Shifting power balances guarantees escalation and global draw-in, extinction.

Previous power transitions show that major powers are by no means doomed to trip into the Thucydides Trap during an era of fluidity. But periods of transition do inflame a whole basket of risks. The uncertainty associated with crumbling hierarchies and the militarization of foreign policies to compensate for perceived weaknesses can heighten the dangers of advertent and inadvertent escalation associated with closing windows of opportunity. These periods are also associated with the tightening of alliances and the accumulation of crises, as well as the spillover of conflicts between political, economic, and ideological domains amid declining ideological agreement between major powers.

All these systemic instabilities increase the probability of war — and they do so in large part through the dynamics unfolding among middle and smaller powers. Worrying about how power shifts drive direct conflict between great powers is not wrong but incomplete. System-shaping wars often grow out of ambitions, aggressions, and miscalculations involving other states, which eventually pull opposing great powers into major wars, crises, and proxy wars. This pattern crops up again and again: Serbia and Austria-Hungary before World War I, the division of the Korean peninsula and the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Kosovo War (with the infamous Pristina Airport Incident), the Syrian and Libyan civil wars (with foreign powers vying for influence), and on to the current Russia-Ukraine war (with Western support for Ukraine via money and military equipment). The assortment of “dangerous dyads” scattered over the globe — including in the Caucasus, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia — does not bode well for regional stability.