In the system of international politics almost everything is strategic. Even the most basic analysis of international historical events can seem like decoding the rules to a complex board game. This is most evident when analyzing grand wars, such as WWI and WWII. Although states and state leaders may attempt to rewrite world order in the wake of such disruptive events, history has proven these efforts extraneous. It is highly argued, for example, that restructuring efforts following WWI only contributed to WWII. So why is it that the unplanned system following WWII lasted twice as long as the carefully planned efforts after the First World War? This period of history, formally known as the Cold War, is sometimes referred to as "the Long Peace" because despite four decades of hostility, the Cold War never manifested into direct military confrontation.
             According to John Lewis Gaddis, war was prevented as a result of the bipolar configuration of the international system at the time, geographical advantages, advanced technology, shifting ideologies, and "game theory". In order to understand why the international system remained stable in the post-WWII world, it is necessary to understand Systems Theory. This theory provides the criteria for stable or unstable international configurations. In this way, stability is characterized by the structure of states and not their behavior, even though both play a role in stabilizing state relations. In systems theory, international politics can take on a bipolar or multipolar configuration. Bipolarity happens when two states dominate the international political system. Post- WWII settlements arbitrarily divided the sovereign nations that could have rivaled the U.S. or Soviet Union in population or economic might. This created an avenue for the domination of the American and Soviet spheres of influence-- the first true polarization in modern history was created (Gaddis 45). Unlike before the war, ...