A modern "great war" would require countries of relatively equal military industrial power, so either it would be a great war without the US involved, i.e. China/India, Russia/China (with caveats), etc. In those situations the countries may temporarily forgo the use of nuclear weapons, at least until one side is pressed beyond the point of rational response.
I'd also suggest the last time countries were so dominant in certain military areas, they didn't overlap as much as they do today, so open conflict was easier to maintain. In the early 1800's France was the undisputed world leader when it came to land based combat, while the British maintained a serious advantage at sea. Today, the US is undisputed in all 3 categories, land, air, sea, and a 4th if you count space. If another country were able to take a commanding lead in at least 1 of those areas, perhaps we could see a high intensity conflict involving the US, however until that happens, there isn't much of a point.
Minor Edit: This isn't intended as support of the current situation.
Are you really sure that the US is undisputed in those 4 categories? A list of obvious weaknesses:
* The US economy and industrial power is dependent on IT and brittle supply chains. Nobody knows how much the cyber infrastructure holding this up is already compromised.
* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
* How does the US have space superiority when there is no ASAT defense besides MAD?
* The US has not been able to suppress a rebellion in Afghanistan with trillions of dollars and 17 years. Maybe in an actual war their hands would be untied, so this isn't the best point.
* The US Navy loses war-games to swarm attacks and is just now a decade later deploying solutions to this. When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
* The US has increasing ethnic and social conflicts, not to mention the potential fifth column of residents with ties to enemy powers.
* Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
I can happily go point by point here, but my original comment wasn't intended to suggest I agreed with the current state of world military balance and shouldn't be taken as implicit support of US policy.
That said -
* The S-400 is an impressive system. The Russians have so built ~300 of them, and like any system, the soft factors are more important than the paper facts suggest. Training, deployment, doctrine, and strategic/tactical goals would greatly affect the viability of it on any modern battlefield.
* Space Superiority is more than just ASAT capabilities, but its an area that few other countries have ever even attempted, and with the US's dominance in rocket technology (arguably anyway) and high altitude laser platforms, I'm fairly confident it would be a stalemate at best, with even the closest competitor. I would agree its an area of US defense that will need special attention over the next ~10 years.
* Insurgency =/= Great War.
* OIF was heavily supported by carrier based aircraft, and there are exactly zero countries that posses a modern enough navel force to threaten US control of the actual blue water areas. US Submarine technology is decades ahead of everyone else at this point. There are concern developments in this area, but again, we're talking "Great War"
* True point. Wars tend to get people pointed in the same direction though. Especially "Great Wars"
* US pilots put in more seat time than every other country combined. This is a factor that cannot be overstated. Putting 10x the number of the worlds best plane in the air means nothing if the actual operator cannot leverage those tools effectively.
In the end, these are all great points as to why the US has room to improve its lead, but none of them really address the core point which is that the US is currently the undisputed leader in almost every military category, and any "Great War" involving the US would be a very lopsided affair. You're more than welcome to pick your challenger and we can see how long it takes me to make a list twice as long with their problems, although I can't guarantee I'll actually spend the time doing that today :)
Due to morbid curiosity or whatever, I can't get enough of these arguments.
Yes, the initial superiority of one military is greater by a large margin and will remain that way for some time to come. But I think it's misleading wording to say it "has room to improve its lead", simply due to the fact that emerging powers are improving a greater rate, and it's economically unreasonable to believe otherwise.
Plus, no individual actor made the decision to plunge their mighty military power into the conflagration that became WWI.
I keep reading articles on the argument that carriers CAN be sunk. One article argued that only a nuclear attack could do it, but its argument was unsubstantiated. Swarm tactics and drone warfare are emerging game-changers in conventional warfare. More than anything, initial phases of WWIII would be missile warfare. Carrier groups can defend against hypersonic, but cannot do so reliably.
Combine this with a risky false impression - that war could be contained regionally. Would the symbolism of sinking a carrier be enough to have the U.S. back out of the contested East Asian theaters?
I can't answer that question, and it worries me that I can't. If the answer was certain either way, war would be less likely. As it stands, I could see certain gambles being both plausible, and terrifyingly dangerous.
"no individual actor made the decision
to plunge their mighty military power
into the conflagration"
Yeah, that part is really the key to everything.
The big wars were really a form of violent economic panic, writ large, and without descalation channels, partly as a component of monarchy, divine right and authoritarian autocracy, but also horrendously aggrivated by profound leaps of technological power, mostly by way of chemistry and industrial scale production of chemicals.
No one knew it would get that bad, that fast, that way. And during a time when royalty simply would not back down from a fight.
There are hot spots and proxy wars right now. If they go sideways, and spill a hot mess in the wrong lap, could an uncontrolled panic open up and let loose a new kind of conflagration we weren't expecting or have never before considered?
That's probably the hardest riddle. How does one anticipate an unexpected, unplanned atrocity?
Carriers are not invincible, submarines have gotten clear views of them before in military exercises, let alone missile swarms. The strongest defense a US carrier group has is the fact that there are 10 other carrier groups distributed around the world.
I think anyone who thinks that inflicting a sharp defeat on the US in the pacific would crush public morale and push it into a negotiated peace would have to be a very poor student of history.
It takes a single Sunburn [0] to take out a carrier. There is no defence - yet. Of course, when the railgun and lasers are deployed, this all changes again, but in the meantime the US' carrier fleet is principally a policing tool, and would be dead in the water during an all-out war - assuming the US chooses to go against an enemy that has the Sunburn in its arsenal.
There are several already deployed defenses against these, and weapon systems similar to these. The basic chaff deployment systems, CIWS systems for close in defense, and several anit-missile missile systems can all be leveraged to provide defense against an incoming attack.
Additionally, the strongest carrier defense against weapons such as this is the size of the ocean, and their short(ish) range. You can't hit what you can't find, and/or what you can't get close too.
They're simply too fast and too agile, employing evasion techniques. The only defence is lasers and railguns - thus, we're getting lasers and railguns Real Soon Now™.
A lot of your analysis hinges on these "soft" factors, but I fear that in a technology-led world of drones, direct human combat expertise will be outmoded, or just about any kind of military invention that closely depends on a human's ability to react and process information on time.
One interesting factor I don't see a lot of in these discussions is that the US also has a nasty habit of leaving its military assets out of range of the land they ultimately defend. A hyper-advanced carrier group out in the Arabian sea won't be a lot of help if Mexico suddenly becomes hyper-nationalistic and decides to press their claims on the US southwest
As a note the #1 complaint I hear in veterans groups is the frustration of not having a clear enemy.
Turn the military loose and Afghanistan will resemble a parking lot full of very submissive people.
Soldiers in combat have tighter rules of engagement with the enemy than US Police force have to follow when interacting with citizens. Let that sink in.
Amen. Overseas positive identification and rules of engagement were drilled into our heads constantly, driven home by threats of prosecution for murder/war crimes if you got it wrong. Despite the fact that Tommy Taliban loved to fire at us from crowds in markets and the windows of school buildings, US forces did a remarkable job of restraint. This is not to say that mistakes weren't made, or that certain groups didn't do things that they most certainly should not have, but by and large I would much rather trust US infantry to not shoot me than the Pittsburgh Police in a confusing situation.
That said, during those rare moments of clarity on the Afghan battlefield, there was zero doubt with respect to the outcome.
>* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
The S-400 is, like all major Russian weapon systems, an enigma. In the past, the Russian were capable of producing some excellent weapon systems, but they've also been very capable of inflating the capabilities of some real stinkers. The Mig 25 Foxbat comes to mind for example. All of my attempts to find real, verified information on S-400 capabilities have only turned up marketing material and articles quoting the marketing material. There have been no usages of the S-400 system in combat conditions that I am aware of.
It seems the S-400 should be taken seriously, but overestimation can be as dangerous as underestimation. It is possible that the S-400 is simply a rehash of the S-300 system with some of the interceptors having larger motors with longer range. This would still make it a potent system but one with known counters.
You know what is absolutely undisputed though? America's love for guns. There are 120 guns in the US for every 100 people. American civilians own 393 million guns, both legally and otherwise, out of a worldwide total of 857 million firearms [1]. Good luck occupying that.
Also, FWIW under every circumstance that isn't some kind of military invasion phantasy porn I generally look less positively on our relationship with guns.
It seems much more likely to me that a crafty foreign power would convince the "real" Americans to fight against the "phony" Americans, whomever they may be. I believe part of the Soviet strategy was to have Americans take arms against their own government. I feel that part of the modern Russian strategy is to get Americans to be willing take arms against their neighbors. Perhaps there are other players as well who haven't made as much of a splash as the Russians in our polity.
My (admittedly uninformed and probably based on too many movies/novels) expectations would be less about traditional occupation and more about neutralization.
I can't imagine the "Red Dawn" scenario of Russian troops invading and occupying US territory. If anything, the goal would be to knock out critical communication/shipping infrastructure to effectively disrupt all normal activity--can't buy or sell, can't get food, can't depend on modern mass communication to organize and maintain order.
Alongside that, the use of modern weapons to do serious damage to centers of power would speed up collapse. That's the goal if your intention is to hit us at our weakest point: catastrophic societal collapse.
If it's our military against some other military, we've got odds as good as anyone else (and almost always better). But if you've knocked out electronic commerce, disrupted civilian use of things like cell networks and internet access, and made it hard enough to get food on supermarket shelves, all those armed people aren't gonna just keep calm and carry on while they're hungry and several cities are burning.
Sure, it's probably a bit too "straight-to-Netflix" but it's much easier for me to imagine someone applying force at the points we're weakest and letting things fall apart than facing off plane vs. plane, ship vs. ship, and tank vs. tank on the battlefield.
I imagine that the "centers of power" that would collapse would be the major metropolitan centers. We would suffer many deaths from starvation there.
But in rural areas, people would just plant a bigger garden and slaughter an extra hog or cow and dip into the canned food in the cellar. They'd also load their empty shells and sharpen their rifle skills.
Yeah. Recently I realized that alien invasion/zombie outbreak movies couldn't possibly have different setting than United States, because no other country on Earth has enough firearms just lying around for survivors to mount an armed defense against the invaders.
28 Days/Weeks/Months is a good zombie series set in the UK, it was mostly the military doing the fighting. I never could understand how zombies in the walking dead managed to overrun the US military and all their bases, many in the middle of the desert or other hard to reach places.
When it comes to zombie attacks pointy sticks seem pretty effective anyway.
Walking Dead is a TV show that makes zero sense whatsoever. I dropped watching it after 2.5 seasons, because after season 1 it lost any semblance of a plot, and became a TV-show-equivalent of the very zombies it portrays - mindlessly wandering around. I can't understand why it is so popular.
I agree that it's long overstayed its welcome, but from what I gather, the zombies are mostly irrelevant. You could swap out "zombie outbreak" with any other persistent hazard that causes the breakdown of civilization and provides a constant background threat to the actual focus of the story: the people who have to survive and deal with each other/the environment they're faced with after said breakdown.
As much as I enjoyed the early seasons, I understand that it was always the goal of the original author and the showrunners to make it more about people being people in extreme circumstances. If it was decades earlier it could just as easily have gone the Fallout route and used nuclear war/radioactive hazards/mutants/etc. as the backdrop and the stories could have stayed 95% the same.
IIRC the creator (Frank Darabont?) left after the first season, and the show has suffered tremendously since. The only reason for it's success is perhaps the love people had for zombies.
I watched a few of season 2's episodes, but gave up pretty quickly.
The problem is that, even with 393 millions of guns, USA can't stop recurrent fireforests year after year. And this is only an example. Would be naive to think that, as people have a pistol, can't be killed remotely from a million Km of distance. The idea of a foreign army marching in a country and killing people one by one like stormtroopers, is very outdated.
And of course you can always distroy critical areas and then sit and look how the civilians start killing other civilians for water or food. With so many weapons in the table would be even much faster. Is hardly a guarantee.
The succession goes grassland, scrubland, forest. The grass is indeed more flammable, but the fires are much less intense. Dry cheatgrass, for example, flares up with incredible enthusiasm, but burns to ash in literally seconds.
> * Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
I was not able to find any sources corroborating that story. Are you confusing it with the F-22?
> When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
1988 Operation Praying Mantis [0] during the Tanker War in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran deployed swarm attacks, but only at a small scale. Which was one of the largest US naval battles after WW2.
> Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
The US Air Force simply doesn't use it's full fleet at any given moment:
"For example, in 1969, 523 USAF fighter
aircraft were deployed to Vietnam or Thailand, only 14 percent of the 3,838 fighters in the USAF
inventory that year." [1]
A counterpoint would be examining each country's idea of "acceptable losses". If losing 1 major city to nuclear weapons is considered unacceptable, then the major nuclear power are essentially on equal footing. Nuclear deterrence seems to be so effective because no nation to date has seemed to be willing to trade 1 of their cities for 2+ of their enemies.
The trouble is that opponents can mount a response while the attack is in progress. Information asymmetries would force a defender to assume the worst once they see the first missile in the air and launch their entire arsenal before their counter-attack capability was destroyed. It becomes a feedback loop when the aggressor is forced to assume they'll be met with the defender's entire arsenal.
Fortunately this is not true. Actually destroying retaliatory capability requires a sustained barrage of hundreds of nuclear weapons, the first rocket will definitely not do it. And while a single rocket will trigger a return strike with a nuclear weapon it will not trigger an all-out response.
If you ever get the chance to read old declassified nuclear attack plans against a city, you will see the same. A single nuclear weapon ... just doesn't do it. Those plans involve starting out with something like 10 nuclear explosions (not even directly against the city itself, rather on supporting infrastructure), and then one more every hour or so for 48 hours or even weeks (these plans are/were made for most large cities, and even for US cities where the likely plans for Russian nuclear attacks are created by US to allow for better preparations).
In some ways what you see in the first episode of Battlestar Galactica is somewhat accurate. First, dozens of nuclear explosions make an effective response impossible (e.g. military installations, runways, important bridges, train lines, communication, ...), then a methodical "sweep" with nuclear explosions of the entire city. This cannot be done with one, or even 10, nuclear bombs.
And even pretty bad radar systems can tell the difference between one and tens/hundreds of rockets.
So whilst this is a concern, it can and is eliminated with proper infrastructure and planning.
There will not be information asymmetry once a nuclear attack actually starts happening.
That's not how these systems work, at least in the US and Russia. "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg (who was involved in war planning before he leaked the Pentagon Papers) has some fascinating and scary info about this.
Apparently there are backup systems in both countries that will fire nuclear weapons automatically (!) at predefined targets if certain cities are hit with nuclear attacks - e.g. Washington, Moscow, etc.
That's why deterrence is effective - because any strike can automatically lead to hundreds of millions of people dying (and, if the modelling of nuclear winter is correct, potentially pretty much all large mammals within a few years)...
The point is more about even countries with a minimal nuclear arsenal being in relatively equal military footing as the countries with large arsenals because no country seems willing to risk losing one of their major cities to nuclear attack. So, threatening 100 cities is about the same as threatening 1 - no one will attack you.
That's pretty much the main reason north Korea hasn't been attacked since the Korean War: even without nuclear weapons, nobody wants to risk war when Seoul is all but guaranteed to be leveled.
It was an example to show how a country with a chance of landing even 1 nuclear missle successfully is on equal military footing with a country that can land hundreds assuming the stronger country does not see losing any of their cities as an acceptable risk.
Thats a great point, and quite possibly how the next war would be fought. I picture some Fight Club esque scenario where all the banks get wiped out. Not from bombs, more from a cyber point of view, but could you imagine the loss of faith even a smallish attack could cause. FUD is a heavy hitter in wars.
The US is clearly in the lead wrt cyber weapons, but it also clearly has the most to lose. Whether the lead balances out the increased threat is anyone's guess.
The common use of SSNs, the continued existence of Credit Card numbers, and the Equifax hack make me gravely concerned that the Federal Government is not helping us harden our cyber defense.
The US carrier force could be blown out of the water by modern electric submarines [1]. The chance of Sweden starting a war against the US is not all that great - this mouse does not roar - but the same or similar technology (Stirling engines, fuel cells, a boatload of 18650 cells running a sub, etc) are available to parties which might stand to gain more from such a conflict. Replacing a carrier takes years, blowing one up takes a few minutes. Were I in command of the US carrier fleet I would be very mindful of this threat and make sure I always have the fleet dispersed with at least one battle group somewhere behind 'safe' lines.
Another great war could mean at least one country preparing for it and building weapons in advance.
As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
>As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
Well, this is one of the reasons a Great War is unlikely - how are you going to do this? Even if you build things up slowly, you still have to store them somewhere. You have to train people. There is no way to create a military force capable of fighting a Great War in today's age without it being obvious.
Which isn't to say that build up can't happen - it's just not going to be a surprise to anyone.
And it's not going to get very far before the nuclear option gets trotted out. What good is an invasion force if the other side feels threatened enough to start nuclear retaliation?
I can remember folks in the Reagan adminstration regularly touted the possibility of winning a nuclear war and used that sort of rhetoric in elections. The other part of that is the fundamentalist Christians in the USA who believe in the literal interpretation of Revelations so for them there is greater glory in armageddon that begins with a conflict in Israel. And in power now, John Bolton is one of those guys who thinks we can win a nuclear war and need simply need to outbuild the other guys.
I will say it is weird when it seems to make sense to be more scared of the people on your own side than the people on the enemy's side. Perhaps they have folks just as scary, though.
We almost went to war in 1983 - the political sloganeering by Reagan adminstration combined with the paranoia on the Soviet side (their double agents inside the West reported Able Archer 83 as an exercise but the Soviets interpreted the intel) made a military exercise for NATO appear to be the start of a first strike preparation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
The US has with no doubt the best ground on the planet to defend themselves with. Isolated by two large oceans and bordered by "mostly" friendly nations
Force extended requires significant amplification.
So for China to impact us in a meaningful way they would have to somehow sneak a force large enough to damage across a pretty wide open space, then maintain that logistically.
Ditto for the RU
That said once in the US you have 300 million small arms manned by 21+ million veterans in the US
Not sure China can actually get that many boots on the US soil before the Navy / Air get a poke or two at them
China/US are probably pretty close to a MAD situation. How many minutes do we have to decide if an oncoming Chinese missile attack is nuclear or conventional these days? And vice-versa. Fun fun.
Not only nationalism. Current conflicts are rooted in the same prejudices as a hundred years ago. The root cause (this idea that somehow my nation/religion/race/etc is superior) hasn't been resolved, only more or less patched, and thus these conflicts are bound to reappear and escalate sooner or later until we recognize that that despite the valuable diversity humanity is essentially one and align the political and economic structures of this world with this reality.
> Not only nationalism. Current conflicts are rooted in the same prejudices as a hundred years ago. The root cause (this idea that somehow my nation/religion/race/etc is superior)
Honest question: is it possible in your opinion for someone to not believe "my nation/religion/race/etc is superior" yet still be opposed to globalism? To me, this is what nationalism means, international cooperation while unequivocally maintaining the right to national democratic self-determination.
Yes, by disillusioning yourself that any of those things matter. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what god you pray to, because prayer is personal; doesn’t matter what nation you call your own, because emigration is easier than ever; and doesn’t matter what colour your skin is, because it doesn’t define you.
Obviously all that is easier said than done, but really if you stop letting any kind of tribal attachment define you as a person, life becomes a lot simpler.
National identity is rooted in language and culture. If people could easily speak two or three languages, the boundaries could become more fuzzy, but right now it seems like learning a real human language is harder than learning 10 programming languages.
Not really, though. Especially for the basics. In fact, multilingualism is still the general standard in the world, especially in places like Asia and Africa. And even Europe, where most learn English. Yes, it's difficult, but it can be easier if we stressed it from a younger age, or if people had need for it. Instead, they use language to distance themselves from people, not bring each other together.
> doesn’t matter what nation you call your own, because emigration is easier than ever
Are there any fiscal consequences to that, at all? For example, I often read about the advantage of socialized medicare in Canada versus the US, is this difference a figment of people's imagination? Is that a tribalist belief, or acknowledgement of physical & fiscal reality?
> Yes, by disillusioning yourself that any of those things matter. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what god you pray to, because prayer is personal; doesn’t matter what nation you call your own, because emigration is easier than ever; and doesn’t matter what colour your skin is, because it doesn’t define you.
Are you saying it doesn't, or it shouldn't? Because from what I see on the news and read in psychological studies, it seems like there are significant numbers of people, some of whom are scientists, who don't share this interpretation of reality.
> Obviously all that is easier said than done, but really if you stop letting any kind of tribal attachment define you as a person, life becomes a lot simpler.
Is this a fact or a theory? And I don't mean that flippantly or offensively, I think it's a perfectly valid question considering the current political climate.
I don't see how nationalism includes international cooperation. At best, it seems to me that international cooperation is a choice a nationalist might consider amongst protectionism, isolationism, imperialism/colonialism, and outright xenophobia.
You can see the Wikipedia page for isolationism or any of the other *isms I listed above [0]. To say that there was no beneficial mutual trade in at least some of the cases is probably a stretch.
I think we are misunderstanding each other, but we both agree. My understanding of what you are saying now is that it is possible to have nationalism with international cooperation, but I read your initial comment as nationalism requiring international cooperation. What I am saying is that nationalism and international cooperation are two choices that a nation-state can make that are almost completely independent from each other.
Not the person you asked the question of, but I think there are reasonable anti-globalist positions that don't have anything to do with superiority. A sort of Ludditism could do. And I actually do think people can be strongly attached to identity without a belief of superiority.
Couldn't non-democratic societies be nationalist? Was nationalism off-limits to Imperial Japan, for example?
Is it necessary? Is primary Nationalism, but with a willingness to trade and cooperate internationally in a mutually beneficial manner, inherently worse than enthusiastic globalism with no regard for the well-being of one's own individual country? I hear most everyone talking this talk on the world stage, but I don't see a lot of people walking the walk (for example, everyone seems to bargain quite strongly in a self-beneficial way in trade talks, even though that is apparently considered immoral).
> The root cause (this idea that somehow my nation/religion/race/etc is superior)
This isn’t really the root cause.
It is possible and common to think your group is superior without wishing any harm onto others and without trying to control others.
For example plenty of developers believe static typing is superior to dynamic typing but there are only a few that believe dynamic typing should be banned / driven out of the workplace.
"Somehow". The answer is found quite simply by this formula:
"My [whatever] is the [whatever] I belong to."
Even if you prove without a doubt that Islam is worse that Christianity, or that one race is worse than another, you won't likely convince the members that they therefore deserve less than they have, or that they should surrender to another. The core tautology still holds true.
I’m afraid of tribalism as much as the other guy, but it’s naive to assume it’s maladaptive. Many people are blind to how many groups that try to protect them in the United States, whether or not they identify as such. Tolerance and peace are luxuries purchased off tribal conflict in some cases.
I feel this is too reductive in some senses. WWI was a war directed by imperialists sacrificing other people's children to profitier and try to grab power and influence for the elites in each country. Yes some elites did demonstrate egoism and inflame predjudice but that's the show for the rubes to get them to sacrifice their children and labor for the imperial project. Egoist leaders can only get their way if theirprogram works for enough of the people implementing their decisions.
Eugene Debs went to jail in America for imploring the working class not to fighta rich mans war and many soldiers walked away completely disgusted. Just a few miles from the trenches filled with death, the war profitiers were making a killing offering hotels and foodstuffs to soldiers on leave.
We still have a command economy based on war and our imperial project is still ongoing. We should take the lessons of world war one to heart and refuse to fight and fuel wars of domination and conquest. I can't recall the last time the western world was called to fight a defensive war after WW2, perhaps the only "good" war in our history.
Your theory about WWI is hard to reconcile with the fraction of the upper classes in the relevant age brackets who were in the army and were casualties, especially on the western front. In WWI, a lot of the people making the decisions in fact ended up sacrificing their own children.
Or to make this concrete, the prime minister of the UK in 1914 (and through 1916) was H. H. Asquith. Looking at the wikipedia articles about his sons:
I have a hard time seeing Asquith here as "sacrificing other people's children", or at least any more so than sacrificing his own.
That said, I agree that there's way more war-making going on recently than there should be and that it's no longer in style for the upper class to actually put their own skins on the line. But WWI is just not a good example of that tendency.
The thing about war is that at some point, the conditions line up where it becomes seen as a solution (if not the only solution), and its not easy to see the point at which that will occur ahead of time.
Will China's big sea grab start a war? So far, they've been able to smother any of their neighbor's push back, and have just ignored any international rulings against them.
What about when they invade Taiwan, which they've said they will do? What about when they take over some of Japan's islands, which they said they would do?
They seem to be going down this path where they think if they just push a calculated amount each time, it won't cause a big problem. It's exactly that kind of thinking that is the problem, though.
And China's not the only aggressive, belligerent country out there. There's also Russia (Crimea/Ukraine, Syria) and Iran (Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon), for example. At what point do their aggressions spill over into a larger conflict?
Actually this is debatable. The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to and nobody would oppose them. Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent. The British Empire was way worse than the USA all things considered.
You're setting a high bar for belligerence. The US is diplomatically & militarily sophisticated enough that it frequently exercises rational restraint. It also is an admirably open society, undergoing strategic policy shifts as internal arguments get won and lost.
But no-one (for other than ideological purposes) ever mistook the US for a fundamentally peaceable nation (internally or externally).
Different times, back during the higjt of the british empire war and colonization have been normal things to do. Even the British were quite aggrez, but still not out of the norm. This whole land grabbing kind of war ended to be a thing with WW 2. So you can still be as aggressive as the British back then, it just manifests itself in different ways. Also, nowadays it is a lot easoer to control countries by economic means alone.
>>Different times, back during the higjt of the british empire war and colonization have been normal things to do.
Indian here. Colonization is just a placeholder term to describe resource grab. There is no real chance England could have annexed India.
Why do all this annexation business, and offer the other country free citizenships? All you have to do is militarily control the country while you can take their resources and ship to your homeland.
>>This whole land grabbing kind of war ended to be a thing with WW 2.
Territorial control often has further ulterior motives. Like grabbing useful land, or creating buffer zones etc.
Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent
I wonder what kinds of things history will be saying about the United States in 200 years, a nation who probably didn't take the brutish British approach to invasion, but has tripwire forces-I mean "installations" dotted all over everyone else's back yards instead.
Considering how NATO, The Gulf Countries, China and Russia are behaving, seems that in 200 years we will be still learning how to build the wheel again. If were are lucky.
Without the US, the world would be a sh*tshow. The tripwire bases prevent the likes of Russia putting its paws on Eastern Europe or China snatching more islands they claim as there own.
Back when the Serbs were genociding their Muslim citizens, Europe was inept while the US saved the day, as usual.
The US enjoys the status quo - most military interventions are to maintain it.
I am not a big fan of current US policy, but definitely agree that our presence is a stabilizing factor in the world geo politics. Take the US out of the equation and there would like be a huge imbalance. The UK and other European countries are but a shadow of their past... At least militarily.
> The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to and nobody would oppose them.
This is false. Have you heard of the korean war or the vietnam war? Or the afghanistan/iraqi war? There are ( and have been ) powers that opposed the US ( sometimes successfully ). Look at current day syria.
> Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent.
What? We have been in a state of perpetual aggressive war ever since ww2 ( frankly since the american revolution war if we are being honest ).
> The British Empire was way worse than the USA all things considered.
It may or may not have been worse. But being belligerent isn't a relative matter of comparison. It's a matter of state. It's like being pregnant. You are pregnant or you are not.
> At what point do their aggressions spill over into a larger conflict?
When perceived benefits outweigh costs. The US's multiple invasions of, and coup plots against, other countries didn't 'spill over into a larger conflict' because the US's power & ruthlessness have been well-understood by the world. The costs of resisting US militaristic aggression have just been too high. The same has applied to Russia, and perhaps will in China's case if it makes good on its threats (though it would have to fight on multiple fronts for decades to even approach US levels of aggression).
US is not annexing Iraq because then US will have to grant US citizenship to Iraqis and they will be free to move to mainland US. Nobody wants that, so instead US bombs the shit out of Iraq, honors its "independence" by erecting a pro-American puppet government, and acts surprised when shit falls apart.
So yeah, not all wars are the same, but people suffer all the same.
A puppet government? Hardly. We simply replaced Sunni for Shiite and slightly shifted things in a millennial old civil war. It was naive optimism of the Potomac chess players that we could reshape a country by invading it.[1] Others have mentioned the US supporting heinous countries like Saudi Arabia. This is sadly true and should stop, despite what the referenced article says about “staying engaged”. Ceasing support of tyrants and ending overtly militaristic policies is not disengaging, but reevaluating failed policies.
But the US also acts through a democracy, while the countries mentioned above do not. I can criticize the stupid policies of the US in a public forum. The citizens of the countries listed above can not. Democracy is not the equivalent of an oligarchy or tyranny. The people of a country are different from the government that represents them. Unelected governments are illegitimate and a danger to the free world despite what their minions of propaganda post.
> A puppet government? Hardly. We simply replaced Sunni for Shiite and slightly shifted things in a millennial old civil war.
When I read these type of comments I get truly scared on how the lives of non-western people don't really mean anything to lots of people.
There wasn't as slight shift in a conflict but an all out invasion causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in a few years. Millions if you consider the last 20 years.
> But the US also acts through a democracy, while the countries mentioned above do not.
Crimes committed by a democracy, a theocracy or a dictatorship are crimes all the same. That is how the rest of the world sees it and it's time for the west to start seeing it too.
> > But the US also acts through a democracy, while the countries mentioned above do not.
I guess the innocent men, women and children feel better having died at the hands of a democracy.
But, your comment did bring a smile to my face, especially as what is happening right now [0]
Democracy? Iraq War pt II. Led by Bush, declared illegal by many, unwanted by more. Led by Bush, democracy. How did he get installed again? Ahh yes, the Florida "recount". Where the governor was his brother and the partisan SCOTUS decided along partisan lines rather than recount.
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[0] POTUS stating the current recount in Florida should be stopped, even though is mandated by state law. Democracy?
The US occupied Iraq for a decade and is still in Afghanistan. While we did not overtly annex, it is clear that the US attempted to control these countries. You would do better to make your point without the moralizing.
The fact is that the US is a global aggressor just as much as the other countries on the list.
> they were saving Muslims from genocide in the Balkans
If you're referring to the NATO bombing of Serbia, then you are incorrect -- there was no genocide in Kosovo.
The justification for the Western intervention (100,000's of people murdered by Serbia) was a lie [1] [2], and Milosevic (the "Butcher of the Balkans") was exonerated of the charges of war crimes, twice [3] [4].
[3] is an opinion piece, [4] says that he was exonorated. However, the wikipedia page says: "After Milošević's death, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded separately in the Bosnian Genocide Case that there was no evidence linking him to genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian War. However, the Court did find that Milošević and others in Serbia had committed a breach of the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent the genocide from occurring and for not cooperating with the ICTY in punishing the perpetrators of the genocide, in particular General Ratko Mladić, and for violating its obligation to comply with the provisional measures ordered by the Court."
Just because he was personally exonerated does not imply no genocide happened.
Classic whataboutism based on a false equivalence that magically appears on any thread too critical of China. This might not be a puppet but it's certainly pointless propaganda designed to shift any discussion away from China.
As long as Saudi Arabia is one of Americas "greatest" allies there is no leg to stand on arguing any aspect of US foreign policy involves a moral war against totalitarianism.
The hypocrisy is clear, but hypocrisy is not sufficient to prove that one does not care at all.
What is pretty clear is that the USA takes a strategic and occasionally very partisan view when making their choices of alliances as well as their use of power and force. I'm not sure they are very unique in this respect though.
Even if they genuinely cared about it, 90 percents of regimes worldwide are dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. So you can not work with anyone if you have very strong principles.
You mean war against radical religious terrorists and dictators that are not allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and etc?
Countries which support the Al-Nusra front, which was affiliated to Al-Qaeda, which masterminded 9/11 an event which 90% of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia or other gulf countries and 0 from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Iran.
The concept of righteous crusades has been around forever and it's stunning that it still works.
And I'd add that it need only be a solution to the person who can start the war. Authoritarian leaders find fights with external enemies extremely useful to quash dissent. Given the global drift toward authoritarianism and nationalism, and especially given how the world's largest military is in the hands of an authoritarian, I think the risk for war is disturbingly high.
Was Obama an authoritarian? What about Bush? What about Clinton (Bill)?
The previous few presidents got the US involved in lots of stupid wars. This president has expressly said he doesn't want to do that and has avoided it.
Obama was not an authoritarian. Bush 2 was maybe a little bit (remember after 9/11 and the spokesman said don't question the president). But trump is far far past all recent presidents in being an authoritarian. He lives for that, and sucks up to leaders like that in other countries. He says he doesn't want to get us in a war, but he seems willing to do anything to divert public attention (like his recent completely racist tv commercial he was pushing before the election).
> Was Obama an authoritarian? What about Bush? What about Clinton (Bill)?
> The previous few presidents got the US involved in lots of stupid wars. This president has expressly said he doesn't want to do that and has avoided it.
I'm not sure how you can find fault with Obama and Clinton but absolve Trump. What do you make of his continuation of the many wars we are involved in? Or his bombings in Syria?
I'm going to ignore the whataboutism and skip to your apparent core point, that Trump saying he doesn't want to get involved in war means something. Trump has made 5000 false or misleading statements so far: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/09/13/president...
Trump has an extraordinary ability to do and say whatever is to his momentary perceived advantage. He's excellent at creating scary distractions; note how the sinister migrant caravan, so dangerous as to require thousands of US troops on the border, became a non-issue as soon as the election was over.
I'm not aware of Israel making it a matter of national policy to annihilate Iran or any other country. However, that is Iran's stated policy, and what they've said they'll do when they get nukes.
Iran is training proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to attack Israel. And that's what they're doing. They just launched a missile barrage, the largest ever, at Israel.
It seems that Israel is just defending its existence.
Hamas chose Saudi Arabia's and Qatar's side on the Syrian conflict and that lead to Assad breaking relations with them.
Syria took it as a betrayal so I doubt they would do anything to help Hamas.
Israel is not bombing Syria to defend itself. Syria never had and nor will have the capability to do anything to Israel.
The reason Israel have been bombing Syria is the same reason Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, USA, UK, France, Australia and the rest of the coalition are doing it too: regime change.
They want to replace Assad with a puppet, like Hariri in Lebanon, so they can all push their own agendas in the region.
And on the other side Russia, Iran and Hezbollah jumped in Assad's rescue to counter that move.
They are ALL pushing their own interests at the expense of Syrian lives so please drop this outrageous "defending itself" narrative and admit all actors of both sides are war criminals with blood on their hands.
> Israel is not bombing Syria to defend itself. Syria never had and nor will have the capability to do anything to Israel.
You're forgetting about the Six-Day War [1] and the Yom Kippur War [2]. Yes, there are controversies around those too, and Israel came out on top in the end - but let's not pretend that Israel the modern nation-state hasn't been on guard against being obliterated by its neighbors since Day 1.
Nobody denied those conflicts and the need of Israel to defend itself.
But sometime seems that only Israel has the right to defend itself, even when its not on the defense but actively bombing countries with far inferior armies / allies and they have to just accept being bombed because of events 50 years ago.
Can Iraq or Syria use the recent invasions as excuse to do whatever they want for the next 50 years too?
The concept of preemptive war has always been an excuse to actually start wars.
> [to annihilate Israel] However, that is Iran's stated policy
This is not strictly true. Words were twisted and misconstrued and reported falsely in western media of what was actually said (which I think was still reprehensible, but Iranian policy is not the annihilation of Israel)
> and what they've said they'll do when they get nukes.
Absolutely not true. For one, they would never state they are trying to build a nuclear weapon, two they know Iran would cease to exist on the map if they did.
Unless you are perhaps referring to just a random person stating as such, if so, you could can find many more examples of Israeli and US persons saying the same of Iran, but that does not make it policy of Israel and US
What do you expect from a country that Israel has been demonizing for the last 20+ years calling for bombing it and spreading lies about its non-existent nuclear arms programs? A love poem?
>Iran is training proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to attack Israel.
while Israel helps ISIS in Syria to destroy the country, bombed Lebanon, annexed the Golans and areas in the West Bank... you really shouldn't be digging up that dead high horse.
Asking the world to dethrone and delegitimize a country - even without the context of Iran's posture towards them - is different from genocide, which is Iran's posture, yes.
No, it wouldn't start anything more than a regional conflict à la the Seven Days' War or any of the other several Arab-Israeli conflicts of the past 70 years.
World War I did not start because Austria had a legitimate grievance against Serbia that it was determined to settle with military force. It started because France, Germany, and Russia were all willing, maybe even eager, to go to war and the putative Third Balkan War in as many years was an opportunity to do so. When the leaders of Germany and Russia started getting cold feet and asked about partial mobilization as an alternative option, the military commands were shocked and worked assiduously to convince them that there was no alternative to complete war. In stark contrast stands the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Kennedy and Khrushchev both ignored their military commands' pleas for war and sought to find alternatives to war.
The ingredients for global war are international disputes irreconcilable except for war; a conflict that can serve as a flashpoint to rapidly bring in these wide international disputes; and you need leaders who can continue to escalate the war, knowing all the consequences it might entail. The Middle East simply lacks strategic importance to make two major power blocs go to global war in support of their local allies in a localized conflict.
I think Israel (and, unlike GP, also Iran) are too small-time to start real global war. They're more the potential Bosnias or Serbias - small, belligerent countries that could drag their patrons into conflict.
The nuclear bombing of Iran by a state would almost certainly be enough to precipitate the complete collapse of the NPT, which is already wobbly (the latest Review Conference ended in acrimony).
Subsequent nuclear weapons projects in erstwhile NPT NNWS could easily trigger a few regional wars, and from there the escalation to a global conflict is certainly possible.
Probably because, like myself, the OP isn't informed enough to make a judgement on that case.
There are aggressive factors on all sides of that conflict and there's no clear-cut good or bad guy; only unfortunate things happening to real people who'd all be better off if religion stayed inside the walls of one's dwelling and temple of worship.
Also if in cases of contested buildings listed above, everyone had equal access to the area administered by a neutral outside party.
I think quite the opposite, I believe they wanted the current leadership to stay, consequences and means of enforcement and human rights be damned. (it's also contrary to the US's wishes, for right or wrong). They want the status quo, cuz it's their only navy base on the Mediterranean.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_the_Syr...
Gain land/people? If there's a thriving economy there, war will probably change that quickly. If there's no thriving economy, what's the point?
You could try to exploit the people/resources there, but the profits in that seem (at least compared to a world power) pretty thin. Unskilled labor and unimproved land are just not worth what they used to be.
Specific resources might become dramatically more valuable. Seems not terribly likely with oil (more technology, more producers, more alternatives). Maybe water, but the obvious pressure for that would be population, which is somewhat leveling off (though maybe global warming would do it).
I would think any modern war would be very different and less bloody than we're used to. Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken. Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
I think that's a possibility but that's provided everything else holding up the system(s) actually holds up. The minute supermarkets stop having enough food on their shelves is the minute panic sets in. After that it's not long before any nation runs the risk of turning into Venezuela and people are killing their neighbor's dog for food. I don't think you're giving enough weight to the grim reality of human nature. The only reason your situation is plausible is because there's some sort of expectation that there will be a certain level of humanity and civility even with extreme events like that and people won't just be left to starve or die. And that might very well be the case. But there are other factors that threaten that decency and if/when that fails, all hell would break loose. Human nature is what it is and people react to their reality. People, generally speaking, have pretty good lives, all things considered. That's why they don't want things like war which disrupt that. But if, for example, their livelihoods are already disrupted and a decent amount of people suddenly have a lot less (or nothing) to lose now, the reasons for shying away from war and violence are less convincing. Toss into the mix that in such cases serving your country can provide people with a purpose to their current existence after their prior purpose and way of life went away, and you have a pretty ugly mix of reasons to engage in war.
Also it feels like food supply is much more fragile now (more dependent), almost 8 bln people now compared to ~1.5 bln 100 years ago, if this collapses, it'll collapse big time.
as TeMPOraL and Erik816 mentioned, it's not just the increase in population that you get the impression the food supply is more fragile. In fact that probably has very little to do with it. It's more of the just-in-time aspect of the supply chain that all the supermarkets and other food producers/sellers utilize. It is done for efficiency to maximize profit. It applies to all food products, but especially with perishables. Supermarkets used to keep about 10-12 days of supply at all times. Now the supply is only about 3 days! That's why the stores always look ransacked at the mere mention of a severe rain. Bread, eggs, milk - gone in an hour.
This practice is pervasive throughout most of the economy and there is very little planning for any disruptions in any supply chains whatsoever. The decades of relative peace, prosperity, expanded trade, and global growth have tricked everyone into thinking nothing will ever disrupt anything at all. That's probably a mistake.
This kind of foolishness may have some serious consequences at some point. We've also become substantially more dependent on a number of nations for constant imports of raw materials and food as well. And we've largely stopped manufacturing pretty much everything which means we also get almost everything sent to us. This could be a real serious issue if there is a sudden large-scale war and a number of countries we rely upon aren't on the same side as ours. And from an economic perspective, business conditions have been pretty sweet for companies over the last 30-40 years outside of a few catastrophic events. Is there even anyone in the business world left at this point that even remembers what it's like to have to survive on low debt and increasing interest rates? Companies have just expected ever-lower interest rates since the early to mid 80's and they've been able to rollover debt easily and take out more money to fund operations. Is there anyone left who has actually managed large businesses in an environment that was less predictable?
For most of recent history in the West, it's been fairly normal for homes to maintain a larder, root cellar, pantry, or other long-term food storage as a buffer against both economic and supply-related hardships.
Prudently doing so in the modern era, however, is a fairly surefire way to get branded a crazy prepper. And supply chain buffers at home are becoming even shorter with the advent of DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc.
I used to keep a weeks worth of water, noodles/pasta, canned goods. Would rotate it out every 3 months and buy the same.
Despite the government advocating people have 3 days supply and numerous natural disasters where stores empty in hours, my flatmate and friends thought I was absolutely insane.
Running things on "lean manufacturing" ain't helping either. With just-in-time ordering, near-zero buffer at the edge, everyone depends on undisturbed flow through the supply chains. Break that, and we're all in a world of hurt, as there are little to no reserves.
Just being bigger doesn't make it more fragile. Yes we have more people to feed, but there's a lot more people who can grow food now (and of course we have leveraged technology to an incredible degree to reduce the number of people and amount of land needed to produce that food). The food supply could be more fragile, but you would need a lot more data to convince me. I think it is actually far more stable. Look up Norman Borlaug for an example of the kind of improvements we've made within the last 100 years.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about a food shortage. The midwest has a ton of grain stored away hoping for a good price someday.
South America and the rest of the world has taken note of our high yield practices and are crowding the market with their own grain. Granted, you wouldn't want to eat field corn, but then we are talking about tough times which could call for tough measures.
I'm more worried about dealing with the runoff, byproducts and foolish policies that might waste our foodstuff.
>Gain land/people? If there's a thriving economy there, war will probably change that quickly. If there's no thriving economy, what's the point?
The point of war in the modern world may in fact be the denial of a thriving economy or industrial base to an adversary. For instance in a large scale nuclear war many of the plans call for the destruction of enemy nuclear weapons as to protect your own infrastructure/population and to destroy enemy infrastructure/population to gain an economic and industrial advantage after the war ends.
War is also not always an economic calculation: humanitarian concerns, revenge, fear, upholding the law, alliances and thoughts of glory can often motivate a conquest that holds no real value to the victor.
Why did Alexander engage in his wars? He didn't seem to particularly enjoy the job of government.
What was the economic value to Rome of destroying Carthage?
Ultimately the answer to the economic value of Rome destroying Carthage was that Rome became the undisputed ruler of the Med for 500 years. Up until not that much time prior to the Punic wars, it wasn't at all clear that Rome would become the power that it did.
Obviously the animosity between the two played a huge part in the desire to salt the fields of Carthage, but that is almost exactly how The Entente and the Central powers felt towards each other after 2 years of war - neither of them could stomach laying down their arms, because so much blood had been spilt. So they had to keep going, and going, and going
Unfortunately politics works exactly that way. See how far Japan got in WW2, knowing very well what could be the end of it.
In fact the most scary situations in the entire WW2 was the time between the first nuclear weapon and the second nuclear weapon drop and the time after that till surrender. Here is a paragraph from the statement of Emperor of Japan.
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
Your post reminds me of some pre-WW1 opinions shared by Dan Carlin in his great podcast on the topic. There were a number of intelligent observers that thought a pan European war could not happen at that time because the economies of the great powers were going so well.
WW1 was monarchies (professional war-makers) still thinking war-making a major wealth gaining activity. 100 years ago they were proven horribly wrong, and ultimately triggered their extinction. After WW1, world learned that industrial activity had taken the crown from war-making. This brought WW2, socialism and democracy to world scene.
But within next decade world would realize that democrats/socialists are temporary elites filling the vacuum created by the global transition from monarchy to technocracy. This is why there will not be a WW3. Because those who are competent enought to make big money, are making it in tech. There will also not be a global resource war because such mega needs are $$$ opportunity, you can bet there are future-$$$onaires working at this problem this very second.
germany had its royal family as did russia. but a lot of the other countries were not so encumbered by stupid or naive leaders. but then you lose your direction - tech are the deserving brilliant money makers or something? and we are too smart to screw it up. ha.
"The British author Norman Angell would immortalize himself by suggesting, just a few years before World War I, that what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete. War, he argued, had become futile because peace and the growing economic and financial linkages between the major European states were producing so much prosperity."
Basically all war is caused by a combination of competition over resources, and a fear of/interest in subjugation. There's no such thing as unlimited resources, and there will always be someone who wants to subjugate you, or someone you want to subjugate. Logic doesn't prevent a war.
The point of the article is that people thought WWI would not only be impossible, but that it would also be "bloodless". It turned out to be the bloodiest war the world had ever seen.
The future big wars will (eventually) turn the world into an apocalyptic hellscape, but the beginning will be fought with robots and big guns. Less infantry, but more damage. Lots more civilians dying of starvation, cold, disease, once critical infrastructure gets taken out. People in cities are mostly dependent on utilities, so once those go, it's going to get chaotic. Also we don't really have industry anymore, so a trade embargo might totally erode our ability to wage war once we exhaust our surpluses.
> I would think any modern war would be very different and less bloody than we're used to. Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken. Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
The annexing of Crimea was "less bloody" because nobody attempted military intervention to stop it. If this sort of thing continues it will result in war that will absolutely involve plenty of blood being shed.
Thinking this is fundamentally different from how various wars started in previous eras is a mistake.
There are reasons to go to war that transcend macroeconomics. Our instincts to tribal violence are ancient, and I suspect the social bonds of shared fear, danger, and trauma are far more potent than most of us peacetime civilians understand, arguably being an end unto itself. Moreover, there are political motivations domestically that have nothing to do with ostensible mission objectives, whether pursued ideologically, or cynically. If anything, our long stretch of (relative) worldwide peace is the anomaly, and it's debatable whether that would be the case if not for the atom bomb setting an existential upper bound on the level of war that first-world societies choose to tolerate.
Less bloody perhaps by use of less kinetic weapons directly against people, but the scary part of war is famine for the populace. Just look at Yemen, I heard 100,000 died in the past few years there, basically just because Saudi Arabia has them under siege in their proxy war with Iran. The biggest killer in Russia in WWII was famine. When the supply chain or a weak link in our technology breaks (or is broken) death tolls rise scarily fast.
also the point of war is simply about power, or to make the other nation/state/population submit to your demands, and the actions of leaders and their path towards war are not always transparent or easy to spot from a rational observers point of view. I saw this the other day (actually came across it here on HN) and really enjoyed the perspective it puts on power and what people incentives drive those that have it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
>also the point of war is simply about power, or to make the other nation/state/population submit to your demands
A point of war is a complete destruction of enemy country, its population, culture, economy, grinding it to all to dust. Enemy being crushed, hunted to the last man, turned into animal by fear. Making enemy fear you more than death — this is the point of war.
You think you know a thing about war? Western people, thinking of war as a ritual sabre rattling with some symbolic bloodshed just to motivate the enemy to accept talks on their terms, know nothing about war.
If Western powers would enter a war with that idea in heads of their leaders, I am afraid to image what the outcome will be. The West is too used to think of wars as wars of politicians. Genghis khan was not a politician, and the next man to follow his steps wouldn't be either.
^ yep, the above point regarding famine [and civilian suffering in general] being the biggest weapon of war is impossible to over-emphasize. Wars are generally won by breaking the will of the people against whom one is waging war, and that is done by reducing the population to a state of utter misery.
Besides the points made already, it's IMO misleading to think about what's rational for a country as a whole. A war can be rational for the coalition in power in one of the countries without it being expected-positive-sum even for that country. (Never mind pure mistakes.) This is historically common, I'd guess more common than not.
It bugs me that thinking of states as rational actors is called "foreign policy realism".
Casus belli doesn't matter that much. There is something else that, in lack of a better term I'll call it "salesmanship", is usually at work. It shouldn't be so hard to imagine a crafty sales plan, with ideas catering and hitting the right demographic groups with the most potent methods for each of them, stirring enough force and demand for change on a scale so large that... well, would make handling things in a peaceful manner too difficult, to put it mildly. That scenario is old as humanity itself (or probably older). Sure, that can be prevented (as the article mentions) but that means work and determination, which are more and more difficult to come by as the time passes and the hard lessons fade from memory or loose meaning. People get comfortable, start taking more and more things for granted, and with that less and less thoughts are given to the truly disruptive situations as plausible events. (And speaking of thoughts, unfortunately the reason isn't always at helm; most of the time it gets called there only after, to clean up the mess.)
Most wars end up being sparked by violations of sanctity, even if the underlying factors that drive them are economic. Some group considers an idea sacred, and their adversaries threaten to profane that idea. Because their belief is sacred, they will go to any length, and any cost, to protect it.
Think of Catholicism vs. Protestantism in the European Wars of Religion. The injustice of slavery vs. Southern honor in the American Civil War. Nationalism and alliances in WW1. The superiority of the Aryan Race in Nazi Germany. Capitalism vs. communism in the Cold War and conflicts (Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Central America) within it.
Nazism was fundamentally irrational (and its irrationality led directly to the downfall of Nazi Germany), but that didn't stop it from plunging the whole world into war.
There are plenty of similar flash points in the world today. The current U.S. government includes numerous people for whom the idea of the U.S. as a Christian country is sacred - hell, the acting Attorney General just said that he could not support secular judicial nominees. Economic development (to the extent that it enriches the secular, heathen, and heretical) is part of the problem there, as it profanes the Christian moral fabric of America. Similarly, the progressive left in the U.S. has their own sacred idea: equality.
Economic development, to them, is a net negative to the extent that it benefits entrenched corporations or privileged groups.
Where is North Korea not on this list? Right...they have nuclear weapons. The surefire way of preventing invasion & war. That's why the Great War isn't going to happen again. If WWIII does happen it's game over folks.
Nuclear weapons are the reason why the competing global powers have found new ways to compete and project power abroad. Global wars have mostly moved from being violence-based to being fought via propaganda and economics. It probably mirrors the way smaller communities moved from physical to intellectual competition.
Crimea is Ukraine. Donetsk and Crimea were captured by Russia because Ukraine signed contract with Shell to develop natural gas field near Donetsk, and because dispute with Romania about natural field in Black Sea was ended, so Gasprom owners worried about competition at European market.
Syria - to stop natural gas pipeline from Qatar’s north Field through Syria on to Turkey and to the EU. Gasprom owners are worried again.
When a mosquito will bite you into nose, you will crush it with power enough to crush all mosquitoes in the house and more. How many resources you can extract from mosquitoes?
Stop repeat the Russian propaganda. USA now is the largest oil producer in the world, so give me reason.
The oil of these nations is extremely valuable for the US not to consume them but to acquire exploration rights with ridiculous terms, generating a huge amount of revenue, propping the US economy up keeping up the American dream.
The US has Saudi Arabia and the gulf countries on it's side, Libya in shambles, Venezuela and Iran isolated. That gives the US a lot of power on the energy market.
This line of thinking is partly what the author is warning about. France’s early war aims in WWI were to recapture Alsace-Lorraine (think Crimea). Germany’s were, basically, to be taken seriously. Britain was fairly anti-war but got talked into by the Germans triggering their treaty requirements invading Belgium (and being horrible there). Austria-Hungry was a monarchy that started the whole thing because of what they viewed as an act of state sponsored terrorism against the regime.
Everyone knew war was a economically foolish action (although many believed “reparations” would cover the cost), but WWI happened anyway. They believed that the war would be cheap and over quickly- the troops deployed in August would be home by Christmas.
I agree with the worrying trends the article notes. There are two countervailing trends that help stabilize the current system though- one is nuclear weapons, which really make clear the potential costs of conflict, and the other is the consistent success of Guerillia warfare and insurgencies since WWII, which all major powers except China have experienced in recent memory, reminding them of the costs of ground warfare.
To amplify some of the business-related points already mentioned : War as an industry is itself profitable and the mobilization of resources toward the purpose of a war being actively prosecuted puts desirable numbers in a lot of peoples' spreadsheets.
As opposed to run-of-the-mill 'defense spending', wherein materiel and training costs are limited by the nature of routine budgetary apparatus, an active war consumes gargantuan supplies of goods, from weapons and ordnance to socks and coffee, that need to be constantly replenished. And technical costs are free to spiral because the notion of failure in automated systems, communications, etc, is terrible to countenance.
Funding is also easier to get during an active war because, well, 'THIS IS WAR!' The point in this thread from restalis about salesmanship is spot-on.
It's also worth noting that the equities / stocks associated with war-oriented corporations are tremendously widespread in terms of portfolio inclusion. Nearly everybody has Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc etc etc in their retirement fund [for the somewhat circular reason that those stocks generally do perform in the long term].
I'll add trade as an important deterrent to war in the modern world. The more countries' economies become intertwined, the more incentive there is to work things out peacefully. Unfortunately, the wave of protectionism we're seeing undermines this incentive.
But trade was a tiny percentage of either country's economy: these countries had total annual exports something close to 5% of their GDPs. In contrast, for example the USA now exports about 20% of its GDP; China, about 35%.
Also, industrial goods today have complex global supply chains, unlike in the past. In 1914 perhaps the worst French import that Germans lost was something like luxury foodstuffs. Today it might be more like, nobody can build X smartphone or airplane because one of its critical parts is only made in one place, and building an identical plant on this side of the war border will take several years. There's a multiplier on the economic damages here, because losing the ability to trade for a $5 chip might mean your economy loses a $500 smartphone.
That's not to say this makes a big war impossible, but shutting down trade would be vastly more painful today than back then.
You should read the entire article because you are parroting the people referenced in the article that claimed another world war was impossible, right before WWI broke out.
The entire point of the article is to not ignore history.
If your worldview is grounded in the apocalyptic - eg. incoming ecological disaster - you will get people who are willing to wage war if they are persuaded it is preventable and certain nations are impeding it. That's just one example; militant theocracy would be another worldview driven towards war, as well.
In general, it's mindshare that I could see driving more war, a push to add more people under the overall worldview of a nation or coalition, similar to what we saw under the Soviet Union.
I think this is a good question, but it also seems like someone could have said "what's the point of war" with the same arguments in the late 1930s. Maybe I'm wrong, if so if love to hear some thoughts on what has changed.
China hasn't invaded a country in 50 years and hasn't put an offensive military anywhere in decades. They very much keep to themselves as far as large economies go.
Find the amount of yellow peril in this thread amusing. I guess no one really worries about the numerous invasions by US/UK/Allies
For most of that time China was not a "large economy".
That said, your "50 years" number is conveniently eliding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War which was closer to 40 years ago. Just because China failed to invade successfully doesn't change the fact that it invaded.
As for China's future actions, we'll see what they are. So far, the territorial claims they are making are not looking like they will lead to peace in the future.
For the rest, the people not worrying about invasions by US/UK/Allies live in those countries, I expect.
I'm not sure I'd call that an invasion, it was a 3 week assualt on the border in response to Vietnam deciding to go overthrow and occupy Cambodia and Laos, both of whom were supported by China.
There's not enough room in the comments to write down the last 50 years of US and allies boots on ground adventures bringing "peace" to the world.
The point of war today is the same as it was throughout history - wealth.
> Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken.
That's the best scenario. Where concessions are made to avoid wars.
> Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
Well Germany first took rhineland, sudetenland and austria before invading poland. Not saying we are going to escalate to ww2 levels, but in war, just like in life, it's baby steps before we really start to get going.
I would like to think you are right, and I agree to a point. Engagements like Crimea and Georgia played out as they did because a much larger foe essentially bullied a smaller country and took what it wanted but stopped just short of making the smaller country think it was fighting for its life. The smaller country knows it cannot win so it must swallow its pride and take the loss, to go all in on a less that total invasion would be suicide against Russia. If you look at the situation in Yemen you can see the end game of a much more powerful country going close to all in against a much weaker foe (and Saudi Arabia is holding back). Mass starvation, woman and children dying for the simple reason that Saudi Arabia has blockaded the delivery of food. The world just sits and watches, occasionally sending a stern tweet. Look at what the US did to Iraq, ~250,000+ dead to date. Whenever it is a superpower pitted against a smaller nation it will likely play out as you say, but we are still talking of suffering on a massive scale.
China operates on decades long plans, is it possible that if they thought that securing the entire South China sea was worth it in the long run that they would be willing to go to war over it? I see nothing that makes me thing they would not be willing to decimate Vietnam and the Philippines to do so. Would the united states be willing to go to war against China for the benefits of Vietnam or the Philippines. They have forced a million Uighur's into camps and we shrug so probably not. That would change if China went after Japan. What if the current trade war escalated to the point it was causing serious harm to China's economy, would they go to war?
A war with China would potentially be a war to end all wars (again), especially if it pulled in Russia, Japan and others. Furthermore, the victor of a war between China and the United states would lay claim to being known as the dominant power on earth, able to enforce its will to greatly enhance its economy in much the same way the US did after WW II. If China thought it could win, they would be able to essentially force their way of life on vast sections of the world. It also allows the victor to claim the moon and mars in the long term, a massive advantage in the next few decades.
We unfortunately live in a very precarious world that most of us on this site don't have to see the worst of due to the simple act of winning a geographic birth lottery.
Why the US, with the support of Europe supported the coup against the democratically elected government in Ukraine?
- Because they could. Because that way they could force Sevastopol out of Russia's hand and remove the Rusia's access to the only not frozen port of Russia. They could also control the Black sea and the gas and oil it has, and more than this, control all the pipelines that connect or will connect in the future Asia and Europe.
Why they invaded Syrian territory? Something very similar. Access and control of oil and gas reserves in the Mediterranean sea or pipelines from places like Saudi Arabia. Removing Russia army from Mediterraneans ports.
Why the US invaded Afganistan? Control of natural resources. Cutting the access of Rusia-China to the Indic Ocean(Russia invaded Afganistan first so it was very important for them). Pipelines.
Why the US invaded Iraq? Because 20 people living 1000Kms away committed a terrorist attack in the US? not really, this was just an excuse they gave, the reason was controlling oil.
So it is very clear at this point that in 2018 war continues being one of the most important activities for the powers that be, specially the US.
Without war for example, the US dollar will not be what it is, as Europeans or Chinese or Japanese need dollars to buy energy, as the producers only trade in dollars(or they get invaded by the US). In the case of Saudi Arabia, they use dollars because the US gobertment supports the dictatorship that holds a minority in charge. Without US support, the system could collapse fast.
Russia invaded Afghanistan for the same reason the US invaded Vietnam - an imperative to spread their ideology. Both failed for the same reason too. But natural resources weren’t even in the frame.
there are still plenty of drivers for such a war besides ideology.
Natural resources, they don't need to be profitable during the war, if the prospect of future peaceful taxation after victory is alluring enough.
Natural resources, the natural resources don't need to reside in the target country, the politicians, war industry etc in the invading country can use their profit to gain a bigger share of the resources and economy at home.
Dick length contest, remember when for one of the missing planes a few years ago how the larger nations refused to share any military RADAR imagery, since it would reveal the state of their art. During peacetime you can develop and test future war technologies, but there is always the paranoia that you don't know how far potential future enemies are. So they need a "playground" and compare genitals, and test systems in practice... but neither power wants to wage war on their own soil, nor risk all-out war with the other power on their soil... so they squash the little powers, especially those that start gaining independence and would otherwise end up paying tax to neither superpower. In this perspective the war is in fact a common goal for the "animous" superpowers...
I kind of agree, but for different reasons. Part of the reason WWI came out the way that it did is that both technology and social organization had changed so much since the last big war that nobody really knew what would happen or what to do with it all. And we find ourselves in that situation again with nuclear weapons, modern air power, drones, and cyber war.
I'm thinking that nuclear weapons will continue to preclude any large-scale direct war between the great powers. The downside is that cyber-war by both nation-states and small groups and individuals, along with civilian conflict amplified by modern social-media based divisions and filter bubbles have a lot of potential to spiral out of control, especially when further provoked by foreign interference. Particularly because nobody knows for sure how it will all work or what will happen when determined adversaries exploit all of these to the maximum potential.
It's also entirely possible we'll see some new thing as equivalently stupid, bloody, and pointless as tightly massed soldiers in brightly colored uniforms with no protection doing foot-charges against dug-in machine guns behind barbed wire and artillery.
Nuclear weapons likely preclude large-scale direct conflict between great powers, but they raise the stakes a lot for civil wars, civil disorder, and anarchy within great powers. MAD works great up until a splinter group gains control of a launch facility and says "What, you're gonna nuke San Francisco if we nuke Beijing? Be my guest. We hate those hippie libtards anyway."
Also a point, lots of tricky possibilities in there. I do wonder what would happen if a frustrated national government of one of the great powers tried to use nuclear weapons to subdue a rebellious province. If Russia nuked Ukraine or Poland to keep them in check, would we do anything? If California or Texas was openly defying the Feds and got nuked, would Russia or China do anything?
At this point wars between powerful nations are almost impossible. Proxy wars are the current fashion, and those tend to be controlled in scale by the puppetmasters behind it.
I'm more scared about a great civil war in a powerful nuclear nation. Civil wars are a savage affair where no rules apply.
Premise: the large nations of the world are far to intertwined by commerce and culture. Large scale war would be suicidal and the leadership of these countries would never do something so foolish.
I forget whether it was in medieval europe or in feudal japan ( or maybe both ) where someone wrote that the gun was so horrible and easy to use that it would make war unthinkable. The thinking was that the art and skill of the warrior and nobleness of battle was undone by the gun. Years of training to develop martial skills by the brave knight or samurai were no match for a cowardly peasant with a gun. People forget that the gun was viewed as a coward's tool when it was introduced. A real man would never use such a weapon. Or so they predicted. Boy were they wrong.
War between developed nations was unthinkable 10 years ago, today it is very much thinkable. In Europe there is now an ongoing low intensity trench war already. Russians are mentally conditioned for total war by five years of nonstop propaganda, and their leader's idea of compromise is doubling down. NATO has switched back from the 00s cumbersome CONINS and relief mission training to combined arms war exercises.
If the political vectors of the last few years remain unchanged, a large war is very likely.
That's literally what this article says to avoid thinking and it gives examples as to how wrong people were when they said that. You're just repeating that without giving anything new.
I'd like to think this is true, but I think it's naive - there was similar sentiment before WWI too.
Nationalism and hysteria can lead people do things that are bad for both individuals and the group. Increasing free trade between countries and globalism is a good way to try and prevent wars, but the current reversion to nationalism makes me nervous.
It's bizarre to think there are rules in wars between countries but no rules in civil wars. In a civil war every party is still liable to the world as they're in a conventional war. If they use chemical or nuclear weapons they know that it's entirely possible third parties may get involved just because of their dirty tactics. If you're in a country where the West doesn't give a shit, and nobody bats an eye when chemical weapons are used (e.g. Syria) it doesn't make much sense to think that the same wouldn't apply if this were a conventional war (say, Syria vs Iraq). Obviously nuclear weapons are a bit bigger deal than chemical weapons, but what I'm trying to say is that similar dynamics are in play both in civil wars and conventional wars. If you're in the belief that a nuclear civil war can happen when a rogue party can shoot nukes, why wouldn't they shoot it to another country if they come to power? If you think "well then US would get involved so they obviously wouldn't do that" then why would US not get involved nukes being used in a civil war.
I believe that the likeliest cause of another Great War is not to save the planet from dictators, but from environmental destruction.
At some stage, a consensus must build for stopping our destruction of the climate. (Well perhaps it won't, but in that case we're doomed, so there's little point in evaluating that path).
At that point, some countries (presumably rich ones) will have cleaned their own houses emissions-wise and be signed up to assist poorer nations.
It will then become unacceptable to them that their efforts are in vain and at risk, because other countries are free riding and doing nothing, and continuing to pump emissions into the atmosphere.
Their mindset will move from pride at their own achievements to anger and frustration at others.
Soon after that will come enforcement. After all, it cannot be unreasonable to stop other countries from destroying the environment that we all share - even if those countries have to be destroyed to save the planet.
> At that point, some countries (presumably rich ones) will have cleaned their own houses emissions-wise and be signed up to assist poorer nations.
> It will then become unacceptable to them that their efforts are in vain and at risk, because other countries are free riding and doing nothing, and continuing to pump emissions into the atmosphere.
The idea of invading countries to stop carbon emissions is interesting as a thought experiment, but given how things are now, it's far more likely that most countries (including rich countries) won't make efforts to massively reduce carbon emissions until it's far too late. It may already be far too late.
Most countries aren't even interested in trying to limit emissions to their current levels which is a complete joke compared to what is actually needed to have a chance of stopping global warming (assuming it can still be stopped).
I expect some incredibly stupid reason. Post-brexit UK tries to nuke somewhere in the EU, or the USA decides we need to get Jesus here faster, or actually anything on this spectrum of insanity.
Right now it seems like science fiction that anybody will try doing anything about the climate.
So, in reality we'll probably see a failing ecosystem and the strongest military killing the rest of us.
China needing to get rid of a couple million excess men is the thing that scares me most.
I could see China throwing a couple million men into a meat grinder with India. That could easily do enough damage to India to provoke a nuclear response.
Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln
War Is Merely the Continuation of Policy by Other Means"
Politicians always cause wars ... and always will. The only way we have a war over environment is when we impact a nation so they have no choice... or it has something to do with profit.
We are so close, probably within 50 to 100 years, of having technology far beyond what we can comprehend now. We have the chance to be multi-planetary, automate pretty much all work, and fullfil everyone's basic needs...if we don't destroy everything first.
I'm going to be real pissed off if we screw this up.
We already have the means to automate pretty much all work and fulfill everyone's basic needs. We choose not to. As for multi planetary, why? Earth is paradise.
You can make anywhere a habitable paradise with enough energy. You don't even really need specific resources since with sufficient energy can you synthesize elements. A lot of people underestimate what the current projected growth of solar potential will lead to this century given its current pace in how much work you can do when energy is cheap and abundant.
You and I must have very different definitions of paradise.
No matter how much energy you capture, you can't replicate the multi-billion year process of evolution and growth in biodiversity that has led to the incredible present state of Earth.
It is pure madness to invest in colonizing other planets before we figure out how to sustain the ideal place we already inhabit.
For hundreds of years, after every leap in productivity, people have proclaimed the 'end of work'. But that never happens. One theory is that cost of living rises to offset generated wealth (historically, see real estate).
Ya I totally get that, but if we are raising our standards of living...or at least bringing almost everyone up to a baseline, that would be awesome. You know, not having to work 60 hours a week to just keep going.
We need to take a MUCH harder stance against Russia poisoning the public discourse with conspiracy theories, fake news and alternative medicine/science/history/morality. We have to restore values and trust to the public affairs.
As far as the US goes their own parties have poisoned the the public discourse with conspiracy theories, fake news and alternative medicine/science/history/morality. Those parties should restore values and trust to the public affairs.
To me, there is a better word for those things, and I don't understand why we do not use it. That word is: propaganda. Is there a good argument that fake news etc. Is not propaganda? To me calling it propaganda paints a clearer picture, because new words make it easy to claim that something is unprecedented. The problem is that if our own government falls victim to propaganda, then we have propagandistic narratives being pushed by the government, and that, to me, is as bad as it sounds. But, I think it also gives us a broader perspective to pull from history with
The reach and effectiveness of Russia's propaganda is unprecedented. Also recent revelations make it clear that they were merely sowing dissent, rather than pushing any particular point of view. That's not new, but it's also not what comes to mind when one says "propaganda."
Propaganda may be the end goal but the global mind poisoning operation includes all kind of BS - from alternative medicine & anti-vax, the flat earth theory and chemtrails, to white supremacism and religious bigotry - all used to spread doubts, alienation and confusion.
Are we not in the midst of a great war now? While not massive like the previous world wars, the US has been in active military operations since 9/11. Russia has been involved in ground invasions. I'll admit these conflicts aren't huge, but they are constant and sustained.
No, because no major country has its entire economy mobilized for the purpose of war. Outside of the countries where these conflicts are taking place, most people's lives are not being affected whatsoever. That is an enormous difference from WW I and II.
This article does appear to conclude many points on the premise of nationalism and it’s varied outcomes. Nationalism has only existed for not much more than 200 years which is not very long at all compared to all of human history. In the USA we are given this notion that these ideas are a solid foundation but I tend to think that America is very young and most national concepts are still very experimental. It will take much more time to figure out what is really going on here, what the goal is, and how to cope with it all. That may be the cause of a great war just a worldwide upheaval of imposed thought much like the Napoleonic era where the concept of monarchies was challenged again and again. In the transition from Rome to the Byzantine empire it seems religious and cultural freedoms were challenged during that period. If we all woke up one day and realized something very ingrained in our world is wrong then change would take place hell or high water. Much of the intrinsic message of nationalism is a dissolution of multiculturalism refining it into a set of rules which cannot be argued with by literally drawing lines in the sand. The only thing that used to matter was the town a person was from (e.g. last names with the name of that town or region). Today we create so many large homogeneous groups based on borders the rationality of favoritism and hatred becomes absurd. Maybe we are at the end of this serving much of a purpose after all so it’s time for a much needed review complete with unresolved baggage from an earlier time. I would like to get off at the closest stop before things get too weird personally.
I can't read Greek or Latin so I don't have access to the primary sources, but it is my understanding that nationalism was a prevalent part of political life in antiquity, particularly from the death of Alexander through to the end of the Roman empire, and reemerged in Europe around the same time as absolutism.
In many ways, the United States, and to a larger extent the West, has significantly more in common with the late roman republic than it does with any point in it's own modern history.
Almost all great empires to some degree planted the roots of their legitimacy of conquest in their own self superiority. Nationalism is as old as the first man who thought some other culture as "uncivilized". Like how, say, the Romans called all the European peoples that weren't Roman barbarians.
What the article and the commenters here seem to forget is that it's not only the technological level/political situation has changed, but the way people think as well. There are several global trends that allow for optimistic predictions regarding big wars of the future.
The global level of violence is dropping and overall tolerance of casualties is declining. Rising cost of human life shifts the perception of conflicts in the majority of countries. It's getting very hard to explain the necessity of even several dead bodies from local conflicts, let alone to justify a sacrifice of millions of lifes.
Related to this is the shift of global power: throughout the history the ruling class is basically military. Thus the perception of war as of something possible, profitable under right circumstances and even desirable. This mindset was carried into the 20th century when it met technological progress which made possible the horror of World Wars. Likely, it seems that it has changed, at least to some extent.
Current 'ruler of the world' is not the army, it's rather all sorts of special forces and agencies. It's hard to sell the idea of marching and dying for your king/motherland/god to the public today and thus get/take the funding required, but it's much easier to sell it the idea of security. Security is a good thing, right? So the agencies need more and more power to protect you better. Sadly, in a paradoxical way this is partly also a consequence of rising value of human life.
However, 'special forces' elite is different from a military one and it's more bound to civil oversight in regards to casualties and the acceptable scale of violence. So we see that the conflicts of today are much less bloody than they could be given the weapons we have.
Now one can argue that this only holds until the current order is not significantly destabilized, or that it can spiral into some perverted form of 'preemptive security' (like e.g. govt propaganda about the need to eliminate some threat completely and strike first and hard for the sake of 'security'). And yes, everything can happen. But thinking of probability it seems that the balance is shifting towards smaller local conflicts rather than global wars.
If you think "but everybody in charge knows what they are doing" you probably never worked in any large enough organization. We should all actively work on forcing the politicians to significantly reduce the installed nuclear resources, simply to increase the chance for humanity to survive once an accident happen, because sooner or later it will.
Military spending around the western world was in line with what we have today (single digit %) before Nazis started the arms race.
This sense of increased morality was also present around WW2. German jew hatred was never a secret, yet few anticipated the scale what was coming. And even after the war it wasn't until the 70s before the horrors of the Holocaust really entered common public awareness.
Some of that perception today is a result of censorship too. While most realize China is persecuting the Falun Gong few realize it goes into a million with a significant percentage murdered. And now China seems to be doing a similar thing with Muslims, albeit no reports of mass murder yet.
If we go to war with China I'm sure this information will go from relatively embargoed to an important element of justifying the conflict.
How is it possible to write this article without mentioning MAD? The presence of nuclear self defense is what keeps nuclear armed nations from engaging in aggressive wars with other nuclear armed nations.
Given how many close calls we had when their were only 2 relatively well-balanced superpowers and how the nuclear balance of power is becoming more unstable these days, I think the chance of nuclear war is a lot higher than most people think it is.
IMO, the chance of a nuclear war in any given year is about 1-2%. That's not very much for any particular year, but over a few decades...
Yes but while horrible India and Pakistan lobbing nukes at each other would be on a different order of magnitude to the US and Russia launching a global thermonuclear war.
The graph of warheads per country is basically the US, Russia and everyone else combined is a distant third.
The UK had ~200 warheads about a quarter of which are deployed at anyone time, two US ballistic missile subs fields more than that (they have 18) and then the missile silos, the cruise missiles, the gravity bombs and on and on it goes...
> The graph of warheads per country is basically the US, Russia and everyone else combined is a distant third.
Once just one single nuclear bomb destroys something significant, all bets are almost surely off. So counting doesn't help, the whole domino-effect constellation is simply too dangerous. The only sustainable solution is to reduce the arsenals the orders of magnitude, if we want to increase the chances for the humanity to survive.
The right perspective is exactly the WW I: Austrian Empire just wanted its own teeny-weeny local war (just as an perspective, as late as four years ago, some Austrian historians still claimed: "Austria didn't start the WW I -- we just started the war with Serbia -- everything else was done by everybody else"). But the domino effect ensued. The result was the whole world erupting, so badly that even WW II was a kind of an effect of WW I, as the article also recognizes.
Obviously I'm in favour of reducing warhead counts.
That said I don't think your analogy holds with pre and post nuclear powers.
The escalation in WW1 was complex but from the british side we just expected it to be a short war, we'd nip over there achieve our objectives and be home for Christmas (that was actually said at the time iirc).
Escalation between states with large nuclear arsenals would likely follow a very different path.
I mean the UK is a minor nuclear power but if everyone went collectively insane we could wreck most of western Europe and the US, I mean we'd all be dead minutes later but when you have that kind of capability on the table and more crucially when the people you are firing on have that kind of capability then the "it'll all be over by Christmas" line takes on a much more macabre undertone to those giving the orders.
The presence of nuclear self defense is what keeps nuclear armed nations from engaging in aggressive wars with other nuclear armed nations.
The US and Russia are already in the midst of several proxy wars: Ukraine, Syria and Libya. In addition, Russia is directly destabilizing Europe by funding alt-right parties financially (AfD/DE, FrontNational/FR, FPÖ/Austria, Jobbik/HU, Lega Nord/IT) and by promoting their crap on Twitter and Facebook, as well as their "media outlets" that historically have spread alt-right propaganda (Sputnik, RT), but now have expanded to liberal/leftie propaganda (Inthenow, Ruptly, Redfish).
The Chinese seem to be playing the long game by strategically investing in infrastructure like roads and rail across Africa, probably both for strategic advantages (given Africa's large reserves of anything from rhino horns over diamonds and uranium to rare-earth metals) and economic advantages (the US and EU markets are saturated, South America is going down rapidly, but Africa can only grow and buy Chinese products in return - basically the Marshall Plan just without the war).
Also, both China and Russia engage in cyber warfare - the Chinese right now mostly for economic espionage, the Russians at the moment for destabilizing democracy.
What worries me is the shit some Arab countries are trying to play with Israel (esp. Turkey!) and the skirmishes between India and Pakistan, as well as Pakistan's problems with terrorism. Both countries are highly volatile and hell I don't want to experience the Taliban getting hands on Pakistani nukes.
So, there are LOTS of possibilities for nuclear-armed powers to go to war, and some not even violent. The key is that no power ever actively uses nuclear weapons, but there's nothing that prevents them from using conventional ammo. There's enough of that alone to blow the planet to pieces.
> The Chinese seem to be playing the long game by strategically investing in infrastructure like roads and rail across Africa, probably both for strategic advantages (given Africa's large reserves of anything from rhino horns over diamonds and uranium to rare-earth metals) and economic advantages (the US and EU markets are saturated, South America is going down rapidly, but Africa can only grow and buy Chinese products in return - basically the Marshall Plan just without the war).
There is a key difference between the Marshall Plan and China's modern African investment. The Marshall Plan was pretty emphatically a plan to help coerce Western Europe into supporting what effectively became the West, and combined vigorous restoration efforts with criterion for supporting certain kinds of economic reforms. In particular, it was very much meant to build up Europe not so that it served as a market for American goods but rather so that Europe could be useful junior partners in a coalition. China's current investment hews much closer to neocolonialism: it's building African infrastructure, but managed by Chinese, owned by Chinese, and even built by Chinese imported for the labor. It is not engendering local goodwill for China, and unlike the Marshall Plan, it isn't helping move these countries into China's camp in a putative global war.
> and unlike the Marshall Plan, it isn't helping move these countries into China's camp in a putative global war.
China doesn't need African foot soldiers to burn away in the trenches, there are enough Chinese people to serve as cannon fodder. Sounds harsh but that's the ultimate advantage of China compared to any other military except maybe India's.
What the Chinese are doing actually is to ensure they control the world's reserves of uranium and rare-earth metals. Or, if they don't control it or the governments by puppet/bought governments directly, then by extortion a la "you give the West their uranium, we grind your economy to a halt". Or, by controlling the shipping ports in the sea countries of Africa so that resources from the landlocked countries cannot be exported, or at least the transport cost rises.
The latter strategy they are also pursuing in central Europe - they bought, for example, the port of Piraeus via Cosco.
Whoever crosses their path can be ground to pieces if the Chinese wish so. The West is too f...ing dependent on China and that's gonna bite us in our behinds.
American corporate control of Cuba sure did it well during the Cold War. Oh wait, the Cuban government nationalized everything the Americans owned.
Focusing on the levers of control given by corporate control of strategic foreign sectors ignores the ability of host countries to unilaterally seize control of those assets at their own whim. China's hold over Africa is a very tenuous grasp at best.
The Cuban missile crisis is an example of MAD working as intended. If it weren't for the threat of nuclear war the Cuban missile crisis would have turned into the "Russian tanks in Paris and Marines in Havana crisis"
We came really close to war between two nuclear powers at the Cuban blockade[0]. A Russian submarine didn't torpedo a US ship only because 1 of 3 officers on the sub voted against it.
Rising nationalism and games of "chicken" don't mix well.
There wasn’t MAD during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US had the ability to completely destroy the USSR but the reverse was not true, which is why they wanted to put missiles in Cuba in the first place.
If a war had occurred, the US would have suffered enormously, but it would have come out of the conflict largely intact. Think the “get our hair mussed” bit from Dr. Strangelove.
The Crisis just shows that war can be avoided even when one side has a huge advantage, if neither side really wants it.
Actually, the US only thought that there wasn't MAD. As mentioned in the documentary "The Fog of War", only decades later did the US discover that there were already nuclear missiles with warheads in Cuba when they began the blockade. And Castro was willing to use them!
That made the situation even more dangerous than they realized at the time. The US would not have come out intact. It's very lucky for everyone that the Soviets decided not to escalate the situation.
Of course, I suppose MAD isn't MAD if there isn't also mutual knowledge of mutually assured destruction. It's something even worse when both sides think they have the advantage.
No it did not. Up until eighties, accuracy of ICBMs was so bad, that they were completely useless against even a brigade sized formation in an open field. There is even a theory that Khrushchev intentionally nudged USA into believing into "missile gap," as a part of diversion.
TBMs were another story, but there USSR had a sizeable lead in them.
ICBMs wouldn't get used against military forces in the field. Shorter range missiles and other tactical weapons existed for that. ICBMs were for destroying military bases, factories, and cities. Their accuracy in the early 1960s sucked, but it was good enough for that job.
That's the very point — while US were to be wasting megatons on Soviet cities without a plan B, Soviet paratroopers would be already landing on their lawn, and their main force moving down whatever left of enemy land force with a rain of short range tactical nukes.
The Soviets had no ability to land any significant force in the US. They would have poured forces into Western Europe, but both sides had so many tactical nukes there that the whole place would have ended up flattened.
Right, so the outcome would have been: USSR wrecked by US strategic forces, Europe wrecked by medium-range forces on both sides, US hurt by Soviet strategic forces but largely intact. I didn’t mention Europe but that’s otherwise what I said.
MAD is not necessarily a silver bullet preventative here. If two nuclear-armed states are fighting, for either of them to bring out the nukes would be a huge, difficult decision. It's entirely possible to imagine them settling into an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" to stick to conventional weapons only, as long as the conflict stays within certain parameters (i.e. the war doesn't pose an existential threat to either).
India and Pakistan fought a war in 1999, despite both having sizable nuclear arsenals (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War). The risk of escalation kept the scale of the fighting limited, but it didn't prevent the war altogether.
The article is specifically talking about another "Great War", not limited conventional conflicts. All out, generation crippling war is a far cry from anything we've seen large industrialized countries engage in since World War II. I can't see how anything like another "Great War" could be possible without going nuclear.
Nobody brought out chemical weapons in World War II, though both sides had them. (Granted, chemical weapon defenses were practical in WWII, whereas nuclear weapon defenses are not today. Still, even in great wars, there have been weapons that were not used.)
That's a very good point. They weren't widely used. But Japan did use both chemical and biological weapons against the Chinese. We don't really know why Hitler didn't use them, but it's likely that his experience in WWI gave him a unique hatred of chemical warfare.
Regardless by the time Germany accepted that they were facing an existential threat, they couldn't have used Chemical weapons to completely decimate their enemy the way a losing country could with ICBMS (both land based and on submarines).
They had no way to reach America, or even Britain at the end of the war (with enough munitions), so chemical attacks would have been pointless by that time. If Hitler could have pressed a button completely destroy America, Britain, and Russia when he was in his bunker in Berlin, I'm willing to bet he would have.
All right, not exactly, but close. Close enough that I think the point still stands - they had these weapons, but they were mostly not used, because of the fear of retaliation with the same weapon, even in the heat of a great war.
The Germans couldn't match the Allied expertise with biological weapons, and were warned that using chemical weapons would be responded to with far more effective biological weapons. I don't see anything "greater than nuclear" that would complete the analogy here.
Thankfully that stayed a limited war with combat in one region and relatively modest forces and casualties on both sides. It's when a country feels that its existence is threatened, as in WWI, that the use of nuclear weapons becomes very likely.
the fear of MAD also implies that a big power spends a lot of effort to avoid running into a direct military confrontation against another great power; direct confrontations run the risk of escalating into all out war. That's why you have so many proxy conflicts - these ugly little conflicts add some layers of indirection so to speak.
Consider what happens when effective ballistic missile defense is developed. This still leaves the threat of tactical nuclear weapons (artillery) and short range missiles from submarines. It will also spur the development of improved ballistic missile delivery systems. However, if technology brings MAD into question and causes a shift in thinking to acceptable risk/losses, we may find ourselves in a destructive situation very reminiscent of 100 years ago.
I don't really see MAD as being a given, especially depending on if China or the US develops rapid technological advancements over the next few decades. I think it's a really unlikely idea to assume the nuke will be the great deterrent or equalizer for the rest of this century. China could easily conquer the planet if they pull sufficiently ahead in China, which is a fair possibility, looking at the current state of the US and Europe
>if they pull sufficiently ahead in China, which is a fair possibility, looking at the current state of the US and Europe
Be careful with extrapolation. People said the same thing about the USSR, Japan, and the EU.
Sure the US won't be as dominant as they are now forever, but extrapolating China's growth from a very poor developing country to their current level and assuming that means that they might make some kind of leap that allows them to take over the world is going too far.
I don't think it's going far enough. There are several hundreds variables completely separating China and the USSR and Japan from a blanket comparison.
I would like to hope that they hit the breaks in the same way that Japan did, and there's certainly plenty of evidence that it's possible. However, if their model remains viable and they continue growing at the same rate, they'll certainly eclipse us in political and economic influence in 10-20 years at most - potentially technologically as well. I'm not sure that's even a disputable claim - it should be self evident. The question is if we'll suddenly outperform or if they'll hit a stumbling block, which remains to be seen.
That's what I mean by the problem with extrapolation. There is absolutely no reason to think that they will continue growing at the same rate. The likely scenario based on all the historical evidence we have is that they won't.
Their GDP growth rate has been declining since 2010, there's no reason to assume that they'll be able to stop it. The most likely scenario is that it flattens out to a more reasonable rate.
Also this is the state reported GDP, which no one believes is accurate. And this is without taking into account China's demographic problems and potential hidden debt issues.
And even if China's economy does overtake the US, it took decades and a World War for the US to eclipse the rest of the world politically and militarily after it's economy became the largest.
By the same token, there's no reason to think they'll fall anywhere near or under 5% in the near future. They have 1.5 billion people with a higher average IQ than the US with a strong educational culture, increasing economic opportunity with a lot of i's to dot in various industries, their per capita is still a fraction of that of a developed company, and there are another 1000 reasons to paint a fuller picture beyond my small sampling. In contrast, for example, Japan had less than half our population, didn't manage to steal all of our trade secrets, reached a high stage of development, and really didn't have anything revolutionary to offer.
I'm aware of what you're saying about the potential issues they're facing, but we really don't know how that will play out - it strikes me as western optimism.
That is true, but China is already setting the stage to assert itself as an imperial power.
I don't mean to come across as a sinophile - I don't want a hologram of Xi Jinping standing over me in 10 years, but, there is plenty of reason to worry and to not draw conclusions on whether or not they'll pull ahead or how quickly - that remains to be seen.
>By the same token, there's no reason to think they'll fall anywhere near or under 5% in the near future.
Why? It's fallen 6 points since 2010. The OECD long term forecast puts it at 5% in just 2 years, and predicts it will drop down to around 3% within 10 years. This is without any serious problems.
These numbers are also based on official GDP estimates, and there are studies that estimate that China's GDP is 30% lower than reported due to padding at the local and national level.
>They have 1.5 billion people
Their official population count is 1.386 billion, rounding up to 1.5 seems a bit much. And we don't even know if that is true. There are reports that they've overestimated their population by around 100 million people.
>with a higher average IQ than the US
We can't even remove all of the cultural biases to make accurate comparisons between native English speakers within the US. There's no way we are going to be able to accurately compare countries as different as the US and China. Not to mention sample differences, suppressed scores from the children of migrant workers etc...
>strong educational culture
And many parts of that educational culture have been criticized. Regardless this is a completely subjective metric that isn't worth comparing.
>really didn't have anything revolutionary to offer
Last one regarding, for example, US developing a massive competitive advantage with the internet right after their housing market crash.
I won't debate any further because clearly I'm going to get downvoted for doing anything other than linking a business insider article on why chinese local debt is going to collapse tomorrow in the HN echo chamber. If you want to believe it's inevitable China is going to plateau in rapidly, by all means.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I linked to a lot more than articles about local debt. Perhaps you could refute the OECD long term forecast that predicts a plateau rather than setting up a straw man about business insider articles.
By the way, I'm not even saying that China won't overtake the US economy sometime this century, I'm saying that naive extrapolation based on current growth rates is a terrible way to predict the future.
I subscribe to (Einstein's?) WW4 will be fought with sticks & stones sentiment.
The world is way beyond what can be survived in terms of flat out war.
It's not really something I worry about. People just want to eat McD and earn a high salary. Nobody in the powerful nations is eager to get shot (well US military complex aside).
> This is why the U.S. chose to stay so deeply engaged in the affairs of Europe
Aside from this rather endearing naivete, the gist of the article is fine: we need to fear another 'Great War'.
Modern warfare grants (perceived) first-strike capability to almost any state, rendering the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible. We live in the 21st century now, things are different than before, and highly dangerous as long as states put their self-interest above our common global destiny, as is the attitude du jour.
People behave as if nothing bad can happen, it's highly frustrating to watch.
> Modern warfare grants (perceived) first-strike capability to almost any state, rendering the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible.
That is folly. The idea of MAD is that you have second-strike capabilities that are sufficiently hardened that no first-strike attack is capable of preventing the second-strike retaliation from occurring. In essence, the idea is that the calculus becomes "if we go to war, the only outcome is that we both lose."
> rendering the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible
Are you implying you can destroy the enemy's nuclear arsenal in your first strike? If so, you don't understand MAD. Any submarine arsenal will be nearly impossible to destroy. If you first strike North Dakota (for example) to destroy all the missile silos, subs will simply eradicate your country.
I understand MAD. But "nearly impossible" is not impossible (think not only nuclear, but the whole arsenal of modern weapons, including computerized, chemical, biological etc). The problem is not actual first-strike capability though, it is perceived such, be it one's own or the enemy's.
The whole premise of submarine nuclear strikes is that:
A single submarine cannot be trivially located - the ocean is too deep and vast. If countries working together can't find the wreckage of a single crashed airplane in a generally known location, how do you expect them to find dozens of cloaked subs in unknown locations each holding hundreds of nuclear warheads?
Even assuming you wipe out 100% of the continental USA's weapons with a first strike, there are still thousands of nukes in the ocean ready to wipe your country off the face of the earth.
How does this fit in with your original argument that first strikes "render the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible"?
I find it interesting that your examples involve the case where the US is under attack. Let's turn it round: do you find it equally implausible that the US would not believe they have a capacity to thwart the second-strike capacity of say, North Korea? I'm not saying this is more realistic, I'm saying it is this perception of first-strike capability that is dangerous, and any country can believe themselves to be invincible, not just the US.
We won't have another giant war because: the internet. i don't know about anyone else but I spent some of my childhood travelling distances. Every time I did there was a cultural identity associated with the places I went. Post internet culture has changed nearly every place I've been. Everywhere I go everyone is the same now. They are all connected. People are connected to people in other countries like never before. There is so much connectivity that any "warmongering" king/president can't nearly control the flow of information like they used to. That all being said, how do we explain things like Crimea, issues with North Korea, the middle east? Well, Crimea, I can't fully explain. But North Korea and the middle east definitely practice tight control over their internet.
That all being said, I'm not saying it's impossible, but that we're so connected now that I just don't see a great war because too many of our soldiers will have brothers, sisters, best friends in the war we're going up against.
Wars don't happen because people don't get along; they don't happen because people are different and don't understand each other. Civil wars are both common and nasty.
Wars happen because in a set of animals, one member or subset will want the control of, say, the resources of an area, mating rights within the group, etc. Its members will often think that it's acting this way as a form of public service. "Someone has to divide up the meat of the fallen antelope," for example, ignoring what happens with control which is that the spoils, the resources, etc. will start to divide unevenly.
This continues to the point of extreme imbalance, such as just before the French Revolution where the wealthy paid less in tax than the poor, or the leader becomes too weak to maintain control. In all cases, control isn't maintained for long.
Right now, America is the empire in control. The problem that I see is that its generals are preparing for the last war with battleships and big guns (as sort of an "innovator's dilemma", where what has been successful for a company maintains the limelight despite a growing new reality). You can see the control ebbing, weakening. The petrodollar, for example, once so strong and a big part of the country's economic power, is now being replaced with the Special Drawing Right (SDR) -- a diversified basket of currencies.
And that's' the only solution: to diversify control. The peace that's found when an empire has control is temporary; it's the eye of the storm. Until there's world-wide democracy, we will have war.
Even if you're absolutely right that Internet access changed everything, all it would take for a Great War would be if there was a major world military power that tightly controls its Internet, and that's China.
>We won't have another giant war because: the internet.
I used to think that, but then I realised that the Internet is mostly just a porn-delivery device.
Plus, there's the 4-chan factor, as in: if there is going to be another world war, it'll start because of something someone posted on 4-chan ... I mean look how easily the Internet was usurped to provide the "but Russia!" narrative, eagerly embraced by many a hawk as a means to a violent end ..
Almost. Actually the main message of that Bloomberg article is (quoting from the article):
"As Americans consider how strongly — or even whether — to defend the international order their country created against the growing pressures exerted by authoritarian revisionist powers such as China and Russia, this lesson is worth keeping in mind."
Basically, the author argues: "the Americans" should not stop to "to defend the international order" "against" "China and Russia" or... there can be a new World War.
Note the problem: it is not clear how the author imagines that the very insisting on "defending" the "order" by the Americans can't provoke the bigger war than they imagine?
Austrian leaders, at that moment of a huge empire, also just believed they "defended" the "order" when attacking Serbia, which they expected will be a small and easy war, but they actually started the WW I. In spite of the popular belief, also mentioned in the article that "what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete."
None of the top comments mention nuclear weapons. Are we really going to fight a huge war with multiple combatants when some of them could kill untold millions in metropolitan areas with a few rockets?
It's possible because a world power doesn't need to completely annihilate another to win. They just need to remove their ability to compete on the global stage.
The supply chain of American (and most modern countries) isn't fortified against any sort of large-scale attack. It wouldn't take much to know out food, fuel, and power supplies for most Americans. Once that happens, a little bit of propaganda will incite major riots which require police intervention.
There are enough "militias" in the country waiting patiently for their time to rise up. Should they decide to "protect" themselves from the "looters," the country's leadership will probably have to redirect their attention an resources homeward in order to stabilize their power.
That alone is enough to set the country back several decades. Especially if the educated class seeks refuge in a more stable, foreign country. Like what happened in central Europe after WWII.
The future of warfare is against world powers is probably a long-term sequence of small scale attacks of this nature. Disrupt supplies, push propaganda, and create power vacuums which need to be filled.
There will always be conflicts with developing nations but unless global ballistic nuclear missiles magically disappear one day, the chances of another “Great War” are low. MADD keeps the Great Peace
I'm worried. A big war could easily start partly by accident. A confrontation in the South China Sea or a move by Russia against Estonia could set off a major war. Look what started WWI.
First it was the Chinese motherboard implants and now visions of a great war. What's their agenda? Does Bloomberg news represent Michael Bloomberg's agenda/views/paranoia in any way?
What is it about trade that you suppose would protect us, this time around? In the run-up to the Great War all of the European powers, as well as the U.S., were engaged in vigorous trade with each other. That did nothing to prevent the onset of war.
It's not trade, it's US facilitated trade via the Bretton Woods system which has enabled free trade between countries that previously went to war over resources (among other things). Much of global trade is facilitated and protected by US empire.
I'm not being jingoistic, and am very cynical about US intentions, practices and policies, but the reality is that without US military hegemony, countries that fought for resources, like on the NEP, might again.
Much of global trade is facilitated by the US military. If that support and protection is withdrawn, people will be more likely to dive into war over resources.
I'm not saying the US is _good_ because they prop up free trade. It's just empire 2.0, not some altruistic quest on the US's part.
The reason I've been concerned about this for a while is our degree of economic imbalance. War is historically the solution when things get like this. It's a way of selling Keynesianism to conservatives as well as a way to redistribute wealth through high taxes to fund war production.
Back when countries near proximity had access to conventional military gear with equal level of power, all out war made sense, you simply had to destroy the other countries gear to deter them from ever trying that shit again.
but after the development of nuclear weapons, this is no longer a realistic choice. Instead, look at the Russian model:
1) Infiltrate high society of an enemy country decades before saboteur activities. Helps if you have kompromat of sexual nature. Especially, if back home if the truth ever got out, you would be finished. Elites are used to doing whatever the fuck they want and getting away with it so there's little to suspect or take precaution. They are the perfect weak willed asset that can be easily persuaded to serve their own interests which is aligned with the foreign government's.
2) Use your newly acquired assets to spread misinformation through social media. Instigate separatist movements within the enemy country.
3) Wait for the enemy country to react and use it as an excuse to "protect ethnic minorities" or some other bullshit like pipelines.
4) Start arming the rebels, send professional soldiers and latest equipment to make the enemy hurt.
5) Occupy the rebel territory, sign ceasefire, and let UN sit on it's ass for decades until the rest of the world forgets.
6) Repeat.
The American model is a bit different and rarely need to involve the military unless other escalation method fails:
1) Bribe the elite, give out monopolies, lucrative contracts to further American interests at the peril of the victim country's citizens in the name of "Freedom". Target country is cleaned bone dry of resources. If you had oil and lived in the same continent, chances are high that the US is directly responsible for narco-economies in South America.
2) Let human greed corrupt the government inside and out so they are more open to electing a leader serving their own self interests that are aligned with American interests.
3) If somebody doesn't take the silver, they get lead or crash and burn. Make it look like an accident.
4) If all your assets are gone thanks to annoying rebels that took up arms to protect their country from corrupt foreign interests, send in the military to crush them, install someone friendly to the US, and this time give them the latest hardware and weapons aimed at their own citizens.
tldr: How poor and rich empires do empire things slightly differently in robbing the world blind.
A modern "great war" would require countries of relatively equal military industrial power, so either it would be a great war without the US involved, i.e. China/India, Russia/China (with caveats), etc. In those situations the countries may temporarily forgo the use of nuclear weapons, at least until one side is pressed beyond the point of rational response.
I'd also suggest the last time countries were so dominant in certain military areas, they didn't overlap as much as they do today, so open conflict was easier to maintain. In the early 1800's France was the undisputed world leader when it came to land based combat, while the British maintained a serious advantage at sea. Today, the US is undisputed in all 3 categories, land, air, sea, and a 4th if you count space. If another country were able to take a commanding lead in at least 1 of those areas, perhaps we could see a high intensity conflict involving the US, however until that happens, there isn't much of a point.
Minor Edit: This isn't intended as support of the current situation.
Are you really sure that the US is undisputed in those 4 categories? A list of obvious weaknesses:
* The US economy and industrial power is dependent on IT and brittle supply chains. Nobody knows how much the cyber infrastructure holding this up is already compromised.
* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
* How does the US have space superiority when there is no ASAT defense besides MAD?
* The US has not been able to suppress a rebellion in Afghanistan with trillions of dollars and 17 years. Maybe in an actual war their hands would be untied, so this isn't the best point.
* The US Navy loses war-games to swarm attacks and is just now a decade later deploying solutions to this. When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
* The US has increasing ethnic and social conflicts, not to mention the potential fifth column of residents with ties to enemy powers.
* Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
I can happily go point by point here, but my original comment wasn't intended to suggest I agreed with the current state of world military balance and shouldn't be taken as implicit support of US policy.
That said - * The S-400 is an impressive system. The Russians have so built ~300 of them, and like any system, the soft factors are more important than the paper facts suggest. Training, deployment, doctrine, and strategic/tactical goals would greatly affect the viability of it on any modern battlefield.
* Space Superiority is more than just ASAT capabilities, but its an area that few other countries have ever even attempted, and with the US's dominance in rocket technology (arguably anyway) and high altitude laser platforms, I'm fairly confident it would be a stalemate at best, with even the closest competitor. I would agree its an area of US defense that will need special attention over the next ~10 years.
* Insurgency =/= Great War.
* OIF was heavily supported by carrier based aircraft, and there are exactly zero countries that posses a modern enough navel force to threaten US control of the actual blue water areas. US Submarine technology is decades ahead of everyone else at this point. There are concern developments in this area, but again, we're talking "Great War"
* True point. Wars tend to get people pointed in the same direction though. Especially "Great Wars"
* US pilots put in more seat time than every other country combined. This is a factor that cannot be overstated. Putting 10x the number of the worlds best plane in the air means nothing if the actual operator cannot leverage those tools effectively.
In the end, these are all great points as to why the US has room to improve its lead, but none of them really address the core point which is that the US is currently the undisputed leader in almost every military category, and any "Great War" involving the US would be a very lopsided affair. You're more than welcome to pick your challenger and we can see how long it takes me to make a list twice as long with their problems, although I can't guarantee I'll actually spend the time doing that today :)
Due to morbid curiosity or whatever, I can't get enough of these arguments.
Yes, the initial superiority of one military is greater by a large margin and will remain that way for some time to come. But I think it's misleading wording to say it "has room to improve its lead", simply due to the fact that emerging powers are improving a greater rate, and it's economically unreasonable to believe otherwise.
Plus, no individual actor made the decision to plunge their mighty military power into the conflagration that became WWI.
I keep reading articles on the argument that carriers CAN be sunk. One article argued that only a nuclear attack could do it, but its argument was unsubstantiated. Swarm tactics and drone warfare are emerging game-changers in conventional warfare. More than anything, initial phases of WWIII would be missile warfare. Carrier groups can defend against hypersonic, but cannot do so reliably.
Combine this with a risky false impression - that war could be contained regionally. Would the symbolism of sinking a carrier be enough to have the U.S. back out of the contested East Asian theaters?
I can't answer that question, and it worries me that I can't. If the answer was certain either way, war would be less likely. As it stands, I could see certain gambles being both plausible, and terrifyingly dangerous.
>Due to morbid curiosity or whatever, I can't get enough of these arguments.
That's a very civil way to frame an otherwise bona fide flamewar topic, without ruining it :)
The big wars were really a form of violent economic panic, writ large, and without descalation channels, partly as a component of monarchy, divine right and authoritarian autocracy, but also horrendously aggrivated by profound leaps of technological power, mostly by way of chemistry and industrial scale production of chemicals.
No one knew it would get that bad, that fast, that way. And during a time when royalty simply would not back down from a fight.
There are hot spots and proxy wars right now. If they go sideways, and spill a hot mess in the wrong lap, could an uncontrolled panic open up and let loose a new kind of conflagration we weren't expecting or have never before considered?
That's probably the hardest riddle. How does one anticipate an unexpected, unplanned atrocity?
Carriers are not invincible, submarines have gotten clear views of them before in military exercises, let alone missile swarms. The strongest defense a US carrier group has is the fact that there are 10 other carrier groups distributed around the world.
I think anyone who thinks that inflicting a sharp defeat on the US in the pacific would crush public morale and push it into a negotiated peace would have to be a very poor student of history.
It takes a single Sunburn [0] to take out a carrier. There is no defence - yet. Of course, when the railgun and lasers are deployed, this all changes again, but in the meantime the US' carrier fleet is principally a policing tool, and would be dead in the water during an all-out war - assuming the US chooses to go against an enemy that has the Sunburn in its arsenal.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-22
Looks like these missiles are at least 20 year old. How come there's no defence against them yet?
There are several already deployed defenses against these, and weapon systems similar to these. The basic chaff deployment systems, CIWS systems for close in defense, and several anit-missile missile systems can all be leveraged to provide defense against an incoming attack.
Additionally, the strongest carrier defense against weapons such as this is the size of the ocean, and their short(ish) range. You can't hit what you can't find, and/or what you can't get close too.
They're simply too fast and too agile, employing evasion techniques. The only defence is lasers and railguns - thus, we're getting lasers and railguns Real Soon Now™.
>inflicting a sharp defeat on the US in the pacific would crush public morale and push it into a negotiated peace
This would depend squarely on the context and circumstances. Historical precedents are of little to no relevance here.
A lot of your analysis hinges on these "soft" factors, but I fear that in a technology-led world of drones, direct human combat expertise will be outmoded, or just about any kind of military invention that closely depends on a human's ability to react and process information on time.
One interesting factor I don't see a lot of in these discussions is that the US also has a nasty habit of leaving its military assets out of range of the land they ultimately defend. A hyper-advanced carrier group out in the Arabian sea won't be a lot of help if Mexico suddenly becomes hyper-nationalistic and decides to press their claims on the US southwest
Just consider every airbase in the US to act as a carrier in support of a US-Mexico altercation.
As a note the #1 complaint I hear in veterans groups is the frustration of not having a clear enemy.
Turn the military loose and Afghanistan will resemble a parking lot full of very submissive people.
Soldiers in combat have tighter rules of engagement with the enemy than US Police force have to follow when interacting with citizens. Let that sink in.
Amen. Overseas positive identification and rules of engagement were drilled into our heads constantly, driven home by threats of prosecution for murder/war crimes if you got it wrong. Despite the fact that Tommy Taliban loved to fire at us from crowds in markets and the windows of school buildings, US forces did a remarkable job of restraint. This is not to say that mistakes weren't made, or that certain groups didn't do things that they most certainly should not have, but by and large I would much rather trust US infantry to not shoot me than the Pittsburgh Police in a confusing situation.
That said, during those rare moments of clarity on the Afghan battlefield, there was zero doubt with respect to the outcome.
This is more of a problem with US Police
>* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
The S-400 is, like all major Russian weapon systems, an enigma. In the past, the Russian were capable of producing some excellent weapon systems, but they've also been very capable of inflating the capabilities of some real stinkers. The Mig 25 Foxbat comes to mind for example. All of my attempts to find real, verified information on S-400 capabilities have only turned up marketing material and articles quoting the marketing material. There have been no usages of the S-400 system in combat conditions that I am aware of.
It seems the S-400 should be taken seriously, but overestimation can be as dangerous as underestimation. It is possible that the S-400 is simply a rehash of the S-300 system with some of the interceptors having larger motors with longer range. This would still make it a potent system but one with known counters.
You know what is absolutely undisputed though? America's love for guns. There are 120 guns in the US for every 100 people. American civilians own 393 million guns, both legally and otherwise, out of a worldwide total of 857 million firearms [1]. Good luck occupying that.
Also, FWIW under every circumstance that isn't some kind of military invasion phantasy porn I generally look less positively on our relationship with guns.
[1]http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Pap...
It seems much more likely to me that a crafty foreign power would convince the "real" Americans to fight against the "phony" Americans, whomever they may be. I believe part of the Soviet strategy was to have Americans take arms against their own government. I feel that part of the modern Russian strategy is to get Americans to be willing take arms against their neighbors. Perhaps there are other players as well who haven't made as much of a splash as the Russians in our polity.
Or, perhaps a foreign power would work with a political party to attempt to disarm Americans...
My (admittedly uninformed and probably based on too many movies/novels) expectations would be less about traditional occupation and more about neutralization.
I can't imagine the "Red Dawn" scenario of Russian troops invading and occupying US territory. If anything, the goal would be to knock out critical communication/shipping infrastructure to effectively disrupt all normal activity--can't buy or sell, can't get food, can't depend on modern mass communication to organize and maintain order.
Alongside that, the use of modern weapons to do serious damage to centers of power would speed up collapse. That's the goal if your intention is to hit us at our weakest point: catastrophic societal collapse.
If it's our military against some other military, we've got odds as good as anyone else (and almost always better). But if you've knocked out electronic commerce, disrupted civilian use of things like cell networks and internet access, and made it hard enough to get food on supermarket shelves, all those armed people aren't gonna just keep calm and carry on while they're hungry and several cities are burning.
Sure, it's probably a bit too "straight-to-Netflix" but it's much easier for me to imagine someone applying force at the points we're weakest and letting things fall apart than facing off plane vs. plane, ship vs. ship, and tank vs. tank on the battlefield.
I imagine that the "centers of power" that would collapse would be the major metropolitan centers. We would suffer many deaths from starvation there.
But in rural areas, people would just plant a bigger garden and slaughter an extra hog or cow and dip into the canned food in the cellar. They'd also load their empty shells and sharpen their rifle skills.
Judging by contemporary U.S. politics, in a Red Dawn scenario the Wolverines will be on joint patrols with Russians.
Yeah. Recently I realized that alien invasion/zombie outbreak movies couldn't possibly have different setting than United States, because no other country on Earth has enough firearms just lying around for survivors to mount an armed defense against the invaders.
28 Days/Weeks/Months is a good zombie series set in the UK, it was mostly the military doing the fighting. I never could understand how zombies in the walking dead managed to overrun the US military and all their bases, many in the middle of the desert or other hard to reach places.
When it comes to zombie attacks pointy sticks seem pretty effective anyway.
Walking Dead is a TV show that makes zero sense whatsoever. I dropped watching it after 2.5 seasons, because after season 1 it lost any semblance of a plot, and became a TV-show-equivalent of the very zombies it portrays - mindlessly wandering around. I can't understand why it is so popular.
I agree that it's long overstayed its welcome, but from what I gather, the zombies are mostly irrelevant. You could swap out "zombie outbreak" with any other persistent hazard that causes the breakdown of civilization and provides a constant background threat to the actual focus of the story: the people who have to survive and deal with each other/the environment they're faced with after said breakdown.
As much as I enjoyed the early seasons, I understand that it was always the goal of the original author and the showrunners to make it more about people being people in extreme circumstances. If it was decades earlier it could just as easily have gone the Fallout route and used nuclear war/radioactive hazards/mutants/etc. as the backdrop and the stories could have stayed 95% the same.
I read that the goal of the author was a zombie story that didn't end.
IIRC the creator (Frank Darabont?) left after the first season, and the show has suffered tremendously since. The only reason for it's success is perhaps the love people had for zombies.
I watched a few of season 2's episodes, but gave up pretty quickly.
There's a rifle at the Winchester.
> Good luck occupying that.
The problem is that, even with 393 millions of guns, USA can't stop recurrent fireforests year after year. And this is only an example. Would be naive to think that, as people have a pistol, can't be killed remotely from a million Km of distance. The idea of a foreign army marching in a country and killing people one by one like stormtroopers, is very outdated.
And of course you can always distroy critical areas and then sit and look how the civilians start killing other civilians for water or food. With so many weapons in the table would be even much faster. Is hardly a guarantee.
> The problem is that, even with 393 millions of guns, USA can't stop recurrent fireforests year after year.
Not exactly true.
The problem is that nobody wants to pay the money to do so--especially the people who live in those areas.
In addition, you only get to burn those forests once. After that, they are no longer a threat because there is no fuel.
> After that, they are no longer a threat because there is no fuel.
Not necessarily. I bet that the new replacement ecosystem will be, in fact, much more flammable. The water has quit the area.
The issue we worry about post fire is not more fire, it's landslides next time whatever excuse we get for a rainy season comes around.
You simply can't burn a forest to the ground twice without growing another forrest in between.
https://www.fs.fed.us/science-technology/fire/after-fire
The succession goes grassland, scrubland, forest. The grass is indeed more flammable, but the fires are much less intense. Dry cheatgrass, for example, flares up with incredible enthusiasm, but burns to ash in literally seconds.
Exactly. Lawns don't burn down homes.
> * Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
I was not able to find any sources corroborating that story. Are you confusing it with the F-22?
> When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
1988 Operation Praying Mantis [0] during the Tanker War in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran deployed swarm attacks, but only at a small scale. Which was one of the largest US naval battles after WW2.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis
> Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
The US Air Force simply doesn't use it's full fleet at any given moment:
"For example, in 1969, 523 USAF fighter aircraft were deployed to Vietnam or Thailand, only 14 percent of the 3,838 fighters in the USAF inventory that year." [1]
1. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/..., p.20
These points largely are speculative and could be applied broadly to any super power.
A counterpoint would be examining each country's idea of "acceptable losses". If losing 1 major city to nuclear weapons is considered unacceptable, then the major nuclear power are essentially on equal footing. Nuclear deterrence seems to be so effective because no nation to date has seemed to be willing to trade 1 of their cities for 2+ of their enemies.
The trouble is that opponents can mount a response while the attack is in progress. Information asymmetries would force a defender to assume the worst once they see the first missile in the air and launch their entire arsenal before their counter-attack capability was destroyed. It becomes a feedback loop when the aggressor is forced to assume they'll be met with the defender's entire arsenal.
Fortunately this is not true. Actually destroying retaliatory capability requires a sustained barrage of hundreds of nuclear weapons, the first rocket will definitely not do it. And while a single rocket will trigger a return strike with a nuclear weapon it will not trigger an all-out response.
If you ever get the chance to read old declassified nuclear attack plans against a city, you will see the same. A single nuclear weapon ... just doesn't do it. Those plans involve starting out with something like 10 nuclear explosions (not even directly against the city itself, rather on supporting infrastructure), and then one more every hour or so for 48 hours or even weeks (these plans are/were made for most large cities, and even for US cities where the likely plans for Russian nuclear attacks are created by US to allow for better preparations).
In some ways what you see in the first episode of Battlestar Galactica is somewhat accurate. First, dozens of nuclear explosions make an effective response impossible (e.g. military installations, runways, important bridges, train lines, communication, ...), then a methodical "sweep" with nuclear explosions of the entire city. This cannot be done with one, or even 10, nuclear bombs.
And even pretty bad radar systems can tell the difference between one and tens/hundreds of rockets.
So whilst this is a concern, it can and is eliminated with proper infrastructure and planning.
There will not be information asymmetry once a nuclear attack actually starts happening.
That's not how these systems work, at least in the US and Russia. "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg (who was involved in war planning before he leaked the Pentagon Papers) has some fascinating and scary info about this.
Apparently there are backup systems in both countries that will fire nuclear weapons automatically (!) at predefined targets if certain cities are hit with nuclear attacks - e.g. Washington, Moscow, etc.
That's why deterrence is effective - because any strike can automatically lead to hundreds of millions of people dying (and, if the modelling of nuclear winter is correct, potentially pretty much all large mammals within a few years)...
The point is more about even countries with a minimal nuclear arsenal being in relatively equal military footing as the countries with large arsenals because no country seems willing to risk losing one of their major cities to nuclear attack. So, threatening 100 cities is about the same as threatening 1 - no one will attack you.
That's pretty much the main reason north Korea hasn't been attacked since the Korean War: even without nuclear weapons, nobody wants to risk war when Seoul is all but guaranteed to be leveled.
Why just 1?
It was an example to show how a country with a chance of landing even 1 nuclear missle successfully is on equal military footing with a country that can land hundreds assuming the stronger country does not see losing any of their cities as an acceptable risk.
I wonder if cybersecurity could be counted as a 5th area, and if so, how far behind the US is.
Thats a great point, and quite possibly how the next war would be fought. I picture some Fight Club esque scenario where all the banks get wiped out. Not from bombs, more from a cyber point of view, but could you imagine the loss of faith even a smallish attack could cause. FUD is a heavy hitter in wars.
I highly recommend the novels Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez, where he shows highly plausible attacks on our digital infrastructure.
The answer to the last part is "the US is probably in the lead or at least competitive to the lead."
Keep in mind that Stuxnet is generally figured to be a joint American/Israeli cyberweapon.
The US is clearly in the lead wrt cyber weapons, but it also clearly has the most to lose. Whether the lead balances out the increased threat is anyone's guess.
The common use of SSNs, the continued existence of Credit Card numbers, and the Equifax hack make me gravely concerned that the Federal Government is not helping us harden our cyber defense.
Offensive and defensive capability.
No, is not for you the worrying. US is best in all the cybers.
Da, is good, comrade, is good.
Please don't do this here.
The US carrier force could be blown out of the water by modern electric submarines [1]. The chance of Sweden starting a war against the US is not all that great - this mouse does not roar - but the same or similar technology (Stirling engines, fuel cells, a boatload of 18650 cells running a sub, etc) are available to parties which might stand to gain more from such a conflict. Replacing a carrier takes years, blowing one up takes a few minutes. Were I in command of the US carrier fleet I would be very mindful of this threat and make sure I always have the fleet dispersed with at least one battle group somewhere behind 'safe' lines.
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/swedens-super-ste... (and many other similar articles elsewhere)
Modern torpedoes are quite impressive, do damage via cavitation. Not sure how detectable they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV8MF-440xg
Another great war could mean at least one country preparing for it and building weapons in advance.
As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
>As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
Well, this is one of the reasons a Great War is unlikely - how are you going to do this? Even if you build things up slowly, you still have to store them somewhere. You have to train people. There is no way to create a military force capable of fighting a Great War in today's age without it being obvious.
Which isn't to say that build up can't happen - it's just not going to be a surprise to anyone.
And it's not going to get very far before the nuclear option gets trotted out. What good is an invasion force if the other side feels threatened enough to start nuclear retaliation?
I can remember folks in the Reagan adminstration regularly touted the possibility of winning a nuclear war and used that sort of rhetoric in elections. The other part of that is the fundamentalist Christians in the USA who believe in the literal interpretation of Revelations so for them there is greater glory in armageddon that begins with a conflict in Israel. And in power now, John Bolton is one of those guys who thinks we can win a nuclear war and need simply need to outbuild the other guys.
I will say it is weird when it seems to make sense to be more scared of the people on your own side than the people on the enemy's side. Perhaps they have folks just as scary, though.
We almost went to war in 1983 - the political sloganeering by Reagan adminstration combined with the paranoia on the Soviet side (their double agents inside the West reported Able Archer 83 as an exercise but the Soviets interpreted the intel) made a military exercise for NATO appear to be the start of a first strike preparation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
Robots?
Trained via software updates and built under the guise of something innocent like 'gardener bots'
The US has with no doubt the best ground on the planet to defend themselves with. Isolated by two large oceans and bordered by "mostly" friendly nations
Force extended requires significant amplification.
So for China to impact us in a meaningful way they would have to somehow sneak a force large enough to damage across a pretty wide open space, then maintain that logistically.
Ditto for the RU
That said once in the US you have 300 million small arms manned by 21+ million veterans in the US
Not sure China can actually get that many boots on the US soil before the Navy / Air get a poke or two at them
China/US are probably pretty close to a MAD situation. How many minutes do we have to decide if an oncoming Chinese missile attack is nuclear or conventional these days? And vice-versa. Fun fun.
Ditto for the RU
Russia is only 55 miles from the US.
Yeah... only Russians and Inuit find that area habitable and then we are using that word quite loosely.
Nationalism.
This has been rising up like a plague in recent years and it isn't going away any time soon.
When ego and emotion come into play, the question of what is the point because a matter of pride and the point is just to win regardless of the costs.
Not only nationalism. Current conflicts are rooted in the same prejudices as a hundred years ago. The root cause (this idea that somehow my nation/religion/race/etc is superior) hasn't been resolved, only more or less patched, and thus these conflicts are bound to reappear and escalate sooner or later until we recognize that that despite the valuable diversity humanity is essentially one and align the political and economic structures of this world with this reality.
> Not only nationalism. Current conflicts are rooted in the same prejudices as a hundred years ago. The root cause (this idea that somehow my nation/religion/race/etc is superior)
Honest question: is it possible in your opinion for someone to not believe "my nation/religion/race/etc is superior" yet still be opposed to globalism? To me, this is what nationalism means, international cooperation while unequivocally maintaining the right to national democratic self-determination.
Yes, by disillusioning yourself that any of those things matter. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what god you pray to, because prayer is personal; doesn’t matter what nation you call your own, because emigration is easier than ever; and doesn’t matter what colour your skin is, because it doesn’t define you.
Obviously all that is easier said than done, but really if you stop letting any kind of tribal attachment define you as a person, life becomes a lot simpler.
National identity is rooted in language and culture. If people could easily speak two or three languages, the boundaries could become more fuzzy, but right now it seems like learning a real human language is harder than learning 10 programming languages.
Not really, though. Especially for the basics. In fact, multilingualism is still the general standard in the world, especially in places like Asia and Africa. And even Europe, where most learn English. Yes, it's difficult, but it can be easier if we stressed it from a younger age, or if people had need for it. Instead, they use language to distance themselves from people, not bring each other together.
> doesn’t matter what nation you call your own, because emigration is easier than ever
Are there any fiscal consequences to that, at all? For example, I often read about the advantage of socialized medicare in Canada versus the US, is this difference a figment of people's imagination? Is that a tribalist belief, or acknowledgement of physical & fiscal reality?
> Yes, by disillusioning yourself that any of those things matter. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what god you pray to, because prayer is personal; doesn’t matter what nation you call your own, because emigration is easier than ever; and doesn’t matter what colour your skin is, because it doesn’t define you.
Are you saying it doesn't, or it shouldn't? Because from what I see on the news and read in psychological studies, it seems like there are significant numbers of people, some of whom are scientists, who don't share this interpretation of reality.
> Obviously all that is easier said than done, but really if you stop letting any kind of tribal attachment define you as a person, life becomes a lot simpler.
Is this a fact or a theory? And I don't mean that flippantly or offensively, I think it's a perfectly valid question considering the current political climate.
You’re completely ignoring national identity, which has and always will be, a major part of people’s identity.
Speak for yourself.
I don't see how nationalism includes international cooperation. At best, it seems to me that international cooperation is a choice a nationalist might consider amongst protectionism, isolationism, imperialism/colonialism, and outright xenophobia.
Do nationalists not engage in mutually beneficial trade out of spite or something? Is there historical evidence of this?
You can see the Wikipedia page for isolationism or any of the other *isms I listed above [0]. To say that there was no beneficial mutual trade in at least some of the cases is probably a stretch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolationism
So now you do see how nationalism might also include international cooperation?
I think we are misunderstanding each other, but we both agree. My understanding of what you are saying now is that it is possible to have nationalism with international cooperation, but I read your initial comment as nationalism requiring international cooperation. What I am saying is that nationalism and international cooperation are two choices that a nation-state can make that are almost completely independent from each other.
Sorry for any lack of clarity on my part.
Wouldn't that just be anti-globalist?
Not the person you asked the question of, but I think there are reasonable anti-globalist positions that don't have anything to do with superiority. A sort of Ludditism could do. And I actually do think people can be strongly attached to identity without a belief of superiority.
Couldn't non-democratic societies be nationalist? Was nationalism off-limits to Imperial Japan, for example?
> A sort of Ludditism could do.
Is it necessary? Is primary Nationalism, but with a willingness to trade and cooperate internationally in a mutually beneficial manner, inherently worse than enthusiastic globalism with no regard for the well-being of one's own individual country? I hear most everyone talking this talk on the world stage, but I don't see a lot of people walking the walk (for example, everyone seems to bargain quite strongly in a self-beneficial way in trade talks, even though that is apparently considered immoral).
> The root cause (this idea that somehow my nation/religion/race/etc is superior)
This isn’t really the root cause.
It is possible and common to think your group is superior without wishing any harm onto others and without trying to control others.
For example plenty of developers believe static typing is superior to dynamic typing but there are only a few that believe dynamic typing should be banned / driven out of the workplace.
somehow my nation/religion/race/etc is superior
"Somehow". The answer is found quite simply by this formula:
"My [whatever] is the [whatever] I belong to."
Even if you prove without a doubt that Islam is worse that Christianity, or that one race is worse than another, you won't likely convince the members that they therefore deserve less than they have, or that they should surrender to another. The core tautology still holds true.
It's quite refreshing, and not a little bit amusing, when you don't belong to anything. The world appears mostly insane.
I see you’ve joined the group of the ‘sensible ones’. Your opinion of all other factions has been reduced by 20.
I’m afraid of tribalism as much as the other guy, but it’s naive to assume it’s maladaptive. Many people are blind to how many groups that try to protect them in the United States, whether or not they identify as such. Tolerance and peace are luxuries purchased off tribal conflict in some cases.
I like belonging to a country with socialized Medicare, it is refreshing to not have to worry about that cost.
I feel this is too reductive in some senses. WWI was a war directed by imperialists sacrificing other people's children to profitier and try to grab power and influence for the elites in each country. Yes some elites did demonstrate egoism and inflame predjudice but that's the show for the rubes to get them to sacrifice their children and labor for the imperial project. Egoist leaders can only get their way if theirprogram works for enough of the people implementing their decisions.
Eugene Debs went to jail in America for imploring the working class not to fighta rich mans war and many soldiers walked away completely disgusted. Just a few miles from the trenches filled with death, the war profitiers were making a killing offering hotels and foodstuffs to soldiers on leave.
We still have a command economy based on war and our imperial project is still ongoing. We should take the lessons of world war one to heart and refuse to fight and fuel wars of domination and conquest. I can't recall the last time the western world was called to fight a defensive war after WW2, perhaps the only "good" war in our history.
https://www.marxist.com/first-world-war-a-marxist-analysis-o...
Your theory about WWI is hard to reconcile with the fraction of the upper classes in the relevant age brackets who were in the army and were casualties, especially on the western front. In WWI, a lot of the people making the decisions in fact ended up sacrificing their own children.
Or to make this concrete, the prime minister of the UK in 1914 (and through 1916) was H. H. Asquith. Looking at the wikipedia articles about his sons:
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Asquith -- killed in action in 1916.
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Asquith_(poet) -- served in the artillery in the British Army.
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Asquith -- wounded four times, lost a leg.
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Asquith,_Baron_Asquith_o... -- was in the army, but not on the Western Front.
5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Asquith -- was 12 years old when the war started, 16 when it ended: too young to serve.
I have a hard time seeing Asquith here as "sacrificing other people's children", or at least any more so than sacrificing his own.
That said, I agree that there's way more war-making going on recently than there should be and that it's no longer in style for the upper class to actually put their own skins on the line. But WWI is just not a good example of that tendency.
Nice post, but spare us the shilling for your cancerous ideology. Delete the link and the final sentence about WW2 being good.
The thing about war is that at some point, the conditions line up where it becomes seen as a solution (if not the only solution), and its not easy to see the point at which that will occur ahead of time.
Will China's big sea grab start a war? So far, they've been able to smother any of their neighbor's push back, and have just ignored any international rulings against them.
What about when they invade Taiwan, which they've said they will do? What about when they take over some of Japan's islands, which they said they would do?
They seem to be going down this path where they think if they just push a calculated amount each time, it won't cause a big problem. It's exactly that kind of thinking that is the problem, though.
And China's not the only aggressive, belligerent country out there. There's also Russia (Crimea/Ukraine, Syria) and Iran (Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon), for example. At what point do their aggressions spill over into a larger conflict?
I find it laughable that you completely disregarded USA as one of the other "aggressive, belligerent" countries out there...
Actually this is debatable. The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to and nobody would oppose them. Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent. The British Empire was way worse than the USA all things considered.
You're setting a high bar for belligerence. The US is diplomatically & militarily sophisticated enough that it frequently exercises rational restraint. It also is an admirably open society, undergoing strategic policy shifts as internal arguments get won and lost.
But no-one (for other than ideological purposes) ever mistook the US for a fundamentally peaceable nation (internally or externally).
Further more, US is so scary they often don't need to do anything. The fact that they make their will known suffices to further their political goals.
War is an extension of politics.
Well said.
> Since they are not doing so
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...
> nobody would oppose them
Except the local militias that would inevitably form, and would cause considerable losses on the US side, leading to poor public appetite for war
See: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan
Different times, back during the higjt of the british empire war and colonization have been normal things to do. Even the British were quite aggrez, but still not out of the norm. This whole land grabbing kind of war ended to be a thing with WW 2. So you can still be as aggressive as the British back then, it just manifests itself in different ways. Also, nowadays it is a lot easoer to control countries by economic means alone.
>>Different times, back during the higjt of the british empire war and colonization have been normal things to do.
Indian here. Colonization is just a placeholder term to describe resource grab. There is no real chance England could have annexed India.
Why do all this annexation business, and offer the other country free citizenships? All you have to do is militarily control the country while you can take their resources and ship to your homeland.
>>This whole land grabbing kind of war ended to be a thing with WW 2.
Territorial control often has further ulterior motives. Like grabbing useful land, or creating buffer zones etc.
Well they've done it, remember when they took half Mexico?
Yeah, the us invaded mexico in the 1800s and 1900s, and murdered millions of native americans, and uncountable lynching against black people.
Mexico came a long time ago, we aren't doing stuff like that anymore. Except when we invade small countries like panama, that we still do.
> we aren't doing stuff like that anymore.
The US still does it via corporate resource extraction and puppet regimes.
Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent
I wonder what kinds of things history will be saying about the United States in 200 years, a nation who probably didn't take the brutish British approach to invasion, but has tripwire forces-I mean "installations" dotted all over everyone else's back yards instead.
Considering how NATO, The Gulf Countries, China and Russia are behaving, seems that in 200 years we will be still learning how to build the wheel again. If were are lucky.
Gratitude, I hope.
Without the US, the world would be a sh*tshow. The tripwire bases prevent the likes of Russia putting its paws on Eastern Europe or China snatching more islands they claim as there own.
Back when the Serbs were genociding their Muslim citizens, Europe was inept while the US saved the day, as usual.
The US enjoys the status quo - most military interventions are to maintain it.
I am not a big fan of current US policy, but definitely agree that our presence is a stabilizing factor in the world geo politics. Take the US out of the equation and there would like be a huge imbalance. The UK and other European countries are but a shadow of their past... At least militarily.
The USA should never be out of the equation. Nor should Europe, China or Russia.
All the actors are needed for a multi-polar world.
What everyone needs is for all of them to stop waging proxy wars, grabbing international waters and deploying nukes around each other.
The US has no problem arming and training SA who is committing genocide in Yemen as we speak.
> The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to
We'll ignore Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice) for the sake of this comment?
Also lets ignore all those south american Coup d'états because it helps the narrative.
Coups d'état, maybe.
A letter out of place doesn't change the point.
> The USA has the first military power in the whole world and could go and invade a bunch of countries if they wanted to and nobody would oppose them.
This is false. Have you heard of the korean war or the vietnam war? Or the afghanistan/iraqi war? There are ( and have been ) powers that opposed the US ( sometimes successfully ). Look at current day syria.
> Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent.
What? We have been in a state of perpetual aggressive war ever since ww2 ( frankly since the american revolution war if we are being honest ).
> The British Empire was way worse than the USA all things considered.
It may or may not have been worse. But being belligerent isn't a relative matter of comparison. It's a matter of state. It's like being pregnant. You are pregnant or you are not.
because we don't have to. USA enjoys global hegemony and the methods have evolved. Still brutal, just less so.
> At what point do their aggressions spill over into a larger conflict?
When perceived benefits outweigh costs. The US's multiple invasions of, and coup plots against, other countries didn't 'spill over into a larger conflict' because the US's power & ruthlessness have been well-understood by the world. The costs of resisting US militaristic aggression have just been too high. The same has applied to Russia, and perhaps will in China's case if it makes good on its threats (though it would have to fight on multiple fronts for decades to even approach US levels of aggression).
USA's bombing list for the last 20 years alone speaks for itself:
Go back further and the US has been involved in overseas conflicts every year save for one year in the 1800's when we had a major steel strike, here.
Panama 1989 - Operation Just Cause (gotta love the operational names)
oops morning coffee fail, that is 30 not 20
Tell us, what territory was the US annexing in these attacks?
And while they were saving Muslims from genocide in the Balkans, what islands did they steal?
Not all acts of war are the same.
US is not annexing Iraq because then US will have to grant US citizenship to Iraqis and they will be free to move to mainland US. Nobody wants that, so instead US bombs the shit out of Iraq, honors its "independence" by erecting a pro-American puppet government, and acts surprised when shit falls apart.
So yeah, not all wars are the same, but people suffer all the same.
A puppet government? Hardly. We simply replaced Sunni for Shiite and slightly shifted things in a millennial old civil war. It was naive optimism of the Potomac chess players that we could reshape a country by invading it.[1] Others have mentioned the US supporting heinous countries like Saudi Arabia. This is sadly true and should stop, despite what the referenced article says about “staying engaged”. Ceasing support of tyrants and ending overtly militaristic policies is not disengaging, but reevaluating failed policies.
But the US also acts through a democracy, while the countries mentioned above do not. I can criticize the stupid policies of the US in a public forum. The citizens of the countries listed above can not. Democracy is not the equivalent of an oligarchy or tyranny. The people of a country are different from the government that represents them. Unelected governments are illegitimate and a danger to the free world despite what their minions of propaganda post.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Life_in_the_Emerald_C...
> A puppet government? Hardly. We simply replaced Sunni for Shiite and slightly shifted things in a millennial old civil war.
When I read these type of comments I get truly scared on how the lives of non-western people don't really mean anything to lots of people.
There wasn't as slight shift in a conflict but an all out invasion causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in a few years. Millions if you consider the last 20 years.
> But the US also acts through a democracy, while the countries mentioned above do not.
Crimes committed by a democracy, a theocracy or a dictatorship are crimes all the same. That is how the rest of the world sees it and it's time for the west to start seeing it too.
> > But the US also acts through a democracy, while the countries mentioned above do not.
I guess the innocent men, women and children feel better having died at the hands of a democracy.
But, your comment did bring a smile to my face, especially as what is happening right now [0]
Democracy? Iraq War pt II. Led by Bush, declared illegal by many, unwanted by more. Led by Bush, democracy. How did he get installed again? Ahh yes, the Florida "recount". Where the governor was his brother and the partisan SCOTUS decided along partisan lines rather than recount.
------ [0] POTUS stating the current recount in Florida should be stopped, even though is mandated by state law. Democracy?
That the US is a proper democracy can be discussed: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
The US occupied Iraq for a decade and is still in Afghanistan. While we did not overtly annex, it is clear that the US attempted to control these countries. You would do better to make your point without the moralizing.
The fact is that the US is a global aggressor just as much as the other countries on the list.
> they were saving Muslims from genocide in the Balkans
If you're referring to the NATO bombing of Serbia, then you are incorrect -- there was no genocide in Kosovo.
The justification for the Western intervention (100,000's of people murdered by Serbia) was a lie [1] [2], and Milosevic (the "Butcher of the Balkans") was exonerated of the charges of war crimes, twice [3] [4].
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/pilger-kosovo-wa...
[2] https://www.newstatesman.com/node/151946
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/28/warcri...
[4] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-hague-tribunal-exonerates-...
[3] is an opinion piece, [4] says that he was exonorated. However, the wikipedia page says: "After Milošević's death, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded separately in the Bosnian Genocide Case that there was no evidence linking him to genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian War. However, the Court did find that Milošević and others in Serbia had committed a breach of the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent the genocide from occurring and for not cooperating with the ICTY in punishing the perpetrators of the genocide, in particular General Ratko Mladić, and for violating its obligation to comply with the provisional measures ordered by the Court."
Just because he was personally exonerated does not imply no genocide happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre
Note that the parent didn't make argument about Bosnia at all.
Classic whataboutism based on a false equivalence that magically appears on any thread too critical of China. This might not be a puppet but it's certainly pointless propaganda designed to shift any discussion away from China.
So what it is speaking to me is
It seems there is a war against Radical religious terrorists which is stateless and more regional, and stopping dictators.
As long as Saudi Arabia is one of Americas "greatest" allies there is no leg to stand on arguing any aspect of US foreign policy involves a moral war against totalitarianism.
Unlike software, the world is not binary.
>and stopping dictators
If the US cared about stopping "dictators", why are there so many dictators allies of the US?
Because politics and circumstance.
Which implies that they do not care about "dictatorships".
I think that there are strong tendencies and actions towards democracies where convienent and possible.
Unfortunately the world is a messy place — ideological purity gets you no where.
> ideological purity gets you no where.
While I also disagree with the parent, these facts are not in evidence.
That is a bit of a simplistic conclusion.
The hypocrisy is clear, but hypocrisy is not sufficient to prove that one does not care at all.
What is pretty clear is that the USA takes a strategic and occasionally very partisan view when making their choices of alliances as well as their use of power and force. I'm not sure they are very unique in this respect though.
Even if they genuinely cared about it, 90 percents of regimes worldwide are dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. So you can not work with anyone if you have very strong principles.
You mean war against radical religious terrorists and dictators that are not allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and etc?
Countries which support the Al-Nusra front, which was affiliated to Al-Qaeda, which masterminded 9/11 an event which 90% of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia or other gulf countries and 0 from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Iran.
The concept of righteous crusades has been around forever and it's stunning that it still works.
And I'd add that it need only be a solution to the person who can start the war. Authoritarian leaders find fights with external enemies extremely useful to quash dissent. Given the global drift toward authoritarianism and nationalism, and especially given how the world's largest military is in the hands of an authoritarian, I think the risk for war is disturbingly high.
Was Obama an authoritarian? What about Bush? What about Clinton (Bill)?
The previous few presidents got the US involved in lots of stupid wars. This president has expressly said he doesn't want to do that and has avoided it.
Obama was not an authoritarian. Bush 2 was maybe a little bit (remember after 9/11 and the spokesman said don't question the president). But trump is far far past all recent presidents in being an authoritarian. He lives for that, and sucks up to leaders like that in other countries. He says he doesn't want to get us in a war, but he seems willing to do anything to divert public attention (like his recent completely racist tv commercial he was pushing before the election).
> Bush 2 was maybe a little bit
"With us or with the terrorists" definitely had a authoritarian bent to it
With John Bolton around don't keep your hopes up. Iran's humanitarian invasion is just around the corner.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.vice.com/amp/en_us/article...
They are ramping up ‘engagements’ in Africa not lowering them.
> Was Obama an authoritarian? What about Bush? What about Clinton (Bill)?
> The previous few presidents got the US involved in lots of stupid wars. This president has expressly said he doesn't want to do that and has avoided it.
I'm not sure how you can find fault with Obama and Clinton but absolve Trump. What do you make of his continuation of the many wars we are involved in? Or his bombings in Syria?
>has avoided it.
While explicit declarations of war don't exist, airstrikes and threats do.
Trump has accelerated bombing rates over the Obama administration: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/09/donald-trump-is-droppin...
Trump has threatened Iran: https://fox8.com/2018/07/23/trump-tweets-explosive-threat-to...
Trump has threatened North Korea: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-un-north-...
I'm going to ignore the whataboutism and skip to your apparent core point, that Trump saying he doesn't want to get involved in war means something. Trump has made 5000 false or misleading statements so far: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/09/13/president...
Trump has an extraordinary ability to do and say whatever is to his momentary perceived advantage. He's excellent at creating scary distractions; note how the sinister migrant caravan, so dangerous as to require thousands of US troops on the border, became a non-issue as soon as the election was over.
There are many who have made the case that Trump is a clear authoritarian. Today there's a great thread from David Neiwart on the topic: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1062018162500153344.html
And authoritarians definitely love external threats, creating them as necessary, just as Trump did with the migrant caravan.
You forgot to mention Israel's aggression on adjacent countries Lebanon and Palestine. Would Israel's constant belligerence start a war?
I'm not aware of Israel making it a matter of national policy to annihilate Iran or any other country. However, that is Iran's stated policy, and what they've said they'll do when they get nukes.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2018/04/21/Iranian-g...
Iran is training proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to attack Israel. And that's what they're doing. They just launched a missile barrage, the largest ever, at Israel.
It seems that Israel is just defending its existence.
Hamas is bombing Israel, not the Syrian Army.
Hamas chose Saudi Arabia's and Qatar's side on the Syrian conflict and that lead to Assad breaking relations with them.
Syria took it as a betrayal so I doubt they would do anything to help Hamas.
Israel is not bombing Syria to defend itself. Syria never had and nor will have the capability to do anything to Israel.
The reason Israel have been bombing Syria is the same reason Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, USA, UK, France, Australia and the rest of the coalition are doing it too: regime change.
They want to replace Assad with a puppet, like Hariri in Lebanon, so they can all push their own agendas in the region.
And on the other side Russia, Iran and Hezbollah jumped in Assad's rescue to counter that move.
They are ALL pushing their own interests at the expense of Syrian lives so please drop this outrageous "defending itself" narrative and admit all actors of both sides are war criminals with blood on their hands.
> Israel is not bombing Syria to defend itself. Syria never had and nor will have the capability to do anything to Israel.
You're forgetting about the Six-Day War [1] and the Yom Kippur War [2]. Yes, there are controversies around those too, and Israel came out on top in the end - but let's not pretend that Israel the modern nation-state hasn't been on guard against being obliterated by its neighbors since Day 1.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War
Nobody denied those conflicts and the need of Israel to defend itself.
But sometime seems that only Israel has the right to defend itself, even when its not on the defense but actively bombing countries with far inferior armies / allies and they have to just accept being bombed because of events 50 years ago.
Can Iraq or Syria use the recent invasions as excuse to do whatever they want for the next 50 years too?
The concept of preemptive war has always been an excuse to actually start wars.
> You're forgetting about the Six-Day War [1] and the Yom Kippur War [2].
You using something to deflect from something else doesn't mean anyone else isn't aware of the thing you use to deflect.
> [to annihilate Israel] However, that is Iran's stated policy
This is not strictly true. Words were twisted and misconstrued and reported falsely in western media of what was actually said (which I think was still reprehensible, but Iranian policy is not the annihilation of Israel)
> and what they've said they'll do when they get nukes.
Absolutely not true. For one, they would never state they are trying to build a nuclear weapon, two they know Iran would cease to exist on the map if they did.
Unless you are perhaps referring to just a random person stating as such, if so, you could can find many more examples of Israeli and US persons saying the same of Iran, but that does not make it policy of Israel and US
What do you expect from a country that Israel has been demonizing for the last 20+ years calling for bombing it and spreading lies about its non-existent nuclear arms programs? A love poem?
>Iran is training proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to attack Israel.
while Israel helps ISIS in Syria to destroy the country, bombed Lebanon, annexed the Golans and areas in the West Bank... you really shouldn't be digging up that dead high horse.
> I'm not aware of Israel making it a matter of national policy to annihilate Iran
You jest. That's the centerpiece of their foreign policy.
Asking the world to dethrone and delegitimize a country - even without the context of Iran's posture towards them - is different from genocide, which is Iran's posture, yes.
That is not Iran's posture.
That is nowhere near Iran's posture or policy.
No, it wouldn't start anything more than a regional conflict à la the Seven Days' War or any of the other several Arab-Israeli conflicts of the past 70 years.
World War I did not start because Austria had a legitimate grievance against Serbia that it was determined to settle with military force. It started because France, Germany, and Russia were all willing, maybe even eager, to go to war and the putative Third Balkan War in as many years was an opportunity to do so. When the leaders of Germany and Russia started getting cold feet and asked about partial mobilization as an alternative option, the military commands were shocked and worked assiduously to convince them that there was no alternative to complete war. In stark contrast stands the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Kennedy and Khrushchev both ignored their military commands' pleas for war and sought to find alternatives to war.
The ingredients for global war are international disputes irreconcilable except for war; a conflict that can serve as a flashpoint to rapidly bring in these wide international disputes; and you need leaders who can continue to escalate the war, knowing all the consequences it might entail. The Middle East simply lacks strategic importance to make two major power blocs go to global war in support of their local allies in a localized conflict.
I think Israel (and, unlike GP, also Iran) are too small-time to start real global war. They're more the potential Bosnias or Serbias - small, belligerent countries that could drag their patrons into conflict.
Israel has "the bomb", they definitely could start a global war.
Or, Israel having nukes has made their neighbors wary of another attempt at annihilating them, which could trigger a large war.
What series of bombings might start a global war? I doubt bombing Iran would be enough.
The nuclear bombing of Iran by a state would almost certainly be enough to precipitate the complete collapse of the NPT, which is already wobbly (the latest Review Conference ended in acrimony).
Subsequent nuclear weapons projects in erstwhile NPT NNWS could easily trigger a few regional wars, and from there the escalation to a global conflict is certainly possible.
According to Colin Powell they have 200 of them.
More than enough to bring the Fallout series to life.
yeah.... but isn't that how big wars get started... coughBosniacoughwar that ended 100ys ago almost to the day...
Probably because, like myself, the OP isn't informed enough to make a judgement on that case.
There are aggressive factors on all sides of that conflict and there's no clear-cut good or bad guy; only unfortunate things happening to real people who'd all be better off if religion stayed inside the walls of one's dwelling and temple of worship.
Also if in cases of contested buildings listed above, everyone had equal access to the area administered by a neutral outside party.
Can you please elaborate on Russia's aggression in Syria? Did they annex something there? Tried to depose a government maybe ?
>> Tried to depose a government maybe
I think quite the opposite, I believe they wanted the current leadership to stay, consequences and means of enforcement and human rights be damned. (it's also contrary to the US's wishes, for right or wrong). They want the status quo, cuz it's their only navy base on the Mediterranean. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_the_Syr...
What's the point of war in the modern world?
Gain land/people? If there's a thriving economy there, war will probably change that quickly. If there's no thriving economy, what's the point?
You could try to exploit the people/resources there, but the profits in that seem (at least compared to a world power) pretty thin. Unskilled labor and unimproved land are just not worth what they used to be.
Specific resources might become dramatically more valuable. Seems not terribly likely with oil (more technology, more producers, more alternatives). Maybe water, but the obvious pressure for that would be population, which is somewhat leveling off (though maybe global warming would do it).
I would think any modern war would be very different and less bloody than we're used to. Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken. Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
I think that's a possibility but that's provided everything else holding up the system(s) actually holds up. The minute supermarkets stop having enough food on their shelves is the minute panic sets in. After that it's not long before any nation runs the risk of turning into Venezuela and people are killing their neighbor's dog for food. I don't think you're giving enough weight to the grim reality of human nature. The only reason your situation is plausible is because there's some sort of expectation that there will be a certain level of humanity and civility even with extreme events like that and people won't just be left to starve or die. And that might very well be the case. But there are other factors that threaten that decency and if/when that fails, all hell would break loose. Human nature is what it is and people react to their reality. People, generally speaking, have pretty good lives, all things considered. That's why they don't want things like war which disrupt that. But if, for example, their livelihoods are already disrupted and a decent amount of people suddenly have a lot less (or nothing) to lose now, the reasons for shying away from war and violence are less convincing. Toss into the mix that in such cases serving your country can provide people with a purpose to their current existence after their prior purpose and way of life went away, and you have a pretty ugly mix of reasons to engage in war.
Also it feels like food supply is much more fragile now (more dependent), almost 8 bln people now compared to ~1.5 bln 100 years ago, if this collapses, it'll collapse big time.
as TeMPOraL and Erik816 mentioned, it's not just the increase in population that you get the impression the food supply is more fragile. In fact that probably has very little to do with it. It's more of the just-in-time aspect of the supply chain that all the supermarkets and other food producers/sellers utilize. It is done for efficiency to maximize profit. It applies to all food products, but especially with perishables. Supermarkets used to keep about 10-12 days of supply at all times. Now the supply is only about 3 days! That's why the stores always look ransacked at the mere mention of a severe rain. Bread, eggs, milk - gone in an hour.
This practice is pervasive throughout most of the economy and there is very little planning for any disruptions in any supply chains whatsoever. The decades of relative peace, prosperity, expanded trade, and global growth have tricked everyone into thinking nothing will ever disrupt anything at all. That's probably a mistake.
This kind of foolishness may have some serious consequences at some point. We've also become substantially more dependent on a number of nations for constant imports of raw materials and food as well. And we've largely stopped manufacturing pretty much everything which means we also get almost everything sent to us. This could be a real serious issue if there is a sudden large-scale war and a number of countries we rely upon aren't on the same side as ours. And from an economic perspective, business conditions have been pretty sweet for companies over the last 30-40 years outside of a few catastrophic events. Is there even anyone in the business world left at this point that even remembers what it's like to have to survive on low debt and increasing interest rates? Companies have just expected ever-lower interest rates since the early to mid 80's and they've been able to rollover debt easily and take out more money to fund operations. Is there anyone left who has actually managed large businesses in an environment that was less predictable?
It's not just supermarkets.
For most of recent history in the West, it's been fairly normal for homes to maintain a larder, root cellar, pantry, or other long-term food storage as a buffer against both economic and supply-related hardships.
Prudently doing so in the modern era, however, is a fairly surefire way to get branded a crazy prepper. And supply chain buffers at home are becoming even shorter with the advent of DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc.
I’ve been called crazy by my own family for buying 20 cans of baked beans for stock so yes indeed you are right.
This is despite having nothing to live on for 3 months once. Short memory they have.
I used to keep a weeks worth of water, noodles/pasta, canned goods. Would rotate it out every 3 months and buy the same.
Despite the government advocating people have 3 days supply and numerous natural disasters where stores empty in hours, my flatmate and friends thought I was absolutely insane.
Running things on "lean manufacturing" ain't helping either. With just-in-time ordering, near-zero buffer at the edge, everyone depends on undisturbed flow through the supply chains. Break that, and we're all in a world of hurt, as there are little to no reserves.
Just being bigger doesn't make it more fragile. Yes we have more people to feed, but there's a lot more people who can grow food now (and of course we have leveraged technology to an incredible degree to reduce the number of people and amount of land needed to produce that food). The food supply could be more fragile, but you would need a lot more data to convince me. I think it is actually far more stable. Look up Norman Borlaug for an example of the kind of improvements we've made within the last 100 years.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about a food shortage. The midwest has a ton of grain stored away hoping for a good price someday. South America and the rest of the world has taken note of our high yield practices and are crowding the market with their own grain. Granted, you wouldn't want to eat field corn, but then we are talking about tough times which could call for tough measures.
I'm more worried about dealing with the runoff, byproducts and foolish policies that might waste our foodstuff.
>Gain land/people? If there's a thriving economy there, war will probably change that quickly. If there's no thriving economy, what's the point?
The point of war in the modern world may in fact be the denial of a thriving economy or industrial base to an adversary. For instance in a large scale nuclear war many of the plans call for the destruction of enemy nuclear weapons as to protect your own infrastructure/population and to destroy enemy infrastructure/population to gain an economic and industrial advantage after the war ends.
War is also not always an economic calculation: humanitarian concerns, revenge, fear, upholding the law, alliances and thoughts of glory can often motivate a conquest that holds no real value to the victor.
Why did Alexander engage in his wars? He didn't seem to particularly enjoy the job of government.
What was the economic value to Rome of destroying Carthage?
Ultimately the answer to the economic value of Rome destroying Carthage was that Rome became the undisputed ruler of the Med for 500 years. Up until not that much time prior to the Punic wars, it wasn't at all clear that Rome would become the power that it did.
Obviously the animosity between the two played a huge part in the desire to salt the fields of Carthage, but that is almost exactly how The Entente and the Central powers felt towards each other after 2 years of war - neither of them could stomach laying down their arms, because so much blood had been spilt. So they had to keep going, and going, and going
> neither of them could stomach laying down their arms, because so much blood had been spilt.
Lets hope sunk cost fallacy doesn't doom our global civilization. =/
Unfortunately politics works exactly that way. See how far Japan got in WW2, knowing very well what could be the end of it.
In fact the most scary situations in the entire WW2 was the time between the first nuclear weapon and the second nuclear weapon drop and the time after that till surrender. Here is a paragraph from the statement of Emperor of Japan.
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan
Now imagine if the emperor had thought, they might as well endure a little further and let it continue.
Then you have no other option but to the bomb the earth to biological extinction.
Its very dangerous to posses a powerful weapon(like nuclear weapons), what's more dangerous is an enemy country deciding to be oblivious of it.
"At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"
Your post reminds me of some pre-WW1 opinions shared by Dan Carlin in his great podcast on the topic. There were a number of intelligent observers that thought a pan European war could not happen at that time because the economies of the great powers were going so well.
WW1 was monarchies (professional war-makers) still thinking war-making a major wealth gaining activity. 100 years ago they were proven horribly wrong, and ultimately triggered their extinction. After WW1, world learned that industrial activity had taken the crown from war-making. This brought WW2, socialism and democracy to world scene.
But within next decade world would realize that democrats/socialists are temporary elites filling the vacuum created by the global transition from monarchy to technocracy. This is why there will not be a WW3. Because those who are competent enought to make big money, are making it in tech. There will also not be a global resource war because such mega needs are $$$ opportunity, you can bet there are future-$$$onaires working at this problem this very second.
germany had its royal family as did russia. but a lot of the other countries were not so encumbered by stupid or naive leaders. but then you lose your direction - tech are the deserving brilliant money makers or something? and we are too smart to screw it up. ha.
I feel like you may have not read the article.
"The British author Norman Angell would immortalize himself by suggesting, just a few years before World War I, that what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete. War, he argued, had become futile because peace and the growing economic and financial linkages between the major European states were producing so much prosperity."
Violence is what a person or government uses when they think it's the only way to get what they want and deem the consequences worth it.
Global warming/water shortages causing a country into forced migration seems like an obvious one, as the alternative is death for that state.
Or a government might view starting a war to prevent itself from being removed from power to be acceptable.
World war may be unlikely, but regional conflicts between desperate governments still seem pretty likely.
Basically all war is caused by a combination of competition over resources, and a fear of/interest in subjugation. There's no such thing as unlimited resources, and there will always be someone who wants to subjugate you, or someone you want to subjugate. Logic doesn't prevent a war.
The point of the article is that people thought WWI would not only be impossible, but that it would also be "bloodless". It turned out to be the bloodiest war the world had ever seen.
The future big wars will (eventually) turn the world into an apocalyptic hellscape, but the beginning will be fought with robots and big guns. Less infantry, but more damage. Lots more civilians dying of starvation, cold, disease, once critical infrastructure gets taken out. People in cities are mostly dependent on utilities, so once those go, it's going to get chaotic. Also we don't really have industry anymore, so a trade embargo might totally erode our ability to wage war once we exhaust our surpluses.
> I would think any modern war would be very different and less bloody than we're used to. Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken. Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
The annexing of Crimea was "less bloody" because nobody attempted military intervention to stop it. If this sort of thing continues it will result in war that will absolutely involve plenty of blood being shed.
Thinking this is fundamentally different from how various wars started in previous eras is a mistake.
There are reasons to go to war that transcend macroeconomics. Our instincts to tribal violence are ancient, and I suspect the social bonds of shared fear, danger, and trauma are far more potent than most of us peacetime civilians understand, arguably being an end unto itself. Moreover, there are political motivations domestically that have nothing to do with ostensible mission objectives, whether pursued ideologically, or cynically. If anything, our long stretch of (relative) worldwide peace is the anomaly, and it's debatable whether that would be the case if not for the atom bomb setting an existential upper bound on the level of war that first-world societies choose to tolerate.
Less bloody perhaps by use of less kinetic weapons directly against people, but the scary part of war is famine for the populace. Just look at Yemen, I heard 100,000 died in the past few years there, basically just because Saudi Arabia has them under siege in their proxy war with Iran. The biggest killer in Russia in WWII was famine. When the supply chain or a weak link in our technology breaks (or is broken) death tolls rise scarily fast.
also the point of war is simply about power, or to make the other nation/state/population submit to your demands, and the actions of leaders and their path towards war are not always transparent or easy to spot from a rational observers point of view. I saw this the other day (actually came across it here on HN) and really enjoyed the perspective it puts on power and what people incentives drive those that have it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
>also the point of war is simply about power, or to make the other nation/state/population submit to your demands
A point of war is a complete destruction of enemy country, its population, culture, economy, grinding it to all to dust. Enemy being crushed, hunted to the last man, turned into animal by fear. Making enemy fear you more than death — this is the point of war.
You think you know a thing about war? Western people, thinking of war as a ritual sabre rattling with some symbolic bloodshed just to motivate the enemy to accept talks on their terms, know nothing about war.
If Western powers would enter a war with that idea in heads of their leaders, I am afraid to image what the outcome will be. The West is too used to think of wars as wars of politicians. Genghis khan was not a politician, and the next man to follow his steps wouldn't be either.
^ yep, the above point regarding famine [and civilian suffering in general] being the biggest weapon of war is impossible to over-emphasize. Wars are generally won by breaking the will of the people against whom one is waging war, and that is done by reducing the population to a state of utter misery.
Besides the points made already, it's IMO misleading to think about what's rational for a country as a whole. A war can be rational for the coalition in power in one of the countries without it being expected-positive-sum even for that country. (Never mind pure mistakes.) This is historically common, I'd guess more common than not.
It bugs me that thinking of states as rational actors is called "foreign policy realism".
Casus belli doesn't matter that much. There is something else that, in lack of a better term I'll call it "salesmanship", is usually at work. It shouldn't be so hard to imagine a crafty sales plan, with ideas catering and hitting the right demographic groups with the most potent methods for each of them, stirring enough force and demand for change on a scale so large that... well, would make handling things in a peaceful manner too difficult, to put it mildly. That scenario is old as humanity itself (or probably older). Sure, that can be prevented (as the article mentions) but that means work and determination, which are more and more difficult to come by as the time passes and the hard lessons fade from memory or loose meaning. People get comfortable, start taking more and more things for granted, and with that less and less thoughts are given to the truly disruptive situations as plausible events. (And speaking of thoughts, unfortunately the reason isn't always at helm; most of the time it gets called there only after, to clean up the mess.)
> What's the point of war in the modern world?
To create reasons to keep funding the military industrial complex.
To assert political and economical power.
Most wars end up being sparked by violations of sanctity, even if the underlying factors that drive them are economic. Some group considers an idea sacred, and their adversaries threaten to profane that idea. Because their belief is sacred, they will go to any length, and any cost, to protect it.
Think of Catholicism vs. Protestantism in the European Wars of Religion. The injustice of slavery vs. Southern honor in the American Civil War. Nationalism and alliances in WW1. The superiority of the Aryan Race in Nazi Germany. Capitalism vs. communism in the Cold War and conflicts (Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Central America) within it.
Nazism was fundamentally irrational (and its irrationality led directly to the downfall of Nazi Germany), but that didn't stop it from plunging the whole world into war.
There are plenty of similar flash points in the world today. The current U.S. government includes numerous people for whom the idea of the U.S. as a Christian country is sacred - hell, the acting Attorney General just said that he could not support secular judicial nominees. Economic development (to the extent that it enriches the secular, heathen, and heretical) is part of the problem there, as it profanes the Christian moral fabric of America. Similarly, the progressive left in the U.S. has their own sacred idea: equality. Economic development, to them, is a net negative to the extent that it benefits entrenched corporations or privileged groups.
Very similar arguments were made over 100 years ago.
And then the WW1 broke out.
Dan Carlin gives the relevant background quite good.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepr...
>> Gain land/people? If there's a thriving economy there, war will probably change that quickly. If there's no thriving economy, what's the point?
Natural resources are often one point.
Access to key geographies are another (e.g., sea access.)
Note: NOT justifying this, just recounting the past 20yrs.
I don't know. Why did the aggressor nations invade (since 2000):
Afghanistan
Anjouan
Crimea
Gambia
Georgia
Iraq
Lebanon
Somalia
Syria
Where is North Korea not on this list? Right...they have nuclear weapons. The surefire way of preventing invasion & war. That's why the Great War isn't going to happen again. If WWIII does happen it's game over folks.
Nuclear weapons are the reason why the competing global powers have found new ways to compete and project power abroad. Global wars have mostly moved from being violence-based to being fought via propaganda and economics. It probably mirrors the way smaller communities moved from physical to intellectual competition.
Crimea is Ukraine. Donetsk and Crimea were captured by Russia because Ukraine signed contract with Shell to develop natural gas field near Donetsk, and because dispute with Romania about natural field in Black Sea was ended, so Gasprom owners worried about competition at European market.
Syria - to stop natural gas pipeline from Qatar’s north Field through Syria on to Turkey and to the EU. Gasprom owners are worried again.
Afghanistan, Iraq - because of 9/11.
Funny how I always heard that Crimea & Syria were about people and terrorists, respectively, whereas Afghanistan and Iraq were about oil.
Maybe all of these were really about resources?
What truth is there to the participation of the world banking system tends to lead to this sort of war ?
>>Maybe all of these were really about resources?
Of course? Though nuts always exist, but as whole do you seriously think people fight for Jesus, Allah or Karl Marx?
Its always Oil, Gold, Wheat or Highway taxes or some thing like that.
When a mosquito will bite you into nose, you will crush it with power enough to crush all mosquitoes in the house and more. How many resources you can extract from mosquitoes?
Stop repeat the Russian propaganda. USA now is the largest oil producer in the world, so give me reason.
The oil of these nations is extremely valuable for the US not to consume them but to acquire exploration rights with ridiculous terms, generating a huge amount of revenue, propping the US economy up keeping up the American dream.
The US has Saudi Arabia and the gulf countries on it's side, Libya in shambles, Venezuela and Iran isolated. That gives the US a lot of power on the energy market.
So there it is, control over oil = money + power.
What else people start wars for?
Spent trillions to steal billions? Numbers does not match.
Does if you realize the horizon for politicians in US is at most 4 years long; after that, it's most likely going to be someone else's problem.
This line of thinking is partly what the author is warning about. France’s early war aims in WWI were to recapture Alsace-Lorraine (think Crimea). Germany’s were, basically, to be taken seriously. Britain was fairly anti-war but got talked into by the Germans triggering their treaty requirements invading Belgium (and being horrible there). Austria-Hungry was a monarchy that started the whole thing because of what they viewed as an act of state sponsored terrorism against the regime.
Everyone knew war was a economically foolish action (although many believed “reparations” would cover the cost), but WWI happened anyway. They believed that the war would be cheap and over quickly- the troops deployed in August would be home by Christmas.
I agree with the worrying trends the article notes. There are two countervailing trends that help stabilize the current system though- one is nuclear weapons, which really make clear the potential costs of conflict, and the other is the consistent success of Guerillia warfare and insurgencies since WWII, which all major powers except China have experienced in recent memory, reminding them of the costs of ground warfare.
To amplify some of the business-related points already mentioned : War as an industry is itself profitable and the mobilization of resources toward the purpose of a war being actively prosecuted puts desirable numbers in a lot of peoples' spreadsheets.
As opposed to run-of-the-mill 'defense spending', wherein materiel and training costs are limited by the nature of routine budgetary apparatus, an active war consumes gargantuan supplies of goods, from weapons and ordnance to socks and coffee, that need to be constantly replenished. And technical costs are free to spiral because the notion of failure in automated systems, communications, etc, is terrible to countenance.
Funding is also easier to get during an active war because, well, 'THIS IS WAR!' The point in this thread from restalis about salesmanship is spot-on.
It's also worth noting that the equities / stocks associated with war-oriented corporations are tremendously widespread in terms of portfolio inclusion. Nearly everybody has Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc etc etc in their retirement fund [for the somewhat circular reason that those stocks generally do perform in the long term].
I'll add trade as an important deterrent to war in the modern world. The more countries' economies become intertwined, the more incentive there is to work things out peacefully. Unfortunately, the wave of protectionism we're seeing undermines this incentive.
That's the same thing they said at the turn of the 20th century. Didn't work out too well...
France was Germany's largest trading partner at the outset of WWI.
But trade was a tiny percentage of either country's economy: these countries had total annual exports something close to 5% of their GDPs. In contrast, for example the USA now exports about 20% of its GDP; China, about 35%.
Also, industrial goods today have complex global supply chains, unlike in the past. In 1914 perhaps the worst French import that Germans lost was something like luxury foodstuffs. Today it might be more like, nobody can build X smartphone or airplane because one of its critical parts is only made in one place, and building an identical plant on this side of the war border will take several years. There's a multiplier on the economic damages here, because losing the ability to trade for a $5 chip might mean your economy loses a $500 smartphone.
That's not to say this makes a big war impossible, but shutting down trade would be vastly more painful today than back then.
Power.
Always has been, always will be.
People either want more power or are concerned about losing it. Either way, the cause of war is always power.
I consider “fear” to be about power too, as it’s usually about fear of losing power of some sort. WWI is probably the best example.
You should read the entire article because you are parroting the people referenced in the article that claimed another world war was impossible, right before WWI broke out.
The entire point of the article is to not ignore history.
War of worldviews.
If your worldview is grounded in the apocalyptic - eg. incoming ecological disaster - you will get people who are willing to wage war if they are persuaded it is preventable and certain nations are impeding it. That's just one example; militant theocracy would be another worldview driven towards war, as well.
In general, it's mindshare that I could see driving more war, a push to add more people under the overall worldview of a nation or coalition, similar to what we saw under the Soviet Union.
I think this is a good question, but it also seems like someone could have said "what's the point of war" with the same arguments in the late 1930s. Maybe I'm wrong, if so if love to hear some thoughts on what has changed.
Good point, but counterpoint is: assets.
Gold. Credit. Mines. Water, forests. Strategic positions.
E.g. I wouldn't be surprised if China has considered invading Mongolia, potentially worth trillions of US$ in minerals alone.
China hasn't invaded a country in 50 years and hasn't put an offensive military anywhere in decades. They very much keep to themselves as far as large economies go.
Find the amount of yellow peril in this thread amusing. I guess no one really worries about the numerous invasions by US/UK/Allies
For most of that time China was not a "large economy".
That said, your "50 years" number is conveniently eliding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War which was closer to 40 years ago. Just because China failed to invade successfully doesn't change the fact that it invaded.
As for China's future actions, we'll see what they are. So far, the territorial claims they are making are not looking like they will lead to peace in the future.
For the rest, the people not worrying about invasions by US/UK/Allies live in those countries, I expect.
I'm not sure I'd call that an invasion, it was a 3 week assualt on the border in response to Vietnam deciding to go overthrow and occupy Cambodia and Laos, both of whom were supported by China.
There's not enough room in the comments to write down the last 50 years of US and allies boots on ground adventures bringing "peace" to the world.
It's going to be to kill people, this time around.
The winners are going to want the resources -- and maybe a select subset of the losing populations, if opportunity provides.
> What's the point of war in the modern world?
The point of war today is the same as it was throughout history - wealth.
> Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken.
That's the best scenario. Where concessions are made to avoid wars.
> Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
Well Germany first took rhineland, sudetenland and austria before invading poland. Not saying we are going to escalate to ww2 levels, but in war, just like in life, it's baby steps before we really start to get going.
I would think any modern war would be very different and less bloody than we're used to.
A war like no other?
Trying to catch the north off guard again, Jeff Davis?
For oil?
I would like to think you are right, and I agree to a point. Engagements like Crimea and Georgia played out as they did because a much larger foe essentially bullied a smaller country and took what it wanted but stopped just short of making the smaller country think it was fighting for its life. The smaller country knows it cannot win so it must swallow its pride and take the loss, to go all in on a less that total invasion would be suicide against Russia. If you look at the situation in Yemen you can see the end game of a much more powerful country going close to all in against a much weaker foe (and Saudi Arabia is holding back). Mass starvation, woman and children dying for the simple reason that Saudi Arabia has blockaded the delivery of food. The world just sits and watches, occasionally sending a stern tweet. Look at what the US did to Iraq, ~250,000+ dead to date. Whenever it is a superpower pitted against a smaller nation it will likely play out as you say, but we are still talking of suffering on a massive scale.
China operates on decades long plans, is it possible that if they thought that securing the entire South China sea was worth it in the long run that they would be willing to go to war over it? I see nothing that makes me thing they would not be willing to decimate Vietnam and the Philippines to do so. Would the united states be willing to go to war against China for the benefits of Vietnam or the Philippines. They have forced a million Uighur's into camps and we shrug so probably not. That would change if China went after Japan. What if the current trade war escalated to the point it was causing serious harm to China's economy, would they go to war?
A war with China would potentially be a war to end all wars (again), especially if it pulled in Russia, Japan and others. Furthermore, the victor of a war between China and the United states would lay claim to being known as the dominant power on earth, able to enforce its will to greatly enhance its economy in much the same way the US did after WW II. If China thought it could win, they would be able to essentially force their way of life on vast sections of the world. It also allows the victor to claim the moon and mars in the long term, a massive advantage in the next few decades.
We unfortunately live in a very precarious world that most of us on this site don't have to see the worst of due to the simple act of winning a geographic birth lottery.
Why must war be about gain? Many conflicts in the Middle East seek to reduce standards of living to feed radicalism.
Yes, the parent reads as "Homo economicus contemplates folly of war".
>What's the point of war in the modern world?
Let's see:
Why the US, with the support of Europe supported the coup against the democratically elected government in Ukraine?
- Because they could. Because that way they could force Sevastopol out of Russia's hand and remove the Rusia's access to the only not frozen port of Russia. They could also control the Black sea and the gas and oil it has, and more than this, control all the pipelines that connect or will connect in the future Asia and Europe.
Why they invaded Syrian territory? Something very similar. Access and control of oil and gas reserves in the Mediterranean sea or pipelines from places like Saudi Arabia. Removing Russia army from Mediterraneans ports.
Why the US invaded Afganistan? Control of natural resources. Cutting the access of Rusia-China to the Indic Ocean(Russia invaded Afganistan first so it was very important for them). Pipelines.
Why the US invaded Iraq? Because 20 people living 1000Kms away committed a terrorist attack in the US? not really, this was just an excuse they gave, the reason was controlling oil.
So it is very clear at this point that in 2018 war continues being one of the most important activities for the powers that be, specially the US.
Without war for example, the US dollar will not be what it is, as Europeans or Chinese or Japanese need dollars to buy energy, as the producers only trade in dollars(or they get invaded by the US). In the case of Saudi Arabia, they use dollars because the US gobertment supports the dictatorship that holds a minority in charge. Without US support, the system could collapse fast.
Russia invaded Afghanistan for the same reason the US invaded Vietnam - an imperative to spread their ideology. Both failed for the same reason too. But natural resources weren’t even in the frame.
there are still plenty of drivers for such a war besides ideology.
Natural resources, they don't need to be profitable during the war, if the prospect of future peaceful taxation after victory is alluring enough.
Natural resources, the natural resources don't need to reside in the target country, the politicians, war industry etc in the invading country can use their profit to gain a bigger share of the resources and economy at home.
Dick length contest, remember when for one of the missing planes a few years ago how the larger nations refused to share any military RADAR imagery, since it would reveal the state of their art. During peacetime you can develop and test future war technologies, but there is always the paranoia that you don't know how far potential future enemies are. So they need a "playground" and compare genitals, and test systems in practice... but neither power wants to wage war on their own soil, nor risk all-out war with the other power on their soil... so they squash the little powers, especially those that start gaining independence and would otherwise end up paying tax to neither superpower. In this perspective the war is in fact a common goal for the "animous" superpowers...
I kind of agree, but for different reasons. Part of the reason WWI came out the way that it did is that both technology and social organization had changed so much since the last big war that nobody really knew what would happen or what to do with it all. And we find ourselves in that situation again with nuclear weapons, modern air power, drones, and cyber war.
I'm thinking that nuclear weapons will continue to preclude any large-scale direct war between the great powers. The downside is that cyber-war by both nation-states and small groups and individuals, along with civilian conflict amplified by modern social-media based divisions and filter bubbles have a lot of potential to spiral out of control, especially when further provoked by foreign interference. Particularly because nobody knows for sure how it will all work or what will happen when determined adversaries exploit all of these to the maximum potential.
It's also entirely possible we'll see some new thing as equivalently stupid, bloody, and pointless as tightly massed soldiers in brightly colored uniforms with no protection doing foot-charges against dug-in machine guns behind barbed wire and artillery.
Nuclear weapons likely preclude large-scale direct conflict between great powers, but they raise the stakes a lot for civil wars, civil disorder, and anarchy within great powers. MAD works great up until a splinter group gains control of a launch facility and says "What, you're gonna nuke San Francisco if we nuke Beijing? Be my guest. We hate those hippie libtards anyway."
Also a point, lots of tricky possibilities in there. I do wonder what would happen if a frustrated national government of one of the great powers tried to use nuclear weapons to subdue a rebellious province. If Russia nuked Ukraine or Poland to keep them in check, would we do anything? If California or Texas was openly defying the Feds and got nuked, would Russia or China do anything?
At this point wars between powerful nations are almost impossible. Proxy wars are the current fashion, and those tend to be controlled in scale by the puppetmasters behind it.
I'm more scared about a great civil war in a powerful nuclear nation. Civil wars are a savage affair where no rules apply.
This book was hugely influential in the years just before WW1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
Premise: the large nations of the world are far to intertwined by commerce and culture. Large scale war would be suicidal and the leadership of these countries would never do something so foolish.
> Large scale war would be suicidal
They weren't wrong
I forget whether it was in medieval europe or in feudal japan ( or maybe both ) where someone wrote that the gun was so horrible and easy to use that it would make war unthinkable. The thinking was that the art and skill of the warrior and nobleness of battle was undone by the gun. Years of training to develop martial skills by the brave knight or samurai were no match for a cowardly peasant with a gun. People forget that the gun was viewed as a coward's tool when it was introduced. A real man would never use such a weapon. Or so they predicted. Boy were they wrong.
The countries involved might not stand to gain anything, but that doesn’t mean that the leaders of those countries understood (or cared) about that.
They didn't have nukes. With nukes, the principal players no longer feel safe, and large-scale war is disincentivized accordingly.
The book was right about it being suicidal, but before ww1 did we have any evidence for this?
The US Civil War was pretty epic in its destruction.
War between developed nations was unthinkable 10 years ago, today it is very much thinkable. In Europe there is now an ongoing low intensity trench war already. Russians are mentally conditioned for total war by five years of nonstop propaganda, and their leader's idea of compromise is doubling down. NATO has switched back from the 00s cumbersome CONINS and relief mission training to combined arms war exercises.
If the political vectors of the last few years remain unchanged, a large war is very likely.
That's literally what this article says to avoid thinking and it gives examples as to how wrong people were when they said that. You're just repeating that without giving anything new.
I'd like to think this is true, but I think it's naive - there was similar sentiment before WWI too.
Nationalism and hysteria can lead people do things that are bad for both individuals and the group. Increasing free trade between countries and globalism is a good way to try and prevent wars, but the current reversion to nationalism makes me nervous.
> At this point wars between powerful nations are almost impossible.
That is exactly what "everybody" assumed before 1914, as pointed by the article.
It's bizarre to think there are rules in wars between countries but no rules in civil wars. In a civil war every party is still liable to the world as they're in a conventional war. If they use chemical or nuclear weapons they know that it's entirely possible third parties may get involved just because of their dirty tactics. If you're in a country where the West doesn't give a shit, and nobody bats an eye when chemical weapons are used (e.g. Syria) it doesn't make much sense to think that the same wouldn't apply if this were a conventional war (say, Syria vs Iraq). Obviously nuclear weapons are a bit bigger deal than chemical weapons, but what I'm trying to say is that similar dynamics are in play both in civil wars and conventional wars. If you're in the belief that a nuclear civil war can happen when a rogue party can shoot nukes, why wouldn't they shoot it to another country if they come to power? If you think "well then US would get involved so they obviously wouldn't do that" then why would US not get involved nukes being used in a civil war.
Truly the End of History which even Fukuyama has walked back a bit.
I believe that the likeliest cause of another Great War is not to save the planet from dictators, but from environmental destruction.
At some stage, a consensus must build for stopping our destruction of the climate. (Well perhaps it won't, but in that case we're doomed, so there's little point in evaluating that path).
At that point, some countries (presumably rich ones) will have cleaned their own houses emissions-wise and be signed up to assist poorer nations.
It will then become unacceptable to them that their efforts are in vain and at risk, because other countries are free riding and doing nothing, and continuing to pump emissions into the atmosphere.
Their mindset will move from pride at their own achievements to anger and frustration at others.
Soon after that will come enforcement. After all, it cannot be unreasonable to stop other countries from destroying the environment that we all share - even if those countries have to be destroyed to save the planet.
> At that point, some countries (presumably rich ones) will have cleaned their own houses emissions-wise and be signed up to assist poorer nations.
> It will then become unacceptable to them that their efforts are in vain and at risk, because other countries are free riding and doing nothing, and continuing to pump emissions into the atmosphere.
The idea of invading countries to stop carbon emissions is interesting as a thought experiment, but given how things are now, it's far more likely that most countries (including rich countries) won't make efforts to massively reduce carbon emissions until it's far too late. It may already be far too late.
Most countries aren't even interested in trying to limit emissions to their current levels which is a complete joke compared to what is actually needed to have a chance of stopping global warming (assuming it can still be stopped).
I expect some incredibly stupid reason. Post-brexit UK tries to nuke somewhere in the EU, or the USA decides we need to get Jesus here faster, or actually anything on this spectrum of insanity.
Right now it seems like science fiction that anybody will try doing anything about the climate.
So, in reality we'll probably see a failing ecosystem and the strongest military killing the rest of us.
> I expect some incredibly stupid reason.
China needing to get rid of a couple million excess men is the thing that scares me most.
I could see China throwing a couple million men into a meat grinder with India. That could easily do enough damage to India to provoke a nuclear response.
> Post-brexit UK tries to nuke somewhere in the EU
What is stopping pre-brexit UK trying to nuke EU? The EU treaties?
A lack of anger. Anger comes with the brexit effects.
(Probably not. But for the sake of argument.)
The Trident weapons system is in need of renewal.
Clausewitz
Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln
War Is Merely the Continuation of Policy by Other Means"
Politicians always cause wars ... and always will. The only way we have a war over environment is when we impact a nation so they have no choice... or it has something to do with profit.
We are so close, probably within 50 to 100 years, of having technology far beyond what we can comprehend now. We have the chance to be multi-planetary, automate pretty much all work, and fullfil everyone's basic needs...if we don't destroy everything first.
I'm going to be real pissed off if we screw this up.
We already have the means to automate pretty much all work and fulfill everyone's basic needs. We choose not to. As for multi planetary, why? Earth is paradise.
You can make anywhere a habitable paradise with enough energy. You don't even really need specific resources since with sufficient energy can you synthesize elements. A lot of people underestimate what the current projected growth of solar potential will lead to this century given its current pace in how much work you can do when energy is cheap and abundant.
You and I must have very different definitions of paradise.
No matter how much energy you capture, you can't replicate the multi-billion year process of evolution and growth in biodiversity that has led to the incredible present state of Earth.
It is pure madness to invest in colonizing other planets before we figure out how to sustain the ideal place we already inhabit.
For hundreds of years, after every leap in productivity, people have proclaimed the 'end of work'. But that never happens. One theory is that cost of living rises to offset generated wealth (historically, see real estate).
Ya I totally get that, but if we are raising our standards of living...or at least bringing almost everyone up to a baseline, that would be awesome. You know, not having to work 60 hours a week to just keep going.
...said people 50 to 100 years ago.
yes, the people 50-100 years ago - like H.G Wells - would probably think we screwed it up.
We need to take a MUCH harder stance against Russia poisoning the public discourse with conspiracy theories, fake news and alternative medicine/science/history/morality. We have to restore values and trust to the public affairs.
God damn Ruskies are up at it again, poisoning our public discourse and our precious bodily... wait.
As far as the US goes their own parties have poisoned the the public discourse with conspiracy theories, fake news and alternative medicine/science/history/morality. Those parties should restore values and trust to the public affairs.
To me, there is a better word for those things, and I don't understand why we do not use it. That word is: propaganda. Is there a good argument that fake news etc. Is not propaganda? To me calling it propaganda paints a clearer picture, because new words make it easy to claim that something is unprecedented. The problem is that if our own government falls victim to propaganda, then we have propagandistic narratives being pushed by the government, and that, to me, is as bad as it sounds. But, I think it also gives us a broader perspective to pull from history with
The reach and effectiveness of Russia's propaganda is unprecedented. Also recent revelations make it clear that they were merely sowing dissent, rather than pushing any particular point of view. That's not new, but it's also not what comes to mind when one says "propaganda."
Propaganda may be the end goal but the global mind poisoning operation includes all kind of BS - from alternative medicine & anti-vax, the flat earth theory and chemtrails, to white supremacism and religious bigotry - all used to spread doubts, alienation and confusion.
Pretty sure no one can disagree with that, but HOW do you do it? Even harder, how do you do it and respect free speech?
Education!
In the US we spend 12 years in state mandated school and no body seems to come out any smarter :P
The reason the world is in this state is the same reason your comment is the most upvoted.
Yes, it is the Russian's that have made America racist.
America is just as guilty of this as anyone.
Are we not in the midst of a great war now? While not massive like the previous world wars, the US has been in active military operations since 9/11. Russia has been involved in ground invasions. I'll admit these conflicts aren't huge, but they are constant and sustained.
No, because no major country has its entire economy mobilized for the purpose of war. Outside of the countries where these conflicts are taking place, most people's lives are not being affected whatsoever. That is an enormous difference from WW I and II.
This article does appear to conclude many points on the premise of nationalism and it’s varied outcomes. Nationalism has only existed for not much more than 200 years which is not very long at all compared to all of human history. In the USA we are given this notion that these ideas are a solid foundation but I tend to think that America is very young and most national concepts are still very experimental. It will take much more time to figure out what is really going on here, what the goal is, and how to cope with it all. That may be the cause of a great war just a worldwide upheaval of imposed thought much like the Napoleonic era where the concept of monarchies was challenged again and again. In the transition from Rome to the Byzantine empire it seems religious and cultural freedoms were challenged during that period. If we all woke up one day and realized something very ingrained in our world is wrong then change would take place hell or high water. Much of the intrinsic message of nationalism is a dissolution of multiculturalism refining it into a set of rules which cannot be argued with by literally drawing lines in the sand. The only thing that used to matter was the town a person was from (e.g. last names with the name of that town or region). Today we create so many large homogeneous groups based on borders the rationality of favoritism and hatred becomes absurd. Maybe we are at the end of this serving much of a purpose after all so it’s time for a much needed review complete with unresolved baggage from an earlier time. I would like to get off at the closest stop before things get too weird personally.
I can't read Greek or Latin so I don't have access to the primary sources, but it is my understanding that nationalism was a prevalent part of political life in antiquity, particularly from the death of Alexander through to the end of the Roman empire, and reemerged in Europe around the same time as absolutism. In many ways, the United States, and to a larger extent the West, has significantly more in common with the late roman republic than it does with any point in it's own modern history.
Almost all great empires to some degree planted the roots of their legitimacy of conquest in their own self superiority. Nationalism is as old as the first man who thought some other culture as "uncivilized". Like how, say, the Romans called all the European peoples that weren't Roman barbarians.
What the article and the commenters here seem to forget is that it's not only the technological level/political situation has changed, but the way people think as well. There are several global trends that allow for optimistic predictions regarding big wars of the future.
The global level of violence is dropping and overall tolerance of casualties is declining. Rising cost of human life shifts the perception of conflicts in the majority of countries. It's getting very hard to explain the necessity of even several dead bodies from local conflicts, let alone to justify a sacrifice of millions of lifes.
Related to this is the shift of global power: throughout the history the ruling class is basically military. Thus the perception of war as of something possible, profitable under right circumstances and even desirable. This mindset was carried into the 20th century when it met technological progress which made possible the horror of World Wars. Likely, it seems that it has changed, at least to some extent.
Current 'ruler of the world' is not the army, it's rather all sorts of special forces and agencies. It's hard to sell the idea of marching and dying for your king/motherland/god to the public today and thus get/take the funding required, but it's much easier to sell it the idea of security. Security is a good thing, right? So the agencies need more and more power to protect you better. Sadly, in a paradoxical way this is partly also a consequence of rising value of human life.
However, 'special forces' elite is different from a military one and it's more bound to civil oversight in regards to casualties and the acceptable scale of violence. So we see that the conflicts of today are much less bloody than they could be given the weapons we have.
Now one can argue that this only holds until the current order is not significantly destabilized, or that it can spiral into some perverted form of 'preemptive security' (like e.g. govt propaganda about the need to eliminate some threat completely and strike first and hard for the sake of 'security'). And yes, everything can happen. But thinking of probability it seems that the balance is shifting towards smaller local conflicts rather than global wars.
> But thinking of probability it seems that the balance is shifting towards smaller local conflicts rather than global wars.
Only if you ignore "but you started first" nuclear war that can start even completely accidentally.
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/past-announcements/
If you think "but everybody in charge knows what they are doing" you probably never worked in any large enough organization. We should all actively work on forcing the politicians to significantly reduce the installed nuclear resources, simply to increase the chance for humanity to survive once an accident happen, because sooner or later it will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
Military spending around the western world was in line with what we have today (single digit %) before Nazis started the arms race.
This sense of increased morality was also present around WW2. German jew hatred was never a secret, yet few anticipated the scale what was coming. And even after the war it wasn't until the 70s before the horrors of the Holocaust really entered common public awareness.
Some of that perception today is a result of censorship too. While most realize China is persecuting the Falun Gong few realize it goes into a million with a significant percentage murdered. And now China seems to be doing a similar thing with Muslims, albeit no reports of mass murder yet. If we go to war with China I'm sure this information will go from relatively embargoed to an important element of justifying the conflict.
How is it possible to write this article without mentioning MAD? The presence of nuclear self defense is what keeps nuclear armed nations from engaging in aggressive wars with other nuclear armed nations.
Given how many close calls we had when their were only 2 relatively well-balanced superpowers and how the nuclear balance of power is becoming more unstable these days, I think the chance of nuclear war is a lot higher than most people think it is.
IMO, the chance of a nuclear war in any given year is about 1-2%. That's not very much for any particular year, but over a few decades...
Yes but while horrible India and Pakistan lobbing nukes at each other would be on a different order of magnitude to the US and Russia launching a global thermonuclear war.
The graph of warheads per country is basically the US, Russia and everyone else combined is a distant third.
The UK had ~200 warheads about a quarter of which are deployed at anyone time, two US ballistic missile subs fields more than that (they have 18) and then the missile silos, the cruise missiles, the gravity bombs and on and on it goes...
> The graph of warheads per country is basically the US, Russia and everyone else combined is a distant third.
Once just one single nuclear bomb destroys something significant, all bets are almost surely off. So counting doesn't help, the whole domino-effect constellation is simply too dangerous. The only sustainable solution is to reduce the arsenals the orders of magnitude, if we want to increase the chances for the humanity to survive.
The right perspective is exactly the WW I: Austrian Empire just wanted its own teeny-weeny local war (just as an perspective, as late as four years ago, some Austrian historians still claimed: "Austria didn't start the WW I -- we just started the war with Serbia -- everything else was done by everybody else"). But the domino effect ensued. The result was the whole world erupting, so badly that even WW II was a kind of an effect of WW I, as the article also recognizes.
Obviously I'm in favour of reducing warhead counts.
That said I don't think your analogy holds with pre and post nuclear powers.
The escalation in WW1 was complex but from the british side we just expected it to be a short war, we'd nip over there achieve our objectives and be home for Christmas (that was actually said at the time iirc).
Escalation between states with large nuclear arsenals would likely follow a very different path.
I mean the UK is a minor nuclear power but if everyone went collectively insane we could wreck most of western Europe and the US, I mean we'd all be dead minutes later but when you have that kind of capability on the table and more crucially when the people you are firing on have that kind of capability then the "it'll all be over by Christmas" line takes on a much more macabre undertone to those giving the orders.
The Chinese seem to be playing the long game by strategically investing in infrastructure like roads and rail across Africa, probably both for strategic advantages (given Africa's large reserves of anything from rhino horns over diamonds and uranium to rare-earth metals) and economic advantages (the US and EU markets are saturated, South America is going down rapidly, but Africa can only grow and buy Chinese products in return - basically the Marshall Plan just without the war).
Also, both China and Russia engage in cyber warfare - the Chinese right now mostly for economic espionage, the Russians at the moment for destabilizing democracy.
What worries me is the shit some Arab countries are trying to play with Israel (esp. Turkey!) and the skirmishes between India and Pakistan, as well as Pakistan's problems with terrorism. Both countries are highly volatile and hell I don't want to experience the Taliban getting hands on Pakistani nukes.
So, there are LOTS of possibilities for nuclear-armed powers to go to war, and some not even violent. The key is that no power ever actively uses nuclear weapons, but there's nothing that prevents them from using conventional ammo. There's enough of that alone to blow the planet to pieces.
> The Chinese seem to be playing the long game by strategically investing in infrastructure like roads and rail across Africa, probably both for strategic advantages (given Africa's large reserves of anything from rhino horns over diamonds and uranium to rare-earth metals) and economic advantages (the US and EU markets are saturated, South America is going down rapidly, but Africa can only grow and buy Chinese products in return - basically the Marshall Plan just without the war).
There is a key difference between the Marshall Plan and China's modern African investment. The Marshall Plan was pretty emphatically a plan to help coerce Western Europe into supporting what effectively became the West, and combined vigorous restoration efforts with criterion for supporting certain kinds of economic reforms. In particular, it was very much meant to build up Europe not so that it served as a market for American goods but rather so that Europe could be useful junior partners in a coalition. China's current investment hews much closer to neocolonialism: it's building African infrastructure, but managed by Chinese, owned by Chinese, and even built by Chinese imported for the labor. It is not engendering local goodwill for China, and unlike the Marshall Plan, it isn't helping move these countries into China's camp in a putative global war.
> and unlike the Marshall Plan, it isn't helping move these countries into China's camp in a putative global war.
China doesn't need African foot soldiers to burn away in the trenches, there are enough Chinese people to serve as cannon fodder. Sounds harsh but that's the ultimate advantage of China compared to any other military except maybe India's.
What the Chinese are doing actually is to ensure they control the world's reserves of uranium and rare-earth metals. Or, if they don't control it or the governments by puppet/bought governments directly, then by extortion a la "you give the West their uranium, we grind your economy to a halt". Or, by controlling the shipping ports in the sea countries of Africa so that resources from the landlocked countries cannot be exported, or at least the transport cost rises.
The latter strategy they are also pursuing in central Europe - they bought, for example, the port of Piraeus via Cosco.
Whoever crosses their path can be ground to pieces if the Chinese wish so. The West is too f...ing dependent on China and that's gonna bite us in our behinds.
American corporate control of Cuba sure did it well during the Cold War. Oh wait, the Cuban government nationalized everything the Americans owned.
Focusing on the levers of control given by corporate control of strategic foreign sectors ignores the ability of host countries to unilaterally seize control of those assets at their own whim. China's hold over Africa is a very tenuous grasp at best.
The U.S. and Russia have been signaling to each other recently that they would be willing to deploy low-yield nukes in a limited regional engagement.
Anyway, MAD has very nearly failed on several occasions -- Cuban Missile Crisis, false alarms, etc.
The Cuban missile crisis is an example of MAD working as intended. If it weren't for the threat of nuclear war the Cuban missile crisis would have turned into the "Russian tanks in Paris and Marines in Havana crisis"
We came really close to war between two nuclear powers at the Cuban blockade[0]. A Russian submarine didn't torpedo a US ship only because 1 of 3 officers on the sub voted against it.
Rising nationalism and games of "chicken" don't mix well.
[0]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a23074/cuban-missi...
There wasn’t MAD during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US had the ability to completely destroy the USSR but the reverse was not true, which is why they wanted to put missiles in Cuba in the first place.
If a war had occurred, the US would have suffered enormously, but it would have come out of the conflict largely intact. Think the “get our hair mussed” bit from Dr. Strangelove.
The Crisis just shows that war can be avoided even when one side has a huge advantage, if neither side really wants it.
Actually, the US only thought that there wasn't MAD. As mentioned in the documentary "The Fog of War", only decades later did the US discover that there were already nuclear missiles with warheads in Cuba when they began the blockade. And Castro was willing to use them!
That made the situation even more dangerous than they realized at the time. The US would not have come out intact. It's very lucky for everyone that the Soviets decided not to escalate the situation.
Of course, I suppose MAD isn't MAD if there isn't also mutual knowledge of mutually assured destruction. It's something even worse when both sides think they have the advantage.
Those would have hurt but they wouldn't have been a MAD-level threat. They could only reach the Southeastern US and there weren't that many.
No it did not. Up until eighties, accuracy of ICBMs was so bad, that they were completely useless against even a brigade sized formation in an open field. There is even a theory that Khrushchev intentionally nudged USA into believing into "missile gap," as a part of diversion.
TBMs were another story, but there USSR had a sizeable lead in them.
ICBMs wouldn't get used against military forces in the field. Shorter range missiles and other tactical weapons existed for that. ICBMs were for destroying military bases, factories, and cities. Their accuracy in the early 1960s sucked, but it was good enough for that job.
That's the very point — while US were to be wasting megatons on Soviet cities without a plan B, Soviet paratroopers would be already landing on their lawn, and their main force moving down whatever left of enemy land force with a rain of short range tactical nukes.
The Soviets had no ability to land any significant force in the US. They would have poured forces into Western Europe, but both sides had so many tactical nukes there that the whole place would have ended up flattened.
Yes, I meant that they would've rolled over the Europe while US were trying to shoot them from another side of the globe.
Right, so the outcome would have been: USSR wrecked by US strategic forces, Europe wrecked by medium-range forces on both sides, US hurt by Soviet strategic forces but largely intact. I didn’t mention Europe but that’s otherwise what I said.
MAD is not necessarily a silver bullet preventative here. If two nuclear-armed states are fighting, for either of them to bring out the nukes would be a huge, difficult decision. It's entirely possible to imagine them settling into an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" to stick to conventional weapons only, as long as the conflict stays within certain parameters (i.e. the war doesn't pose an existential threat to either).
India and Pakistan fought a war in 1999, despite both having sizable nuclear arsenals (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War). The risk of escalation kept the scale of the fighting limited, but it didn't prevent the war altogether.
The article is specifically talking about another "Great War", not limited conventional conflicts. All out, generation crippling war is a far cry from anything we've seen large industrialized countries engage in since World War II. I can't see how anything like another "Great War" could be possible without going nuclear.
Nobody brought out chemical weapons in World War II, though both sides had them. (Granted, chemical weapon defenses were practical in WWII, whereas nuclear weapon defenses are not today. Still, even in great wars, there have been weapons that were not used.)
That's a very good point. They weren't widely used. But Japan did use both chemical and biological weapons against the Chinese. We don't really know why Hitler didn't use them, but it's likely that his experience in WWI gave him a unique hatred of chemical warfare.
Regardless by the time Germany accepted that they were facing an existential threat, they couldn't have used Chemical weapons to completely decimate their enemy the way a losing country could with ICBMS (both land based and on submarines).
They had no way to reach America, or even Britain at the end of the war (with enough munitions), so chemical attacks would have been pointless by that time. If Hitler could have pressed a button completely destroy America, Britain, and Russia when he was in his bunker in Berlin, I'm willing to bet he would have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Changde#Use_of_chemi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...
He did of course use chemical weapons in his death camps.
Very true.
Nobody brought out chemical weapons in World War II, though both sides had them.
Sure they did. They were just used on civilians instead of regular combatants. What was Zyklon-B, chopped liver?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_warfare#World_War_II
Not exactly.
All right, not exactly, but close. Close enough that I think the point still stands - they had these weapons, but they were mostly not used, because of the fear of retaliation with the same weapon, even in the heat of a great war.
The Germans couldn't match the Allied expertise with biological weapons, and were warned that using chemical weapons would be responded to with far more effective biological weapons. I don't see anything "greater than nuclear" that would complete the analogy here.
Thankfully that stayed a limited war with combat in one region and relatively modest forces and casualties on both sides. It's when a country feels that its existence is threatened, as in WWI, that the use of nuclear weapons becomes very likely.
IMO mutually-assured destruction only really guarantees that powers won't use nukes against each other.
the fear of MAD also implies that a big power spends a lot of effort to avoid running into a direct military confrontation against another great power; direct confrontations run the risk of escalating into all out war. That's why you have so many proxy conflicts - these ugly little conflicts add some layers of indirection so to speak.
Consider what happens when effective ballistic missile defense is developed. This still leaves the threat of tactical nuclear weapons (artillery) and short range missiles from submarines. It will also spur the development of improved ballistic missile delivery systems. However, if technology brings MAD into question and causes a shift in thinking to acceptable risk/losses, we may find ourselves in a destructive situation very reminiscent of 100 years ago.
I don't really see MAD as being a given, especially depending on if China or the US develops rapid technological advancements over the next few decades. I think it's a really unlikely idea to assume the nuke will be the great deterrent or equalizer for the rest of this century. China could easily conquer the planet if they pull sufficiently ahead in China, which is a fair possibility, looking at the current state of the US and Europe
>if they pull sufficiently ahead in China, which is a fair possibility, looking at the current state of the US and Europe
Be careful with extrapolation. People said the same thing about the USSR, Japan, and the EU.
Sure the US won't be as dominant as they are now forever, but extrapolating China's growth from a very poor developing country to their current level and assuming that means that they might make some kind of leap that allows them to take over the world is going too far.
I don't think it's going far enough. There are several hundreds variables completely separating China and the USSR and Japan from a blanket comparison.
I would like to hope that they hit the breaks in the same way that Japan did, and there's certainly plenty of evidence that it's possible. However, if their model remains viable and they continue growing at the same rate, they'll certainly eclipse us in political and economic influence in 10-20 years at most - potentially technologically as well. I'm not sure that's even a disputable claim - it should be self evident. The question is if we'll suddenly outperform or if they'll hit a stumbling block, which remains to be seen.
>and they continue growing at the same rate,
That's what I mean by the problem with extrapolation. There is absolutely no reason to think that they will continue growing at the same rate. The likely scenario based on all the historical evidence we have is that they won't.
Their GDP growth rate has been declining since 2010, there's no reason to assume that they'll be able to stop it. The most likely scenario is that it flattens out to a more reasonable rate.
Also this is the state reported GDP, which no one believes is accurate. And this is without taking into account China's demographic problems and potential hidden debt issues.
And even if China's economy does overtake the US, it took decades and a World War for the US to eclipse the rest of the world politically and militarily after it's economy became the largest.
By the same token, there's no reason to think they'll fall anywhere near or under 5% in the near future. They have 1.5 billion people with a higher average IQ than the US with a strong educational culture, increasing economic opportunity with a lot of i's to dot in various industries, their per capita is still a fraction of that of a developed company, and there are another 1000 reasons to paint a fuller picture beyond my small sampling. In contrast, for example, Japan had less than half our population, didn't manage to steal all of our trade secrets, reached a high stage of development, and really didn't have anything revolutionary to offer.
I'm aware of what you're saying about the potential issues they're facing, but we really don't know how that will play out - it strikes me as western optimism.
That is true, but China is already setting the stage to assert itself as an imperial power.
I don't mean to come across as a sinophile - I don't want a hologram of Xi Jinping standing over me in 10 years, but, there is plenty of reason to worry and to not draw conclusions on whether or not they'll pull ahead or how quickly - that remains to be seen.
>By the same token, there's no reason to think they'll fall anywhere near or under 5% in the near future.
Why? It's fallen 6 points since 2010. The OECD long term forecast puts it at 5% in just 2 years, and predicts it will drop down to around 3% within 10 years. This is without any serious problems.
These numbers are also based on official GDP estimates, and there are studies that estimate that China's GDP is 30% lower than reported due to padding at the local and national level.
>They have 1.5 billion people
Their official population count is 1.386 billion, rounding up to 1.5 seems a bit much. And we don't even know if that is true. There are reports that they've overestimated their population by around 100 million people.
>with a higher average IQ than the US
We can't even remove all of the cultural biases to make accurate comparisons between native English speakers within the US. There's no way we are going to be able to accurately compare countries as different as the US and China. Not to mention sample differences, suppressed scores from the children of migrant workers etc...
>strong educational culture
And many parts of that educational culture have been criticized. Regardless this is a completely subjective metric that isn't worth comparing.
>really didn't have anything revolutionary to offer
I'm not sure I know what to make of this one.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/new-study-shin...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/business/china-gdp-econom...
https://qz.com/887709/chinas-liaoning-province-admitted-that...
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-growth-annual
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/20...
Last one regarding, for example, US developing a massive competitive advantage with the internet right after their housing market crash.
I won't debate any further because clearly I'm going to get downvoted for doing anything other than linking a business insider article on why chinese local debt is going to collapse tomorrow in the HN echo chamber. If you want to believe it's inevitable China is going to plateau in rapidly, by all means.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I linked to a lot more than articles about local debt. Perhaps you could refute the OECD long term forecast that predicts a plateau rather than setting up a straw man about business insider articles.
By the way, I'm not even saying that China won't overtake the US economy sometime this century, I'm saying that naive extrapolation based on current growth rates is a terrible way to predict the future.
Our world looks similar to 1914 in a lot of ways, but it looks different in a lot of ways too.
1) Mutually assured destruction.
2) No major empires dissolving.
3) Global news keeps everyone on the same page as crises unfold.
4) World powers separated by vast seas, neutral countries, and demilitarized zones.
5) The UN exists (not always effective, but at least it's there).
6) Less chauvinism. Kaiser Wilhelm II makes Trump look diplomatic and cordial in comparison.
> Global news keeps everyone on the same page as crises unfold
Have you watched Russian news? Or Fox?
> World powers separated by vast seas, neutral countries, and demilitarized zones.
That's just not true. Where was the demilitarized zone or neutral country between Ukraine and Russia?
> Less chauvinism. Kaiser Wilhelm II makes Trump look diplomatic and cordial in comparison.
I somewhat doubt that. Again, you've heard of Putin?
Ukraine is not a world power, but rather one of those neutral countries separating the world powers.
I subscribe to (Einstein's?) WW4 will be fought with sticks & stones sentiment.
The world is way beyond what can be survived in terms of flat out war.
It's not really something I worry about. People just want to eat McD and earn a high salary. Nobody in the powerful nations is eager to get shot (well US military complex aside).
> This is why the U.S. chose to stay so deeply engaged in the affairs of Europe
Aside from this rather endearing naivete, the gist of the article is fine: we need to fear another 'Great War'.
Modern warfare grants (perceived) first-strike capability to almost any state, rendering the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible. We live in the 21st century now, things are different than before, and highly dangerous as long as states put their self-interest above our common global destiny, as is the attitude du jour.
People behave as if nothing bad can happen, it's highly frustrating to watch.
> Modern warfare grants (perceived) first-strike capability to almost any state, rendering the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible.
That is folly. The idea of MAD is that you have second-strike capabilities that are sufficiently hardened that no first-strike attack is capable of preventing the second-strike retaliation from occurring. In essence, the idea is that the calculus becomes "if we go to war, the only outcome is that we both lose."
> rendering the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible
Are you implying you can destroy the enemy's nuclear arsenal in your first strike? If so, you don't understand MAD. Any submarine arsenal will be nearly impossible to destroy. If you first strike North Dakota (for example) to destroy all the missile silos, subs will simply eradicate your country.
I understand MAD. But "nearly impossible" is not impossible (think not only nuclear, but the whole arsenal of modern weapons, including computerized, chemical, biological etc). The problem is not actual first-strike capability though, it is perceived such, be it one's own or the enemy's.
The whole premise of submarine nuclear strikes is that:
A single submarine cannot be trivially located - the ocean is too deep and vast. If countries working together can't find the wreckage of a single crashed airplane in a generally known location, how do you expect them to find dozens of cloaked subs in unknown locations each holding hundreds of nuclear warheads?
Even assuming you wipe out 100% of the continental USA's weapons with a first strike, there are still thousands of nukes in the ocean ready to wipe your country off the face of the earth.
How does this fit in with your original argument that first strikes "render the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible"?
I find it interesting that your examples involve the case where the US is under attack. Let's turn it round: do you find it equally implausible that the US would not believe they have a capacity to thwart the second-strike capacity of say, North Korea? I'm not saying this is more realistic, I'm saying it is this perception of first-strike capability that is dangerous, and any country can believe themselves to be invincible, not just the US.
> Modern warfare grants (perceived) first-strike capability to almost any state
What are you talking about? Only 9 states have nuclear weapons. Of them, only 5 have any significant number.
Do the others really matter, then, in this context?
We won't have another giant war because: the internet. i don't know about anyone else but I spent some of my childhood travelling distances. Every time I did there was a cultural identity associated with the places I went. Post internet culture has changed nearly every place I've been. Everywhere I go everyone is the same now. They are all connected. People are connected to people in other countries like never before. There is so much connectivity that any "warmongering" king/president can't nearly control the flow of information like they used to. That all being said, how do we explain things like Crimea, issues with North Korea, the middle east? Well, Crimea, I can't fully explain. But North Korea and the middle east definitely practice tight control over their internet.
That all being said, I'm not saying it's impossible, but that we're so connected now that I just don't see a great war because too many of our soldiers will have brothers, sisters, best friends in the war we're going up against.
Wars don't happen because people don't get along; they don't happen because people are different and don't understand each other. Civil wars are both common and nasty.
Wars happen because in a set of animals, one member or subset will want the control of, say, the resources of an area, mating rights within the group, etc. Its members will often think that it's acting this way as a form of public service. "Someone has to divide up the meat of the fallen antelope," for example, ignoring what happens with control which is that the spoils, the resources, etc. will start to divide unevenly.
This continues to the point of extreme imbalance, such as just before the French Revolution where the wealthy paid less in tax than the poor, or the leader becomes too weak to maintain control. In all cases, control isn't maintained for long.
Right now, America is the empire in control. The problem that I see is that its generals are preparing for the last war with battleships and big guns (as sort of an "innovator's dilemma", where what has been successful for a company maintains the limelight despite a growing new reality). You can see the control ebbing, weakening. The petrodollar, for example, once so strong and a big part of the country's economic power, is now being replaced with the Special Drawing Right (SDR) -- a diversified basket of currencies.
And that's' the only solution: to diversify control. The peace that's found when an empire has control is temporary; it's the eye of the storm. Until there's world-wide democracy, we will have war.
Even if you're absolutely right that Internet access changed everything, all it would take for a Great War would be if there was a major world military power that tightly controls its Internet, and that's China.
>We won't have another giant war because: the internet.
I used to think that, but then I realised that the Internet is mostly just a porn-delivery device.
Plus, there's the 4-chan factor, as in: if there is going to be another world war, it'll start because of something someone posted on 4-chan ... I mean look how easily the Internet was usurped to provide the "but Russia!" narrative, eagerly embraced by many a hawk as a means to a violent end ..
In my opinion, Bloomberg has become a fear mongering tabloid.
Have they resolved the calls to retract or strengthen the evidence supporting their apple/amazon hardware hack story?
Now a story about "the next great war"?
Has anyone noticed there seems to be a common theme with the related articles on that page?
A lot of fear mongering it seems. What is bloomberg's agenda in doing that?
The elites are psychologically prepping people for it.
Almost. Actually the main message of that Bloomberg article is (quoting from the article):
"As Americans consider how strongly — or even whether — to defend the international order their country created against the growing pressures exerted by authoritarian revisionist powers such as China and Russia, this lesson is worth keeping in mind."
Basically, the author argues: "the Americans" should not stop to "to defend the international order" "against" "China and Russia" or... there can be a new World War.
Note the problem: it is not clear how the author imagines that the very insisting on "defending" the "order" by the Americans can't provoke the bigger war than they imagine?
Austrian leaders, at that moment of a huge empire, also just believed they "defended" the "order" when attacking Serbia, which they expected will be a small and easy war, but they actually started the WW I. In spite of the popular belief, also mentioned in the article that "what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete."
Less prepping and more priming, trying to make war happen.
For example all the noise about Russia's influence in US election, seemed to me the media was trying to ultimately instigate war.
None of the top comments mention nuclear weapons. Are we really going to fight a huge war with multiple combatants when some of them could kill untold millions in metropolitan areas with a few rockets?
It's possible because a world power doesn't need to completely annihilate another to win. They just need to remove their ability to compete on the global stage.
The supply chain of American (and most modern countries) isn't fortified against any sort of large-scale attack. It wouldn't take much to know out food, fuel, and power supplies for most Americans. Once that happens, a little bit of propaganda will incite major riots which require police intervention.
There are enough "militias" in the country waiting patiently for their time to rise up. Should they decide to "protect" themselves from the "looters," the country's leadership will probably have to redirect their attention an resources homeward in order to stabilize their power.
That alone is enough to set the country back several decades. Especially if the educated class seeks refuge in a more stable, foreign country. Like what happened in central Europe after WWII.
The future of warfare is against world powers is probably a long-term sequence of small scale attacks of this nature. Disrupt supplies, push propaganda, and create power vacuums which need to be filled.
There will always be conflicts with developing nations but unless global ballistic nuclear missiles magically disappear one day, the chances of another “Great War” are low. MADD keeps the Great Peace
I'm worried. A big war could easily start partly by accident. A confrontation in the South China Sea or a move by Russia against Estonia could set off a major war. Look what started WWI.
WW1 was not an accident.
Seems to me that, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to avoid falling into yet another Thucycides trap.
> dreadful innovations such as aerial bombing
Aerial bombing was an Italian innovation, during their war in Lybia
>authoritarian revisionist powers such as China and Russia
"Revisionist" in what sense?
I mean literally, what does it mean in this context?
First it was the Chinese motherboard implants and now visions of a great war. What's their agenda? Does Bloomberg news represent Michael Bloomberg's agenda/views/paranoia in any way?
Einstein alleged suggested there will be no WW4.
Without the US's involvement in global trade Europe & Asia will likely erupt in war again. The US would be immune to most of the violence though.
What is it about trade that you suppose would protect us, this time around? In the run-up to the Great War all of the European powers, as well as the U.S., were engaged in vigorous trade with each other. That did nothing to prevent the onset of war.
It's not trade, it's US facilitated trade via the Bretton Woods system which has enabled free trade between countries that previously went to war over resources (among other things). Much of global trade is facilitated and protected by US empire.
I'm not being jingoistic, and am very cynical about US intentions, practices and policies, but the reality is that without US military hegemony, countries that fought for resources, like on the NEP, might again.
Seems like a reasonable analysis based on a careful study of the facts. Keep going.
Much of global trade is facilitated by the US military. If that support and protection is withdrawn, people will be more likely to dive into war over resources.
I'm not saying the US is _good_ because they prop up free trade. It's just empire 2.0, not some altruistic quest on the US's part.
I was being ironic.
The reason I've been concerned about this for a while is our degree of economic imbalance. War is historically the solution when things get like this. It's a way of selling Keynesianism to conservatives as well as a way to redistribute wealth through high taxes to fund war production.
l
Back when countries near proximity had access to conventional military gear with equal level of power, all out war made sense, you simply had to destroy the other countries gear to deter them from ever trying that shit again.
but after the development of nuclear weapons, this is no longer a realistic choice. Instead, look at the Russian model:
1) Infiltrate high society of an enemy country decades before saboteur activities. Helps if you have kompromat of sexual nature. Especially, if back home if the truth ever got out, you would be finished. Elites are used to doing whatever the fuck they want and getting away with it so there's little to suspect or take precaution. They are the perfect weak willed asset that can be easily persuaded to serve their own interests which is aligned with the foreign government's.
2) Use your newly acquired assets to spread misinformation through social media. Instigate separatist movements within the enemy country.
3) Wait for the enemy country to react and use it as an excuse to "protect ethnic minorities" or some other bullshit like pipelines.
4) Start arming the rebels, send professional soldiers and latest equipment to make the enemy hurt.
5) Occupy the rebel territory, sign ceasefire, and let UN sit on it's ass for decades until the rest of the world forgets.
6) Repeat.
The American model is a bit different and rarely need to involve the military unless other escalation method fails:
1) Bribe the elite, give out monopolies, lucrative contracts to further American interests at the peril of the victim country's citizens in the name of "Freedom". Target country is cleaned bone dry of resources. If you had oil and lived in the same continent, chances are high that the US is directly responsible for narco-economies in South America.
2) Let human greed corrupt the government inside and out so they are more open to electing a leader serving their own self interests that are aligned with American interests.
3) If somebody doesn't take the silver, they get lead or crash and burn. Make it look like an accident.
4) If all your assets are gone thanks to annoying rebels that took up arms to protect their country from corrupt foreign interests, send in the military to crush them, install someone friendly to the US, and this time give them the latest hardware and weapons aimed at their own citizens.
tldr: How poor and rich empires do empire things slightly differently in robbing the world blind.
The US shouldn't have to do the job that Europe could share the burden in. They can't keep passing off the costs and responsibility to others.
The media would love another war. They'd make so much money. They've already made so much from Trump.
It's not the media who makes money off wars, it's the arms industry.
Of course they would. They profit off conflict. In their current iteration, at least.
It is actually every industry. Steel, oil, textile, food, healthcare, pharmaceuticals etc..
The only thing I fear at the moment is how deluded Bloomberg is about the gullibility of their audience.