Why War Rather Than a Deal? How Bargaining Can Break Down

As the conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran unfolds in real time, it raises one of the oldest question in politics: why do wars start? The familiar answers are tempting — greed, power, hatred, the darker instincts of human nature. But they are often too simple. War is ruinously expensive for both sides, and almost any deal is better than destruction. The costliness of war is precisely why it remains the exception rather than the rule — rivals usually prefer to loathe one another in peace rather than fight. The book we will be looking at in May takes that observation seriously. Instead of asking why humans are warlike in general, it asks a sharper question: if peace is usually the better choice, why do deals collapse and wars break out anyway? By mapping the specific strategic breakdowns — miscalculations, hidden uncertainties, promises that can't be kept — that derail even willing parties, it offers a diagnostic framework for understanding why conflicts erupt despite overwhelming incentives to avoid them, and how those same insights can be used to chart a path to peace. Come along and let's dig in.

Primary Reading: Why We Fight Summary (A 38-page guide prepared for this meetup)

The Book: Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (2022) by Christopher Blattman.

Christopher Blattman is a professor at the University of Chicago who has spent decades doing something rare in conflict studies: actually going to war zones and high-violence communities to run rigorous field experiments and test his theories against reality. Drawing on political science, economics, and psychology, he builds a framework that applies equally to international wars, civil conflicts, drug cartel turf wars, and street gangs — the same underlying logic, he argues, explains them all.

His central claim is that war is almost never inevitable — peace and co