Democratic Peace Theory Analysis

It is rare to have wars based solely on religion, although they make up about 40% of all other wars fought. Religious wars are motivated by a higher power or idol that is said to have commanded radical groups to kill in an unjust manner. Ethnic cleansing, for instance, is one aspect of war against religion. The Holocaust, for example, was a war against millions of Jewish men, women, and children were killed because of their ethnic background. Hitler’s affirmation of dominance of his race was his primary objective. The new face of war, however, is with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS who uses a direct competitive strategy, simultaneously attempting to outmaneuver other jihadist groups of a weaker secular. In its efforts …show more content…
Jackson and Morelli (2009) say that elected leaders under the last term of a term-limit can diverge from the population’s interests and go to war. As stated earlier, the Democratic Peace Theory is a theory that believes democracies hesitate to engage in armed conflict with other democracies because of mutual democratic pacifism maintaining that the state of peace can easily be sustained between democratic nations. However, democracies can engaging in war through a coup, such as the coup in Venezuela when the United States assisted the Venezuelan military into forcing Chavez to step down as president. Unfortunately, the coup was unsuccessful and caused bad blood between the United States and Venezuela. Young democracies are also in danger of being subjects of war because they are seen as vulnerable and unstable in their governing policies. While democratic peace arguments have drawn attention to the statistical fact that democracies have historically not been involved in wars with other democracies , democratic states …show more content…
If there were no first-strike advantage, then there would be some mutual allocation of resources leading to a better outcome for all countries than war (presuming that the allocation does not further alter the expected outcome of war). Jackson and Morelli (2009) explain that if players can make simultaneous commitments it is possible for them to reach incompatible demands in settings with uncertainty about whether commitments are binding. In many cases, the outcome depends on who initiates a war. A significant offensive advantage to war can lead war to be inevitable (Jackson and Morelli 16). As a simple illustration, imagine two evenly matched countries with an even split of resources and a cost to war. If war leads to an evenly matched outcome regardless of who attacks first or under what circumstances, then peace is self-enforcing. In contrast, if a country that strikes first gains a large advantage by doing so, and expects to gain resources with a high enough probability, then peace is destabilized. Each country would like to strike before the other, and also understands that the other also has an incentive to attack first, and so must react by expecting a war, and so war becomes