Nobody foresaw a world war in 1914. While historians argue about this, in my opinion, the war escalated from a minor localized conflict into a pan-European disaster as the result of the following miscalculations:
- The Austro-Hungarian government somehow thought that the prestige gained by crushing Serbia was going to solve the problems of a dysfunctional political system. The government also thought, with some reason, that the Russians wouldn’t intervene. They had backed down before, most notably in 1908.
- The Russian government believed that the danger of backing down exceeded the danger of intervening and losing. Guess how that turned out.
The current analogy is, of course, North Korea. I don’t have the impression that Trump really wants to fight the North Koreans; if he did, the war would already be over. War could nonetheless come, however, over a miscalculation of motives, including the following:
- The administration could view a harmless North Korean provocation (say, a missile intended to miss Guam by 20 miles) as an actual declaration of war.
- Kim could start taking Trump’s tweets seriously and assume that a preemptive strike is imminent, when it really isn’t.
- And, of course, there is the matter of Trump feeling humiliated, and needing to “win” for his ego and for domestic political reasons, but that is the subject for another day.