Completely disregarding which president is in office, I always thought the paradoxical way to minimise war is to ensure you have a credible threat of retaliation. That means if you are attacked, you must fight back, otherwise your credibility falls and you become more of a target, thus emboldening adversaries and increasing violence.
The problem with this sort of logic is that it becomes incredibly easy to bait states into disproportionate responses that end up as strategic failures - either due to bad PR or deploying force against decoy attacks and leaving holes in places that matter.
There are a lot of ways to prevent wars. That’s just one.
- Promises not to go to war
- Reduction of armaments
- Machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations
- Economic penalties against aggressors
War doctrine is a very complicated subject, as is even the definition of war in modernity.
What causes a nation to declare war is unclear and difficult to reliably determine, but there is often a period or circumstances of instability or a immoral act that precipitates them.
The US appears to be going into a period of isolation and the world without global shipping protection is going to look radically different.
Judging by the declaration of war against Ukraine by Russia, it appears an underappreciated aspect of the equation is equal measures of senility and insanity.
