States only fight rivals of matched size, preventing most conflicts
Evidence
Huge militaries are effective deterrents, and a tiny state would no more attack a superpower outright than a tiny crab would escalate a fight with a leviathan. Instead, tiny states challenge other tiny states. Midsized states confront midsized states, and only big states face off with big states. Despite a political landscape littered with countries of all sizes, contests tend to coalesce around clusters of equally matched opponents. Occasionally, when a confrontation settles into a true duel with matched rivals squaring off face-to-face, and when both sides have discretionary resource pools large enough to sustain it, a state-versus-state contest can spiral into an arms race. — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 559
Categorization
- XREF: Directly parallels size-assortative fighting described in earlier chapters on fiddler crabs and beetles — matched opponents are the precondition for escalation. — connects to: Weapons primarily deter rivals rather than inflict harm in actual fights
Related
- Military size honestly signals a state’s fighting strength just as animal weapons do (similarity 0.81)
- Interstate war escalates like a contest between rival crabs (similarity 0.81)
- Evenly matched rival states with WMDs pose civilization-scale escalation risk (similarity 0.80)
- Weapons primarily deter rivals rather than inflict harm in actual fights (similarity 0.79)
- State arms races mirror single male-male animal contests, not evolutionary turnover (similarity 0.78)