Stephen William Van Evera (born 10 November 1948) is a professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in international relations.
He has also co edited Nuclear Diplomacy and Crisis Management (1990), Soviet Military Policy (1989), and The Star Wars Controversy (1986).
Van Evera states three main hypotheses: However, false perceptions of these factors are common and thus explain a great deal of history.
Van Evera wrote on these factors being causal in the outbreak of the World War I in a famous 1984 article.
[3] Although trench warfare and the development of the machine gun meant that defensive strategies should have prevailed, many European nations were under the illusion that conquest was easy or that they were valuable.