"driven circumstances" is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it to refer to situations in which people are motivated or compelled to do something by external events or conditions. For example, "The economic downturn caused people to find creative solutions to their financial problems, out of driven circumstances."
That ambiguity is not due to a failure to think it through, it is due to a considered judgment that we do not want to give the hotheads on either side of the Taiwan Straits an ability to drive circumstances toward American involvement for their own purposes.
The British were deeply resentful of America's tardy entry, driven by circumstances rather than principle.
Sellers, the presentation points out, are largely driven by circumstances like death, divorce and debt.
Driven by circumstances and self-confidence, the president has made himself the star performer in the national drama.
She's driven by circumstances into crime and prostitution, he's the lover who serves to redeem her.
Just as each candidate must take a measure of his own race, the party's response is also driven by circumstances.
They are driven by circumstances and the jostle of competing constituencies, so you have to allow them a lot of leeway and never give up on them, unless they do something extraordinarily wrong.
(DHS, 522) Much of this was driven by circumstances.
Today, Katerina, given her money, could have hired a sharp defense counsel to argue that she was driven by circumstance to kill her father-in-law and husband.
But once he embraces that bad thought, he's so lost to logic, so driven by circumstance, you begin to wonder if free will is nothing more than a cosmic joke.
It enters the lives of a group of young men, driven by circumstance, discrimination and poverty to make the perilous journey from the Indian subcontinent to the UK and the mysterious young Sikh woman whose fate becomes intertwined with theirs.
