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43 UNIT 5. THE LONG PEACE: ELEMENTS OF STABILITY IN THE POSTWAR INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM Systems Theory and International Stability Anyone attempting to understand why there has been no third world war confronts a problem not unlike that of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that did not bark in the night: how does one account for something that did not happen? How does one explain why the great conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, which by all past stand-ards of historical experience should have developed by now, has not in fact done so? The question involves certain method-ological difficulties, to be sure: it is always easier to account for what did happen than what did not. But there is also a curious bias among students of international relations that reinforces this tendency: “for every thousand pages published on the causes of wars,” Geoffrey Blainey has commented, “there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace.” Even the discipline of “peace studies” suffers from this dis-proportion: it has given far more attention to the question of what we must do to avoid the apocalypse than it has to the equally interesting question of why, given all the opportu-nities, it has not happened so far. It might be easier to deal with this question if the work that has been done on the causes of war had produced some-thing approximating a consensus on why wars develop: we could then apply that analysis to the post-1945 period and see what it is that has been different about it. But, in fact, these studies are not much help. Historians, political scientists, economists, sociologists, statisticians, even meteorologists, have wrestled for years with the question of what causes wars, and yet the most recent review of that literature concludes that “our understanding of war remains at an elementary level. No widely accepted theory of the causes of war exists and little