41–50 of 339 posts
Deglobalization is an attempt to make war feasible because some strong countries feel like they are losing economic war and want to fall back on real war.
This premise is delusional. The Russian military may have degraded, but the war in Ukraine shows clearly that the only aspect of warfare that has significantly changed since WWII is the vastly increased efficiency in targeting weapons payloads. Which can be unwound at any moment when smart munitions run thin. The idea that today's conscripts are less willing to fight than those in 1940 is ludicrous. Neither wanted to fight and both were ignorant blobs / yobs.
The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction. That construct has not been slowly undermined by any determined wish for unity contrary to it on the part of the people living under the regimes which are yoked into that system. There is every indication that disrupting that system would lead to one party or another committing a nuclear holocaust, so therefore the balance of terror (including Putin's repression of Russians) must be preserved at all costs.
A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war. To use Venezuela as an example, the author says no one has tried to invade it (which is actually not even true, see below) but also the US has been imposing crippling sanctions for over 15 years in an attempt to…
So, not to come off as "these are good things" or anything, but you have to be able to see that "economic warfare" is preferable to "warfare warfare", right? It would obviously be better to have neither, but if I have to pick one, I know which one I'm going to pick, and I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize a switch from traditional warfare to economic warfare as "more peaceful" or even just "peaceful".
This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The predominant theory about this in international relations is hegemonic stability theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory - there have been several peri…
> Considering that the US was half of global GDP at the end of WW2 and has long been more than happy to sanction anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now), the modern era of "long peace" fits this theory pretty well. How often has the US been at not-war in that period?
This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The predominant theory about this in international relations is hegemonic stability theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory - there have been several peri…
you're actually saying that any war is OK as long as the USA starts it.
it's an expression of: "do as the USA tells you to do; do not do what the USA itself does"
the 'grown up view' is that there are trade-offs. the USA is an empire... I define the essence of an empire to be: a group of people from one place telling people from another place what to do. the most often thing they're told is to pay tribute (which by this point is part of a semi-obscure system of taxes, tariffs, technological transfers, and other hidden things)
This blog post has some curious blind spots that, if taken into account, negate most of its primary thesis about 'the long peace'. The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendatio…
"the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public. Surely they can list off any number of wars or other violent conflicts that happened recently. But the data here is actually quite strong (and we all know my attitude towards certainty on points of real uncertainty; this is not one of them) – violence has been falling worldwide for nearly 80 years, the fall has been dramatic and relatively consistent."
> standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak
"the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of"
There's an alternative view is that there was a long war essentially from the beginning of WW1 to the collapse of communism [0]. The so-called long peace also included the Korean War, the Vietnam war, various Arab-Israeli conflicts. I've seen it stated that there were only in fact a few days of peace in the entire 20C: the very brief period between Japan's surrender in August 1945 to the start of conflict that gradually ramped to the Vietnam war, when an Anglo/French force supported by rearmed Japanese took on the Viet Minh[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_P...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Vietnam_(1945–1946)
No, not just the general public; the 'long peace' is a hotly contested idea amongst academic and professional circles too. And, it's arguably a rather large amount of hand-wavey bullshit trying to paint certain nation states in a particular light and narrowly define 'war', 'peace', and 'violence'.
> I’ve discussed this before a few times, but I think Azar Gat is probably right to suggest that the long peace is itself a consequence of the changing incentives created by the industrial revolution and to an even greater extent, by nuclear weapons. Prior to the industrial revolution, war was the best way to get rich (if you won) because land and conquered subjects were so much more valuable than any kind of capital…
Honestly another thing I didn't like about this peace was the "Russian army is weak so maybe lots of other armies are weak" idea. That's the last thing we need the chickenhawks running DC to believe
This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The predominant theory about this in international relations is hegemonic stability theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory - there have been several peri…
This hegemony is not actually so different from all of the empires that came before it.