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Comment by jltsiren | Hacker News Reader

That "usually" was in a different world.

Before the industrial revolution, there was almost no sustained economic growth and business was essentially a zero-sum game. Wars of conquest were high-risk business ventures that promised higher returns than actual business.

Then the industrial revolution happened. Economic growth made business more lucrative, while wars got deeper into the negative-sum territory. Leaders were slow to understand that, which is why the 19th and 20th centuries saw a series of increasingly destructive wars that left almost everyone worse off.

But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive. But there have been plenty of lesser wars: civil wars, proxy wars, and wars against much weaker states. As well as regional wars, where at least one of the parties is so dysfunctional that it does not benefit from positive-sum business.

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> But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive.

People talked like that before WW I. There hasn't been a major war in Europe since 1870 almost half a century and trade is such a large war would bankrupt all the major powers and so would never happen. The Great Illusion was published in 1909 and was positively received at the time:

> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4][5] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[6] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[7] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay.

There was a major war between Russian and Ottoman empires in 1877–1878. And if you look outside Europe, there was an even greater war between Russia and Japan in 1904–1905.

These were small wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War

Smaller than the one in Ukraine today.

0.15% of world population was mobilized to fight in the Russo–Japanese war. That would correspond to ~12.5 million combatants today. Napoleon's invasion of Russia saw more casualties from combat, starvation, and disease, but it involved a smaller fraction of world population.

I assume you're going off the 1.365M + 1.2M combatant strength listed in the Wikipedia article?

Those are figures for the total size of those national armies at the time. It'd be like saying the Iran war involved 3M people because the U.S. has about 2.1M in uniform and Iran has just under 1M counting reservists. Meanwhile there've been precisely zero boots on the ground in Iran, and the total number of military personnel directly affected is on the order of tens of thousands.

The text of the article has the Russian far east strength at about 95,000 at the start of the war, with another 410,000 trained in over the course of the war. The best proxy for Japanese (and Russian) combat strength might be the Battle of Mukden [1], which had about 250K Japanese and 292K Russian troops. These numbers are smaller by a factor of about 5x.

The present-day Russo-Ukrainian war is significantly larger. Estimated Russian deaths are 500K+, higher than the total number of Russian soldiers involved in the Russo-Japanese war.

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

If you continue reading the article, it mentions that Russia had mobilized almost a million soldiers in the Far East by the end of the war, and that mobilization largely happened after the Battle of Mukden. Without the naval defeat at the Battle of Tsushima, Russia would have had the upper hand at that point, and the war would likely have reached a different conclusion.

Industrial armies were massive. By the standards of that era, current US military strength exceeds 60 million. But they mostly relied on reserves, which were slow to mobilize. Japan's quick decisive victories ended the Russo–Japanese war before it had a chance to escalate further, potentially reaching the scale of the Eastern Front in WW1. But even then, the Battle of Mukden was one of the largest land battles in history until that point

The biggest Thucydides Trap wars were WW1 and WW2, which happened specifically as Britain (the first major power to industrialize) lost its hegemony over industrialization and faced competition from Germany, Russia, Japan, the US, etc. Thirty years of some of the most brutal war the world has ever seen followed, which only ended with the U.S. re-establishing hegemony because it was the only one whose homeland hadn't been bombed into oblivion.

You're right that there have been no great-power wars in the last 80 years. That's about the timescale at which major hegemonic realignments occur: WW1/WW2 from 1914-1945 (England -> US), Napoleonic Wars from 1803-1815 (England -> France -> England), Nine Years War + Glorious Revolution + War of Spanish Succession from 1688-1715 (France -> England), European Wars of Religion from 1618-1648 which created the nation-state system.

But that just means that this is the first major hegemonic realignment after the development of nuclear weapons and drone swarms, which makes me fear for the survival of civilization a bit.

Fall of the Soviet union was also a major hegemonic realignment.

I don't know I have some hopes that maybe it'll play out more with economic tools.

Oh, and I don't think western alliances and trade relationships necessarily need to collapse. But Trump certainly tries :(

To some extent yes, but the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was never really as threatening as western propaganda made it seem. In basically all metrics that matter - population, GDP, military spending, technological advancement, etc. - the eastern bloc was a distant second to NATO. That makes its collapse far less disruptive to the world order than when the former hegemon falls.

In history 80 years is nothing.

But since the industrial revolution 80 years is something.

I hope it's a trend: but living in Europe right now, I do feel like our strongest ally are giving our enemies reason doubt the deterrence we've collectively built over the past 77 years.

We had to deploy armed troops to Greenland to deter an ally from invasion.

The deterrence to war we've spilled blood building for 77 years.

Economics is part of why we haven't had wars, collective deterrence probably had something to do with it too. Without NATO who is to say how many smaller nations Russia/USSR would have invaded for the fun of it.

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