The peace lasts 5 years at best before the enemy kingdom, worrying about a ring gap, uses leaked intelligence and targeted research to develop its own ring arsenal, leading to a vicious ring race between the superpower
At most it lasts as long as the individual members of the Fellowship are around to hold the peace, but as soon as they pass away or are pushed out of power it begins again
It's not even new - The Delian League became Athens' little extortion/expansion policy that collapsed quickly after Persia left
We're always fighting little wars, so there's no variance, so they don't fit into IR models. If you can't count it, it doesn't count!
As for big wars... if you can get that Wizard to replay history a couple thousand times, we can totally get you an answer.
Interestingly Lord of the Rings is about destroying the one ring and thereby reducing the power of everyone on Middle Earth. Although this arguably subverts usual fantasy logic (definitely subverts average CRPG story logic).
Likewise the Hobbit ends with redistributing wealth over accumulation.
And the Grand Alliance that created the situation in LOTR only lasted as long as it took for each power to forget the lessons they had learned and succumb to greed and power
After the events of LOTR there would be maybe 3-4 years of peace before it happened again, even with the Fellowship in charge
Smaug's horde is redistributed not merely among the 14 members of Thorin's party, but the dwarves of the Iron Hills, the Lakemen, the Elves of Mirkwood, I suspect Beorn also got some.
All that vast wealth goes from being in 1 set of hands (claws) to several. Clearly reduces the Gini index.
Also the Eagles got a little bit of the horde when Dain crowned their King with gold at the end of the Hobbit.
Not it may be that all that treasure only ended up in the hands of the elite (they do rebuild Laketown etc.) but more than standard 1 hero who kills dragon gets horde + marries princess.
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It's not even new - The Delian League became Athens' little extortion/expansion policy that collapsed quickly after Persia left
As for big wars... if you can get that Wizard to replay history a couple thousand times, we can totally get you an answer.
Likewise the Hobbit ends with redistributing wealth over accumulation.
After the events of LOTR there would be maybe 3-4 years of peace before it happened again, even with the Fellowship in charge
All that vast wealth goes from being in 1 set of hands (claws) to several. Clearly reduces the Gini index.
Not it may be that all that treasure only ended up in the hands of the elite (they do rebuild Laketown etc.) but more than standard 1 hero who kills dragon gets horde + marries princess.