Hacker News Reader

Comment by vvillena | Hacker News Reader

At this point wars between powerful nations are almost impossible. Proxy wars are the current fashion, and those tend to be controlled in scale by the puppetmasters behind it.

I'm more scared about a great civil war in a powerful nuclear nation. Civil wars are a savage affair where no rules apply.

View on HN

This book was hugely influential in the years just before WW1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

Premise: the large nations of the world are far to intertwined by commerce and culture. Large scale war would be suicidal and the leadership of these countries would never do something so foolish.

> Large scale war would be suicidal

They weren't wrong

I forget whether it was in medieval europe or in feudal japan ( or maybe both ) where someone wrote that the gun was so horrible and easy to use that it would make war unthinkable. The thinking was that the art and skill of the warrior and nobleness of battle was undone by the gun. Years of training to develop martial skills by the brave knight or samurai were no match for a cowardly peasant with a gun. People forget that the gun was viewed as a coward's tool when it was introduced. A real man would never use such a weapon. Or so they predicted. Boy were they wrong.

The countries involved might not stand to gain anything, but that doesn’t mean that the leaders of those countries understood (or cared) about that.

They didn't have nukes. With nukes, the principal players no longer feel safe, and large-scale war is disincentivized accordingly.

The book was right about it being suicidal, but before ww1 did we have any evidence for this?

The US Civil War was pretty epic in its destruction.

War between developed nations was unthinkable 10 years ago, today it is very much thinkable. In Europe there is now an ongoing low intensity trench war already. Russians are mentally conditioned for total war by five years of nonstop propaganda, and their leader's idea of compromise is doubling down. NATO has switched back from the 00s cumbersome CONINS and relief mission training to combined arms war exercises.

If the political vectors of the last few years remain unchanged, a large war is very likely.

That's literally what this article says to avoid thinking and it gives examples as to how wrong people were when they said that. You're just repeating that without giving anything new.

I'd like to think this is true, but I think it's naive - there was similar sentiment before WWI too.

Nationalism and hysteria can lead people do things that are bad for both individuals and the group. Increasing free trade between countries and globalism is a good way to try and prevent wars, but the current reversion to nationalism makes me nervous.

> At this point wars between powerful nations are almost impossible.

That is exactly what "everybody" assumed before 1914, as pointed by the article.

It's bizarre to think there are rules in wars between countries but no rules in civil wars. In a civil war every party is still liable to the world as they're in a conventional war. If they use chemical or nuclear weapons they know that it's entirely possible third parties may get involved just because of their dirty tactics. If you're in a country where the West doesn't give a shit, and nobody bats an eye when chemical weapons are used (e.g. Syria) it doesn't make much sense to think that the same wouldn't apply if this were a conventional war (say, Syria vs Iraq). Obviously nuclear weapons are a bit bigger deal than chemical weapons, but what I'm trying to say is that similar dynamics are in play both in civil wars and conventional wars. If you're in the belief that a nuclear civil war can happen when a rogue party can shoot nukes, why wouldn't they shoot it to another country if they come to power? If you think "well then US would get involved so they obviously wouldn't do that" then why would US not get involved nukes being used in a civil war.

Truly the End of History which even Fukuyama has walked back a bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com