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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that economic interdependence deserves the bulk of the credit for this relative peace. Tying the economic prosperity of nations together makes it harder to rationalise physical conflict.

But perhaps we can also thank global communications for making it that little bit harder (though still by no means impossible) to sufficiently otherise far away populations.

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> economic interdependence deserves the bulk of the credit for this relative peace.

That was the thesis of a book called The Great Illusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

The book argued a European war was very unlikely.

the economic interdependence between industrial countries would be "the real guarantor of the good behavior of one state to another", as it meant that war would be economically harmful to all the countries involved.

The book was published, to great acclaim, in... 1909.

The author could well have been right, but underestimated how much economic interdependence was required for his thesis to hold.

Oh, yes. I believe it was Francis Fukuyama who predicted that different regions of the world would specialize in producing specific products, trade would increase, and wars would decrease. Wars would decrease because of the DEPENDENCE of trade - BUT international sanctions would replace wars as the key piece to hold other countries in check.

We are seeing the US sanction other countries when they do things we don't like - and we are getting sanctioned in turn.

And nukes certainly limit large scale wars as well.

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