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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

War happens when one of two nations assumes that they are more capable of winning than another.

If you stop spending in the US and assume that Russia and China will sit idly by without invading our allies, you are living in a land of fantasy.

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> War happens when one of two nations assumes that they are more capable of winning than another.

That’s only part of the equation - said country needs to have a desire or need to go to war as well.

Indeed. Look at the US immediately after WW2.

Huge power imbalance between USA (sole holder of all nuclear arms), and the rest of the world.

So ... yeah, kinda proves your point.

Nuclear weapons were developed by the Soviets before the end of the 40's, so it was a very narrow window where the US was the sole holder of all nuclear arms (about five years).

Five years is an eternity though. The major factor was more likely we didn't have the capacity to produce a large number of nuclear weapons to tip the balance

> Nuclear weapons were developed by the Soviets before the end of the 40's

Developed/stolen.

It's definitely a land of fantasy today, I agree but one can always hope that maybe one day instead of killing each other we'd learn to live together and work together. Imagine how much more productive we'd be. To be honest I nearly didn't post this message because it's a bit off topic and definitely divisive. I definitely support all the brave people fighting for me to be safe because I sure as hell wouldn't feel comfortable killing someone else myself to protect my "country".

Looking at human history, that will never happen. As long as there is scarcity in the world, and as long as sovereign states exist, geopolitics and thus the looming threat of war will always exist.

Perhaps with that attitude. There's a lot of amazing things humans have accomplished that were once thought impossible. We are likely very, very early on in the anthropocene. Thousands of years from now I'm optimistic that the world will be a better place and that they'll look back on us as barbaric environment destroyers.

Either that, or the one-eyed cannibal mutants will keep our descendants in fattening pens.

Kumbaya, m-fer.

judging by recent political events in the UK and the US combined with the level of obesity and overconsumption in these nations I'd say we're already there

I don't buy that history is a good guide for the future here. All but the most recent history was in an era where we couldn't talk to eachother without physically travelling for weeks/months. The nature of diplomacy, politics, countries, and war have all fundamentally changed. The world has not "settled into" a new steady-state since those changes have been made (partially because significant changes are still happening).

You could reasonably extrapolate from bodies like the EU and think there is a chance we end up with a single global order that doesn't include war in the future.

That said I think you can look at the current and say with some confidence that there are at least a few wars left - there are too many current armed conflicts, and too many threats of armed conflict, to seriously believe otherwise.

> You could reasonably extrapolate from bodies like the EU and think there is a chance we end up with a single global order that doesn't include war in the future.

How, precisely, does one extrapolate from the EU (of all places) to a one world government? The variation across the world in everything from cultural and religious norms to even technical approaches to solving problems is extreme, and it has been like this since forever. The genesis of the EU seems, in my view, an evolution of American dominance of the continent after WWII. Is that what you mean? Further American influence tends to encourage (or coerce) countries into further integration?

I’d put the odds of any of that happening on a global scale at approximately zero, because there actually have been globe spanning empires in the past (multiple iterations, in point of fact), and they all collapsed or shed their empires when it became clear ruling it was no longer in the interest of the Sovereign or the Subjects.

Who said anything about an empire? That is obviously not going to work and is not what the EU is.

The EU is far from perfect but is an early iteration of a workable model. I can’t see this happening even in somewhere with a pretty similar societal model as the US currently as the political siuation is so polarised.

That would require the introduction of negative interest on cash and land value taxes including a citizen's dividend.

This makes no sense. Using this logic, why don’t more countries attack, say Costa Rica, which doesn’t even have a military?

I think the OP probably doesn’t have a problem with actual defense projects, but if you’ve been paying any attention over the last 70 years, you will know that the US has attacked many countries under the guise of “defense”.

> Using this logic, why don’t more countries attack, say Costa Rica, which doesn’t even have a military?

You might want to read up on the "Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance". Essentially, "the rest of the Americas".

That mostly works because the set of potential aggressors is small. (Nicaragua and Panama). OK, fine, the US might want to, but they're close enough partners that they don't need to.

> they're close enough partners that they don't need to

I think that might be the crux of what GP was getting at. There's more to it than the ability to win (and in a hopeful dreamy world, I'd wish we can all get to the state where collaboration is always the obvious better choice, but that's obviously at least a few hundred years off... something to strive for, though)

To the US, "winning" is basically defined as having access to local resources (including workers) at market rates without the responsibility of governing.

AKA -- free trade. Global free trade exists because the US wants it to. In that sense, it's currently winning/won. The size of the US military and economy (and it's close allies) are largely what enforces that world order.

Personally, I think it's better than the old model of imperialism (it's certainly way less violent and has rapidly increased living standards across the globe). But it's still a case of the big powerful countries enforcing their will on smaller countries.

Free trade lives on the back of enormous military spending. Particularly commercial shipping lanes are protected by the power of the US Navy.

The past few years have seem drastically reduced US Naval spending, particularly on the protection of commercial shipping (the shipping and military news sites are almost ready to agree that the US Navy has abandoned this part of the mission entirely). Under Obama's administration we balked at protecting the commercial fishing rights of our allies in the Philippines and it's expected that this kind of policy in reaction to Chinese aggression in SEA will continue.

Then COVID hit us and we might actually see a real unravelling or the last 60 years of global economic policy.

This means that we should probably expect more conflict rather than less.

Because Costa Rica has agreed to act as a client state of the US and is protected as long as they do what the US government says.

> "This makes no sense. Using this logic" ...

I was almost-directly quoting the co-founder of Anduril.

> why don’t more countries attack, say Costa Rica, which doesn’t even have a military?

Because of the Monroe Doctrine [1], which has been applied in some form or another for the past couple of hundred years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine

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