Power Shifts and War Risks: Security Dilemmas and the Expected Value of Aggression

All else held equal, a shift in underlying economic power within any interstate dyad changes each side’s ability to advance its interests at the expense of the other via force, thereby changing the strategic prospects of both. Absent other intervening variables, therefore, power shifts generate dyadic security dilemmas in which each side is incentivised to contain, retard, and ideally destroy the other’s ability to harm them. But of course, all else is not “held equal”, and there always are intervening variables of at least some kinds. Accordingly, this paper combines these exacerbatory and mitigatory variables to produce a compound theory of the expected value of risking aggression as a strategic response to relative power shifts.