War keeps the bad guys out. Gaza is isn't going to be shooting up Israeli music festivals for a long long time, if ever again. The West Bank is well-behaved, under threat of extinction.
From Russia's perspective, NATO is still out of Ukraine.
The Kosovars got their own UN-patrolled drug den excuse me, protectorate, carved out of Serbia thanks to US aerial bombardment. The Kuwaiti royals got their oil back, again, thanks to US ability to wage war.
Red Sea shipping will eventually get back to capacity, once the US has killed enough Houthis, who don't seem to be adding much to world civilization.
The infidels are gone from Afghanistan, thanks to the Afghans' capacity for multi-generational warfare.
If you look early enough, war isn't even about dirt. The early books of Livy suggest a situation where Rome's wars with its neighbors were mostly about the acquisition of *people*; whoever lost had to move to the winning city and become citizens.
Before the Persians, war in the Ancient Near East was also frequently over people. The Bible records this, in the form of the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, and archaeological evidence seems to back it up (see https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-the-archaeology-of-ancient-israel-and-judah-interview-with-professor-avraham-faust ). The Assyrian and Babylonian empires could profit from ruling their near neighbors in place, but if relatively remote territories failed to pay tribute, it was more profitable to move their people to the imperial core where they could be integrated into local systems of production and taxation than to try to move extracted surplus resources long distances over land. The Persians' willingness to accept precious metals and military levies instead was an innovation that allowed them to administer a larger empire.
The abduction of the Sabine women seems like another even earlier motive of even smaller-scale more localized wars, where women persuade their men to get into a fight with a different group of men. The women of the losing side get to improve their gene pool by mating with different men, with different genes, presumably of high quality since they just won an even fight, while the mothers on the winning side get more grandchildren. The men presumably hope to be on the winning side.
China under Xi Jinping is a lot more aggressive than it was in 2006. They see some logic in taking over the South China Sea according to the Nine-Dash Map, but is that really rational?
But partly the motivation is that it isn't war, spraying hoses and ramming Philipino coastguard and fishing ships is naked nationalist aggression but it is unlikely large numbers will die or that it will lead to serious fighting.
I'm afraid that wars for people will become fashionable again.
Resources are often brought up as reasons for war, but the original resource has always been human. This has always been obfuscated by some moralizing, some explaining away of what we're really after.
Vespasian's coins were so honest: the shackled Jewish woman with the Roman victor above.
And that's what it was for the Aztecs and Iroquois: capture and subjugation.
Since it's St. Patrick's Day, let's consider that St. Patrick - a former slave of Irish pirates himself - made it his mission to liberate his fellow Britons through faith, and struggled against Pictish warlords who seized his catechumens.
That same impulse to subjugate and uwn people us with us today. The progressives inflict it on us, their own people, but the list for dominance extends as far as it can be sustained.
I'm convinced that it is this ancient impulse that will sustain warfare in this so-called modern, enlightened age. We will sacrifice lives to gain souls, just as our barbaric Mohican allies did to sustain their confederacy.
Yep. I've always stated this as humans having a basic program from the days before we were homo sapiens-- divide into groups then fight over land. For whatever reason we like to have some human language pretext or backsplanation for war, but the underlying instinct is the same.
I had a boss once argue me that people will always do what is in their economic interest and then one of our customers explained why this meant that so and so would fight to create a new caliphate.
They were both confusing homo economicus, a simplifying assumption economists make in their work, with the reality of human psychology. Of course back in the 1980s a subset of economists were already showing this assumption did not reflect people's real world behavior.
Since the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine it’s been more trouble than it’s worth to have a hostile defeated population within your borders. Renoir’s movie “La Grande Illusion” (1937) took its title from a 1910 book by the British economist Norman Angell which argued that the economies of Europe were developed and integrated to such an extent that war could no longer be profitable:
“When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.”
Four years later Britain, France and Germany proved him right by going to war and permanently reducing their relative power, wealth and prestige.
The state is a monopoly of power, and power is like a bad drug.
We are not supposed to know that what we call the United Nations was created by the alliance that called itself the United Nations to organize its victory. This is evident from the facts that the Security Council is authorized to veto acts by the UN General Assembly, that a single member of the great powers committee can veto any proposal in the Security Council, and that Germany and Japan are not Security Council members. The UN can enforce world peace or justice only if the committee of great powers decides to do so. But they profit materially and gloriously from indecisive wars, wars of conquest, proxy wars, unused preparations for war, etc.
I've approved of most of what Trump 2 has done so far, but am nervous about Iran. I am hoping it stays small scale stuff like Trump 1s Syrian missile strikes. No wars was a major campaign promise, so I have to be cautiously optimistic.
As for war overall, maybe it's a Sunset Boulevard situation. The Powers got big, it's the wars that got small. Hobbes and de Maistre will not be denied forever, so I expect smaller regional clashes while the big boys stay more level headed. My fear is how bad will the violence due to the real world Camp of the Saints grow into? Intra-country violence may be the most common "war" we see versus inter-.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is pretty big first world war. Fortunately, it's not being fought super hard, and if we are lucky we'll learn lessons about how much less fun real war is these days than Call Of Duty.
Certainly by proxy, with the US and EU indirectly participating on the Ukranian side. But it isn't a direct clash of major powers; this version of Kursk is nothing like the last time (thankully).
One problem is the amount of readily available war gore porn being distributed. Kids playing video games may make war seem fun, but that is nothing new. Seeing bodies ripped apart whenever you want probably does about as much good as having porn on demand is doing for kids. It's no longer just some weird VHS tape in the back row of the video store or oddball websites. So I doubt youth are learning anything positive.
The adults in charge probably aren't either when war now resembles video games (going as far back to Iraq, with clinical nightvision videos making things seem easy and risk free, now drones taking that to another level). Good news is everyone in the US is too fat to fight so that should keep large war ambitions in check.
I swear the first time I read that name I thought it was made up. Like when some wiseguy reporter asked a presidential candidate a couple decades ago what he thought about the evolving situation in Freedonia.
You hit the nail on the head towards the end when you mentioned US hegemony. The logical (as opposed to underlying instinctual) reason for war since about 1900 is that the modern war machine runs on petroleum. If you are an advanced little country without an empire or much of a spread (e.g. Germany/Japan) you are at the potential mercy of large powers cutting off your supply. I don't know why they never taught us that in high school. Why would Germany and Japan just bet their autonomy on the world continuing to respect the idea of free trade.
Nowadays we have a global hegemon in the US, guaranteeing free trade. I assume in the past, for periods of time this was also done by the current imperial power. We tend to think of the great empires of the past as units on the historical timeline but many of those lasted longer than the US has so far. What was it like in the middle of those periods?
I bet to most of their subjects and neighbors war had ceased to make economic sense. I would never be so gauche as to crack a history book or even email an historian with this proposition so I'm just going to assume it's correct. Good enough for an internet discussion, I say.
Also, Steve your first article was like a sick Dave Barry column ;)
In keeping with the theme of the article, like any proud monarch, he overestimates what he can accomplish with his aggressive, war like actions in the realm of trade. His apparent rhetoric for parity of tariffs would indicate a golden age of free trade as once everyone’s at parity you might as well as bring everything down to zero. Unfortunately, this contradicts his rhetoric of getting rid of income taxes and using tariffs to pay for government.
DOGE is child’s play compared to walking into the hornets nest of our highly calibrated system of international trade where China is now the worlds largest trading nation and much of our wealth seems to be dependent on US dollar remaining the worlds reserve currency. Thank goodness Xi Ji Ping is as alpha President Trump and the CCP rejects the rule of law. Not to mention the total ideological and demographic mess of Europe.
When was free trade ever here? Countries with VATs apply them at port of entry. Companies have to hire platoons of lawyers to navigate sanctions regs. Europe has been ordered not to buy LNG from Russia, and had a pipeline blown up to make sure. Everybody has to manipulate their currencies and the US has to fund a blue water navy to keep this "free" trade going.
Having a strong martial culture and blood and soil nationalism has paid off very well for Israel. Lebanon and Syria practice diverse sectarianism and are fashionably anti-nationalist, and they are disappearing as integral self-governing countries.
Europe and Britain are currently suffering the fate of pacifistic liberal cultures: to be invaded by aggressive, illiberal cultures.
The US is not pacifistic, but it's been distracted with Wars To Uphold Pure Principle, and is constantly harangued by its governing class that only very bad people (except for Ukrainians and Israelis) would ever defend blood and soil. Consequently our military is constantly sent packing to defend other people's borders: South Korea's, South Vietnam's, Kuwait's, downtown Kabul's (draw, loss, win, loss, if you're keeping track).
The US military no longer fills the historical role of protecting the country's territorial and cultural integrity. After all, Americans have always been able to retreat up the interstates behind a wall of high property values. But that's a finite process and we are approaching the end game where only legacy owners or the rich can afford safe, sane neighborhoods. In retrospect, it would have been nice if the US had been more martial and nationalistic versus GHW Bush's globalist vision. I'm guessing the whites who emerge at the end of majority-minority America will be a lot more truculent. Or they just won't show up. We'll see how Greenland and Canada feel about Afro- Caribbean/Latino America with nukes.
The different views of war are exemplified in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The European countries seem not to think they will ever fight a real war again, which is why they’ve let their conventional forces get so small. Thus they and their often European-Jewish advocates in the US were happy to push NATO/EU’s borders right up to Moscow, because they don’t see it as genuinely aggressive: it’s just rolling on the jobs/careers gravy train, no one is actually risking their neck. Vladimir Putin meanwhile hadn’t updated his assumptions during the post-1989/End of History phase, and it made him very hot under the collar that NATO was acquiring ever more territory.
If by "the European countries" and "their often European-Jewish advocates in the US" is meant the Brussels Eurocrats and the Washington neoconservatives then you may be on to something. The Ukrainian war arouses strong emotions in both groups very like the Spanish Civil War. However, they are motivated by subtly contradictory myths to send young men to war by.
To the one group, but for the appeasement of dictators, Franco would have lost, and if Franco had lost the 1940s would not have happened. War! Ukraine must join NATO! To the other, a united Europe would have meant a united Spain and Franco would not have fought. Peace! Ukraine must join the EU! Hence Victoria Nuland and "F*ck the EU".
In 1991, the Eurocrats could rationally aspire to share global hegemony with the USA by building a continental-scale EU. Some of them hope so still, and in many ways Trump II suits their purposes.
Putin's war is best seen as a religious-ideological struggle akin to a jihad or crusade, rather than a war for spoils.
He wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire. That in 2025 it consists mostly of empty fields, rusted-out factories and elderly pensioners is neither here nor there.
Russia has been imperialist since long before the Soviets. When you're surrounded by places like Chechnya and Kazakhstan and you get invaded over land a couple of times a century, empire seems like good policy. It's actually good for everyone that Russia pays Chechnya to be in the Russian empire.
There's an argument the US should conquer the Caribbean since we deal with all the externalities these s***hole countries generate any way. But in a democracy it would just mean more crime, more tax eating, and more votes for people like Kamala Harris.
Canada is a looming problem for the US because, in what's probably the worst idea ever, they're using Hindu and Chinese immigration to try and become a geopolitical actor in their own right. It would be good to convince Alberta and Saskatchewan to join the US, as they are just tax serfs for the rest of Canada. BC would be lovely as well but it's becoming part of the global Han empire.
On X, I keep suggesting to angry, paranoid Canadians that they stop their Asian invasion and quit worrying about one from us. But if net zero Carney is elected generally, maybe A&S will secede.
Good points. Whatever you think of Russia's current war in the Ukraine, this is a country that has been invaded multiple times throughout its history and suffered a great deal as a result, and that sort of historical memory certainly drives its desire to have various buffer states between its core territory and traditional invasion routes. The US has no comparable experience - to the contrary, our entire history is one of expansion of our economic and military reach, which apparently a lot of people that should know better believe is never going to be pushed back to some extent by rising or anxious regional powers.
That said, we are not as screwed as the European Union. They are in total denial about a) their massive internal demographic problems, b) its economic growth falling continuously further behind China and the US, and c) their ability and the value in projecting military power abroad independent of the US. Things are going to get very, very bad for many of the EU member states and their historic people in the decades to come. Absent some kind of political revolution I don't think the situation is recoverable.
America (empire? republic?) has expanded in exactly the same way as Russia. We got to a huge land mass and went up then over the Appalachians. Naturally, we proceeded to the Mississippi (it now seems hilariously quaint that present day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois et al. we're once considered "the Northwest Territories"). Since there was nothing on the opposite bank but the verdant plains, we invented the Conestoga wagon and trekked to the Continental Divide.
We're almost to the Pacific so what the hey, Manifest Destiny and all that crap about all men being created equal and consent of the governed goes out the window. Now we're the goddam US of A and can interpret the Native American treaties however we want.
Northward, we were forced to stop by the British loyalists. South, we hit the Rio Grande and all those swarthy mestizo Papists speaking hillbilly Spanish.
The post-WW2 "rules-based international order" was always a temporary phenomenon and is showing its age. Actually, it was just rule by the Americans and now that "America" is no longer the Anglo-American monolith and Russia and China have stopped blowing themselves up the succeeding order is taking shape.
And having gotten to the Pacific and monopolized the best land of an entire Continent, why would the USA want to then blow up the "rules-based international order" it had established because it had all it wanted?
It's politically easier to cut Europe loose than to cut SS and Medicare. The shock might force them out of their net zero/migrant insanities before it's too late (if it isn't already).
Anglo-America and its Atlanticist worldview are done in 20 - 30 years, replaced by lower IQ people from countries that were bystanders to WW2. Hopefully we can get Alberta and Saskatchewan on the way out as the Canadian system is replaced by Han and Hindu syndicates and the net tax-paying provinces decide they've had enough. And if you really believe the Russian bombers are set to fly over as soon as the ink dries on the Ukraine war treaty, Greenland is a useful place to have.
Which seems to be your Cold War-era prior: that Russia pours through the Fulda Gap and the PROC rolls into the ROC but for the US military. Russia got twenty percent of Ukraine and had to switch from offense to defense, so I assume the Tsar's plan for conquering Poland, Germany, and using the corpses of elderly Europeans to build a human bridge across the Atlantic to Brooklyn has been scrapped.
China probably annexes Taiwan over the next 10-20 years, which has always been its goal, and there is nothing the US which just lost its second war in your lifetime can do about it. We no longer have the capacity or the will for meatgrinder wars against peer competitors.
The US is going to have its hands full with its southern and, appallingly, northern borders over the next few decades.
Also, iif the moral arc of the universe is bending toward nuclear war (there would be no other kind) with China, then what are 9.75 million Chinese doing in the Five Eyes? Why do the Five Eyes countries sell real estate to Chinese nationals and Chinese companies? Why are we making payments on the $760B in US debt held by China? Why does the US pay $3 in trade to China for every $1 they pay us?
Revealed preferences, as Tyler Cowen might finally admit, the US is not going to be launching ICBMs at China. And if we did what emerged afterwards would not be the USA as presently constituted. I don't think (I hope, I pray) this Boomer gotterdammerung is going to happen. And it certainly won't happen after Afro-Caribbean-MENA-Latino America gets the nukes (assuming they still work).
"Whatever you think of Russia's current war in the Ukraine, this is a country that has been invaded multiple times throughout its history and suffered a great deal as a result"
The few times Russia has been invaded are very famous because you have to be cock of the walk to even consider it: Napoleon, Hitler, etc.
The argument for Russia being able to reclaim her ancestral homelands is somewhat like the argument for reparations for blacks: people were nasty to their ancestors. But no one says Poland was invaded multiple times so deserves to restore the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (though this may be an unspoken motivation of Poland’s leaders).
"What turned out to be roughly a draw apparently humiliated Israel, which then devoted the next 18 years to its remarkable project to blow up Hezbollah leaders with explosive-packed beepers. (Unfortunately, in order to carry out such a prodigious plot against Hezbollah, Israeli intelligence appears to have taken their eye off Hamas: after all, how much mischief could they get up to?)"
Is there any evidence that the pager plotting had a negative effect on Hamas preparedness? Did it require some massive use of resources that precluded anything else from getting done?
Israel's offensive campaign against Hezbollah in 2024 was stunningly effective due to steps that have been taken years before. It's defensive efforts against Hamas on October 7, 2023 were not.
There appears to have been an opportunity cost issue: Israel put its best men on dealing with Hezbollah and put its women on deterring Hamas.
One of these things is not like the other. Is it part of "the post WW2 consensus" that every foreign country gets a blank check drawn on the US treasury for as much as they desire? Is it 'bullying' to ask for payment, however inadequate? Is it likewise 'bullying' for the US to insist that Israel use US aid to buy exclusively from American defense contractors? This has all the valence of a teenager saying "Why do I have to do my chores for a year before my parents buy me a car? Why can't they just buy me a car no strings attached? They obviously can afford it! They're so mean."
As soon as I saw the title of this essay, I developed an urge to post one of my favorite, but very infrequently-stated beliefs.
We aren't supposed to know that what made America great was a combination of war, socialism, and communism. Any reader of this column or the author can (with great effort) justify that himself or herself. But I'll add a hint anyway, regarding recovery from the Great Depression -- The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes.
Also, a theme of the article is that "small" (local or regional) wars are more useful that large ones. Well, they are less risky for the world powers, who have apparently become afraid of their terror-bombing capacities for mutually assured destruction. I wrote "apparently" -- there is no guarantee. A lesson from the current war in Ukraine is that states are mad enough or drunk on power enough to destroy the population and material resources they appear to be fighting over.
War what is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Say it again!
War is good for plenty of things.
War keeps the bad guys out. Gaza is isn't going to be shooting up Israeli music festivals for a long long time, if ever again. The West Bank is well-behaved, under threat of extinction.
From Russia's perspective, NATO is still out of Ukraine.
The Kosovars got their own UN-patrolled drug den excuse me, protectorate, carved out of Serbia thanks to US aerial bombardment. The Kuwaiti royals got their oil back, again, thanks to US ability to wage war.
Red Sea shipping will eventually get back to capacity, once the US has killed enough Houthis, who don't seem to be adding much to world civilization.
The infidels are gone from Afghanistan, thanks to the Afghans' capacity for multi-generational warfare.
If you look early enough, war isn't even about dirt. The early books of Livy suggest a situation where Rome's wars with its neighbors were mostly about the acquisition of *people*; whoever lost had to move to the winning city and become citizens.
Before the Persians, war in the Ancient Near East was also frequently over people. The Bible records this, in the form of the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, and archaeological evidence seems to back it up (see https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-the-archaeology-of-ancient-israel-and-judah-interview-with-professor-avraham-faust ). The Assyrian and Babylonian empires could profit from ruling their near neighbors in place, but if relatively remote territories failed to pay tribute, it was more profitable to move their people to the imperial core where they could be integrated into local systems of production and taxation than to try to move extracted surplus resources long distances over land. The Persians' willingness to accept precious metals and military levies instead was an innovation that allowed them to administer a larger empire.
The abduction of the Sabine women seems like another even earlier motive of even smaller-scale more localized wars, where women persuade their men to get into a fight with a different group of men. The women of the losing side get to improve their gene pool by mating with different men, with different genes, presumably of high quality since they just won an even fight, while the mothers on the winning side get more grandchildren. The men presumably hope to be on the winning side.
China under Xi Jinping is a lot more aggressive than it was in 2006. They see some logic in taking over the South China Sea according to the Nine-Dash Map, but is that really rational?
It’s not necessarily rational but I fully expect China will make a play for Taiwan. Don’t know when.
But partly the motivation is that it isn't war, spraying hoses and ramming Philipino coastguard and fishing ships is naked nationalist aggression but it is unlikely large numbers will die or that it will lead to serious fighting.
I'm afraid that wars for people will become fashionable again.
Resources are often brought up as reasons for war, but the original resource has always been human. This has always been obfuscated by some moralizing, some explaining away of what we're really after.
Vespasian's coins were so honest: the shackled Jewish woman with the Roman victor above.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2AFT29E/rome-its-rise-and-fall-a-text-book-for-high-schools-and-colleges-348-rome-as-an-empire-judaea-capta-coin-of-vespasian-tation-of-nebuchadnezzar-titus-robbed-the-temple-of-itssacred-utensils-and-bore-them-away-as-trophies-uponthe-triumphal-arch-at-rome-that-bears-his-name-may-be-seen-at-the-present-day-the-sculp-tured-representation-of-the-goldencandlestick-which-was-one-of-thememorials-of-the-war-at-this-same-time-in-the-oppositecorner-of-the-empire-there-brokeout-a-dangerous-revolt-of-the-bata-vians-under-their-celebrated-leaderclaudius-civilis-the-batavianswere-joined-by-2AFT29E.jpg
And that's what it was for the Aztecs and Iroquois: capture and subjugation.
Since it's St. Patrick's Day, let's consider that St. Patrick - a former slave of Irish pirates himself - made it his mission to liberate his fellow Britons through faith, and struggled against Pictish warlords who seized his catechumens.
https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/epistola_english#
That same impulse to subjugate and uwn people us with us today. The progressives inflict it on us, their own people, but the list for dominance extends as far as it can be sustained.
I'm convinced that it is this ancient impulse that will sustain warfare in this so-called modern, enlightened age. We will sacrifice lives to gain souls, just as our barbaric Mohican allies did to sustain their confederacy.
Yep. I've always stated this as humans having a basic program from the days before we were homo sapiens-- divide into groups then fight over land. For whatever reason we like to have some human language pretext or backsplanation for war, but the underlying instinct is the same.
I had a boss once argue me that people will always do what is in their economic interest and then one of our customers explained why this meant that so and so would fight to create a new caliphate.
They were both confusing homo economicus, a simplifying assumption economists make in their work, with the reality of human psychology. Of course back in the 1980s a subset of economists were already showing this assumption did not reflect people's real world behavior.
Since the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine it’s been more trouble than it’s worth to have a hostile defeated population within your borders. Renoir’s movie “La Grande Illusion” (1937) took its title from a 1910 book by the British economist Norman Angell which argued that the economies of Europe were developed and integrated to such an extent that war could no longer be profitable:
“When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.”
Four years later Britain, France and Germany proved him right by going to war and permanently reducing their relative power, wealth and prestige.
The state is a monopoly of power, and power is like a bad drug.
We are not supposed to know that what we call the United Nations was created by the alliance that called itself the United Nations to organize its victory. This is evident from the facts that the Security Council is authorized to veto acts by the UN General Assembly, that a single member of the great powers committee can veto any proposal in the Security Council, and that Germany and Japan are not Security Council members. The UN can enforce world peace or justice only if the committee of great powers decides to do so. But they profit materially and gloriously from indecisive wars, wars of conquest, proxy wars, unused preparations for war, etc.
I've approved of most of what Trump 2 has done so far, but am nervous about Iran. I am hoping it stays small scale stuff like Trump 1s Syrian missile strikes. No wars was a major campaign promise, so I have to be cautiously optimistic.
As for war overall, maybe it's a Sunset Boulevard situation. The Powers got big, it's the wars that got small. Hobbes and de Maistre will not be denied forever, so I expect smaller regional clashes while the big boys stay more level headed. My fear is how bad will the violence due to the real world Camp of the Saints grow into? Intra-country violence may be the most common "war" we see versus inter-.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is pretty big first world war. Fortunately, it's not being fought super hard, and if we are lucky we'll learn lessons about how much less fun real war is these days than Call Of Duty.
Certainly by proxy, with the US and EU indirectly participating on the Ukranian side. But it isn't a direct clash of major powers; this version of Kursk is nothing like the last time (thankully).
One problem is the amount of readily available war gore porn being distributed. Kids playing video games may make war seem fun, but that is nothing new. Seeing bodies ripped apart whenever you want probably does about as much good as having porn on demand is doing for kids. It's no longer just some weird VHS tape in the back row of the video store or oddball websites. So I doubt youth are learning anything positive.
The adults in charge probably aren't either when war now resembles video games (going as far back to Iraq, with clinical nightvision videos making things seem easy and risk free, now drones taking that to another level). Good news is everyone in the US is too fat to fight so that should keep large war ambitions in check.
Arthurian 👍
Baluchistan sounds like a made up location for Dave Berg's 'The Lighter Side of Islamic Terrorism'.
It’s a godforsaken place in Pakistan. The inhabitants have separatist views. Low level insurgency.
I swear the first time I read that name I thought it was made up. Like when some wiseguy reporter asked a presidential candidate a couple decades ago what he thought about the evolving situation in Freedonia.
You hit the nail on the head towards the end when you mentioned US hegemony. The logical (as opposed to underlying instinctual) reason for war since about 1900 is that the modern war machine runs on petroleum. If you are an advanced little country without an empire or much of a spread (e.g. Germany/Japan) you are at the potential mercy of large powers cutting off your supply. I don't know why they never taught us that in high school. Why would Germany and Japan just bet their autonomy on the world continuing to respect the idea of free trade.
Nowadays we have a global hegemon in the US, guaranteeing free trade. I assume in the past, for periods of time this was also done by the current imperial power. We tend to think of the great empires of the past as units on the historical timeline but many of those lasted longer than the US has so far. What was it like in the middle of those periods?
I bet to most of their subjects and neighbors war had ceased to make economic sense. I would never be so gauche as to crack a history book or even email an historian with this proposition so I'm just going to assume it's correct. Good enough for an internet discussion, I say.
Also, Steve your first article was like a sick Dave Barry column ;)
Guaranteeing free trade? Haven’t you been following the tariff news? Free trade is over. Trump loves tariffs.
In keeping with the theme of the article, like any proud monarch, he overestimates what he can accomplish with his aggressive, war like actions in the realm of trade. His apparent rhetoric for parity of tariffs would indicate a golden age of free trade as once everyone’s at parity you might as well as bring everything down to zero. Unfortunately, this contradicts his rhetoric of getting rid of income taxes and using tariffs to pay for government.
DOGE is child’s play compared to walking into the hornets nest of our highly calibrated system of international trade where China is now the worlds largest trading nation and much of our wealth seems to be dependent on US dollar remaining the worlds reserve currency. Thank goodness Xi Ji Ping is as alpha President Trump and the CCP rejects the rule of law. Not to mention the total ideological and demographic mess of Europe.
When was free trade ever here? Countries with VATs apply them at port of entry. Companies have to hire platoons of lawyers to navigate sanctions regs. Europe has been ordered not to buy LNG from Russia, and had a pipeline blown up to make sure. Everybody has to manipulate their currencies and the US has to fund a blue water navy to keep this "free" trade going.
Having a strong martial culture and blood and soil nationalism has paid off very well for Israel. Lebanon and Syria practice diverse sectarianism and are fashionably anti-nationalist, and they are disappearing as integral self-governing countries.
Europe and Britain are currently suffering the fate of pacifistic liberal cultures: to be invaded by aggressive, illiberal cultures.
The US is not pacifistic, but it's been distracted with Wars To Uphold Pure Principle, and is constantly harangued by its governing class that only very bad people (except for Ukrainians and Israelis) would ever defend blood and soil. Consequently our military is constantly sent packing to defend other people's borders: South Korea's, South Vietnam's, Kuwait's, downtown Kabul's (draw, loss, win, loss, if you're keeping track).
The US military no longer fills the historical role of protecting the country's territorial and cultural integrity. After all, Americans have always been able to retreat up the interstates behind a wall of high property values. But that's a finite process and we are approaching the end game where only legacy owners or the rich can afford safe, sane neighborhoods. In retrospect, it would have been nice if the US had been more martial and nationalistic versus GHW Bush's globalist vision. I'm guessing the whites who emerge at the end of majority-minority America will be a lot more truculent. Or they just won't show up. We'll see how Greenland and Canada feel about Afro- Caribbean/Latino America with nukes.
I learned only recently that Hitler was about to run out of money in 1939, which sounds like a bad time to start a ludicrously expensive war.
Some wars are more about denying a location to someone else.
Bismarck was pretty successful, if you don't consider a united Germany led to two world wars and Europe's slow collapse.
"Saudi Arabia, which is heavily populated by Shi'ites."
But they seem so sunny--the ones who didn't eat the wahsabi and sulfuri.
The different views of war are exemplified in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The European countries seem not to think they will ever fight a real war again, which is why they’ve let their conventional forces get so small. Thus they and their often European-Jewish advocates in the US were happy to push NATO/EU’s borders right up to Moscow, because they don’t see it as genuinely aggressive: it’s just rolling on the jobs/careers gravy train, no one is actually risking their neck. Vladimir Putin meanwhile hadn’t updated his assumptions during the post-1989/End of History phase, and it made him very hot under the collar that NATO was acquiring ever more territory.
If by "the European countries" and "their often European-Jewish advocates in the US" is meant the Brussels Eurocrats and the Washington neoconservatives then you may be on to something. The Ukrainian war arouses strong emotions in both groups very like the Spanish Civil War. However, they are motivated by subtly contradictory myths to send young men to war by.
To the one group, but for the appeasement of dictators, Franco would have lost, and if Franco had lost the 1940s would not have happened. War! Ukraine must join NATO! To the other, a united Europe would have meant a united Spain and Franco would not have fought. Peace! Ukraine must join the EU! Hence Victoria Nuland and "F*ck the EU".
In 1991, the Eurocrats could rationally aspire to share global hegemony with the USA by building a continental-scale EU. Some of them hope so still, and in many ways Trump II suits their purposes.
You’re right, in a sense the pitch is, “we’re building a world in which there’ll be no more war, so Ukraine’s got to fight for it.”
I hope Indiana has a Bobby Knight Chair of Peace Studies.
Indeed.
Putin's war is best seen as a religious-ideological struggle akin to a jihad or crusade, rather than a war for spoils.
He wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire. That in 2025 it consists mostly of empty fields, rusted-out factories and elderly pensioners is neither here nor there.
Russia has been imperialist since long before the Soviets. When you're surrounded by places like Chechnya and Kazakhstan and you get invaded over land a couple of times a century, empire seems like good policy. It's actually good for everyone that Russia pays Chechnya to be in the Russian empire.
There's an argument the US should conquer the Caribbean since we deal with all the externalities these s***hole countries generate any way. But in a democracy it would just mean more crime, more tax eating, and more votes for people like Kamala Harris.
Canada is a looming problem for the US because, in what's probably the worst idea ever, they're using Hindu and Chinese immigration to try and become a geopolitical actor in their own right. It would be good to convince Alberta and Saskatchewan to join the US, as they are just tax serfs for the rest of Canada. BC would be lovely as well but it's becoming part of the global Han empire.
On X, I keep suggesting to angry, paranoid Canadians that they stop their Asian invasion and quit worrying about one from us. But if net zero Carney is elected generally, maybe A&S will secede.
Good points. Whatever you think of Russia's current war in the Ukraine, this is a country that has been invaded multiple times throughout its history and suffered a great deal as a result, and that sort of historical memory certainly drives its desire to have various buffer states between its core territory and traditional invasion routes. The US has no comparable experience - to the contrary, our entire history is one of expansion of our economic and military reach, which apparently a lot of people that should know better believe is never going to be pushed back to some extent by rising or anxious regional powers.
That said, we are not as screwed as the European Union. They are in total denial about a) their massive internal demographic problems, b) its economic growth falling continuously further behind China and the US, and c) their ability and the value in projecting military power abroad independent of the US. Things are going to get very, very bad for many of the EU member states and their historic people in the decades to come. Absent some kind of political revolution I don't think the situation is recoverable.
"The US has no comparable experience"
Parts of us do. With widespread A/C, the Yankee invasion began again.
America (empire? republic?) has expanded in exactly the same way as Russia. We got to a huge land mass and went up then over the Appalachians. Naturally, we proceeded to the Mississippi (it now seems hilariously quaint that present day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois et al. we're once considered "the Northwest Territories"). Since there was nothing on the opposite bank but the verdant plains, we invented the Conestoga wagon and trekked to the Continental Divide.
We're almost to the Pacific so what the hey, Manifest Destiny and all that crap about all men being created equal and consent of the governed goes out the window. Now we're the goddam US of A and can interpret the Native American treaties however we want.
Northward, we were forced to stop by the British loyalists. South, we hit the Rio Grande and all those swarthy mestizo Papists speaking hillbilly Spanish.
The post-WW2 "rules-based international order" was always a temporary phenomenon and is showing its age. Actually, it was just rule by the Americans and now that "America" is no longer the Anglo-American monolith and Russia and China have stopped blowing themselves up the succeeding order is taking shape.
And having gotten to the Pacific and monopolized the best land of an entire Continent, why would the USA want to then blow up the "rules-based international order" it had established because it had all it wanted?
What's in it for America?
Greenland? Manitoba? Nunavuk? Chiapas? Honduras?
How much longer can we afford to enforce it?
It's politically easier to cut Europe loose than to cut SS and Medicare. The shock might force them out of their net zero/migrant insanities before it's too late (if it isn't already).
Not fighting wars against peer competitors like China and perhaps Russia seems cheaper than fighting wars against them.
Anglo-America and its Atlanticist worldview are done in 20 - 30 years, replaced by lower IQ people from countries that were bystanders to WW2. Hopefully we can get Alberta and Saskatchewan on the way out as the Canadian system is replaced by Han and Hindu syndicates and the net tax-paying provinces decide they've had enough. And if you really believe the Russian bombers are set to fly over as soon as the ink dries on the Ukraine war treaty, Greenland is a useful place to have.
Which seems to be your Cold War-era prior: that Russia pours through the Fulda Gap and the PROC rolls into the ROC but for the US military. Russia got twenty percent of Ukraine and had to switch from offense to defense, so I assume the Tsar's plan for conquering Poland, Germany, and using the corpses of elderly Europeans to build a human bridge across the Atlantic to Brooklyn has been scrapped.
China probably annexes Taiwan over the next 10-20 years, which has always been its goal, and there is nothing the US which just lost its second war in your lifetime can do about it. We no longer have the capacity or the will for meatgrinder wars against peer competitors.
The US is going to have its hands full with its southern and, appallingly, northern borders over the next few decades.
Also, iif the moral arc of the universe is bending toward nuclear war (there would be no other kind) with China, then what are 9.75 million Chinese doing in the Five Eyes? Why do the Five Eyes countries sell real estate to Chinese nationals and Chinese companies? Why are we making payments on the $760B in US debt held by China? Why does the US pay $3 in trade to China for every $1 they pay us?
Revealed preferences, as Tyler Cowen might finally admit, the US is not going to be launching ICBMs at China. And if we did what emerged afterwards would not be the USA as presently constituted. I don't think (I hope, I pray) this Boomer gotterdammerung is going to happen. And it certainly won't happen after Afro-Caribbean-MENA-Latino America gets the nukes (assuming they still work).
"Whatever you think of Russia's current war in the Ukraine, this is a country that has been invaded multiple times throughout its history and suffered a great deal as a result"
The few times Russia has been invaded are very famous because you have to be cock of the walk to even consider it: Napoleon, Hitler, etc.
The argument for Russia being able to reclaim her ancestral homelands is somewhat like the argument for reparations for blacks: people were nasty to their ancestors. But no one says Poland was invaded multiple times so deserves to restore the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (though this may be an unspoken motivation of Poland’s leaders).
"What turned out to be roughly a draw apparently humiliated Israel, which then devoted the next 18 years to its remarkable project to blow up Hezbollah leaders with explosive-packed beepers. (Unfortunately, in order to carry out such a prodigious plot against Hezbollah, Israeli intelligence appears to have taken their eye off Hamas: after all, how much mischief could they get up to?)"
Is there any evidence that the pager plotting had a negative effect on Hamas preparedness? Did it require some massive use of resources that precluded anything else from getting done?
Israel's offensive campaign against Hezbollah in 2024 was stunningly effective due to steps that have been taken years before. It's defensive efforts against Hamas on October 7, 2023 were not.
There appears to have been an opportunity cost issue: Israel put its best men on dealing with Hezbollah and put its women on deterring Hamas.
Will there be decades of "Bibi knew and let it happen to start a war" as with FDR and Pearl Harbor?
Or maybe Bibi was, not unreasonably, concentrating upon Hezbollah and let the other H run amok on 10/7/23?
Being in charge of Israel is a tough job.
"bullying and/or conquering internationally recognized states"
One of these things is not like the other. Is it part of "the post WW2 consensus" that every foreign country gets a blank check drawn on the US treasury for as much as they desire? Is it 'bullying' to ask for payment, however inadequate? Is it likewise 'bullying' for the US to insist that Israel use US aid to buy exclusively from American defense contractors? This has all the valence of a teenager saying "Why do I have to do my chores for a year before my parents buy me a car? Why can't they just buy me a car no strings attached? They obviously can afford it! They're so mean."
As soon as I saw the title of this essay, I developed an urge to post one of my favorite, but very infrequently-stated beliefs.
We aren't supposed to know that what made America great was a combination of war, socialism, and communism. Any reader of this column or the author can (with great effort) justify that himself or herself. But I'll add a hint anyway, regarding recovery from the Great Depression -- The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes.
Also, a theme of the article is that "small" (local or regional) wars are more useful that large ones. Well, they are less risky for the world powers, who have apparently become afraid of their terror-bombing capacities for mutually assured destruction. I wrote "apparently" -- there is no guarantee. A lesson from the current war in Ukraine is that states are mad enough or drunk on power enough to destroy the population and material resources they appear to be fighting over.