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You can't change that paradigm. Everything ultimately cashes out in force, unless you want to invent a new universe with new physics or something.

What usually happens nowadays, is that technology greatly increases the amount of force which can be cashed out for. The start of the Nuclear age was literally applying a "new" (heretofore not yet applied to war) physics.

Applying space forces actively to war could well be applying a new part of the universe to war. (Airplanes and submarines were also this.)

Ok. How does that change the paradigm? It’s still a use of force ...

In potentially the same way that nuclear weapons did. No one can "win" a nuclear exchange, unlike those who thought many of the previous non-nuclear large conflicts would be over quickly (both World Wars and the US Civil War come to mind). Nuclear weapons are still use of force, but provide deterrence in a way conventional forces can not.

But not _everything_. Is your city going to invade a neighboring city if it decides it wants a better property tax base?

the basic premise is that the bottom line for control is deadly force

Yes. That's actually enshrined in international law. Sovereignty is pretty much defined as whomever has enough force in that place to get their way.

the international operating mode is that serious conflicts are resolved with machines designed to destroy property and lives

CGP Grey puts it this way: Sovereignty == Bigger Army Diplomacy.

Actually that's not quite right. Sovereignty == Better Armed Forces with Sustainable Logistics Diplomacy.

Thank you so much for the introduction to CGP Grey. Watching 'The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

The line, "While you can call them all British it's not recommended as the four countries generally do not like each other." hooked me, I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Rest of my day is gone watching these videos, I'm down the rabbit hole.

Well Europe has figured out how to redirect all that energy into football so other paradigms are possible. Before that discovery they spent most of history killing each other every 3 months or so.

Europe is merely exchanging smaller governments for a bigger one; they have their peace (for now) but are slowly trading relatively local sovereignty for it. Yes, you can have a walled garden within which there is peace. Enjoy your walls, young Siddhartha.

I'm glad you brought Europe up. Because I think that maybe I didn't quite make my ultimate point.

Its true that Europeans used to fight each other much more. That's also true of most areas of the planet.

I think that for the main part you have Europeans working together now under NATO.

I believe that actually the most core reason for NATO is common genetic and ethnic heritage. In fact, to me the major global factions are essentially just ancient tribal disputes write large.

Now, this may make sense if you have a sort of 19th century Social Darwinistic pre-gentic-science eugenic worldview where human life has little value to you and each group is essentially an ant colony battling it out so that the greatest "subspecies" may procreate.

But we understand now that humans are humans. We have instantaneous global communications with increasingly effective translation systems. Our technology provides a relative abundance for much of the population.

Would it make sense for this paradigm of deadly force to apply to the people who live on your block? No, of course not. What about within your city? No. What about between the United States and Canada? It seems unlikely.

But if I bring up the example of the United States and Mexico? The idea that there might be mass killing to resolve conflicts would be much more palatable for many people unfortunately. And I think it comes down to ethnic and cultural differences. In other words, they have different family histories, look different, speak a different language.

We are a at new point, compared to those in the past thanks to the level of interconnectedness.

Its very hard to actually see how much things are connected until things break down and the connections reveal themselves.

Applying deadly force in such a context is much more unpredictable than in the past. Even though we have enough examples of what happens (Read Niall Fergusons the Square and the Tower) the scale of interconnectedness and interdependencies as massive.

Think of the 2008 financial crisis, nobody cared about the banks, they even let two fail but the chain reaction it set off scared the shit out of everyone. Finance Ministers and Federal Banks in ever corner of the world across all kinds of difference were all of a sudden guaranteeing matching safegaurds and stimulus packages. From Russia to India to China. Same story will repeat with any kind military conflict between say US and Mexico, the actual interdepedencies will reveal themselves beyond the legacy reasons for grouping such as language, culture etc. It's a delusion that the connections can be severed. And sooner or later people learn that the hard way. It's good for health in the long run.

That’s not true. Economic sanctions is the ultimate weapon these days. Look at Ukraine and Russia. Russia is now in its 5th year of sanction from EU and US and others. As a result, a withering economy and massive population outflow for Russia.

Also look at the effects of sanctions against Iran and Venezuela. Both are collapsing.

Imagine the effects of sanction on an economy as big as China.

If you owe the bank $10k, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $10b, you own the bank.

Sanctions against China would be fairly painful for the rest of the world, too.

Sanctions are always painful to both sides. But it's usually one coutry vs most of the rest of the world. Each country only cuts off ties with that one country, so the relative impact of that action is small. The sanctioned country has its ties cut off by most if not all trading partners, culminating negative effects and adding some synergies on top, yielding a big impact for that country.

> Each country only cuts off ties with that one country, so the relative impact of that action is small

Right... that's my point: the relative impact of cutting off ties to China would be pretty large, given that it's the worlds factory. They would be worse for China, but more painful for everyone else than existing sanctions.

Sanctions against Russia didn't have much impacts on European/US consumers.

Tariffs against China didn't have much impacts on European/US consumers.

You get the idea.

> Sanctions against Russia didn't have much impacts on European/US consumers.

Russia isn't an export/manufacturing powerhouse, unlike China. The one thing that Russia does export that EU consumers are about - oil & gas - isn't subject to sanctions.

> a withering economy [...] for Russia

The Russian economy is growing, not withering: "Although economic sanctions tightened, [...] Russian economy expanded at a 1.6 percent pace in the year just ended," - [1] (or [2] if you think rt.com is fake news).

> massive population outflow for Russia

It is true that Russia population is decreasing, although Poland, Germany, Hungary, Japan etc are decreasing even more [3]. It's hyperbolic to describe this as "massive".

[1] - https://www.rt.com/business/448357-russian-economy-grows-san...

[2] - http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2019/01/08/da...

[3] - https://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=24