July 1914 escalates because of a deterrence failure. Germany and Russia were playing a game of chicken. The kaiser stood firm; he believed that Russia was not prepared for war and would therefore back down. The tsar likewise stood firm; he vowed not to back down again after the Bosnian Crisis – and he thought that Germany would ultimately back down because it would not want to fight the combined power of Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. With neither side yielding, the crisis continued to escalate. A second dynamic contributed to escalation as well. At some point – probably on July 30 – the actors changed strategy. Instead of using coercion to deter their opponent, they started taking coercive measures to increase the likelihood that they would win a war, if one began. Each side mobilized, and mobilization led to war. Beneath all this lay rivalry and the repetition of crises between the major states. Finally, once war broke out between Germany and Russia, the alliance structure caused the war to spread rapidly. From this crisis, we learn many lessons, including that a balance of power and relatively equal military capabilities are associated with war onset; they do not prevent war.

The Munich conference notoriously symbolizes appeasement and its failure. The issue under dispute concerns territory – specifically, the Sudetenland. This territorial dispute was initially internal to Czechoslovakia, a disagreement between the Sudetenland Germans and the central government of Czechoslovakia. Eventually, however, the nationalistic element to the dispute brought in the German government. The major powers avoided war because the French and British prime ministers – Daladier and Chamberlain, respectively – forced the Czechoslovakian president, Benes, to accept the peaceful transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, based on the norm of nationalism (or self-determination). As this case shows, when actors widely agree on the norms through which territory can change hands, the probability of war declines. Nevertheless, this peace was short-lived. Indeed, the afterword to the chapter describes how Hitler invaded Prague shortly thereafter. The Danzig–Poland crises then followed. By that point, Britain and France had abandoned appeasement and shifted to balancing against Hitler; they allied with Poland and gave Hitler an ultimatum to try to stop his invasion. This conventional deterrence failed, and the Second World War began in Europe.