Thread by @thescottwolford

My #APSA2019 paper, on how coalitions end their wars...and why World War I ended in armistice, not the "knockout" the Allies had sought for so long. (1/x)

scott-wolford.com/uploads/2/5/2/…

Why did the Great War end (in the West) not with a bang but with a whimper? Turns out its part of a general problem of shifting power inside a war coalition. (2/x)

Britain and France knew that, if the war went into 1919, the US would be even more powerful, with more boots on the Continent, and Wilson would be well-positioned to dominate the peace settlement, which made an armistice look attractive. (3/x)

Wilson, for his part, didn't have the stakes---like survival as a great power---and Britain and France did, so he was more willing to gamble on the German promise of democratization to make its commitment to the peace credible. (4/x)

So Entente fears of rising American power, combined with lower American stakes, led to an "early" end to the war, based on a faulty solution to the commitment problem. (5/x)

But that combination of not-too-rapidly rising power and lower stakes is the exception; if power were rising faster (say if Br hadn't been slowing the flow of doughboys) or if the US weren't so distant from the German threat, then the model predicts a fight to the finish. (6/x)

So what do we learn? Bargains struck *within* warring sides (btwn friends) can have as much to say about how and why wars end as bargaining that occurs across warring sides (btwn enemies). (7/x)

Also worth noting that this paper sprang from initial ideas that I put down here, in my textbook, amazon.com/Politics-First… and here, for @monkeycageblog: washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-ca… (8/8)