As the world (including the self-styled peacemaker-in-chief in the White House) holds its breath for the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, spare a moment to ponder the growing risk of war, including world war.
Even a cursory scan of today’s major military powers suggests that both their leaders and policy elites are dangerously overconfident, and could — as in 1914, say — sleepwalk into disaster out of what international-relations scholars call mutual optimism.
If you’re not worried yet, consider a study, the largest and most international of its kind, that comes to exactly this conclusion. Jeffrey Friedman at Dartmouth College just published the findings of surveys he’s been giving (between roughly 2016 and 2022) to about 2,000 national-security officials from more than 40 Western countries — men and women, North Americans and Europeans, civilians and service members.
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