Commitment problems and preventive war

You can find a very nice illustration of our (cursory) discussion of power shifts, commitment problems, and civil war in this blog post by Phil Arena. Arena summarizes a working paper by Rutgers political scientist Paul Poast. The example that Poast studies is a very familiar one: the American Civil War. The key quote from Arena's summary:

the desire to prevent an outcome that would increase the effective power of the Confederacy can be seen as playing a key role in leading Lincoln to abandon the blockade strategy in favor of invasion.

But read the whole post (and have a look at the paper as well).