International Relations Theory of War 47
Prague Spring]; and the Solidarity crisis in Poland in August 1980), led the
system to dictate to the Soviet Union, one of the two superpowers at the
time, to take negative feedback actions in order to restore the homeostasis
and preserve the equilibrium of the system. However, at the same time,
the system prevented the USSR from expanding its involvement in those
countries because of its fear of American involvement. The expansion
of the Soviet Union’s involvement in those countries would have made
the negative feedback, whose purpose was to maintain the homeostasis,
into positive feedback, which in itself could have led to disruption of the
homeostasis and violation of the equilibrium of the system.^55 In the unipo-
lar system of 1992–2016, the United States served as the sole hyperpower
of the system. The fact that the United States abstained from acting as
expected of it as a leader of the system in the 1990s led the system to dictate
to the other players in the system to take positive feedback actions.^56 Here
the attack on the U.S. embassy in East Africa in 1998, which resulted in 224
deaths, of whom 12 were Americans, and about 5,000 injuries; the attack
against the USS Cole on October 12, 2000, in which 17 sailors were killed;
and the most prominent, the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, on U.S.
soil, may be mentioned.^57
I shall now turn to examining the independent variable “polarity of the
system” and its influence on the two international outcomes examined in
the study.
POLARITY OF THE SYSTEM:
THE INDEPENDENT VARIABLE
Realism is characterized by a prominent degree of parsimony that is based
primarily on its assumption that the assignment of power in the system
is the only variable that may explain differences in international politics.
This assumption distinguishes it from competing explanations—liberal,
epistemic, or institutional. These expect internal sources of resources and
interaction between countries to lead to change not through control of
material resources but because of the preferences and beliefs of countries
and the information available to them.^58 This simple concept has allowed
Morgenthau and Waltz to eliminate consistently the influence of ideas,
local institutions, economic interests, psychology, and other resources
over the preferences of different countries. For these realist theoreticians,
the material resources form an extreme reality that has an extrinsic effect
on the behavior of countries irrespective of what they are seeking, believe
in, or are asking to build.^59
According to the international relations theory of war, like the classic real-
istic theories that sanctify the distribution of capabilities—and in com-
plete contrast to a number of contemporary realist theories that have