The Democratic Peace Theory

One of the four sources of threat, aggregate power, is a component of the realist view that the greater a state’s resources or capabilities, the greater threat they pose to other nations. Therefore, the more missiles, ships, and nuclear weapons the Soviets possessed, the more they threatened the United States. This increased the probability of the American misperception, as the US believed the Soviets to be more powerful than they actually were. The help support their effort to appear superior to the United States, increase global prestige, and gain allies, the Soviets often lied about the number of missiles they possessed. This also allowed the Soviet Union to gain domestic legitimacy among its own people. The Soviets did not anticipate American …show more content…
Under the structural model, the tendency for peace between democratic nations stems from the time and support needed to carry out a major conflict. On the contrary, the cultural mode, detailed in the following paragraphs, claims that the tendency toward peace derives from the political belief that democracies should be friendly towards one another in order to preserve democracy in the international sphere. This theory proposes that democratic states do not enter violent conflicts with other democratic states; however, the theory does not apply to relationships between democracies and non-democracies, as the latter are not bound by public approval or the same governmental restrictions on declaring of wars. The underlying thesis that the executive of a democratic nation, whether structural or cultural factors restrict their actions, has a limited amount of choice due to the representative nature of the …show more content…
With the effects of globalization in the present day, and with modern technological advances, come entire areas of research that were unavailable during the Cold War. Drones, for example, have revolutionized the nature of aerial surveillance and unmanned warfare. Technological advances by both states would be put to the test. Likewise, the political nature of both states is no longer the same. If a study examined Russian-American relationship and probability of war now, multinational organizations would play a role as well. NATO’s incremental encroachment of Russia’s traditional borders over the past two decades increases the relevance of proximate threat under the balance of threat theory, as the United States is obligated to support its’ NATO allies in the event of war. While there are still no borders between them, the degree to which the United States is connected to states that do share borders with Russia is greater than ever