Center for Preventive Action - Averting Major Power War - The Logic of Mutual Assured Survival

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the official National Secu- rity Strategy of the United States declared that “the risk of conflict between major powers is increasing.”4 The imperative to avert such a conflict cannot be overstated. [...] Even if the worst excesses and extreme dangers of the Cold War era can be avoided, there is still the question of how the major powers will cooperate on a range of pressing threats to humanity—not least 2 Averting Major Power War the accelerating effects of climate change, the possibility of pandem- ics deadlier than COVID-19, and the emergence of malignant forms of artificial intelligence—while r. [...] Even before the latest round of economic sanctions brought on by its aggression toward Ukraine, Russia was facing the prospect of falling even further behind China and the West, with unpredictable consequences for its foreign and security policies.20 Third, the risk of dangerous interactions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War was arguably tem- pered by their geograp. [...] Historical precedents exist for such rapprochement: Great Britain choosing to settle differ- ences with the United States in the Western Hemisphere at the end of the nineteenth century; Britain and France reconciling their differences prior to World War I to focus on the growing challenge from Wilhelm- ine Germany; the United States and China normalizing relations in the early 1970s; and China and. [...] For a brief distillation of the debate among international relations scholars regarding the relationship between structural characteristics of the international system, particularly the distribution of power among major powers and the risk of conflict, see Jack S.