Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

The more important aspect was the social and government structures pre-WWI. Europe was still dominated by an aristocratic elite and a very class based society. That elite drove public opinion and policy. It served as the officer corps. It served in government and in civil service. It's very difficult today to imagine a world so different from today, especially with regard to class.

Ultimately what all that meant was that the bad old ways that European aristocracy had always worked continued apace. Empire was an extension of national pride, and primarily extractive and selfish. Foreign policy was also selfish and dominated not by the thought of maintaining order by by the idea of gaining advantage. And only moderated by the fear of a foreign hegemon and the desire to team up to prevent such in order to maintain the conditions that allowed everyone to scuttle about and get up to geopolitical hijinx for the benefit of their own country.

These patterns of behavior had led to a great number of wars in Europe's past, it was a strong pattern. Wars fought for territorial or trade advantage: Wars fought to reign in a hegemon. Etc. That was how things were, even going back to the hundred years war and earlier. In the 19th century you had the Napoleonic wars, the wars of German/Italian unification, various imperial skirmishes, the Franco-Prussian war, etc.

The point being, wars were seen as being an opportunity for advantage and positive change. And the powerful elite at the time very much had a fascination and lust for war due to its glorification as well as the immediate financial gain of being an officer. The concept of an existential war, the concept of wars that took millions of lives, the concept of a war where bullets and bombs were putting troops on the front lines in danger of death every day for years was not a concept Europe at the time could understand.

And in the shock of the war a lot of the old ways of Europe broke apart and were destroyed. Post WWI Europe was much different than it was before the war, and you can see this culturally. Post WWI cultural artifacts tend to seem much more modern and tend to more easily resonate with modern sensibilities than pre-war stuff does.

The point being, it wasn't just the alliances and weapon buildup that brought about WWI. More than anything it was a culture that saw war as a tool for gaining advantage, a culture that tended to fall into a war between great powers at least once a generation. That sort of culture doesn't exist anymore in the great powers. Even in countries that see geopolitics as a realm for gaining selfish benefits generally there just aren't a lot of folks who are eager to go to war. At best there are folks who think that it's wise to go to war in order to take out an enemy that's a threat, but that's a very different proposition than the pre-WWI situation.

I recently read a fabulous history of WWI (G.J. Meyer's _The World Undone_). What struck me is that if you modeled Europe in 1914 as a distributed system, you'd see incredible latencies between decisions being made and decisions being carried out. Kaiser Wilhelm and King George (first cousins!) were negotiating to stave off the war long after Germany's decision to mobilize, and might very well have succeeded were it possible to reverse the mobilization decision. The German generals insisted it wasn't. And even before then, Germany's decision to mobilize was based on reports of Russia's decision to mobilize, which also took weeks to carry out. If communication and military latencies were shorter, maybe the war could have been avoided. It was like the world's worst race condition.

This is a great analysis, but I'd hesitate to call anything the "root cause" of WWI. Of course the Ottoman Empire's decay was a factor, but hard to say that it was more important than the many others listed here and elsewhere.

Clearly you have not read Siegfried Sassoon's Public Statement Of Defiance. It was published in The London Times on 17 July 1917:

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects witch actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerity's for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise."

We have not moved on from 1917. The US seeks out war for fun and profit. Peace is a disaster for the military industrial complex, war, or at least the preparation for war, has to be perpetuated. Militarism is the cancer at the heart of almost every government, most notably the USA. Even Carter wasn't able to inoculate it. Although most Americans don't want war - it is not cultural - those people in Washington want nothing more for the exact same reasons Sassoon described.

What would you say to the argument that economic interests and power blocs wield much more influence over nations today? The political, cultural and economic establishments of most nations are now heavily infiltrated/controlled by a relatively miniscule number of financial institutions. The void left by the declining aristocracy is now arguably filled by central bankers and hedge fund managers.