Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

    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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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"