The End of the Cold War

Predicting an Emergent Property

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6284922
AutoresBruce Bueno De Mesquita (0000-0001-8582-8330, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1998
Volumen42
Número2
Páginas131-155
Fecha de publicación1998-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Conflict Resolution (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-0027 • E-ISSN: 1552-8766
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0022002798042002001
OpenAlexW2155238110
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas23
Referencias citadas20

Gaddis claimed that international relations theory failed to predict the Gulf War, the Soviet Union's collapse, and the cold war's end. Subsequently, he acknowledged that the expected utility model captures the logic behind complex adaptive systems such as the cold war international system. That model correctly predicted two of the events to which Gaddis pointed. Here, that model is used to simulate alternative scenarios to determine whether the cold war's end could have been predicted based only on information available in 1948. The simulations show a 68% to 78% probability that the United States would win the cold war peacefully given the conditions in 1948 and plausible shifts in the attentiveness of each state to security concerns over time. The analysis demonstrates a rigorous method for testing counterfactual histories and shows that the pro-American end to the cold war was an emergent property of the initial post-World War II conditions

Cold war · Counterfactual thinking · Economics · International relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Soviet union · State (computer science · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Mathematics · Psychology · Social Psychology