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Military strategy is an area of growing interest in the study of international conflict. It is linked to the outbreak, duration, and outcome of wars. This article presents the first quantitative empirical tests of the proposition that military strategy affects the outbreak of international conflict. The focus is on maneuver-oriented military strategies, such as the German blitzkrieg in World War II, which are hypothesized to be particularly conflict prone. Tests were conducted on the initiation and escalation of militarized interstate disputes for a sample of states from 1903 to 1992. The results indicate that states with maneuver strategies were significantly more likely to initiate disputes in general, although not disputes that escalate to the use of force. However, dispute participants with maneuver strategies were significantly more likely to escalate a dispute to war if the adversary employed a military strategy that emphasized attrition.

This article presents and tests a theory of learning in international politics. Drawing primarily from social psychology and organization theory, the learning theory proposes that lessons tend to be drawn only from high-impact events in world politics, such as large wars and economic depressions. Lessons drawn tend to be simple and are oriented around the question of which policies are likely to be successful and which policies are likely to fail. This learning theory is tested on the alliance choices of small powers in the twentieth century. The predictions of two learning hypotheses are compared with those of a leading realist explanation of alliance choices, balance of threat theory. Quantitative analysis of small powers' alliance choices reveals that a small power's experience in the previous world war is a very powerful explanation of its peacetime alliance choices after that war, whereas the level of threat in the international environment has only marginal effects on the small power's alliance choices. Further, these threat effects may be in the opposite direction of that predicted by balance of threat theory.