This book investigates the origins of regional war and peace. My interest in this subject can be traced back to the first day of a major regional war in which I actively took part as a very young soldier — the 1973 Yom Kippur War. On the first day of that war I found myself engaged in tank battles with Syrian forces and in the early morning of the day after I — together with a few other Israeli soldiers — was surrounded by a major Syrian armored force in a very small bunker in the southern part of the Golan Heights.

I will not go here into the details of the very frightening experience in that bunker and following experiences later in the war. But such traumatic events have left me with a strong desire to look for an explanation for the occurrence of armed conflicts, notably those which escalate to large-scale violence, and how to manage, reduce, or overcome such conflicts and to move from war to peace.

As a student of Kenneth Waltz at the University of California, Berkeley, I fully realized the importance of the international system, and specifically the great powers and their influence on a great variety of events in world politics. Thus, my first book focused on the sources of conflict and cooperation among the great powers.