Political scientist Stephen Walt knows the scenario inside and out. Wars, he notes, touched the new revolutionary republics of France in 1792, Russia in 1918, China in 1950, and Iran in 1980-each time preceded by a similar spiral of events. Walt sees a logic to the international conflicts that often follow the violent creation of a state. The newly established government and other powers exaggerate the threat that they pose to one other. Worse yet, they exaggerate the ease of a military solution to those threats.
Many political scientists believe that revolutions spark wars by shifting the balance of power.
And in part Walt shares that perspective, called realism, which sees the need for international security as the driving force behind states' behavior. These ingredients provide the optimism and paranoia that fuel spiraling conflicts. Not that war is always the result, as the aftermath of the Turkish, Mexican, and U.S. revolutions demonstrates. In the former, stabilizing elements such as less expansionist revolutionary ideologies helped avert a major international clash. Yet the dynamic of misperception and fear, he notes, still shaped relations among states.