. And this recognition compels the weaker side to look for ways of compensating, circumventing, financing, getting around, or even taking advantage of its adversaries' superior capabilities. In the literature, we find lots of examples of ways in which this is done. The most important one in my view, and maybe I'll talk about this for a second, and then get to ethical traps. So let's come back to Klaus Vitz, again, who described war as a contest of wills. And that contest of wills had two components to it. It was in the form of an equation, if you like. The one side of the equation was the ability to inflict pain on an adversary. And this is the sign of the equation that powerful states focus on all the time. I'll just look at Donald Trump. He's going to kick the shit out of you name whatever country. Weakestides often pay more attention to the other side of the equation, which is absorbing pain. And if they can absorb more pain than their adversary, they'll win. So the vietcong, and the North Vietnamese, lost every battle of the Vietnam War, but emerged the victor. They emerged the victor because the American people, many of whom saw no national interest in bleying, in Vietnam, compelled their government to end the war. So this was a very successful and run around American power. The Iranians are doing something right now with respect to the United States. Well, another variant, which Mervyn Frost, my colleague at King's College and Longstanding Friend at Mervyn and I wrote about, is a strategy that we call ethical traps. And ethical traps are designed to entice an adversary to do something that will rebound against them. And let me give you by the first historical example of this that I came up with. And it's quite appropriate because it's such it's just been the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution. So American colonists who were pro-independents provoked the British army into firing into a protest crowd on Boston common. People were killed. And the British who claimed to be representatives of law and of a sensitive political system that was governing in the interest of the colonies were exposed as somebody who committed violence. And interestingly, there was a trial of the commander of the British forces who had ordered his troops to fire. And he was defended by John Adams, who of course, revolutionary and John Adams got him off. He made the case that the troops were threatened, that they saw their lives were at risk, that they fired in self-defense, and they couldn't be held accused of murder. And the colonists were furious that they lost. But the effects of the massacre rallied Americans in all the colonies to come to support. And it changed the perception that American colonists had of those who were confronting the British from being rental rouses to people we want to support. So the British were trapped. Gandhi and campaign of non-violence, getting British to behave in ways which violated their very claims for why they were justified in ruling India. On the mind, support not only in India but in Britain. And that turn of public opinion in the two countries had profound political importance. I was very clear that it would have been hard for the Indians to defeat the British by force, but non-violence succeeded. More recent examples include Palestinian militias who do things like firing missiles at Israel from inside schools and hospitals whose rules have been removed. And if the Israelis attack the missile launches, they've committed atrocities by bombing schools and hospitals. Public opinion turns against Israel. Or the 202, October 23, Hamas attack on Israel. Hundreds of missiles close to what a thousand people killed. And it provoked an overreaction. And whether Hamas sought to do this or it just happened, I don't have the answer to. But the effect was the same. Netanyahu greatly overreacted. And his military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon have led to loss of support of Israel everywhere. And have in fact undermined, not enhanced, Israeli security. Because ultimately, Israel is dependent on the United States and Americans and many American Jews have turned on Netanyahu and have questioned what Israel is doing. And this is the only thing any rational Israeli leader would want. So these are ethical traps. They work. At the extent they work, then those parties like militias are encouraged again and again to use them. And you don't stop them by bombing them. You stop them by not falling into their traps, which is something that people don't think about. It's going to be those in power in Israel. Quince specializes in effortless high quality essentials, like ultra-soft organic cotton and premium Mongolian cashmere sweaters. Quince also has premium stretch denim, starting at just $50, with the kind of perfect fit, structure, and weight you'd expect from a luxury designer brand. Everything at Quincy's priced 50-80% less than similar brands. Quincy's t-shirts have become an absolute staple in my wardrobe. If you're looking to get new basics, Quincy should be your first and last stop. Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quincy app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quincy.com/newbooks. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. Cue you-in-c-e.com/newbooks. This is your home, road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at bj's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months, open soon, limited time offer new members only. It's a first of its kind plan, created for how Texans actually use energy, discover how much more you could save with free nights in Cool Summer, TXU Energy, energy for everything. Visit TXU.com for more information, rep #1004. And that is an intervention to large extent for those who study the weapons of the week to log James Scott, for example, who also looks at rhetoric as a particular form of weapons of the week. You know, Jim and I, who are graduate students together again. Yes. So I think there's a longer trajectory of looking at what sort of strategies that the week aside stake through the use of ethics, and through use of specific traps to hold the stronger side accountable and to some extent also defeat them is a long-standing project. And Ned, you'd also agree that almost the reason why we came to this discussion on ethical traps is just an example of how, in coding the set of 88 cases of intervention and wars, and talking about 126 initiators, the process, the reflexive methodology enables you to code in some ways, rather than others, some countries as aggressors and some countries as not. And these sort of reflexivity enables us to-- It's a term aggressor, initiator, yeah, initiator, sorry about that, yeah, you know, yeah, I know, aggressor is a load of 10. In a way, this, you point out to the politics of it, and I really agree with that. And the question on the ethical traps when I had was that the condition under which the stronger dominant party remains trapped and to some extent remains frozen by these ethical traps, really rests on the assumption that they all abide by the shared practices and norms of the international system, only by actually exposing the fundamental contradictions of the international system that the subordinate of the weaker states sort of tries to challenge the broader dominant state now have to then accept it. And that is a big challenge, right? And what we see with what Israel is doing recently is to say, well, you know, I don't care anything about the shared practices and norms, I'm just going to bomb the shit out of everything. And that's what Russia has been doing, we're challenging the shared practices in international society as well. So the ethical traps is a super argument, but at the same time, it rests on the understanding that almost both the trapper and the trapped remain somehow committed to the broader tenets of normative shared practices of the system, and that it's collapsing these days, don't you think, sir? Yes, this is a very good observation. And to me, your comment is a very important one for ethical traps to work. There have to be norms that are accepted. And ethical traps have worked in the past because the power that's trapped has acted in the name of those norms. So it's left itself exposed. I don't know, of course, Poutine and Trump and Netanyahu, well, less Netanyahu, but Poutine and Trump pretend to be acting in terms of those norms, but we know they're not. The question is, what's going to happen in the aftermath of these violations? So let me suggest that there are two pathways to the future that we could look at. And I'm not suggesting that these are the two pathways that are most likely. They're both possible pathways, and they anchored two extremes, no doubt what will happen and will be somewhere in between. The first pathway is that the powerful do what they want and the weak suffer what they most. Sadly, you see this phrase from Thucydides, Millian dialogue, repeated by some talking head every week somewhere, also taking it out of context and to believe that Thucydides really believed that this is how international relations function. The meeting dialogue is intended as a pathology. And the people who act this way think that they're acting in their own interests, but they're acting counter to it. They lose in the long run as the Athenians did in the Peloponnesian War. And as I believe the Russians will do in Ukraine and Donald Trump with the United States. So the two pathways are this, the three great powers behave the way Athens did. And they decide that they're too big and too powerful to be constrained by norms. But these norms allow others to play them for chumps, which is precisely what Trump claims has been happening to the United States all along, is that they're going to put their interests first. And they create a triumvirate, and I deliberately go back to the Roman use of the term here, in which they rule each of them over territories that they control or in their backyard and the others allow them to do what they want. If such a world came about, everybody would lose. I don't think I have to elaborate how or why. I also think in such a world as with the Roman triumvirates, they very quickly fall out among themselves. And it'd be the kind of wars that George Orwell describes in 1984. What was it with Oceania, Asia, and the Pacific world, more or less something similar? So that's one pathway. I can see it as a possibility, but I can also construct an narrative that the attempt of Trump, Poutine, and Xi to get there has produced enough horror and opposition that the world and these countries are going to draw back from doing it. The other pathway is the one in business by many of the people responsible for the European Union, a world in which there are certainly conflicts, but the use of force or trade wars to deal with them is just out of the question. And indeed, it's still unimaginable that any member of the EU would go to war against another one, and mind-poggling the Donald Trump threat to do this in Greenland. We could come back to that later. I don't think it could possibly happen, but the threat was real in his mind. In this other world, norms are important. People follow them for the most part. People see the benefits of doing this, and they go stronger over the future. So we're at a cusp where things could go one way or the other, and maybe you have a bit of crystal ball that I do. I can't give you the answer. I don't have any crystal ball net, but clearly, this is the, you know, you come across this extremely interesting and optimistic of the situation. I think I'm getting more pessimistic, and to some extent, my friends also accuse me of being nihilistic, of some extent to see that they might at all be chances of these three time variates coming together and destroying the world, but at the same time we don't still have a counterhegemonic force that looks at the world for the benefits it has to coordinate and bring all these bigger powers and hold them accountable. Yet this is because of the short self-interest of each and every single state that works for its own so-called narrow national interest. And we park that discussion for the conclusion, but this do raise an important problem which is the central crux of your book. The problem that if almost all countries invariably end up waging war for the rational reasons and war is a rational by its very nature, the focus on miscalculation and misjudgment is extremely important for your book. As a sort of way to sort of tease out how then do leaders end up sort of doing these things that they know that they are going to fail or they have lessons previously learned that they are going to fail or evidence shows that they are going to fail, but nevertheless they don't see it. Poutine expected Ukrainians not to oppose Russian forces and even thought they might welcome them. How crazy is that? And why is this continuous form of miscalculation and misjudgment among policy makers? Is it a natural condition of the way humans are or is it the pathology of being a political leader? So that's what the book tries to answer. And if or they follow on the irrational and we should probably not go there now because it would be a long answer, but we could do another interview when the other book comes out. But the short answer is that leaders are people and that people who face risks and opportunities believe they can cope with them. And once they commit themselves to acting or once they move toward commitment to act, they have strong psychological incentives to believe they can succeed. So they deny, distort, discredited evidence and those who tell them you're heading for trouble. I mean, look, again, in the case of Trump and Iran, this CIA told him in no uncertain terms that the first thing the Iranians would do would be to close the streets of Hormuz and laid out some of the consequences of that. Did it influence Trump? No. So we could and maybe I need to qualify myself here. So there are some leaders that are clearly range from being less rational to full psychopaths and we could put in that category, Trump, Miran Yahu, Putin, mediamine, amorma, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, it would be very easy if we could explain war into crazy leaders. But the lion share of wars in my data set were not initiated by such people. They were started by people who were considered them and even later to be generally peaceful, thoughtful, well-intentioned or did crazy things. That's a bigger and more important puzzle and we need to focus on that. Yeah. I agree. I think and that also shows that by virtue of holding particular political positions or what you call as compulsions and to some extent when they are compelled to do certain things, when they are compelled under the conditions of international system or regional rivalry or when they are compelled in an ethical trap, so to speak, they might then end up behaving in ways that might be hurting their own sort of self-understanding of how the world works and also they stop listening to others who give sort of advice as well. But this might be sort of questioned and to just push this argument a little bit is to say that if all wars are the result of miscalculations or most wars are the results of miscalculation. Most wars are the results of miscalculation. If you say 80 percent. 80 percent. Yeah, most wars are the results of miscalculation. You pointed that out from a realist perspective or somebody who comes from a different theoretical perspective to come and say, "Naysayers will always be right in retrospect." Would be to say, "Yes, almost with the start, you could always say, "Yes, it failed and thus it was a result of miscalculation." You do address those problems within the dataset itself. Enabling opportunities to see, did the leaders, for example, foresee success? Did the leaders foresee failure? How do we collect evidence for motives and intentions? How do we actually see that these problems unfold in a particular complex ways? And so on, are these methodological questions or a method theoretical questions? Well, they're both. They're both. As so consider, one of the important things I do in this dataset that I didn't do in the previous one of Why Nations Fight is to ask, and I focus on this even more, this is the core of the irrational theory book, is I have in this new book, I have a list of questions that rational leaders should ask themselves before they go to war. And they start with, is there some other way I could address this problem, nonviolent way? Why am I rejecting that in favor of violence? I go through a set of questions, they're eight of them, and they end with, am I only considering the short term consequences of my action? I need to consider the medium and longer term consequent, because that's what matters in practice. And the question before that is, do I have a plan B? Because for all kinds of reasons, one's expectations also often fail to be realized. And if so, you have to do something else, is there a reasonable something else I can do? And if not, maybe I shouldn't be using force. So I come up with these questions, and I show in all the cases that I look at, that they weren't asked, or they weren't asked seriously, or the answers to them were rigged. So that becomes the source of miscalculation, but that's of course the cause, the decision making problem is the cause at the superficial level. And after go underneath and say, "Well, what accounts for this not being done right? Where do we look?" That's where my theory goes. And you do point out to several different things, but one interesting thing that struck me was the notion of cultural and great power arrogance. That was responsible for nearly 16 cases, and somebody who's read Marvel, for example, has been very vocal about the great power chauvinism of the Soviet Union, and so on. To some extent, there is something about great power arrogance, and your account of great power arrogance comes from the, and their miscalculations, as a consequence of that, comes from the understanding that somehow we'll be correct, we'll be okay, we'll get away with it, or we'll succeed like the Americans in Vietnam, for example, when they said the French failed, but we'll be able to do it. Yes, exactly, so the Americans said the French, when they last won a war, and even more interestingly, the American leadership said, "Well, of course, the French were imperialists. We're liberators." So part of the cultural and great power arrogance is seeing oneself as benign, having no understanding that as far as the Vietnamese were concerned, the Americans were simply the successes. Dean Atchison is trying to persuade the Chinese that we're no threat because the Americans and Mexicans have such wonderful relations along the Rio Grande. I mean, what a joke that is. And here's Mao accusing the Soviets quite properly of great power arrogance, but being completely blind to Chinese great power arrogance. And if anybody is culturally arrogant, it's historically been Chinese, right? Yeah, yeah. So these are interesting questions, and they come with the territory of being great powers, and that arrogance leads you to believe the other side as a pushover. And it's doing the right thing. And interestingly, and here we can go after Ken Waltz, try to in the this erasionalist theory book, can argue that bipolar systems would be more stable and peace-prone, because very little could happen that would make the superpowers feel insecure. If country A defected from one side to the other, why did it matter? Why did Brezhnevins' colleagues invade Afghanistan of all places, because they feared quite unreasonably that it was about to become pro-American? So it does matter for superpowers, and in fact, it matters for superpowers more, because they end up staking their reputations on loss and gain of influence in contested areas of the world. It's precisely the opposite of what Ken Wall says, and I attributable to a kind of arrogance which leads to global extension, which then leads to a logic which makes the powers who are doing this, because they're strong, feel paradoxically even more insecure, and I try to elaborate on that dynamic in this new book. Yeah, and I found that really interesting, because it kind of resonates with some of the problems these days we find with the notion that it is not just the great power arrogance of military power alone, but also the sort of liberal arrogance that we are here to spread the best and make the world the best place, and you do point out this concern of the so-called liberal order, which is illiberal and democratic, and intolerant of the cultural values of ordinary people in the West and the rest of the world. Think of the Washington consensus, you know, the Americans and their ideological fellow travelers saw this as bringing the great benefits to other people and the wisdom, the wisdom of the liberal West to the unenlightened, unwashed, developing world, and when in fact it was a crude form of imperialism. Yeah, and we'll be here, this great power arrogance, so it got both ways, and sort of like the material side of arrogance, particularly pointed out by the arrogance of having technological superiority and so on, but also the sort of liberal benign arrogance that somehow we solve the world's problems, and the others only have to catch up. And I think the pushback to that is now one of the most serious problems in international politics. Correct, so my good friend, Beton Bardet, has written several books in French, and I'm pleased to see that now a couple of them have been translated into English on the problem of humiliation. And he's an Iranian Frenchman who sees these issues from both sides because he's very much at home in both cultures and languages, and argues that humiliation leads to the most violent forms of pushback, and that's what we're seeing. And I went and maybe I conclude with this a few years back when I was still teaching at Cambridge as a by-fellow, I was invited to be the commentator on a talk given by the then head of the council on foreign relations Richard Haas, and he at the time was touted to be Hillary's Secretary of State or National Security Adviser if she won the election. He gave a cook's tour of trouble spots of the world, pointing to all these countries and movements as sources of disorder. And it was my turn to comment, and I seem to be all very interesting. But you forgot one major source of disorder in the world that you just didn't mention, and that's the United States. And I gave reasons why this was so, he got angry, and he pointed to me and looked at the crowd. He said, "What planet does this man come from?" And of course, the crowd being polite English people, you know, Smile didn't say anything, and he sat down feeling very smug. I mean, that's what you unupigast. And the other occasionally, you meet the other side, so back in I must have been early '70s. I was a council on foreign relations fellow. Almost every other fellow opted to go to Washington and shadow an important policymaker for the year. I decided no, I would use the year and their money to travel around the world. And I came up with a project of studying American support for authoritarian regimes, arguing that in the end it would rebound against the Americans and Iran was one of my cases. David Rockefeller gave the money for the program, and he took all of us out for lunch, very nice restaurant, and he said, "You're a project, particularly interesting." And he said, "My bank, we make a lot of money supporting a thought from these authoritarian regimes." And we talked about it, and he said, "I'm very interested when you come back, I want to read your paper." He was quite aware of what he was doing. Most think tanks, most foundations who fund these projects are well aware of the consequences of what they do. Just some do it as an experiment, and some do it as a sort of a proactive strategy on behalf of the government. I think so. I think so. Yeah. So this has been a most interesting conversation. Thank you very much, Ned. It was great, and I highly recommend everyone to read this book to get both a theoretical, empirical, methodological, and the philosophical intervention into understanding the nature of war. So thank you very much for this conversation. Thank you, Sasha, and see you next time, I'm in London. Thank you for listening to this episode of The New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com. 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