During the academic year 2024-2025, a colleague requested that I lead a seminar for PhD students, one that would be organized around a key text considered to be a classic in the field. He sent me a list of potential books, and I selected Kenneth Waltz’s Man, State, and War. His works are required reading around the world for majors in international relations, and in my career as a teacher of the discipline I have assigned his works when discussing questions of war and peace, so that students may learn the particular answers provided by the school of thought commonly known as ‘realpolitik’ or simply ‘realism’. With wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, the question of why wars occur has become pressing. Science, in my view, cannot provide a definitive answer, but theories which aim to explain war can help to sharpen our thinking, assist in considering plausible explanations, and establish the parameters of testing our arguments in the light of evidence in the form of observable events, facts, patterns, or tendencies.
Man, State, and War is very helpful for this endeavour. Unlike most scholarship, which usually and understandably interrogates narrow or niche nodes of inquiry, the text aims to answer one of the big questions of human affairs, which can be pithily summarized as “Why War”? Or, more specifically, why do wars persist throughout history despite very different epochs, cultures, economic and political structures? Man, State and War provides an answer which itself was not original but which—and here is the novelty and value of the text—is expressed in a very accessible form, in a way which provokes fruitful thought and generative discussion.
The reason for the recurrence of war, argues Waltz, is that the overarching system of international relations is anarchical in the sense that there are no authorities above the state which can peacefully resolve conflict the way, say, a court or legislature can do domestically. Consequently, states must rely on themselves for dispute resolution, and in the absence of an overarching political or legal structure with legitimate coercive power, it is their strength—in the form of economic and military power—which will determine the outcome. The incentive for states, then, is to maximize power, and since all are behaving this way, there is a constant struggle for supremacy which often breaks out in war.
One reason for the argument’s importance is that it challenges other explanations, such as a corrupted human nature or the notion of “bad” states, which most believed before Waltz’s text and perhaps still do. In part because of the way the argument is presented, and in part because it challenges widely held views on the reasons for war, the text has become a classic, meaning it has value that transcends the period in which it was written (mid-1950s), and had a significant influence on later writers in a way that makes it required reading for understanding the history of thought.
The first time I read parts of the text was during my MA and PhD studies between 2007-2013, and I closely re-read the text in its entirety in the Spring of 2025 to help ensure fruitful discussions during the seminar. Re-reading the text after so many years and the accumulation of knowledge and experience allowed, I think, for a more in-depth interpretation of Man, State, and War. This blogpost will present my analysis of the text’s main contributions to our understanding of war and peace, while making connections to the wars currently raging in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Commonly held—and wrong—explanations for war
Most people most of the time perhaps do not theorize the question of war for any number of reasons. One may be that for some, war is a just a part of human affairs, similar to other social practises, and hence there is little need for explanation anymore than we need to explain why, for example, we eat, sleep, poop, marry, and reproduce. Others take this supposed natural tendency as their starting point in attempting to explain war, and in fact classical thinkers have linked war to features of human nature which predispose man to violence. Man, State and War cites thinkers as diverse as Confucius, Saint Augustine, and Niebuhr who observe some intrinsic defects, moral or cognitive, which prevent groups from peacefully and rationally resolving their differences. For Christian thinkers, this was ultimately the result of man’s original sin, which came from Adam’s disobedience and desire to become a god himself. More secular thinkers writing in the 20th century, such as Henry Morgenthau, discarded the religious content but maintained the form of a defective human nature which he called animus dominandi, or the desire/wilfulness to dominate.
The chief critique of this argument in Man, State and War is that human nature is too imprecise a variable. Human nature is related to everything, including, importantly, peace, and so if it is the cause of war, it must also be the cause of the absence of war. Intellectually this does not take us very far, because over-explanations by definition are hard to test or refute. If we want to explain why, for example, WW1 occurred, and we posit human nature as the explanation, and can say the same for why the war ended, we are not in fact providing an explanation for the war that can be challenged with other arguments (such as German militarism, or British and French colonial supremacy, etc).
Another widely held explanation is that it is the character of the state which generates war. This explanation is indissoluble from the modern state system which emerged in the 17th century, and the birth of two ideologies—liberalism and socialism—in the 18th and 19th centuries. The latter ideologies not only provided ideals around which states and societies should be organized, they also attempted to explain many social institutions, including war. For liberals, the main cause of war was non-liberal states, by which they meant monarchy, mercantilist, or other political forms which did operate on the basis of their understanding of liberal democracy, which includes enshrining the right to property, and votes in multiparty elections. Most people most of the time want to better their economic condition, and it is they who mostly pay the price of war; it follows that if citizens have a say, they will vote against war. Ergo, wars occur because small unrepresentative political authorities such as monarchies want to gain glory or territory. It follows that if all countries became liberal democracies, war would disappear from human affairs.
Waltz also shows how implausible this. To say that war would disappear if all countries were liberal democracies is tantamount to say we would stop fighting if we all agreed on the fundamentals of life; in this sense, in form it is little different from saying war would end if we were all Muslims, Christians, or Bhuddists. This may or may not be true, but it is trivial, speculative, utopian, and hence does not conform to the rigours of scientific investigation. Moreover, the core belief that liberal democracies are more peaceful than monarchies does not stand up to scrutiny. Man, State, and War cites England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688, which many liberals see as a key historical turning point. Waltz shows how England subsequently became more entangled in the affairs of other nations and hence more prone to war. The reason is that a change in the regime led to a change in the nature of warfare. Under monarchy, wars were fought mainly by mercenaries and for limited objectives; consequently the damage was often minimal. Liberal states, in contrast, justify war on the basis of ideals, and in this sense was similar to a religious crusade. Wars become, as a consequence, more frequent and destructive.
The ideological elements of socialism—critical of private property and markets—differ significantly from liberalism, but for our purposes they have more in common than they like to admit. Both are products of the 18th and 19th centuries, are utopian, and teological. Both also derive from their ideology explanations of war, and blame small coteries of unrepresentative elites who act on the basis of selfish or narrow interests. While for liberals it is monarchies or authoritarians, for socialists it private capital who profit from war and are able to use their influence to capture the state apparatus. If capitalism is the cause of war, the solution is for all countries to adopt socialism. Here we encounter the same trivial observation made by liberals, mainly, if we were all the same, we would not fight. Waltz also cites evidence from WW1 to show the failure of this theory’s predictions. As war fever was heating up, socialists across Europe shared the above-mentioned explanation. Representatives of workers, who were the majority, were determined to not participate unless the war was “defensive”. As fighting became inevitable, workers and socialists almost invariably sided with their nations rather than with workers in neighbouring countries, and when fighting began, almost all of them contributed to their nation’s efforts on the ground that it was “defensive”. Thus, when push came to shove, loyalty to the nation trumped any socialist convictions about the reasons for the war.
The reason both of the main explanations mentioned above—human nature, and the structure of the state—fail, says Waltz, is that they do not take into account the structure of the international system. To help readers understand on a deep level how this system works, Man, State and War relies especially on the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and particularly the stag hunt parable. Imagine 5 starving men go hunting for a stag, and that success requires their combined efforts. During the hunt, one man sees a rabbit, if he kills and eats it he will satisfy his own hunger and improve chances of survival, but this will undermine the interests of the group. If he refuses because of an ironclad commitment to the group, he risks missing this opportunity and starving to death. Which option does he take? According to the parable, taking the former option places him in a state of war with his fellows, and this will occur frequently. In a state of anarchy, there is no system to punish that individual for betraying the interests of the group.
The point of the intellectual exercise is to highlight several features of anarchy. One is that self-interest will trump the collective interest especially when valuable resources are in play. Second is that under anarchy one cannot rely on others because the threat of defection is very high. Third, self-reliance creates competition for scarce resources, and when inevitable disputes occur, they are resolved through force not law or morality. Fourth, if power determines outcomes, intentions or the character of states does not matter. Rather, coercive power—economic and military capability—is determinative. Consequently, states may feel threatened by the relative not absolute capabilities of their rivals. From this emerges the balance of power, a feature that is structural and cannot be wished away.
From this perspective, wars occur relatively frequently because there is nothing to stop them. The immediate causes are usually the kinds of common disputes which arise because men want things, not because they are devils, but it is anarchy which ultimately turns these disputes into war. For Waltz, this explanation is neither moral nor immoral, it is amoral, similar to a fact of nature. Does this mean that the utopian desire for eternal peace is a pipe dream? Most likely war can never be abolished, but its outbreak can be mitigated via a judicious adjustment of the balance of power. According to the theory presented in Man, State, and War, a major cause of the outbreak of war is the security dilemma, which occurs when one state threatens others because of its asymmetric capabilities. Excessively powerful states feel less obliged to avoid war because weaker states cannot retaliate in a way that imposes severe costs. At the same time, if states increase their relative power too rapidly, weaker states may be inclined to strike before it is too late, leading to the outbreak of war. In contrast, a stable balance of power creates mutual deterrence, whereby states know that they will pay a high price if they attack, making them more reluctant to fight and more likely to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the dispute. In latter works, Waltz uses this framework to explain why the Cold War did not break out in direct fighting between the USA and the USSR: they were relatively militarily balanced, especially because of the possession of nuclear weapons, and this imposed restraint and hence peace.
This places a responsibility on all states to maintain a relatively stable and equal balance of power, despite the inevitable inequalities among them. Powerful states must avoid provoking their rivals by engaging in action which makes their capabilities overwhelmingly preponderate and therefore threatening. Weaker states, meanwhile, must also resist the temptation to surpass other states in terms of coercive power. Achieving this when only conventional military forces are involved is very hard in part because of the high degree of uncertainty, but nuclear weapons can alter calculations in a way conducive to peace, as they are relatively equal in their destructive capacity, and leave little room for uncertainty. Consequently, states which possess them have a de facto equality of power. For this reason, many realists have defended the counter-intuitive position that allowing states to develop these weapons is conducive to peace not war.
During the seminar, students and I discussed some of the problems with this explanation. Regarding the Cold War, it was rightly pointed out that, although there was no direct conflict between the USA and the USSR, they fought indirectly—in Korea or Vietnam—which led to millions of deaths. Thus, rather than preventing war, relative parity between the two superpowers only served to redirect it in other directions, and in ways that were very destructive for other countries. Moreover, the emphasis on power inequalities in the context of an anarchical system does not explain why, for example, two unequal states like the US and Canada, or China and Singapore, can have very peaceful relations.
We can now attempt to see the practical and contemporary value of the arguments presented in Man, State, and War via a consideration of two conflicts raging at the time of writing, in Ukraine and Middle East. Regarding the former, realists almost universally blame Western countries, and in particular their attempt to expand NATO, on the grounds that it destabilized the balance of power. NATO is a military organization controlled by the US, and members states have offensive military hardware controlled by the Washington on their territories. American statesmen such as George F. Kennan knew that this would antagonize Russia, for this reason Secretary of State James Baker assured Russian leaders that NATO would not expand. This promise was not kept, triggering hostilities. Those who blame Putin or Russian imperialism are relying, consciously or not, on the “bad states” argument presented above, which assumes, of course, that the US and its European partners are “good” states. They neglect to consider that if, for example, Mexico were to join a military bloc controlled by Beijing, military action from Washington would be inevitable. The solution, then, is for Western countries to renounce their goal of Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the US has already done this, and major European countries will eventually have to accept the same terms.
The war between Israel and Iran is perhaps more complicated. The former launched the war to prevent the latter from obtaining a nuclear weapon, yet from the perspective of Waltz’s arguments, had Iran possessed such a weapon, the war would not have happened. Many Israelis and their backers say a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat, but the text under discussion leads to other conclusions, namely, that it would be conducive to peace because of the effects of deterrence. A nuclear Iran could not use the weapon against Israel because it knows that Israel’s counter-attack with nuclear weapons would destroy Iran. Many Israelis might reply that the logic of deterrence doesn’t work because Iran led by suicidal Islamists. This is said despite the fact that Iran has all the trappings of a modern state—clearly defined territories, citizens and responsibilities towards them and towards its neighbours. Therefore, Iran, like all other states, would not risk its own survival. It follows that the logic of deterrence would be just as effective between Israel and Iran as, say, between the nuclear armed Pakistan and India. In the latter case, you also have one side with an Islamic government, but there is no evidence that this has altered its calculations on the potential use of nuclear weapons. In fact, a case can be made that, although fighting has broken out between India and Pakistan, it has always almost always quickly resolved in part because both sides want to avoid the existential risk of nuclear confrontation.
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