What Iran teaches us about why wars start

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  NPR.

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  Yesterday, President Trump claimed that the U.S.

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  And Iran are going to talk in Doha as officials try to patch up a ceasefire agreement

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  that was broken by strikes over the last week.

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  So in this liminal moment, we thought it would be a good time to look back and ask,

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  how did we get into this?

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  Chris Blackman is an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago

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  who studies the roots of war and conflict.

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  Once you start thinking about conflict and violence, you can't stop thinking about anything else.

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  Chris's obsession with war and the data on conflicts revealed something to him.

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  He says the several weeks of intense fighting between the U.S.

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  And Israel on one side and Iran on the other is actually kind of typical.

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  I think the average war in the last 200 years has been less than two months long,

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  and so this fits that pattern.

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  We don't know what will happen next,

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  but if the fighting stays at the current lower simmer, then the Iran war's hot stage matched average historical lengths.

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  The two world wars do not fit that pattern.

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  Neither does the war in Ukraine or Gaza.

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  This is The Indicator from Planet Money.

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  I'm Waylon Wong.

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