Germany, for its part, was fighting a preventive war against Russia and its French ally, the solution for which was ending their run as great powers.

Our first step was to see if these stories helped us explain why the war lasted so long, and they got us pretty far. (This happens a lot there’s a damned good reason the vast majority of wars end short of what we talk about colloquially as military “victory.”) On the other hand, when wars begin with states disagreeing about how a total war would play out, they end once fighting produces sufficient agreement that both sides can agree to save the costs of further fighting. This, of course, tends to push states towards particularly extreme war aims, from dismembering states to “ending” them as great powers to replacing their governments. When wars are driven by commitment problems, for example, they tend to end when either (a) commitments are made credible by removing incentives or abilities to renege or (b) the source of incentives to renegotiate (like rising power) are eliminated. To summarize the discussion, though, we emphasized that wars often end when fighting solves the problem that stood in the way of a settlement in the first place. There’s a lot to draw on here, and if you want some accessible treatments of war termination in general check out this and this (both of which figure prominently in today’s story). Why, after Germany’s defeat at the Marne, the onset of trench warfare on the Western Front, and the stalemating of the East, did the war continue until 1918? After all, while Germany suspected it was beaten in December 1914, it pretty much knew that it was in December 1917…and yet the war dragged on. We finish the “real time” part of the course in December 1914/2014, but there were/are 46 more months of war to go. That said, we spent some time today talking about why the war lasted as long as it did. That’s a blessing in some ways-there’s lots to be puzzled by, to explain, and to learn from-but in others, it’s not so great: any one event looks overdetermined when you look closely enough, and it’s inferentially impossible to prize some explanations over others. When it comes to international politics, World War I pretty much has it all.

How long did the klingon war last