Within foreign policy and academic circles in the United States and other western countries, retrenchment has become an increasingly controversial topic. In spite of the increased attention, there have been few empirical studies that rigorously examine the outcomes of great power retrenchment. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap by performing a quantitative analysis of great power retrenchment outcomes from 1870 –2007. Counter to the retrenchment pessimists’ expectations, we find that retrenchment leads to relatively positive outcomes for declining states. States that choose to retrench experience shorter periods of economic decline and are less likely to be the target of predatory conflict initiation.

Scholars and practitioners in international relations have a strong interest in forecasting international conflict. However, due to the complexity of forecasting rare events, existing attempts to predict the onset of international conflict in a cross-national setting have generally had low rates of success. In this paper, we apply Bayesian methods to develop a forecasting model designed to predict the onset of international conflict at the yearly level. We find that this model performs substantially better at producing accurate predictions both in and out of sample.

Rivalry scholars have done much to explain how rivalries begin and how they end, but little explanation has been given to how rivalries are maintained over long periods of time. Existing theories treat maintenance as simply the absence of termination or the continuing presence of structural conditions that birthed the rivalry, but we argue that this is an unsatisfying conceptualization that does little to tell us what mechanisms keep rivalries going. We argue that rivalry maintenance is not a passive condition of nontermination. Rather, rivalries persist because uncertainty about an opponent's resolve periodically surfaces, and states eliminate this uncertainty by issuing threats designed to compel the enemy to make concessions on the underlying issue. States issue threats to signal their commitment to continue disputing the issue or to force their opponent to reveal their level of resolve. States must remain resolved if they do not wish to concede the issue(s) at stake. Rivalry maintenance is therefore a conscious decision by states to continue their rivalry in order to avoid granting concessions.