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Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

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Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#41

Post by mrfredward »

jeffdavis wrote: post #29

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 mig…

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.

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#42

Post by kobrad »

beachy wrote: post #37

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-…

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.

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#43

Post by turc1656 »

jeffdavis wrote: post #29

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 mig…

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.

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#44

Post by vvillena »

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.

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#45

Post by demosito666 »

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.

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#46

Post by jpollock »

jeffdavis wrote: post #29

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 mig…

I don't know. Why did the aggressor nations invade (since 2000):

Afghanistan

Anjouan

Crimea

Gambia

Georgia

Iraq

Lebanon

Somalia

Syria

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#47

Post by acqq »

noir_lord wrote: post #20
bryanlarsen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

> 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.

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#48

Post by AnimalMuppet »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #40
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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.

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#49

Post by [deleted] »

us-throw1 wrote: post #19
AcerbicZero wrote: post #6

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 i…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

#50

Post by twtw »

jeffdavis wrote: post #29

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 mig…

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.
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