Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war
economist.com
economist.com
However, countries more open to global trade have a higher probability of war because multilateral trade openness decreases bilateral dependence to any given country.
Using a theoretically-based econometric model, we test our predictions on a large dataset of military conflicts in the period 1948-2001. We find strong evidence for the contrasting effects of bilateral and multilateral trade. Our empirical results also confirm our theoretical prediction that multilateral trade openness increases more the probability of war between proximate countries. This may explain why military conflicts have become more localized and less global over time.”
http://econ.sciences-po.fr/sites/default/files/martinp/CEPR-...
But I'd argee that China does not feel the same pressure that Germany felt by the time... And Russia didn't enter the analysis at all. Times are very similar, but they are also quite different, depends on how one looks at it.
Anyway, I'm hating to see what I think at the headlines of the mainstream press. I tought it was bad when they ignored all the problems, but it's worse when they acknoledge them.
But I've always strongly thought the "globalisation will make war unthinkable" argument is naive. We're tribal creatures -Nationalism trumps economic interest at the end of the day. History shows this to be true.
As the author hinted at - Russia, Germany, Britain, Belgium, and France were each other's biggest trading partners - by far! Heck, a Belgium company built both the Belgium fortifications... and the German artillery that eventually breached them!
Nowadays, the entire world is trading... but Europe in 1914 was a good example of this principle applying continent-wide.
Convince society the other side is evil and a threat; dismiss and degenerate the peace-mongers as unpatriotic... and economic interest be damned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire
http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-china-leases-farmland/2...
Yeah like 3 small states in Africa almost by accident.
To compare to a "real" colonial empire take a look at the Spanish empire at peak, or the British empire around WWI, or the French colonial empire, or the Russian empire, the Dutch empire...
Needs a sense of scale. The Russian Empire around 1900 was the 3rd largest empire in history, something like 1/8th of a billion people. German colonial population from the linked wiki article before WWI, 23 thousand.
Indeed, the same applies to several other European "powers". Also some European nations had quite extensive overseas colonies while not really being military powers (e.g. Belgium and Holland). For that matter. Russia had no colonies that I know of.
There are some name game disagreements where Germany wanted to pretend to be in the colonialism game despite a totally laughable achievement level (a hundred years ago it was considered cool, not like now at all) and Russia ran the provinces of its empire much like Britain ran its colonies, other than the ocean in the middle, look at Finland for an example. Or the name game that modern world trade is not called colonialism.
So the argument that we can't have a WW3 because we have world trade, is incorrect because at WW1 time they had almost the same thing but called it colonialism and everyone but Germany was heavily into it and that didn't help prevent war very much (and yes yes OK OK Germany achieved the most pitiful level of colonialism of all the European powers, not none at all, but it rounded to zero compared to every other European power)
I also agree that deeper cultural understanding can only help, not hurt. I particularly wish all 7 billion of us had the opportunity to spend a year traveling the globe and live with different peoples.
I interpret history as "nationalism used to trump economic interests". A lot of has changed since. Most countries are representative democracies, and it's more difficult for leaders to go into a war.
As for the tribal argument, I think the "nation state" is dying. Tribes are subcultures these days[1]. The internet connects me to my subcultures (like Hacker News), and it matters less every year what country I happen to physically live in. There's also the argument that the world is more united these days (particularly thanks to the European Union and somewhat because of United Nations).
1. http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So...
I agree representative democracies are far less likely to go to war. I also don't think war is likely anytime in the present era. On the other hand, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are not representative democracies. They represent a fair portion of earth's landmass, population, and potential destructive power. I'd say the trend towards democracy has already peaked, and authoritarian governments are on the rise.
>As for the tribal argument, I think the "nation state" is dying.
I think we have very different worldviews on this subject, so a debate isn't going to be productive. But from where I'm coming from, it's easy to be idealistic when we're living in a golden age of peace and prosperity (despite the great recession). I'm more pessimistic about humanity in times of scarcity, disasters, and conflict.
> There's also the argument that the world is more united these days (particularly thanks to the European Union and somewhat because of United Nations).
I truly hope post-WWII institutions like these continue to have force for as long as possible. I think the world is safe from major war as long as this continues. But eventually, be it 50 years or 500 hundred years, they will fall.
To the extent that you could make such an argument "these days", you could make an even stronger argument for the same thing at almost any time in the past history of the U.S.
That maybe was true before, when the "democracy" craftsmanship wasn't mastered well enough. Now, I'll never bet against a government's ability to sway, at least for a while, the public perception in whatever direction, no matter how misplaced it might be. And to start a war, "for a while" is all it takes! ...Saddam's WMD?
"I think the "nation state" is dying."
Reality check - ask the Palestinians why do they want so bad a "palestinian" state when there already is an Israeli one in place? Or for that matter ask a Jew the the same question - is it that important to have an Israeli state?
There's not really a lot of evidence that representative democracies are any less likely to go to war than otherwise similarly-situated nations with different government forms.
Drop the Naturalistic Fallacy, please, and the.... damn.
Is there some actual name for the particular fallacy of predictive sociology being invoked when someone says, "People will do X because it's human nature to do X!"?
Which fortifications are you talking about?
The Germans used Krupp and Skoda siege guns to reduce the fortifications at Liège. Krupp was a German company, and Skoda was an Austro-Hungarian company based in Bohemia (today's Czech Republic).
Most of what I know of WWI I learned from Guns of August :)
On the other hand, as the article says, people in 1914 were making similar claims about the interdependence of their economies and their new technologies.
Still, it's quite a different situation.
Also, China makes most of the world's everyday stuff, I don't see how they would drop all those customers for a war that would bring in less profits and will leave them starving afterwards (cause no one would trust them with their factories anymore). The pre-WW1 trade ties were peanuts compared to today...
I wonder about the next 10 years or so and whether the US will rebound and China will finally face challenges they can't simply overcome via spending.
http://qz.com/160091/china-puts-out-yet-another-credit-marke... "China’s highly-leveraged and opaque financial system ranks high on the list of threats to global growth"
Or this that shows the recent problems: http://qz.com/72487/shadow-banking-brought-america-to-its-kn...
Finally this two days ago in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/business/international/chi...
"Official bank lending has more than doubled since the global financial crisis, growing nearly twice as fast as the overall economy. The even bigger problem, however, appears to come from the rise of a shadow banking system that has allowed a number of companies and individuals, often with political connections, to borrow from state-controlled banks at low interest rates and relend the money at much higher rates to private businesses desperate for credit at almost any price."
Point being, you can find 'analysts' on every side of this particular argument, and unless you're an intellectually dishonest ideologue the best thing to do is to look at the facts and read their analyses critically.
I'm pretty sure one can find a similar quotation from 1913.
I guess that those predictions are based more on wishful thinking than anything else.
I guess the biggest potential problem would be China, but do they really have any allies for their side that would cause a "world war"? Seems to me like if they started anything, then it would be them against the entire west, and as long as we don't feel compelled to invade them, they don't have a lot of power eh can project.
A U.S.-China conflict would shoot decades of progress in the head.
Logistical value perhaps, for example by denying the U.S. the bases they currently have there, but certainly not for resources?
Now to the story. I can see the parallels to the run up to WW1 however there is one large difference. In WW1 there was no real dominate military power (i.e. has complete unmatched and overwhelming force). The fact is that the US military so overmatches everyone else that it would be a very short war. Blood and a mess but still very short.
You may wish to read up on attitudes immediately prior to WWI. And there were three dominate military powers at the start of WWI, Germany the land empire able to call up 5M men in days, Russia with infinite manpower but so logistically messed up they never get to use them, and the British Navy dominated the waves, which was a pretty big deal as this was toward the end of the colonial era (although Germany didn't get to play colonialism which was arguably part of the problem)
Seriously, the franco prussian war was only a couple months adn the protoGermans won decisively. They really did expect to be done, one way or another, by winter time.
WW3 will probably be something like NK implodes and tries to blow up SK and .jp along with it (australia?), and China and "the west" argue very forcibly about who will dominate the area in a post-NK, perhaps post-SK and post-.jp world. At least if I was writing an Alt Hist type novel thats where I'd generally go.
I certainly wouldn't want to live in Seoul if (when?) that comes to pass but wouldn't be too worried even in Japan - it's a good 1000km, and I don't think NK has the tech to get much precision at those distances. Certainly they don't have stealth missiles which would be able to evade JP's considerable number of aegis equipped vessels. They could likely do some damage but I doubt it would be catastrophic.
As for Australia, I wouldn't be worried at all - that's well into ICBM territory, a whole different technological level and NK have never demonstrated anything even close. Not to mention Hawaii is actually closer to Pyongyang than Sydney - if they really can lob missiles ~8000km, why not go for the Great Satan himself?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sleepwalkers-Europe-Went-1914/dp/0...
My comments on the effects of military power come from first hand experience.
An all out war against a powerful nation that could hit back would be far less restrained.
Modern (21st century) war in a semi-modern (early 20th century or earlier) vein would be hard to predict for a great many reasons. But thinking that the equation would work out the same seems pretty dicey to me.
that is the current post-colonial (post-WWI) framework of "independent sovereign nations". This framework starts to show its limitations in dealing with a host of transnational/transcontinental/global issues. Global warming in particular comes to mind. As usually, either framework will get adapted or it will rupture into a new WW, and the new framework will result after it, like it happened after previous WWs.
With regard of mutually assured destruction - this would assure that the war will be fought outside of populated areas, i.e. nobody is going to nuke each others cities (Walmart will still be importing and selling Chinese manufactured goods as sinking the container ships isn't a necessary part of fighting of the modern war for either side :). WWI was new kind of war - trenches. WWII - motorized. WWIII - precision and automated weapons, drones fighting drones.
how about stealth supersonic self-landing on aircraft carrier satellite networked drones? Not that i doubt Chinese military or economical might, especially those of tomorrow, it is just they still have some distance to go.
Japan's utility is not only as a strategic launchpad. It also represented, in 2012, $216 billion in trade [1]. That is a $5.5 trillion asset when discounted at the U.S. 30-year rate.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_par...
Aside from the obvious diplomatic ally stuff. Our other diplomatic allies would make sure we don't leave Japan hang.
One minor problem is that stretch of water between Japan and China, of course. At this point in their military development, an invasion of Taiwan would be ridiculous much less the Japanese home islands. In a couple decades Taiwan might be toast, but its still another order or two of magnitude to invade Japan.
Consider WW1, in which most of the major belligerants, except for Tsarist Russia, have a plausible case for being called democratic. You might try to exclude one country or another, to save the Democratic Peace. But then you've got to be very careful about that: you can very easily add enough conditions until virtually no states until the 1970s were democratic, which gives you a small sample that coincides with an era when all states, democratic or not, have been relatively peaceful.
It also doesn't have a strong causal explanation for why it'd be the case. Democracies certainly aren't less violent in general: they don't have any issues fighting with autocracies. There's even evidence that weak or developing democracies, like Meiji Japan in the 1890s or the United States in the 2000s, actually are more violent than comparable states.
Most Democratic Peace theorists don't really offer anything more powerful than "the US/UK axis and its allies don't go to war with each other." Which is true, but uninteresting.
The Austro-Hungarian empire was also ruled by a hereditary monarch who was in charge of war and foreign policy.
I admit it's all a bit hand-wavy, but wasn't there a huge difference in nature between the likes of UK and France vs Germany, Austia-Hungary, and the Ottomans?
I wouldn't want this to become a tit for tat about who was the real democracy in the war: I'm perfectly happy to say that every participant fell far short of democracy. But the democratic peace folks are making a seemingly predictive, scientific claim using a really fuzzy and emotionally laden term like democracy that's easy to bend to mean whatever you like.
If there's something that's meant beyond my "US/UK and their allies don't fight each other" idea, I'm all for hearing it out. What are some of the countries considered democracies by the democratic peace proponents that aren't in that alliance and seem not to have been in a war with that alliance due to the fact that they're democratic and not autocratic?
I do concede that there it isn't inherently an error to say one country is more democratic than another, and that the Ottomans and Austria Hungary clearly end up on the losing side of that comparison.
Germany had tiered suffrage until the 1918 revolution.
"This distribution meant that a first-class vote had 17.5 times the value of a third-class vote." and "... one result of which was that the industrialist Alfred Krupp was the only person able to vote for the electors in the first class in Essen."
You wouldn't imagine a civil war amongst a homogenous culture. I wonder if the Parliamentarians/Royalists or the Unionists/Confederates were more culturally different than the Anglosphere cultures are today.
Problems:
1) Cultural attitude of "eh, war is not so bad and higher tech means we'll be home by xmas". See franco-prussian war and the most recent "world war" being Napoleon's activities in the decade after the revolution a century ago. I'm not seeing much warmongering as a cultural phenomena. Of course that can change quickly, 90% of everything Americans see is from 5 media companies or whatever, so they can turn on a dime.
2) Germany surrounded by rapidly growing and arming enemies and no allies but Austria, paranoid lash out. But can you blame them? China surrounded by, um, Japan on one side? Is NK threatening to invade? Who exactly is supposed to invade China next decade if they don't invade today? Why would they be paranoid? Yes, maybe NK could try this scheme, but...
3) The root cause of the war being the ottoman empire decaying and almost dead and everyone wanted a lucrative piece of it. (edited to add, and no one wanted a competitor to get a piece of it, and willing to go to war to prevent it) Incredible trade opportunity. Maybe if you put the American Empire in its place and position this in the latter half of the 2000s century and starving people want our rice/corn? Anyway the sick man of Europe lead to crazy allegiance switching in the years prior to WWI.
4) The article skipped several points WRT the German/British alliance thing, Germany was a continental Army power and the UK had a spectacular navy. One nutcase admiral on the German side got them all into navy building leading to disaster WRT the natural alliance. Other than the crazy admiral (Tirpitz?) they were natural allies and their royalty were related, something crazy close like the Kaiser was Queen Victoria's grandson or something. Aside from the obvious trade issue that was brought up.
5) The dangers of multiculturalism. Austrian Empire was a multicultural nightmare basically think conditions in modern Iraq, no majority and everyone hates everyone and the only thing holding it together is a strong empire. Then the independent Serbians start going nuts so to prevent revolution spreading into their own empire the Austrian's fight the Serbians and the game is on. So, uh, who is the nervous feeling multicultural empire with the neighbor in revolution? Gonna try for USA again? Maybe with a .MX revolution next door? I think this is stretching it.
6) Speaking of revolution, Russia was falling apart internally and didn't do so well externally against the Japanese but holy cow do they have resources and manpower, so what better external distraction than a war? Again, I'm just not seeing it. Another allusion to the USA?
7) Who plays the part of Italy? Decades of "we're your ally" "nope just kidding". Another allusion to the USA maybe WRT having Japan's back?
Note if you have the USA play all the parts of WWI then its not much of a WWI anymore, is it?
In groups men are by nature irrational not rational, there is nothing inconsistent with the old quote about WWI being impossible because its obviously futile, yet they had a war anyway. I'm sure WW3 would be completely futile, we'll still have it anyway, but I don't think it'll be this decade and USA vs China or whatever.
Although, as a nitpick, I'd reword "the dangers of multicultalism" as "rising nationalism that made old political boundaries obsolete". The Austrian Empire worked well enough for hundreds of years... until it's various peoples started identifying more and more with their language and ethnicity.
The problem was not the core of the empire, but the states it occupied and annexed with force in it's last few decades, which were not in any way assimilated or integrated into the empire itself.
In the U.S., perhaps not. But nationalism and remilitarisation are flaring up in China and Japan, respectively.
Who exactly is supposed to invade China next decade if they don't invade today?
China, with good reason, perceives itself as being surrounded by U.S.-allied countries looking to suppress its growth. Since growth is the currency the Communist Party trades for its seat of power, this is a potentially existential issue to the elite.
The root cause of the war being the ottoman empire decaying and almost dead and everyone wanted a lucrative piece of it.
The American Pacific alliance would be a loose analogue today. China may think it can establish a suzerainty over, say, the Phillipines, betting the U.S. will balk at another costly intervention.
The Economist's point isn't that we're going to have a war in a mold of WWI - all the seats need not be filled. It's simply warning that while we're watching the S&P 500 soar to record heights on the back of booming productivity and resurgent globalisation we shouldn't ignore the fireworks that are playing out over a handful of unmanned islands in the East China Sea.
Bear in mind that the US has been fighting wars against far weaker opponents for over sixty years now, and on the whole doing quite poorly. If any country ought to not be warmongering...
That is only natural.
The democratic peace theory (see Wikipedia) seems to work, not even USA have wars with democracies but with really unpleasant dictatorships.
With the dictators that have nuclear weapons, you had (have) MAD as in "Mutually Assured Destruction". Not even USA starts a war. Which is why every torturing, murdering and stealing junta wants nukes...
The dictators without nukes come in two flavors. With oil -- or really poor, which implies weak military. (The juntas with oil tend to be corrupt, so no good military either. Iran might be partly an exception.)
The open question here is what happens with China and democracy when the GNP/capita goes up a bit more.
There's no evidence that the government of north vietnam was worse than the organized crime cartel the US backed in the south (that had monks immolating themselves in the streets in protest against them). The US also backed Saddam Hussein against Iran, overthrew a left-wing but democratically elected government in Chile and replaced it with a brutal dictatorship. Castro, for that matter, was no worse than they guys he overthrew. The US repeatedly helped quash popular uprisings in aouth america to help out corporate interests. The US was vetoing sanctions against South Africa as late as 1988.
Oh, and check out our awesome middle eastern ally Saudi Arabia.
Learn some freaking history.
Most of those games also went away with the cold war.
An irrelevant question about your claims:
I don't know about Cuba's number of political prisoners, executions at revolution time, control of information, police state mentality. It might be less bad than the previous junta, but it is worst in the Americas now since the other unpleasant juntas disappeared... Afaik, the south Vietnam regime was horribly corrupt but can it really be worse than a communist place?! (Is that ideology? Do you have references?)
Communism isn't worse than anything no matter how bad. It's hard to determine how bad some of the less nasty communist regimes such as Cuba and Vietnam would have been without massive economic sanctions from the US. (Both Cuba and Vietnam wanted to be US allies.)
There are several cases among my examples of the US taking action against real democracies.
Some references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South...
I asked for examples after the cold war (stupid of me to feed the trolls).
You don't have anything relevant here either, so you list cases that are 40+ years old...
This is a common pattern -- you can excuse anything (including burning food on the stove) with that a bad dictator had common interests with USA 50+ years ago...
It is seriously funny when left wingers blame that all communist countries are dictators on USA.
As I noted already, the non-communist dictators in that part of the world are gone since a long time. So Batiste would almost certainly be gone too. If Cuba implemented human rights, left governments in West Europe would take care of them.
>>Communism isn't worse than anything no matter how bad.
Oh my, I hope you are trolling.
I've seen this before. If I e.g. mention millions of dead repeatedly, you will do a "no true scotsman" variant. Or some more strange logic. I know the QED anyway, all the dead are USAs fault...
Enough.
And having done this you've declared "enough".
Well played.
Incidentally, I love the US and happen to live here. I simply wish the US would stop making really foolish decisions that waste blood and treasure on idiotic adventures which harm its standing in the world. I certainly don't think that any other power, either historical (e.g. the USSR) or speculative (e.g. China or India) is likely to do a better job, or be any "nicer" than the US has been thus far. But we can always do better, and the way to do better is to recognize past mistakes.
You wrote this weird garbage:
>>Communism isn't worse than anything no matter how bad.
That is typical left wing dishonesty, motivated with some Western country (usually USA) being dependent on and cooperating with an unpleasant dictator that is opressive and/or did mass murders.
If you have some other way of explaining that (drugs?), please do.
>>You've also skillfully defeated arguments I have not made (e.g. blaming millions of deaths or lack of democracy in communist countries on the US).
See previous paragraphs. You also wrote this:
>> It's hard to determine how bad some of the less nasty communist regimes such as Cuba and Vietnam would have been without massive economic sanctions from the US.
I can only read that as: "These enslaving juntas would have implemented human rights if it weren't for USA". Stupid.
Also see the debate history:
You changed the subject from war to realpoilitik complaints (which all countries do and lie about). It was stupid of me to comment on that and asking for examples post Cold War (which you didn't acknowledge you lack). Then you got weird (see above).
But ok, you might just lack a clue and not be a troll.
Read it as "communism is not automatically worse that any other possibility you can think of". E.g. compare Cuba under Castro with Germany under Hitler. The latter was obviously worse, simply because Castro did not initiate any genocides. That does not mean Castro is good, just that his stated ideology does not automatically place his regime in the "worst" category - there have been too many really nasty regimes for that.
This is assuming and accepting a right wing interpretation of "communism" to begin with.
> I can only read that as: "These enslaving juntas would have implemented human rights if it weren't for USA". Stupid.
Then your imagination is rather poor.
There are many reasons to think that overall suffering in these countries would have been less, even if the political restrictions might have remained the same. But even that is too simplistic. Castro went to the US first, including a "PR tour" where he was unable to get a visit with anyone senior in the White House. He was rebuffed over the issue of nationalisation that affected US interests, and first then did he walk into the open arms of the Soviets. It took a further several years before his party added "Socialist" to his name, and officially started adopting Soviet terminology.
Similarly, Ho-Chi-Mihn was a nationalist first, who looked to the US as a model for Vietnamese independence, and who appealed to Woodrow Wilson for support for Vietnamese independence.
It was first when this failed that Ho was radicalised further, but even then he largely held on to a nationalist outlook for a long time, while turning to socialist groups for support. Despite his radicalisation, which eventually lead to becoming one of the founder of the French communist party, and an official of the Comintern, during World War II he was supported by the US OSS in fighting the Vichy French and Japanese occupation forces.
But after the war, US support again disappeared when France attempted to re-occupy the country, and he saw no other alternative but to expand warfare and eventually fight those he originally hoped would be the guarantors of a free, independent Vietnam,.
This is a common thread with many of the revolutionary groups over the last century, who have first turned to the US or other democratic countries for support, found that they as groups are "inconvenient" because the dictatorships they oppose or opposed were often considered safer partners, and who have then instead turned elsewhere.
You even see it with the ANC in South Africa, which had an extremely tight relationship with the SACP (South African Communist Party) that deepened as Cuba provided assistance as well as intervened militarily in the South African puppet states of Angola and Namibia. ANC received support from that camp for decades while the West still provided extensive support and/or trade to the Apartheid regime. It would not have taken much for SA to have ended up taking a similar turn to Cuba or Vietnam.
A vast number of these regimes would either have looked very different, or even been open to extensive concessions to the West if "our" governments had been at all concerned with supporting democracy movements rather than propping up convenient trading partners or regimes they saw as strategic partners against the Soviets or Chinese.
Real USA warmongering would sound like, "We're gonna invade Canada and take all the maple syrup as our manifest destiny or we'll die trying".
Even the attitude of the Italian-Ethiopian war would be more hard core than the USA now.
Depressingly, our war mongering looks more like serving an arrest warrant in Detroit than being in a world war. Militarization of cops is the depressing part.
To be fair, however, it often seems that USA military failures are more often due to terrible strategy than poor tactical capacity. I.e., many tactical units can achieve operational objectives that would be impressive in any military. It is the bloated, inept layer of general staff that weighs down the whole structure. But that's really just a reflection of the culture: look at any USA corporation.
"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects witch actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerity's for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise."
We have not moved on from 1917. The US seeks out war for fun and profit. Peace is a disaster for the military industrial complex, war, or at least the preparation for war, has to be perpetuated. Militarism is the cancer at the heart of almost every government, most notably the USA. Even Carter wasn't able to inoculate it. Although most Americans don't want war - it is not cultural - those people in Washington want nothing more for the exact same reasons Sassoon described.
I am not sure if there was ever a time when warmongering was looked upon more casually than today, and that is valid especially in U.S. considering the tolerant attitude toward violence in movies, video games, etc. So I would say it is exactly that, a cultural phenomena. (You'd need to look at it from outside your cultural frame if it is not obvious as it is). I'm not saying that it entirely specific to a culture though. There is a shift in how things are handled in an armed conflict that contributes to the perception of war. Before, war meant one's personal physical exposure (as a fighting soldier) whereas now that is becoming increasingly less so. Human soldiers today are needed not so much for tactical combat, but as an interacting human agent in the war zone (e.g. acting police for occupied civilian population).
All it takes is USA joining a war due to defensive alliances with either japan or south korea. Then assume Russia joins the war on the other side, or already has joined it. Exactly what incentive do the European countries have to join such a war? They certainly wouldn't have any obligation (since Nato is also a defensive pact), and it would be a stupid idea to open a land front against Russia, because most of such a war would be fought on home turf due to Russia having more projective ability compared to Europe.
Sure, Europe would probably eventually win such a war on sheer size of population and economies, but it would be a very very costly war.
Russia is a variable because of its economic and political issues. It would be a wise strategy by the West to insure investors and promote massive business investments in Russia to deepen economic and trade ties.
Starving people don't make war; they have more pressing problems.
History never happens the same way twice, the article is more a warning that the wrong spark in the wrong place could lead to chain of events resulting in a war between US and China whatever their intentions, just as the assassination of an Austrian by a Serb in Bosnia led to Britain (and eventually the US) into a war with Germany 100 years ago.
Details are details. Similar scenarios unfolded thousand years ago if you're willing to ignore enough details.
A nation will always rise, leads through military power, and slowly fall, until another rises. In between, there are periods of fast growth and terrible loss/stagnation as well. Being resources, science or/and human lives.
Ultimately what all that meant was that the bad old ways that European aristocracy had always worked continued apace. Empire was an extension of national pride, and primarily extractive and selfish. Foreign policy was also selfish and dominated not by the thought of maintaining order by by the idea of gaining advantage. And only moderated by the fear of a foreign hegemon and the desire to team up to prevent such in order to maintain the conditions that allowed everyone to scuttle about and get up to geopolitical hijinx for the benefit of their own country.
These patterns of behavior had led to a great number of wars in Europe's past, it was a strong pattern. Wars fought for territorial or trade advantage: Wars fought to reign in a hegemon. Etc. That was how things were, even going back to the hundred years war and earlier. In the 19th century you had the Napoleonic wars, the wars of German/Italian unification, various imperial skirmishes, the Franco-Prussian war, etc.
The point being, wars were seen as being an opportunity for advantage and positive change. And the powerful elite at the time very much had a fascination and lust for war due to its glorification as well as the immediate financial gain of being an officer. The concept of an existential war, the concept of wars that took millions of lives, the concept of a war where bullets and bombs were putting troops on the front lines in danger of death every day for years was not a concept Europe at the time could understand.
And in the shock of the war a lot of the old ways of Europe broke apart and were destroyed. Post WWI Europe was much different than it was before the war, and you can see this culturally. Post WWI cultural artifacts tend to seem much more modern and tend to more easily resonate with modern sensibilities than pre-war stuff does.
The point being, it wasn't just the alliances and weapon buildup that brought about WWI. More than anything it was a culture that saw war as a tool for gaining advantage, a culture that tended to fall into a war between great powers at least once a generation. That sort of culture doesn't exist anymore in the great powers. Even in countries that see geopolitics as a realm for gaining selfish benefits generally there just aren't a lot of folks who are eager to go to war. At best there are folks who think that it's wise to go to war in order to take out an enemy that's a threat, but that's a very different proposition than the pre-WWI situation.
On the cultural note with its attitude toward the war, it's just all about the strategical reality. When you grow in power, you get options. At first you choose to pick the low-hanging fruit, so you hunt down the smaller countries and/or weaker territories. Then when these are finally split-up among the powerful, the clash of titans it's only a matter of time. Soon after WW2, when the most countries got their independence, a new round of this sadistic game begun. Maybe we're not in the finals again right now, but it's only a matter of time. I would like to think like you do and have hope in humanity to become wiser and outgrow this things, but the reality appears to me a little bit different.
China, on the other hand, has considerable strategic depth behind defensible borders. A hostile power controlling the Korean peninsula is their greatest worry.
About your specific points:
1) Cultural attitude of "eh, war is not so bad and
higher tech means we'll be home by xmas".
2) Germany surrounded [...] paranoid lash out.
I will skip the 3rd point. ( I am not sure why the Ottoman empire should be the root cause, so its hard to comment on a analogy.)
4) The article skipped several points WRT the German/British alliance thing, [...]
Skipping 5,6,7, since I do not really view these as essential; I think that there are a lot of similarities between the eve of WWI and the current situation. This does not mean, that we are in exactly the same geostrategic situation but that there are enough similarities to start worrying. Or to quote Mark Twain: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
[1] http://complex.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/20/surrounded...
[2] http://warm-oolong-tea.blogspot.de/2013/10/the-truths-and-my...
[3] http://www.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/12/02/2013-the...
The 1913 perspective is the last total "world" war was Napoleon's escapades a century ago and it was a disaster but everyone involved is dead and mass media wasn't around and it's all crude and obsolete anyway compared to modern war. So the academics know total european world war will be awful, but random dude on the street isn't nearly as informed and concerned as a 2013 dude. The colonial battles on the other side of the planet or whatever didn't have much direct impact on Europeans.
The last "major" local war was franco prussian and the Germans absolutely crushed them in months. The main difference is Germany is now unified and proportionally massively larger and more powerful than France. So WWI "should" only last weeks, this time around. Its a re-run of the franco prussian except Germany outmatches France by a factor of ten more than the first one, oh other than that whole "world" war aspect instead of just two belligerents. Oh and that little problem of having to fight on two fronts but they had an elaborate plan (plans, as usual, don't survive contact with the enemy).
Financially a long war is not a very good idea on either side therefore I'm sure it will HAVE to be over soon. Of course never overlook the ability of governments to make bad financial decisions...
So put this together, and in 1913, "total war? Eh, we'll be done and home by christmas" sounds totally reasonable.
The dying Ottoman empire was a huge trading area. Istanbul or whatever controls all of Russia's southern ports. The trade was very important. However the Ottoman's were collapsing so "someone" is going to step into the vacuum and take over, and whoever does will gain massive power. Its something to fight about. Who allies with who in this era was controlled mostly (well, at least in major part) by who will take over and run Istanbul and all the trade that runs thru it.
Theres a blindness toward the importance of the Balkan states region. Its not just they like to fight for fun, its economically a critical area, enough power to tip the balance in favor of whoever gets them, and the balance was unstable enough before this area lit up.
One specific and major blindness is people not being able to tell the difference between colonial police actions and total war on home turf. Yes dudes with uniforms and rifles fight both, but its really two different concepts.
I will admit that my knowledge of WWI east of Berlin is somewhat suspect, but I think the similarity proposed in the Economist article is anyhow a case of if we paint in broad strokes and squint a little, instead of a very close similarity. And therefore I think ( in the framework of this analogy), the Balkans play the role of the spark plug, rather than an integral part of the analogy.
One specific and major blindness is people not being able
to tell the difference between colonial police actions and
total war on home turf. Yes dudes with uniforms and rifles
fight both, but its really two different concepts.
Where in the world do you get this from? The core of the empire was built through negotiations, and functioned well. Austria-Hungary's problems, and the eventual assassination, came from areas the empire had forcibly occupied and/or annexed. The rise of Serbian resistance, for example, was to a large extent due to the empire eventually annexing Bosnia-Hercegovina after more than four decades of occupation.
Why you believe you can draw inferences about multiculturalism from either Iraq or Austria-Hungary is beyond me.
The internet has destroyed the traditional news media's ability to set the political and social discourse and thus agenda. The NYT and ABC, NBC, CBS are no longer able to set the political and social agenda, like everyone else they are following the internet. Recall that the recent 60 Minutes puff job on the NSA (and secondarily a hit piece on Snowden) fell flat and was generally panned by independent voices on the internet. This gambit was telling in that the powers that be are still playing by the old playbook. 25 years ago this 60 Minutes "news" report would have ended the discussion.
To echo the point of the Economist article, this is a dangerous time and nuclear war is one very real possibility. We are living in the middle of the greatest social revolution in the history of mankind, since the invention of the printing press 500 years ago, and nobody can really say how it will play out.
Read this article by Clay Shirky from 2009 for a better explanation;
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
An article about WWs in the Economist should talk about economic data, about banks burning and destroying the savings of decades of the work of the people. They need to talk about Oligopolies, about Roosevelt(Teddy) trying to do something about that , but at the end the biggest of all(the Fed) being created in 1913.
They need to talk about Africa and middle East, and India colonies and commerce at the time.
But this has a problem: It is not as easy as "blame the Germans!"
"The second precaution that would make the world safer is a more active American foreign policy. "
Oh yeah, again.
"Barack Obama has pulled back in the Middle East—witness his unwillingness to use force in Syria. "
Wow, this is the better line of all. If something Syria has shown us is the willingness of US to use force in Syria, only being stopped by China and Russia.
"But unless America behaves as a leader and the guarantor of the world order, it will be inviting regional powers to test their strength by bullying neighbouring countries."
Today the US is the biggest bully of all. If any parallelism is to be extracted from WWs to today is countries like China behaving like the US of the past, as creditors of the world, while the rest of the world overspends and get in as many wars as possible to protect their turf.
It looks more like an ritualistic show fight you sometimes see in the animal kingdom than an eve of war.
For that matter I am quite glad that they are not rattling their sabers about Taiwan...
Nothing about the disputed island would be worth even a very small scale war, much less the risk of a bigger one. There's just no profit in it. On the other hand, battles about islands (like the Falklands War) tend to cost a lot less lives, especially civilian, than any land-based war.
No, this is more about China trying to harness nationalistic emotions on the one hand and their "opponents" not wanting to present China with an opportunity for actually profitable wars or threats.
If for example the US and Japan would back down, China might "negotiate" the annexation of Taiwan in the near future, which would be profitable. There have been rumors of such attempts already, and China's military buildup makes this ever more realistic.
"Once you've registered, you can read up to three articles each week."
pretty sure I've not been to economist.com in a while. :/
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information for more detailsReally unfortunate pairing.
(Really the sexing up of war is pretty distasteful under any circumstances but this just takes the cake.)
Alliances don't get torn up because of a bit of spying.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530571/100-years-Wo...
I think that these right-wing organ-of-the-secret-state propagandists are all fairly clueless.