I think the Thucydides Trap thing is a significant omission that might increase the probabilities listed here. If we forget the historical data for a minute and just intuitively look at how this could most foreseeably happen, the world’s two greatest powers are at a moment of peak tensions and saber-rattling, with a very plausible conflict spark over Taiwan. Being “tough on China” is also one of the only issues that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on in an increasingly polarized society. All of which fits Allison’s hypothesis that incumbent hegemons rarely let others catch up to them without a fight. So the risk of a great power war—and of escalation—intuitively seems higher today than it was in 2000, for instance, though neither the constant risk nor durable peace hypotheses seem to reflect that.
Maybe the next step is a “fluctuating risk” hypothesis that takes certain (admittedly tough to measure) global conditions of the world right now into account, rather than just the historical frequency of such wars. This would probably be less useful the longer the time horizon we’re trying to model—who knows if US/China will still be the riskiest conflict 50 years from now? - so I don’t want to overstate our confidence and its impact on overall risk would need to be sufficiently marginal. But I also don’t think prior major wars were completely unforeseeable events (in 1930, if you had to predict which countries would be likeliest to fight the next great power war, you’d not be blindsided to learn Germany would be involved). So in theory, a cooling of great power tensions could decrease our risk estimate, while further decoupling of great power economies could increase it, etc.
I agree with this. I think there’s multiple ways to generate predictions and couldn’t cover everything in one post. So while here I used broad historical trends, I think that considerations specific to US-China, US-Russia, and China-India relations should also influence our predictions. I discuss a few of those considerations on pp. 59-62 of my full report for Founders Pledge and hope to at least get a post on US-China relations out within the next 2-3 months.
One quick hot take: I think Allison greatly overestimates the proportion of power transitions that end in conflict. It’s not actually true that “incumbent hegemons rarely let others catch up to them without a fight” (emphasis mine). So, while I haven’t run the numbers yet, I’ll be somewhat surprised if my forecast of a US-China war ends up being higher than ~1 in 3 this century, and very surprised if it’s >50%. (Metaculus has it at 15% by 2035).
Makes sense, and I’m not surprised to hear Allison may overestimate the risk. By coincidence, I just finished a rough cost/benefit analysis of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan for my studies, and his book on Nuclear Terrorism also seemed to exaggerate that risk. (I do give him credit for making an explicit prediction, though, a few years before most of us were into that sort of thing).
In any case, I look forward to a more detailed read of your Founders Pledge report once my exams end next week. The Evaluating Interventions section seems like precisely what I’ve been looking for in trying to plan my own foreign policy career.
I think the Thucydides Trap thing is a significant omission that might increase the probabilities listed here. If we forget the historical data for a minute and just intuitively look at how this could most foreseeably happen, the world’s two greatest powers are at a moment of peak tensions and saber-rattling, with a very plausible conflict spark over Taiwan. Being “tough on China” is also one of the only issues that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on in an increasingly polarized society. All of which fits Allison’s hypothesis that incumbent hegemons rarely let others catch up to them without a fight. So the risk of a great power war—and of escalation—intuitively seems higher today than it was in 2000, for instance, though neither the constant risk nor durable peace hypotheses seem to reflect that.
Maybe the next step is a “fluctuating risk” hypothesis that takes certain (admittedly tough to measure) global conditions of the world right now into account, rather than just the historical frequency of such wars. This would probably be less useful the longer the time horizon we’re trying to model—who knows if US/China will still be the riskiest conflict 50 years from now? - so I don’t want to overstate our confidence and its impact on overall risk would need to be sufficiently marginal. But I also don’t think prior major wars were completely unforeseeable events (in 1930, if you had to predict which countries would be likeliest to fight the next great power war, you’d not be blindsided to learn Germany would be involved). So in theory, a cooling of great power tensions could decrease our risk estimate, while further decoupling of great power economies could increase it, etc.
I agree with this. I think there’s multiple ways to generate predictions and couldn’t cover everything in one post. So while here I used broad historical trends, I think that considerations specific to US-China, US-Russia, and China-India relations should also influence our predictions. I discuss a few of those considerations on pp. 59-62 of my full report for Founders Pledge and hope to at least get a post on US-China relations out within the next 2-3 months.
One quick hot take: I think Allison greatly overestimates the proportion of power transitions that end in conflict. It’s not actually true that “incumbent hegemons rarely let others catch up to them without a fight” (emphasis mine). So, while I haven’t run the numbers yet, I’ll be somewhat surprised if my forecast of a US-China war ends up being higher than ~1 in 3 this century, and very surprised if it’s >50%. (Metaculus has it at 15% by 2035).
Makes sense, and I’m not surprised to hear Allison may overestimate the risk. By coincidence, I just finished a rough cost/benefit analysis of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan for my studies, and his book on Nuclear Terrorism also seemed to exaggerate that risk. (I do give him credit for making an explicit prediction, though, a few years before most of us were into that sort of thing).
In any case, I look forward to a more detailed read of your Founders Pledge report once my exams end next week. The Evaluating Interventions section seems like precisely what I’ve been looking for in trying to plan my own foreign policy career.