JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The U.S. and Iran are trying to salvage a 60-day ceasefire with government officials blaming each other for violations, and nobody knows how long this war will last. The Indicator's Darian Woods and Wailin Wong explain how battles from the past can give insight into how these kind of conflicts can get drawn out.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: This year's war with Iran has cost the U.S. at least $132 billion. It's also resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, more than 3,400 Iranians, and dozens elsewhere in the Middle East.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago who studies the roots of war and conflict. Chris is reluctant to make too many statements on the war in Iran. You know, we're still in the middle of it. Who knows what's going to happen? But he says most conflicts don't last longer than a brief flare up.
CHRIS BLATTMAN: I think the average war in the last 200 years has been less than two months long, and so this fits that pattern.
WONG: So that raises a question. What went wrong in wars like Ukraine and Gaza?
BLATTMAN: If we start from the idea that wars are horrendously costly, then there has to be something that gives one side or the other an incentive, however temporary, to decide to turn to violence.
WOODS: Chris says the first reason is when leaders don't have the incentives to work in the best interests of their country. Take Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
BLATTMAN: Putin wasn't paying the costs of this war directly.
WONG: Democracies like the U.S. aren't immune. President Trump's sons, for example, own part of a drone manufacturing company. They might profit from war, even if it's costly for the country.
WOODS: The second explanation Chris has for violence is something a little more psychological.
BLATTMAN: Values and ideals, things that only war can deliver - the extermination of an ideology or an ethnic group that you loathe - they're not irrational. They're just enduring preferences. I think of these as sort of intangible incentives.
WOODS: Reason No. 3, Chris says, is uncertainty.
BLATTMAN: How strong is Iran? How powerful are my forces? How likely is a decapitation event to create regime change? All of these things just have tremendous uncertainty.
WONG: Chris says you can think of countries as playing a game of poker. Sometimes they're bluffing. Sometimes they're not. And when countries misjudge others, that's when long wars can start.
WOODS: The Trump administration said the war in Iran would be just a, quote, "short excursion." That's proven not to be the case.
WONG: Chris' fourth reason for violence is commitment problems.
BLATTMAN: The classic commitment problem is this idea of a rising power facing a weakening one. If you're a weakening power and you look forward to the day when that rising power is going to dominate you, you have a choice. Am I going to take you out now and prevent your rise and maintain my dominance? Or do I wait until the day when you might dominate me?
WOODS: Chris' fifth and final reason for why we fight is misperceptions. Again, Chris brings up the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
BLATTMAN: Most people say that Putin was overconfident, either because of his psychological bias or because he was getting bad information.
WOODS: It's all a bit gloomy, but Chris' somewhat optimistic take, though, is that usually the high cost of war reduces the chance of all-out violence. Darian Woods.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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