Democracies don’t fight with each other, true. Rather, big democracies pick on little opponents whether they are democratic or not, with the expectation that they won’t fight back or won’t put up much of a fight. Indeed, that could very well be viewed as a straightforward explanation of the history of democracies engaged in imperial and colonial expansion against weak adversaries with little hope of defending themselves. This democratic propensity to pick on weak foes is nothing new. Looking at all wars for nearly the past two centuries, we know that about 93 percent of wars started by
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