Years ago, I read Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. What stuck in my mind was the chapter on hawks and doves that explained the use of aggression in securing resources. The hawks always fight to get what they need for survival and reproduction. The doves pursue the same objectives by preserving their energy and skin. In a world with even one hawk, the doves have no chance. In every fight against a dove the hawk prevails. With more resources the hawk gains an advantage in reproduction. Over time the hawks multiply until there is a world of hawks only. But then the hawks have only other hawks to fight so that those escaping death expend so much energy and resources that chances for survival and reproduction decline. If by any chance of gene mutation, a dove emerges in this all-hawk population, avoiding fighting allows the dove to gain an advantage in survival and procreation to the point an all-dove world could eventually replace the hawks.
But then a hawk may emerge by chance and the world tilts again toward a state favoring the hawks. The interesting thing is that life does not continue through an endless oscillation between worlds of only hawks or only doves. Instead, it comes to an equilibrium with part of the population comprised of hawks and the rest of doves. A stable ratio of hawks to doves is reached when the net benefit of being a hawk or a dove is the same. This is the Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) theory introduced by Maynard Smith and George Price. As much as we would like to have an all-dove world the reality is that doves have to coexist with hawks. Do we have more doves or hawks? It depends on the costs and benefits of fighting versus walking away. If the hawks overestimate the benefits of a fight, they may pick a lot of fights which could eventually bring their demise.
Theories about hawks and doves have also been applied to other cases involving competition for resources, including geopolitical competition. It is instructive to recall the lessons of the Peloponesian War fought to the bitter end between Athens and Sparta. After the war ended the previously defeated Persian Empire came back to subjugate the Greek cities of Asia Minor, the city-state of Thebes rose to defeat Sparta, and eventually the Macedonians put an end to the independence of Athens. In less than a century after the Peloponesian War mighty Sparta was on its way to oblivion. One lesson of the Peloponesian War is that hawks (Athens and Sparta in this case) do not fare well in the long run.
I am afraid the first quarter of this century has been dominated by the actions of the hawks and not only in geopolitics. We also see it in the economic and cultural arenas. However, as in the ESS paradigm, those who now have the upper hand and sense total victory will inevitably discover they have inherited a world far from being stable and ripe for exploitation. In this more hawkish world, the fruits of dominance will remain contestable and a cause for more conflicts.
Oona Hathway, a Yale professor, writes (NYT 1/7/2026) that between 1989 and 2014 there were 15,000 deaths a year because of cross-border conflicts. After 2014 the average went up to 100,000. She adds that “As states increasingly disregard limits on the lawful use of force, this may be just the beginning of a deadly new era of conflict.” Such deadly conflicts are now all around us: Ukraine, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Iran and the broader Middle East. And if we account for intra-country conflicts, we should add Sudan, Kongo, Myanmar, Pakistan, Yemen, Haiti, and the Sahel Region in Africa. Nicholas Kristof laments in the NYT (3/15/2026) that we have entered a more barbarous world. And in his column ‘Once and for All” Means Never” (NYT 3/24/2026) Thomas Friedman points out the futility of wars among hawks in the Middle East in the absence of strategies that leave room for enduring benefits to the peoples of that region.
We should make no mistake that aggression and deadly conflicts come with inordinate collateral damage.
Consider first the collateral damage on the personal level. People’s attitudes, feelings, and manners harden and become darker and more aggressive. Cynicism and nihilism, especially among the young, grow as the sense that might tramples right gains ground. Violence and war as instruments to settle disagreements become more normalized. Trusting others turns into a weakness.
In geopolitics, the success of hawks to gain beyond what is fair or justified as legitimate defense convinces more countries to arm themselves. In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons when it trusted the US and Russia that it had no reason to be afraid about its national security. In 2014 and 2022 Ukraine discovered the folly of behaving like a dove. North Korea’s dictator Kim just declared how prudent it was for him to persist with the development of an atomic arsenal. Other countries, small and big, are now posturing for stronger defensive strategies that will consume billions if not trillions of dollars. As priorities shift to defending one’s country in a world of hawks, precious resources will be siphoned away from much needed social and human development projects. Education, health, culture, and welfare will be underfunded. We already see this happening in Europe. Less trustful of the US in upholding Article 5 of NATO European leaders are redirecting hundreds of billions of Euros to upgrade their defenses to stand up to a hawkish Russia.
It is not difficult to guess that fewer resources for social programs could ignite popular discontent that could alter the political map in many countries. This applies to Europe with its extensive state support of education, health, and social services as well to America. In a NYT (3/22/2026) column titled “Better Ways To Spend the War’s Billions” Nicholas Kristof gives an illustrative list of how many worthy programs could be funded by the billions now spent on the Iran war.
Hawkish posturing is not limited to geopolitical rivalries. We also see it in money and business. The rise of plutocracy and corporate behemoths has taken place following the aggressive pursuit for unchecked wealth and market dominance. The attitude, as well as the actions that go with it, are emblematic of the motto “Winner takes it all” or of a zero-sum game. This is what has produced the “one percenters” and the cluster of super-dominant firms, both standing apart from the rest. The collateral damage of hawkiness in the distribution of wealth and market power is the demise of social capital and equal opportunity on which stable, fair, and thriving communities are built.
In the arena of culture and ideas we also see hawkish behavior that comes from both the right and the left. The fights regarding the separation of church and state, reproductive rights, transgender people, the teaching of history and ideas, all are fought in battles where the hawks (those with absolute beliefs and one-sided solutions) overshadow the doves. As pointed out in this blog and elsewhere, the right prosecutes its culture wars by inserting the government’s authority and the potentially repressive power of the state apparatus to enforce its ideological biases. The left on its part relies on its dominance in academia and the arts to exclude voices it opposes. The collateral damage is divisiveness, polarization, and distraction from focusing on more serious problems that pose risks for all of us.
In the natural world of species, exhaustion eventually checks the proliferation of hawks and allows doves to survive. What about humans? In geopolitics, treaties, alliances, and other cross-country agreements allow hawks and doves to coexist. After WW II we did even better. We established the United Nations to check aggressiveness and to enforce rules of conduct in geopolitical rivalries. Until some years ago the US was the de facto enforcer of these rules; not always consistently and not without a selfish interest but effectively enough to curb extreme acts of hawkish behavior. Not any longer. The UN has lost its power to mediate because that enforcer is no more. Instead, we have become the problem in preserving an acceptable environment where doves can coexist with hawks.
In matters of market structure and business conduct, rules and regulations adopted long ago were supposed to ensure that markets remain as competitive as possible. And in matters of income and wealth distribution we saw that taxes were levied with some degree of fairness so that those who had the most would contribute more than those who had less. Not anymore. As wealth and market dominance have been increasingly converted to political power so have the rules changed in favor of the hawks, that is, those who see no limits in their ambition to control more resources.
Finally, in the cultural arena we have entered a period in which the state as well as the self-governed institutions of academia and worship have failed to fairly mediate the opposing views on matters of religion and morals, speech, and the right for an open discourse of ideas. Even worse, they have lost the trust of the people. That leaves the hawks on both sides to have their way at the expense of the doves.
In a world dominated by hawks none of the critical problems humanity faces, climate, inequality, AI risks, can find the collaborative environment that is needed to produce cooperative solutions. The result may very well be a regression to past troublesome times when indeed might was all that mattered.
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