Are we heading for World War Three?
theweek.com
theweek.com
It's an unpopular opinion on HN which is US-based, but the US is being forced towards a terminal lack of diplomacy by two doctrines: "US Exceptionalism" and the "Wolfowitz Doctrine".
And the US of 2023 is not the US of 1942. The outcome is inevitable.
The risks are primarily of 3 scenarios spiraling out of control:
A. India attacks Pakistan. Like Likud, India's government is full of crazy BJP war hawks.
B. Putin's power were threatened. His view is that Ukrainian aid is waning and the Hamas attack takes attention away, so he feels pretty safe for now.
C. China attacks Taiwan. Xi is an arrogant autocrat, expanding neocolonial with Belt and Road Initiative, and believe they own the South China Sea. I don't see how this could end without either China obliterating Taiwan manufacturing base or a wider exchange.
Furthermore, it's far more relatively "tolerable" by the international order to diffusely level areas by continual conventional munitions accomplishing similar end results of nuclear detonations: widespread destruction. So why broach an unthinkable red line when there's an equivalent substitute?
I have belief in MAD and self-preservation are the ultimate deterrents when leaders aren't suicidal.
I also believe MAD serves a purpose to prevent future conventional World Wars. Denuclearization, while aspirationally wonderful, would counterintuitively make the world less safe because the average person doesn't understand what actually keeps them safe: a strong military.
The US could get by on 1/3 the amount of defense spending. It's spending way, way too much on boondoggles, pork projects, and the MIC's revolving door of generals and defense contractors.
Why would I think that current events are different in some fundamental way?
On the other hand, Ukraine feels different to me for some reason and seems tied to broader territorial ambitions, which wasn't exactly the case before because the territory was put in place in WWII. There was Afghanistan etc but that didn't have the domino implications of NATO.
The Soviet state also seemed more stable to me than the current megalomaniac plutocracy.
China also didn't have the same presence it does now. There's more big players in some ways.
On the other hand, for awhile there in the past there were nuclear drills in classrooms, and it was for a reason.
I don't really see WWIII happening soon but if things continue to escalate everywhere it seems reasonable to wonder about it. People wondered then too.
They are different in a sense US Empire and its vassals are starting to lose wars and influence, so westerners started noticing these events as negative. Previously, they didn’t care.
"We did not lose! It was a tie!"
The Non-Western axis has been turning up the heat, there's been something like 8 or 9 coups in Africa since 2020 plus more coup attempts, there was the Myanmar coup in 2021 you've got troop build up along the Serbia-Kosovo border, you've got fighting again in Azerbaijan and Armenia, and now Israel and Hamas. I expect more and more of these coups and conflicts will arise in the coming year or two as the Non Western powers try to stretch Western military resources.
The future historians will consider the true start to be whenever a NATO country is officially drawn into one of the fights, the same way the UK and France were drawn in to the conflict in WW2 after Poland was invaded.
I don't have high confidence that what the situation feels like based on the media that is readily available to me accurately reflects reality. Especially when it comes to international relations. There's always news about how the sky is falling.
I honestly haven't followed the various conflicts around the world closely enough over the years to trust any gut evaluation I could make of the current situation vs, say, the conflicts in Syria, Afganistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, just to make a few, from the last few decades.
These conflicts are terrible, but what that actually means to the international community on the order of years is non-trivial and far from self evident AFAICT
I wonder if there is a similar firewall of sanity between Putin and nukes. I mean, at some point he's goin' down. Isn't he?
With all due respect to the "leading academic", this is one of the most stupid things I read this year. But then I read this:
> Although no state is openly attempting to automate its nuclear weapons systems, “integrating AI with command systems seems promising and even unavoidable”, said Peter Rautenbach from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
What about the Perimeter/Dead Hand system from the Soviet Union/Russia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
But that open conflict has not started yet and current flareups may still resolve (they aren’t the first), so no not really.
It hasn’t started until it’s started.
Alternatively and even more twisted, I could see someone scapegoating a runaway AI to start the conflict - "it wasn't us that attacked first, it was the AI malfunctioning, we're the good guys but they won't listen to us so we have to fight them now"
One side wins. Takes it all. We who are remaining adapt.
At some point we must enter the middle or end game.
Yes, Iran, Russia and China in particular have broad geopolitical aspirations that they have not been able to achieve with money and influence, ie. China's innocuous Belt and Road, Russia's imperial conflicts, support of the alt-right and misinformation campaigns and Iran's ever-lasting war on Israel. They now chose to leverage with the West by prying on Western aversion to armed conflict. But bullying, hacking and horrific terrorist acts are no foreplay to WWIII.