The Debt–War Engine: A Structural Analysis of Fiscal Collapse as War Catalyst (1907–2025)

This paper presents a structural framework for understanding major 20th and 21st-century conflicts not as outcomes of ideological confrontation or singular trigger events, but as pressure-release mechanisms within systems approaching fiscal termination points. Through analysis of five historical case studies spanning the 1907 Panic to the 2008 financial crisis, we demonstrate that war functions as the sole politically viable pathway for sovereign debt restructuring when conventional monetary tools reach exhaustion. We propose viewing war through a thermodynamic lens: accumulated sovereign debt represents potential energy within closed economic systems, and warfare constitutes the kinetic release event that resets fiscal capacity. This framework challenges dominant historical narratives by relocating war causation from the battlefield to the balance sheet.