ABSTRACT
Understanding the phenomenon of war is vitally important to all endeavors that purport to explain the workings of the international system. For nation-states, the onset, duration, and, particularly, outcome of war largely determine their future influence or insignificance, prosperity or poverty, and even their survival in the system. Global and other Great Power wars are highly visible, much scrutinized events; and comprehensive structural explanations should be able to grapple successfully with the phenomenon of loser initiation. If the structural theories are at all useful, they should have explanatory power in the realm of global wars. The hypothesized explanation for loser initiation is really quite simple, under structural theory. "Balancing" or "coalitioning" is the key behavior that the structural theories predict; and it is this kind of state action that has been primarily tested for in the foregoing analysis of global wars.
