THE END OF THE COLD-WAR - PREDICTING AN EMERGENT PROPERTY

Gaddis claimed that international relations theory failed to predict t he Gulf War, the Soviet Union's collapse, and the cold war's end. Subs equently, he acknowledged that the expected utility model captures the logic behind complex adaptive systems such as the cold war internatio nal system. That model correctly predicted two of the events to which Gaddis pointed. Here, that model is used to simulate alternative scena rios to determine whether the cold war's end could have been predicted based only on information available in 1948. The simulations show a 6 8% to 78% probability that the United States would win the cold war pe acefully given the conditions in 1948 and plausible shifts in the atte ntiveness of each state to security concerns over time. The analysis d emonstrates a rigorous method for testing counterfactual histories and shows that the pro-American end to the cold war was an emergent prope rty of the initial post-World War II conditions.