Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.

Then what explains war among states? Rousseau's answer is really that war occurs because there is nothing to prevent it.

Each state pursues its own interest's, however defined, in ways it judges best. Force is a means of achieving the external ends of states because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of anarchy.

No system of balance functions automatically.

In anarchy there is no automatic harmony .

In a zero-sum game, the problem is entirely one of distribution, not at all one of production.

The implication of game theory, which is also the implication of the third image, is, however, that the freedom of choice of any one state is limited by the actions of the others.