I now address the motives of standing and revenge and my residual category of other. I review the frequency of these motives over the course of the centuries covered by the data set and the conditions that connect them to war. With regard to standing, the link to war is tight and consistent until the end of the nineteenth century when standing and war begin to diverge. This process accelerated during the twentieth century but was not uniform across regions. Today, we have reached the point where war-initiation is almost certain to reduce a state's external standing. The principal exception is intervention to uphold core community values with the authorization of the United Nations or appropriate regional organizations. I treat revenge as an independent motive, but like standing it is an expression of the spirit. It too has declined as a motive for war, in part for the same reason, but also because territorial conquest, its principal objective, is on the whole no longer acceptable or profitable.

The category of other is more complicated, as it includes all causes of war that cannot be assimilated to my four generic motives. Wars I code as other are most often an expression of domestic power struggles or efforts by weak regimes to buttress their popularity. There are obvious connections between internal and external problems and the circumstances that push leaders in the direction of more aggressive or accommodating foreign policies.