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This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 a

This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The predominant theory about this in international relations is hegemonic stability theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory - there have been several periods throughout history that were relatively peaceful because an exceptionally strong nation state decided to step up and enforce a peace. Considering that the US was half of global GDP at the end of WW2 and has long been more than happy to sanction anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now), the modern era of "long peace" fits this theory pretty well.

georgeg23 3y ago
That theory ignores the Cold War, which hinged on M.A.D.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Why do you say that?
- jdlshore 3y ago
  In what way? The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. Edit: My mistake, I thought you were talking about Deveraux’s theory, but it looks like you were talking about the Economic Stability Theory OP mentioned.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. So for countries that lose the economic competition, might war be a 'better' option?
    - pas 3y ago
      if they can decisively finish it fast and keep the spoils. post-WW2 this was only true for the superpowers. and only some of the times. (eg. see the failures in Afghanistan, see how it's impossible to finish a war quickly if there are sufficiently powerful allies of the target willing to sponsor the insurgency/proxy war, etc.)
    - rocqua 3y ago
      It could be a 'high variance, low expected value' play. Like pulling the goaly when you are behind. That kind of strategy only makes sense if 'losing by a little' and 'losing by a lot' are equally unacceptable. That doesn't tend to be how economic competition between countries works I think?
- safety1st 3y ago
  I mean the operative word in "Cold War" is Cold. There was a lot of arms buildup and posturing, and some proxy wars in smaller or less developed countries, but no wars waged directly between the great powers. The Cold War was part of the long peace that HST predicted. I think you could argue that America's supremacy was never seriously contested by the USSR - sure the USSR had nukes, but the US had plenty of those as well, it had the better economy, overwhelmingly better navy etc. There were more chips on the strategic board than MAD and most of them belonged to the US.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    So Vietnam just doesn't count? It wasn't a small way by any metric that matters - it just happened to not be on the home soil of the us or ussr.
    - safety1st 3y ago
      Count towards what? The article refers to the "long peace" since WW2 which included the Cold War. This is a well known concept, there's lots of evidence to support it being real, it's a central concept in the field of international relations, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace Vietnam doesn't invalidate the long peace, no. At least I'm not aware of any academic arguments to that effect, they may exist, I haven't studied this stuff since college.
    - sophacles 3y ago
      Ignoring the strictly subjective "matters" bit - what metrics make it medium or large?
    - rocqua 3y ago
      It counts, but it isn't enough to make the period after ww2 be less peaceful than the period before.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    In the first half of the Cold War, the US's economic superiority was far from evidently obvious. The USSR's economy was growing extremely quickly, and S curves are hard to distinguish from exponential growth. With the benefit of hindsight you're probably right, but at the time I think the posturing / arms race was the rational move for both countries.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
A couple of possible reasons: 1) It takes time for countries to break old habits when it comes to war. 2) Probably most important for WW1, the personal wealth of monarchs is in the lands they own, not the industries their tax-payers own. And this source of wealth, prestige, and vertical mobility is also of immediate importance for the upper classes in a monarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson%2C_1st_Viscount_Nelson#Titles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson%2C_1st_Viscount... Very few of these monarchies exist now. Many of them fell in the aftermath of WW1, and some of the big remaining ones fell in the aftermath of WW2. A positive of this is that now the remaining monarchies see war not as a means to extending their wealth, but, if on the losing side, as a means to ending them entirely. This didn't use to be the case, as previously losing monarchies might be given the opportunity to fold into the conquering monarchy as a subordinate power or noble.
- bradrn 3y ago
  Deveraux explicitly endorses (1) in the article: > If anything, I think cultural values have lagged, resulting in countries launching counter-productive wars out of cultural inertia (because it’s ‘the doing thing’ or valued in the culture) long after such wars became maladaptive. Indeed, I’d argue that’s exactly what Russia is doing right now.
  - epicureanideal 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Benjammer 3y ago
      "If you would just do what I told you, you wouldn't get hit!" Big yikes here...
      - epicureanideal 3y ago
        That's not at all what I said. What do you think about the video I linked? Also, analogies to dysfunctional interpersonal relationships don't represent the dynamics of many-party international competition very well.
ajuc 3y ago
Just before WW2 the Haber Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizers/explosives (same thing basically) was invented. Shortly after the war it was widespread, and since then there was no starvation in any developed or even semi-developed country. Hitler started WW2 to annex Ukraine because of its fertile soil. Basically he wanted colonies without the inconvenience of dealing with the sea. Like soviets and Americans had. Shortly after WW2 it ceased to make sense to invade for farming land. It's not the only factor (nukes are another), but it is a very significant factor.
- ponector 3y ago
  What? Hitler started a war with UK, France and other countries to annex Ukraine a few years later?
  - ChoHag 3y ago
    [dead]
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > Hitler started WW2 to annex Ukraine because of its fertile soil Ukraine wasn't a distinct state then. There were many many factors involved [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    >Ukraine wasn't a distinct state then. That has no relevance.
    - FpUser 3y ago
      Well it does. USSR was much bigger than standalone Ukraine, hence different consequences.
      - 3y ago
avgcorrection 3y ago
> Considering that the US was half of global GDP at the end of WW2 and has long been more than happy to sanction anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now), the modern era of "long peace" fits this theory pretty well. How often has the US been at not-war in that period?
- newhaus1994 3y ago
  IR theorists sometimes try to get around this by narrowing the focus to direct great-power wars, which always felt like a cop-out to me (I'm a political scientist) EDIT: although to be clear, the last time I checked, I believe the stats still back up that overall fatalities from military conflict have been at historic lows. I generally prefer what little Hegemonic Stability there may be to the multipolar shitshows of the early 20th and mid-to-late 19th centuries.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    It's not a cop-out: there are fundamental qualitative differences between a near-pear conflict, which demands restructuring of a nation's economic activity around supporting the fight, versus the kinds of conflicts the US was involved in post-WWII, where the costs aren't that much different than the steady-state maintenance of our armed forces.
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      It’s certainly a cop-out if you use such a segmentation to argue that things are peaceful.
      - l33t233372 3y ago
        Peaceful just has to be a continuum in order for us to make any sense of a theory of peace. Certainly wars between great powers and much smaller countries are more peaceful than near-peer wars.
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
> anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now) you're actually saying that any war is OK as long as the USA starts it. it's an expression of: "do as the USA tells you to do; do not do what the USA itself does" the 'grown up view' is that there are trade-offs. the USA is an empire... I define the essence of an empire to be: a group of people from one place telling people from another place what to do. the most often thing they're told is to pay tribute (which by this point is part of a semi-obscure system of taxes, tariffs, technological transfers, and other hidden things)
- safety1st 3y ago
  I'm not saying any war is OK, regardless of who starts it. I would prefer there be no wars, if such a thing were feasible. I'm just saying that if you start a war the US doesn't like they have the ability to fuck you up with sanctions, and they use this ability pretty liberally to enforce a US-led peace. And no one else really has this ability, take the Iraq War which was exceptionally vile - did the US get sanctioned for it? Nope, because sanctioning the US is basically shooting yourself in the foot. Even today it's still about a quarter of global GDP and a huge buyer of everyone else's stuff.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > you're actually saying that any war is OK as long as the USA starts it. Bush Jr. has been convicted of war crimes in at least one country because of his actions with respect to the Iraq war: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35397/bush-cheney-war-crimes/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35397/b... Very few countries are opposed to the US invasion of Afghanistan, as those plotting the previous attack on the US were doing so from a position of sanctuary in Afghanistan at the time. Wars of genuine self defense are basically automatically approved by standard international law: https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml
ilaksh 3y ago
This almost makes sense to me but I think that characterizing it as "stepping up" to "enforce peace" is part of a fairytale. This hegemony is not actually so different from all of the empires that came before it.
randomopining 3y ago
WW1 was an exact showcasing of what he meant. Combined hubris on all sides led to massive destruction for essentially nothing. WW2 was just before nukes, and also had actors like the Nazis that were completely off the spectrum - where they would eradicate or dominate opponents if they were to win. We then saw the Cold War, where the Soviets and US never felt compelled to have an open confrontation because the costs were so high and the end goals of both sides weren't to conquer the other (just carve up the rest of the world as much as possible). Now we're at China vs the US -- they are competing over future influence but the costs of confrontation are too high. Putin/Russia thought the Ukraine thing would be a quick victory where the West would be too slow/split to act effectively in time and then they would solidify the new "facts on the ground" easily.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
The peace is due to nuclear weapons and the threat of global extinction. When that isn’t a factor, we still see lots of wars. Period. Because the next major war between nuclear equipped powers might be the worlds last
- ajross 3y ago
  > The peace is due to nuclear weapons and the threat of global extinction. When that isn’t a factor, we still see lots of wars. Period. We don't, though. The article treats with this. In fact per capita deaths to state violence are down remarkably over the last century, all over the world. The perception, due to the reach of modern media, is that war is everywhere. But the truth on the ground is very different. Two hundred years ago, almost everyone knew someone who died in a war, or saw a war come through their home. Now? It's a notable rarity.
  - asdff 3y ago
    The nuclear powers attempt to enforce a hegemony. For instance, the US has military bases in nations around the world. This tends to ensure nations like Japan or the Philippines aren't invaded anytime soon. On the other hand, there are countries that aren't necessarily within this hegemony, and anything from warlordism to outright nation state warfare is liable to be taking place.
- rainsford 3y ago
  The Russian invasion of Ukraine appears to be a case where nuclear weapons made war more likely because they can embolden a comparatively weak state to be more conventionally aggressive than they otherwise would be because they can fall back on nuclear weapons if their aggression goes wrong. If Russia did not have nukes, it seems far more likely that western powers would have directly intervened in Ukraine, a version of the war Russia seems incredibly unlikely to win. Would the threat of getting humiliatingly curb-stomped by NATO have been enough to dissuade Russia from invading? Maybe, but it would certainly have provided more of a disincentive than the current state of affairs where Russia can use the threat of nukes to keep NATO at bay. I'd bet a hypothetical nuke-less Russia would have stayed in their own borders and been content to get rich off fossil fuels. On balance, the existence of nuclear weapons probably still prevents more wars than it starts, but Russia having nukes seems like an exception to the rule.
georgeg23 3y ago
The problem with hegemonic "stability" is it can be derailed by one guy who likes to fire people on television.
TexanFeller 3y ago
Mutually assured destruction has surely played a big part. Peace through the threat of nuclear annihilation.
rocqua 3y ago
> For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The Wikipedia article about both the long peace and hegemonic stability theory. Both mention 3 nain examples. The pax Romanica (Roman times), the pax Britannica (1820-1914) and the Pax Americana (1945-now). The Pax Britannica happened after the industrial revolution was wide-spread. Only the Pax Romana was before the industrial revolution, and it was far from global. I would suggest that perhaps the long peace is actually from 1820 till now. With both world wars serving as examples where the calculus against war was ignored, and then later proven correct. Which fits with the theory, which says 'industrial war isn't worth it'. If once in a while a big power decides to test that theory, or decides war is necessary for non-economic reasons, you get horrible wars. Not to say that hegemonic stability theory is clearly wrong. Just to say that the 'industrial revolution means war isn't worth it theory' fits the Pax Britannica and Pax Americana quite well.

georgeg23 3y ago

That theory ignores the Cold War, which hinged on M.A.D.

andsoitis 3y ago
Why do you say that?
jdlshore 3y ago
In what way? The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. Edit: My mistake, I thought you were talking about Deveraux’s theory, but it looks like you were talking about the Economic Stability Theory OP mentioned.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. So for countries that lose the economic competition, might war be a 'better' option?
  - pas 3y ago
    if they can decisively finish it fast and keep the spoils. post-WW2 this was only true for the superpowers. and only some of the times. (eg. see the failures in Afghanistan, see how it's impossible to finish a war quickly if there are sufficiently powerful allies of the target willing to sponsor the insurgency/proxy war, etc.)
  - rocqua 3y ago
    It could be a 'high variance, low expected value' play. Like pulling the goaly when you are behind. That kind of strategy only makes sense if 'losing by a little' and 'losing by a lot' are equally unacceptable. That doesn't tend to be how economic competition between countries works I think?
safety1st 3y ago
I mean the operative word in "Cold War" is Cold. There was a lot of arms buildup and posturing, and some proxy wars in smaller or less developed countries, but no wars waged directly between the great powers. The Cold War was part of the long peace that HST predicted. I think you could argue that America's supremacy was never seriously contested by the USSR - sure the USSR had nukes, but the US had plenty of those as well, it had the better economy, overwhelmingly better navy etc. There were more chips on the strategic board than MAD and most of them belonged to the US.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  So Vietnam just doesn't count? It wasn't a small way by any metric that matters - it just happened to not be on the home soil of the us or ussr.
  - safety1st 3y ago
    Count towards what? The article refers to the "long peace" since WW2 which included the Cold War. This is a well known concept, there's lots of evidence to support it being real, it's a central concept in the field of international relations, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace Vietnam doesn't invalidate the long peace, no. At least I'm not aware of any academic arguments to that effect, they may exist, I haven't studied this stuff since college.
  - sophacles 3y ago
    Ignoring the strictly subjective "matters" bit - what metrics make it medium or large?
  - rocqua 3y ago
    It counts, but it isn't enough to make the period after ww2 be less peaceful than the period before.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  In the first half of the Cold War, the US's economic superiority was far from evidently obvious. The USSR's economy was growing extremely quickly, and S curves are hard to distinguish from exponential growth. With the benefit of hindsight you're probably right, but at the time I think the posturing / arms race was the rational move for both countries.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

A couple of possible reasons: 1) It takes time for countries to break old habits when it comes to war. 2) Probably most important for WW1, the personal wealth of monarchs is in the lands they own, not the industries their tax-payers own. And this source of wealth, prestige, and vertical mobility is also of immediate importance for the upper classes in a monarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson%2C_1st_Viscount_Nelson#Titles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson%2C_1st_Viscount... Very few of these monarchies exist now. Many of them fell in the aftermath of WW1, and some of the big remaining ones fell in the aftermath of WW2. A positive of this is that now the remaining monarchies see war not as a means to extending their wealth, but, if on the losing side, as a means to ending them entirely. This didn't use to be the case, as previously losing monarchies might be given the opportunity to fold into the conquering monarchy as a subordinate power or noble.

bradrn 3y ago
Deveraux explicitly endorses (1) in the article: > If anything, I think cultural values have lagged, resulting in countries launching counter-productive wars out of cultural inertia (because it’s ‘the doing thing’ or valued in the culture) long after such wars became maladaptive. Indeed, I’d argue that’s exactly what Russia is doing right now.
- epicureanideal 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Benjammer 3y ago
    "If you would just do what I told you, you wouldn't get hit!" Big yikes here...
    - epicureanideal 3y ago
      That's not at all what I said. What do you think about the video I linked? Also, analogies to dysfunctional interpersonal relationships don't represent the dynamics of many-party international competition very well.

ajuc 3y ago

Just before WW2 the Haber Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizers/explosives (same thing basically) was invented. Shortly after the war it was widespread, and since then there was no starvation in any developed or even semi-developed country. Hitler started WW2 to annex Ukraine because of its fertile soil. Basically he wanted colonies without the inconvenience of dealing with the sea. Like soviets and Americans had. Shortly after WW2 it ceased to make sense to invade for farming land. It's not the only factor (nukes are another), but it is a very significant factor.

ponector 3y ago
What? Hitler started a war with UK, France and other countries to annex Ukraine a few years later?
- ChoHag 3y ago
  [dead]
KineticLensman 3y ago
> Hitler started WW2 to annex Ukraine because of its fertile soil Ukraine wasn't a distinct state then. There were many many factors involved [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  >Ukraine wasn't a distinct state then. That has no relevance.
  - FpUser 3y ago
    Well it does. USSR was much bigger than standalone Ukraine, hence different consequences.
    - 3y ago

avgcorrection 3y ago

> Considering that the US was half of global GDP at the end of WW2 and has long been more than happy to sanction anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now), the modern era of "long peace" fits this theory pretty well. How often has the US been at not-war in that period?

newhaus1994 3y ago
IR theorists sometimes try to get around this by narrowing the focus to direct great-power wars, which always felt like a cop-out to me (I'm a political scientist) EDIT: although to be clear, the last time I checked, I believe the stats still back up that overall fatalities from military conflict have been at historic lows. I generally prefer what little Hegemonic Stability there may be to the multipolar shitshows of the early 20th and mid-to-late 19th centuries.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  It's not a cop-out: there are fundamental qualitative differences between a near-pear conflict, which demands restructuring of a nation's economic activity around supporting the fight, versus the kinds of conflicts the US was involved in post-WWII, where the costs aren't that much different than the steady-state maintenance of our armed forces.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    It’s certainly a cop-out if you use such a segmentation to argue that things are peaceful.
    - l33t233372 3y ago
      Peaceful just has to be a continuum in order for us to make any sense of a theory of peace. Certainly wars between great powers and much smaller countries are more peaceful than near-peer wars.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

> anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now) you're actually saying that any war is OK as long as the USA starts it. it's an expression of: "do as the USA tells you to do; do not do what the USA itself does" the 'grown up view' is that there are trade-offs. the USA is an empire... I define the essence of an empire to be: a group of people from one place telling people from another place what to do. the most often thing they're told is to pay tribute (which by this point is part of a semi-obscure system of taxes, tariffs, technological transfers, and other hidden things)

safety1st 3y ago
I'm not saying any war is OK, regardless of who starts it. I would prefer there be no wars, if such a thing were feasible. I'm just saying that if you start a war the US doesn't like they have the ability to fuck you up with sanctions, and they use this ability pretty liberally to enforce a US-led peace. And no one else really has this ability, take the Iraq War which was exceptionally vile - did the US get sanctioned for it? Nope, because sanctioning the US is basically shooting yourself in the foot. Even today it's still about a quarter of global GDP and a huge buyer of everyone else's stuff.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> you're actually saying that any war is OK as long as the USA starts it. Bush Jr. has been convicted of war crimes in at least one country because of his actions with respect to the Iraq war: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35397/bush-cheney-war-crimes/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35397/b... Very few countries are opposed to the US invasion of Afghanistan, as those plotting the previous attack on the US were doing so from a position of sanctuary in Afghanistan at the time. Wars of genuine self defense are basically automatically approved by standard international law: https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml

ilaksh 3y ago

This almost makes sense to me but I think that characterizing it as "stepping up" to "enforce peace" is part of a fairytale. This hegemony is not actually so different from all of the empires that came before it.

randomopining 3y ago

WW1 was an exact showcasing of what he meant. Combined hubris on all sides led to massive destruction for essentially nothing. WW2 was just before nukes, and also had actors like the Nazis that were completely off the spectrum - where they would eradicate or dominate opponents if they were to win. We then saw the Cold War, where the Soviets and US never felt compelled to have an open confrontation because the costs were so high and the end goals of both sides weren't to conquer the other (just carve up the rest of the world as much as possible). Now we're at China vs the US -- they are competing over future influence but the costs of confrontation are too high. Putin/Russia thought the Ukraine thing would be a quick victory where the West would be too slow/split to act effectively in time and then they would solidify the new "facts on the ground" easily.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

The peace is due to nuclear weapons and the threat of global extinction. When that isn’t a factor, we still see lots of wars. Period. Because the next major war between nuclear equipped powers might be the worlds last

ajross 3y ago
> The peace is due to nuclear weapons and the threat of global extinction. When that isn’t a factor, we still see lots of wars. Period. We don't, though. The article treats with this. In fact per capita deaths to state violence are down remarkably over the last century, all over the world. The perception, due to the reach of modern media, is that war is everywhere. But the truth on the ground is very different. Two hundred years ago, almost everyone knew someone who died in a war, or saw a war come through their home. Now? It's a notable rarity.
- asdff 3y ago
  The nuclear powers attempt to enforce a hegemony. For instance, the US has military bases in nations around the world. This tends to ensure nations like Japan or the Philippines aren't invaded anytime soon. On the other hand, there are countries that aren't necessarily within this hegemony, and anything from warlordism to outright nation state warfare is liable to be taking place.
rainsford 3y ago
The Russian invasion of Ukraine appears to be a case where nuclear weapons made war more likely because they can embolden a comparatively weak state to be more conventionally aggressive than they otherwise would be because they can fall back on nuclear weapons if their aggression goes wrong. If Russia did not have nukes, it seems far more likely that western powers would have directly intervened in Ukraine, a version of the war Russia seems incredibly unlikely to win. Would the threat of getting humiliatingly curb-stomped by NATO have been enough to dissuade Russia from invading? Maybe, but it would certainly have provided more of a disincentive than the current state of affairs where Russia can use the threat of nukes to keep NATO at bay. I'd bet a hypothetical nuke-less Russia would have stayed in their own borders and been content to get rich off fossil fuels. On balance, the existence of nuclear weapons probably still prevents more wars than it starts, but Russia having nukes seems like an exception to the rule.

georgeg23 3y ago

The problem with hegemonic "stability" is it can be derailed by one guy who likes to fire people on television.

TexanFeller 3y ago

Mutually assured destruction has surely played a big part. Peace through the threat of nuclear annihilation.

rocqua 3y ago

> For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The Wikipedia article about both the long peace and hegemonic stability theory. Both mention 3 nain examples. The pax Romanica (Roman times), the pax Britannica (1820-1914) and the Pax Americana (1945-now). The Pax Britannica happened after the industrial revolution was wide-spread. Only the Pax Romana was before the industrial revolution, and it was far from global. I would suggest that perhaps the long peace is actually from 1820 till now. With both world wars serving as examples where the calculus against war was ignored, and then later proven correct. Which fits with the theory, which says 'industrial war isn't worth it'. If once in a while a big power decides to test that theory, or decides war is necessary for non-economic reasons, you get horrible wars. Not to say that hegemonic stability theory is clearly wrong. Just to say that the 'industrial revolution means war isn't worth it theory' fits the Pax Britannica and Pax Americana quite well.