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I'm not seeing much warmongering as a cultural phenomena.

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.

Go look at US action movies, video games, etc. There's plenty of warmongering going on. Heck, just within the last year we had a mass media frenzy over the prospect of bombing Syria.

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...

>> Bear in mind that the US has been fighting wars against far weaker opponents for over sixty years now

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.

Only if you define dictatorship as someone the US doesn't like and democracy as someone the US likes.

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.

Sigh... The subject was war not realpolitik games of common interests, which all countries play (and lie about).

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?)

@bertb

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...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d'état

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'état

The subject was war. You started talking about your USA hatred.

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.

I see you've inferred I am a "left winger" full of "USA hatred" and a "troll". 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).

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 troll, then insinuate I troll. Classic trick to blame others for what you do yourself -- someone browsing will just see two people calling each others names.

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.

With respect to his statement of communism, I believe you misread what he wrote, and so you are down-voted because others interpretation does not match yours.

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.

That's wimpy warmongering as in "police action" and far away. Psuedo-colonialism.

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.

Colonialism was mostly war as business as usual too. WWI was the exception.

Here's the (vain) hope that their continued failures won't be used to justify even more spending.

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.

Clearly you have not read Siegfried Sassoon's Public Statement Of Defiance. It was published in The London Times on 17 July 1917:

"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'm not seeing much warmongering as a cultural phenomena.» In the U.S., perhaps not."

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).

I've read quite a bit about WWI, and that's a very good analysis.

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.

We all take nationalism for granted these days, but it really was a growing new thing in the late 19th, early 20th c. Germany and Italy didn't even exist as nations back then.

It worked well enough then too - Austria-Hungary in its latest incarnation existed as it did as a result of negotiations to reform the empire that created an extremely devolved, decentralised government. They certainly faced problems and challenges, but they managed to work through them relatively peacefully.

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.

> 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.

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.

Why would you expect there to be such close analogies for so many countries and elements in WWI? Discounting this editorial because there is no one to "play the role of Italy" is weird. The point of the piece is not to say everything is going to be similar, it's (in part) to say that comforting arguments about the war-preventing aspects of economic integration and modernity are insufficient.

Except that the non-american parts of Nato could easily end up not joining such a war. That could easily be considered something similar.

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.

A shooting war is unlikely because of economic interdependence, but trade and political moves are pretty much assured.

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.

The difference between Germany and China is quite stark - Germany is a country perpetually at risk, with few geographical barriers to shelter behind. Germany must worry whenever Russia and France are allied, and be terrified when a rival controls Poland.

China, on the other hand, has considerable strategic depth behind defensible borders. A hostile power controlling the Korean peninsula is their greatest worry.

More abstractly speaking, WWI was the breakdown of a alliance system that guaranteed peace in an earlier era. On this level, there is certainly a lot more going on since the end of the cold war, than between the crowning of Friedrich-Wilhelm and the outbreak of WWI.

About your specific points:

    1) Cultural attitude of "eh, war is not so bad and
     higher tech means we'll be home by xmas".

Ever visited r/worldnews ? Additionally the fetichization of the military in the US is for European eyes frankly absurd. Starting with "thank you for your service", the dedication of NFL games to the military and not ending with the picture of the military in movies.

    2) Germany surrounded [...] paranoid lash out.

Except the Sea-Air-Battle doctrine of the Dod is carefully designed for conflicts without a staging area. ( And they are actually not that shy about the target of this plan.) [1][2] China is rightfully paranoid, the largest military in history is currently pointed at them.

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, [...]

Great point, but if a US foreign policy like [3] takes hold, basically the idea that the US should preemptively prepare for a China-Russia alliance, then the US will create a China Russia alliance. Much in the same way Friedrich-Willhelm did create the Russian-French-British alliance.

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...

Ugh with respect to the cultural attitude you're looking at it like a 2013 guy with plenty of hindsight and not looking at the 1913 perspective. Forget everything that happened post 1913 and my description and explanation of 1913 thinking makes a heck of a lot of sense.

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.

Apart from the first paragraph, I agree. I do not really understand why you accuse me of presentism. Perhaps because you got my argument precisely backwards. I was commenting on your entire paragraph 1), not only on the quoted part. And wanted to argue that quite a bit of current US attitude looks from a European perspective similar to the "home by christmas" attitude in Germany in 1914. ( Actually I think that the "home by christmas" attitude is quite exceptional.)

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.

Great point, it is quite exactly the same difference between Global War on Terror and global war.

You're seeing the article as being about the US, but if you see the (modern) US as (1914) Britain, then its other countries warmongering that can draw you in (1914 Britain didn't care at all about a war in the Balkans, but once Belgium and France were invaded they (we) pretty much had to be involved (Britain guaranteed Belgian neutrality and German domination of the french channel ports would have been very dangerous to British security no matter how "natural" the alliance).

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.

"History never happens the same way twice" Actually, history is bound to repeat itself.

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.

And this is pretty much the point of the article: We should not look at the present and assume that just because everything looks nice and stable now, barring some minor wars here and there, we are somehow magically "different" to in the past - people entered 1914 thinking a war like World War I could never happen too.

The more important aspect was the social and government structures pre-WWI. Europe was still dominated by an aristocratic elite and a very class based society. That elite drove public opinion and policy. It served as the officer corps. It served in government and in civil service. It's very difficult today to imagine a world so different from today, especially with regard to class.

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.

Past lessons can be forgotten. New attitudes can be sawed in current minds. The common folk didn't went to war because of the ability to become an officer or for some financial advantage, he went "for king and country". Now they go "for freedom and democracy". On the upper levels things haven't changed much - whether it's lands with wheat and strategic high-ground mountainous possessions back then, or it's land with oil and strategic places for military bases now, in the end it's basically the same.

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.

This is a great analysis, but I'd hesitate to call anything the "root cause" of WWI. Of course the Ottoman Empire's decay was a factor, but hard to say that it was more important than the many others listed here and elsewhere.

> 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?

Starving people don't make war; they have more pressing problems.