Cod Wars and institutions are supposed to pacify interstate behavior. The Cod Wars are also held up as an example of the decreasing salience of hard power in international relations, with implications for realist theory which emphasizes the importance of hard power. Theorists on asymmetric bargaining have emphasized how Iceland, lacking structural power, can still have an issue power advantage, with its greater commitment to the cause. A 2017 study argues that the occurrence of the Cod Wars is inconsistent with liberal international relations theory, including the democratic peace thesis, as the "supposedly pacifying factors of the liberal peace – democracy, trade
Cod Wars Wars because Icelandic statesmen were too greatly constrained by domestic politics to offer compromises to the British, but British statesmen were not as constrained by public opinion at home. International relations scholars such as Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger and Ned Lebow have written on the Cod Wars. The 2016 review article finds that lessons from the Cod Wars have most commonly been applied to liberal and realist international relations theory and theories on asymmetric bargaining. It claims that the Cod Wars are widely seen as inconsistent with the precepts of the liberal peace, since democracy, trade