War is just negotiation with artillery

Now that recent years’ geopolitical tensions have escalated into military warfare, we take a moment to go beyond the headlines and view recent events through the lens of political science with Krishnan Ranganathan, Former Executive Director, Nomura and Current Guest Faculty, India B-Schools.

Introduction: A history of war

About 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu delivered perhaps the most obvious lesson in geopolitics: “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.” History suggests policymakers either never read the book or stopped at the title.

Most wars are simply negotiations that failed. For every war that erupts, thousands of potential ones quietly die in conference rooms, buried under compromise, concessions, and cups of tepid diplomatic coffee. Negotiation and war are merely two ways of pursuing the same objective: getting what you want. Mao Zedong captured the equivalence bluntly: “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.” A century earlier, the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz had offered the same insight: “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”

Five reasons wars break out

The political scientist Christopher Blattman argues in Why We Fight that wars usually arise from five recurring failures in bargaining. Strip away the patriotic speeches and historical grievances, and most conflicts reduce to some combination of these.

Unchecked interests

The costs of war are normally the strongest argument for peace. War is expensive, destructive, and politically dangerous. But this deterrent works only when those who bear the costs also make the decisions. When leaders are insulated from consequences – autocrats or political elites gambling with other people’s lives – the equation changes. In 1982, Argentina’s military junta didn't invade the Falklands for the sheep; they did it to buy domestic legitimacy. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was similarly shaped by elite miscalculation insulated from public accountability. Leaders who do not personally pay the costs of war often treat it like a high-stakes poker game played with someone else’s chips.

Intangible incentives

Not all wars are fought for land, oil, or markets. Some are fought for the far more combustible currency of status, honour, or revenge. Even God’s glory. Political thinkers have noticed this pattern for centuries. Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau all warned that such motivations are among the most dangerous in politics. Material disputes can often be negotiated. Humiliation rarely is. China frames disputes in the South China Sea partly in terms of historical prestige. Russia has framed the Ukraine invasion partly as resistance to NATO expansion and the perceived humiliation of the post–Cold War settlement.

Uncertainty

Rival nations rarely share the same information and have every incentive to lie about their strength. The historian Geoffrey Blainey concluded bleakly: “Wars usually begin when fighting nations disagree on their relative strength”. In theory, modern intelligence – satellites, cyber-surveillance, AI – should reduce this uncertainty. In practice, it often multiplies it. In an era of AI and deepfakes, "more data" has not produced "more clarity".

Commitment problems

Even if both sides see the balance of power clearly today, they cannot trust it to remain stable tomorrow. This is the Thucydides Trap: the fear a rising power (Athens/China) inspires in an established one (Sparta/US). If you believe your rival will be twice as strong in five years, it becomes "rational" to fight them today. China’s rapid economic and military rise has unsettled US policymakers, while Chinese leaders view US alliances and military deployments in Asia as attempts to contain their country’s rise. Neither side openly seeks war. Yet each worries that delay could leave it strategically weaker in the future.

Misperceptions

Humans are biologically prone to naïve realism – the belief that we see the world objectively while our rivals are malicious. Nationalist TV networks and algorithm-driven social platforms reinforce the belief that one’s own country is rational while its rivals are malicious. Misperceptions that once circulated slowly now spread at the speed of a trending hashtag.

The case of US-Iran conflict

Israel and the US argue that Iran’s nuclear programme poses an unacceptable future threat – a classic commitment problem. Iran frames the confrontation as resistance to Western coercion and regional humiliation, invoking both intangible incentives and elite interests. Meanwhile, uncertainty over Iran’s true nuclear capabilities and intentions fuels misperceptions on all sides. Domestic political pressures in Tehran, Washington, and Jerusalem further narrow the space for compromise. The result is precisely the sort of bargaining breakdown that turns diplomacy into missiles.

The role of leadership in geopolitics

Blattman’s framework, otherwise useful, does not account for the idiosyncratic agency of leadership. Institutions are often just shadows cast by a single individual. When a leader’s identity becomes indistinguishable from the state’s destiny e.g. Putin’s preoccupation with Ukraine or Netanyahu’s historical "red lines", the bargaining vanishes into the vacuum of personal ego. War is not always a bargaining failure; it is sometimes a deliberate tool used to reshape the bargaining power itself.

Pathways to peace

If war is a bargaining failure, peace requires a robust toolkit to repair the process. Montesquieu argued that "Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices." This "Capitalist Peace" theory suggests that when supply chains are intertwined, the cost of war becomes prohibitive. However, as the recent retreat from globalization and the rise of "de-risking" show, trade can be weaponized as easily as it can be used for peace.

Beyond the marketplace, two other pillars support the ceiling of global stability: democracy and institution. The transparency of democratic debate reduces uncertainty and the accountability of the ballot box checks the Unchecked Interests of the elite. International bodies act as information clearinghouses. By providing neutral monitoring of things like Iran's nuclear enrichment, they attempt to solve the commitment problem through verification rather than trust.

In 1932, Freud told Einstein that war was "practically unavoidable" due to our biological drive for destruction. Yet, history offers glimpses of hope. The Thirty Years’ Peace between Athens and Sparta (bought with bribes and territorial concessions) wasn't morally pure but it kept the swords sheathed for a generation.

Peace is not a permanent state but a high-maintenance process of managing failures. It requires sharing information to reduce uncertainty, building institutions that make agreements enforceable, and ensuring that those who declare war are the ones who must live in the ruins. If we fail to maintain the bargaining space, we shouldn't be surprised when the artillery eventually resumes the negotiations.