The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities

The long post-war era of peace is due to a number of factors, but the one we don't talk about enough is that the U.S. spent untold trillions of dollars becoming a global police force. This may be the biggest factor. I believe it is certainly the prerequisite for any others to have had an effect.

The problem is that the U.S. has a tiger by the tail: if they want to continue in this role, they'll need to step up spending to cold war levels to have a chance of taking on China. This has a tremendous cost, culturally and economically.

If they don't, we'll see (as we are seeing) increased global disorder and rearmament by, for example, European and Asian powers. This will likely lead to more wars in the future.

One thing I am certain of: humans didn't just spontaneously become peaceful after WWII. Some energy is being expended to maintain what passes for global peace, and that energy will have to continue being expended for any conceivable time scale.

"Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case)."

While I don't advocate war and violence, I can't help think that such a hostile takeover of a poorly run country by another better run country can be perceived as creative destruction in capitalism. War is too costly now reassuringly, but the incentive of leaders to keep the country strong, economically as well as militarily, is much less. The fear of being wiped out by a neighbor may have kept leaders in check. Now that fear is gone, and nothing has replaced it yet. The optimist in me hopes that states abandon the pretense of being above markets. The fear we desire in those who run states, the fear that we hope will keep them in check, will be that of losing paying customers, their citizens, to other competitive jurisdictions.

lol, how presumptuous. I have visited China in 2007, before it turned authoritarian/dictatorship. I would not visit China again to support the dictatorship. I can visit any number of democratic countries like Taiwan.

I feel for those who don't get that they are supporting evil.

Btw, speaking of evil, China isn't giving up yet (Xi still have 10-20 years to live. free organ transplants from young Chinese, you know. high ranking politicians get them for free). It is producing destroyers at a massive rate, and will exceed # of destroyers that US has by 2040. Combined with the millions of disposable unemployed single young men, and there's still a chance that Taiwan would overwhelmed. and if Taiwan falls, the same strategy can be used to conquer Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia.

Man-made things are real! Finance is the lazy abstraction we use to represent "resources." Competition also does not exist for competitions sake, it exists as a result of multiple agents within a specific context engaging in activity that has "winners" and "losers" (this is not a great way to put this but I'm trying not to think too hard about the specific theoretical nuances of what competition _is_, but more what it's used _for_).

For sports, this context is highly constrained to whatever game is being played and so its impacts are limited to the scope of that game and those involved with its orchestration/spectacle (definitionally!).

On the other hand, global trade is unconstrained by a specific range of activity (there are states with laws that try and combat this but ultimately money is money). This is much closer in effect to the "real" physical violence of war. By controlling an entity financially, you control that entities ability to exist in a financial context and so when that world of finance becomes the dominant form of interaction you are effectively enacting violence upon and limiting the expression of that thing (i.e. the conquest and subjugation of people/land but with money instead of swords).

In contemporary hyper-reality it is a common mistake to ascribe "unrealness" to things like money or the internet, in such a way that we can box out their effects from our understandings. Then, when those systems are employed to reinforce and/or expand existing hierarchies that layer of smoke and mirrors is able to effectively divert attention away from their _very real_ impacts. At the same time they become both non-things and the backdrop on which everything else exists.

"Just turn off the computer"

"Just don't purchase exploitative things"

"Just do your own research"

[Ad infinitum...]

These bits of rhetoric shift the unfathomable inertia of Things™ onto the shoulders of the individual, be it a person, organization or state without recognition as to why that entity is doing the thing that it is doing in the context of everything else that is doing something around it.

There is probably already a term for it but this seems to itself be a kind of logical fallacy ("ex homine"?) that collapses the scale of a problem down to the decision of an individual. Thus it enters the scope of opinion and so is unreal and unworthy of discussion or understanding. Nuance and complexity are shunted away systemically because complex solutions and understandings do not engage well with efficiency. Because things that are economically efficient are those things which can be spread through economics, even the ideas around what it means to be economic can be distorted by this effect in such a way to detach people further and further from reality while assuring them that they are the only ones that _really_ understand how the world works (in "economic" terms). It is a battlefield that is at war with all other battlefields--and it is winning.

“Postulating” on the propaganda-ridden topic of a major European war isn’t worth much (approximately zero).