So tell us, give us kind of a bird's eye view of what you're seeing over there.

Yeah, so we have a new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, who took over from Jay Powell.

And he came in talking tough, a lot of swagger, talking about the fact that the Fed had not gotten inflation down to its target over the past five years or so and saying that he was going to do it.

And we were going to get back down to 2%, which is a pretty far distance from where we are now.

And then in his first couple of meetings, he did nothing basically.

There hasn't been an interest rate hike to try and control inflation.

And now it looks like, yeah, maybe inflation is coming down a little bit.

That's all great, but we also don't want to have a huge displaced workforce either.

I don't say this in any kind of negative way, but for people not in academia, practitioners, people doing the work of government or strategy, what are some of the things that they can look at your book and look at your research and say, okay, this is something I really need to consider as we move forward and look at threats around the globe?

Yeah.

So let me answer, let me make the answer more specific and let's think about sort of what the possibility of China seizing either small islands or some territory along the border with India, right? Two sort of basic scenarios.

A lot of the implications of this book are very discouraging.

One that I think might surprise a lot of your listeners is not once in its entire history, as far as I can tell, has the United States ever fired a shot to defend somebody else's border area, small island, anything like that, when it gets seized, right? There are dozens of cases of this.

It's happened a fair amount of number of times to U.S. partners or allies.

And the U.S., if it's less than an attempt to take over the whole country, the U.S. sits on the sidelines consistently.

What would those two or three things be?

and has chosen not to time and again when opportunities have arisen, which I think is interesting.

Um, we also see that territorial war remains sort of maybe the most important cause of war, even in this period when conquest was supposedly not happening anymore, which is very important.

And you asked about motives.

So we don't see that that states are seizing territory, uh, very frequently where there are resources, where there are strategic value.

There are some cases of each Saddam Hussein did like to seize oil, uh, I will not say the Golan Heights or the Sinai lack strategic value, but for the most part, I think these explanations are overblown.

They fit our sort of theoretical intuitions about why states would want territory more than the actual history.

And so I argue instead what's most important in these cases is what I call image value.

Tell us now about the implications of your findings.

and has chosen not to time and again when opportunities have arisen, which I think is interesting.

We also see that territorial war remains sort of maybe the most important cause of war, even in this period when conquest was supposedly not happening anymore.

which is very important.

And you asked about motives.

So we don't see that states are seizing territory very frequently where there are resources, where there are strategic value.

There are some cases of each.

Saddam Hussein did like to seize oil.

Tell us now about the implications of your findings.

Walk us through what you find in each of those two parts.

So first of all, there's the parts of the book that test my argument and they find broadly what I just described.

They find that we see sort of before World War II, such as in the period World War I to World War II, we see conquest of whole states, of large parts of states and of these small sort of parts of states that have lower war risk, places that maybe aren't populated or defended.

They're all common, right? And then we see after World War II, taking over whole countries declines.

And then around the 1980s, we see even taking sort of large parts of countries with what's sometimes called the limited aims strategy.

So where you plan to fight a war and you're trying to seize maybe a province or more, but you're hoping it will be a limited war.

This often doesn't work very well, but we see a fair number of these during the Cold War.

Tell us now about the implications of your findings.