War is coming, but military power is also more asymmetric than ever. The US fared relatively poorly in the skirmish-like proxy wars of the last 50 years, but that's a different type of warfare than another world war would be. The goals aren't to win and hold territory, the goals are to create a stable environment. All the opponent has to do is create chaos with guerrilla warfare and the US loses.
When you're talking about a total war scenario, the US is effectively unbeatable for a lot of reasons. Ignoring the amount we spend (much of which is wasted on graft and ineffective procurement), we hold the distinct advantage of geography. We're fully capable of building a war machine all by ourselves -- we have the raw materials, the industry, and most important of all: a several-thousand mile long buffer zone between the US and any potential enemy looking to disrupt production.
China is the only real rising threat, and even then, they have two or three decades of catching up to do. And ultimately, I'm not convinced there are any resources that China and the US both covet so much as to go to war with each other: both are large, geographically diverse countries with a wide range of natural resources. The Chinese also have very little to gain by a shooting war: they will naturally eclipse the US in a global economy in the next 100 years anyway, so why bother fighting a dangerous enemy on the battlefield when you have better economic weapons?
You're thinking about the old kind of war. If China wanted the US to suffer, they'd just create versions of ISIS for each minority group—persuasive ideologies that present violence as the only option—and watch as the country tears itself apart.
The article is making the point that the proxy wars we've seen are peanuts compared to "real" war. What you're describing is a proxy war situation; which is the current status quo.
The future probably looks a lot more like Russia's takeover of Crimea (say, China decides its military is big enough to take over Taiwan). Until eventually one of the big powers decides that enough is enough and it becomes a shooting war. That's how both world wars started and how the next one will likely start as well.
> If China wanted the US to suffer, they'd just create versions of ISIS for each minority group—persuasive ideologies that present violence as the only option—and watch as the country tears itself apart.
The USSR tried to pursue a softer version of this strategy, often highlighting racial tensions in the U.S. and poor civil rights for Black People in the U.S. However, it really wasn't all that successful. It turns out despite poor conditions for many racial groups, a shared national identity wins out.
> It turns out despite poor conditions for many racial groups, a shared national identity wins out.
And it's not clear how much of that is present in China.
> If China wanted the US to suffer, they'd just create versions of ISIS for each minority group—persuasive ideologies that present violence as the only option—and watch as the country tears itself apart.
Two can play at that game. (Although the long-term consequences might be unpleasant, as the U.S. has learned about its support of Afghanistan's mujahideen after the U.S.S.R. invaded in 1979.)
It's not very different from dossiers that (intelligence, financial, political) analysts write about different scenarios all the time. While the text does contain more emotional imagery and blog-style tag lines, you'll basically find the same content in many organizations' databases.
Personally I think there is at least some merit to the reasoning behind this specific scenario: the population of the West is beginning to reject the globalisation effects that have brought global peace but left many disadvantaged, while religious and ideological radicalism is sharply on the rise world-wide. As the intellectual level of discourse is declining, the influence of populist ideas is becoming ever greater. From a bird's eye perspective, it seems humanity overall is in the process of rejecting peace, science, and secularism in favor of short-sighted economic considerations and dubious promises.
As long as the world is looked this way:
Socialism is still an enemy which talks about income equality (Fair share of goods and services)
Capitalism is still a friend which brings the income inequality (Winner takes it all)
We are not human anymore. We are the crazies who put end to a planet much faster than any other animal can do. may be thats what human really means.
Find the planet faster which is immune from crazies
Build those rockets quicker which can fly my kid to a safer place.
Let's take one of the 'signs', taken to be 'Brexit in the UK'. For most people the issue came down to asking that vital political question that has to be considered in any country: who has the power and how can it be removed if the demos so decides?
Brexit concluded (among other issues) that letting 28 un-elected commissioners decide EU law and preventing elected members of the European parliament (MEPs) from initiating new legislation or repealing existing law was not acceptable. As to removal of the governing body, unless I'm mistaken that's not possible. You can only vote for MEPs. Thus, UK citizens opted by a majority for control returned to Britain.
Was nationalistic xenophobia on display? Short answer, no! New research from ICM for British Future finds that 84% of the British public supports letting EU migrants stay – including three-quarters (77%) of Leave voters. Among Conservatives, support for protecting the status of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in Europe is even higher at 85%, with 78% of UKIP supporters in agreement.
Aggrieved peoples within a trans-national entity may not contribute towards a recipe for a peaceable environment.
Well, of course the war is coming. The reasons are purely economical. When there are too many hands and too few jobs, war is inevitable. There are no unemployed at war, and after the war too, when those survived gather to rebuild their homelands.
Political implementations may vary, but the world is driven by economy.
"Technology and globalization radically expanded the pie, but they also shrank the number of people who got the big pieces."
All this talk of US income and wealth inequality... First of all, global inequality is falling. This is indisputable! Secondarily, the pie should be measured in actual consumption, not in income or wealth. Look at what Mark Zuckerberg consumes, not what he earns!
You and I know that in absolute terms people are better off now than they were 30 years ago. But, that's simply not how regular people view the world. Their evaluations are relative. They will always be relative.
And as the essay mentions - "But human psychology doesn't work in absolute terms. It works in relative ones." - this is how psychology works.
As much as all the "logical" and "rational thinking" folks in the world want to ignore and dismiss emotions and politics in decisions and actions, the truly rational thinking and logical decisions and actions understand, accept, and take into account emotions and politics.
> Without savings/investments you cannot produce goods or services.
Savings \neq investments. It's been said that one reason the U.S. economy hasn't picked up as much as we'd like in the past few years is that gun-shy banks and corporations were sitting cash instead of investing it.
In theory the optimal economic policy is one that balances (1) creating incentives for investment against (2) encouraging demand for the products of that investment. The latter isn't a given, by the way: The "if you build it, they will come" notion that demand will always exist --- and, therefore, supply-side incentives for investors are supposedly all that's needed --- rests on the "no problem, we'll just assume we have a can opener" assumption that Homo economicus normally behaves rationally, with a view to optimizing his or her economic position. Those assumptions have been widely and, it seems to me, justly criticized (as the author of the post seems to agree).
The US savings rate is still historically low and on a downwards trend. The savings rate is definitely lower than the optimal capital/labour ratio, but economists disagree on how much.
This analysis doesn't seem to take into account the existence of nuclear weapons. Military escalation has a very definite endpoint. Use of nuclear weapons is not unthinkable if a nation feels genuinely threatened. Wars will remain limited and proxy until there is an effective counter to nuclear weapons.
You underestimate the power of the dark side. While most people think nuclear war is loose-loose, some may think differently, especially when anger is overflowing. From the logical point of view Hitler should have never started the war, yet he did.
As a nationalist, I can certify that the author gets their understanding of our motivations completely wrong. Indeed, every time Trump or Le Pen are dismissed as "crazies", our resolve only gets stronger.
The abject refusal of the Left to even so much as attempt to understand this incipient uprising is shocking.
> Indeed, every time Trump or Le Pen are dismissed as "crazies", our resolve only gets stronger.
Of course, that's entirely expected. I doubt this is a criticism meant to weaken your resolve. Like most political posturing, it's not directed at the enemy, but at the home base. If it also strengthens the enemy's resolve that's just an added bonus.
> The abject refusal of the Left to even so much as attempt to understand this incipient uprising is shocking.
The article takes a decent stab at trying to understand your motivations. I would summarize them like this:
You feel your way of life is under attack, the very foundations of society are threatened by the erosion of religious morals. You feel that your nation, once destined for true and unique greatness, might become nothing but a weak and unrecognizable shadow in a larger political landscape. You feel that traditional roles of gender, class, and race, are becoming irrelevant, degrading society into a chaotic free-for-all where only the weak and perverted thrive, and poor people are getting a free ride. You feel that forces beyond your control are taking away your liberties while at the same time giving too many liberties to classes of people you don't like. You feel that education and science are unnaturally superseding righteous decisions made by people who simply know in their guts what's right and what's wrong. You feel you live in the unbroken tradition of like-minded and wise people who have endured through thousands of years, and now it's your generation's turn to keep this tradition alive, which is at this moment facing the greatest threat it has ever known.
Of course, this is a huge list of grievances, and you very likely don't share every single one of them. But your concerns are in there, right? If not, I'd be very eager to hear them!
i wish i could live in as simple a universe as this person. maybe our anger stems from boiling down the "other" to "crazy" and "stupid" and "ignorant" rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt and making an honest attempt to understand them.
When you're talking about a total war scenario, the US is effectively unbeatable for a lot of reasons. Ignoring the amount we spend (much of which is wasted on graft and ineffective procurement), we hold the distinct advantage of geography. We're fully capable of building a war machine all by ourselves -- we have the raw materials, the industry, and most important of all: a several-thousand mile long buffer zone between the US and any potential enemy looking to disrupt production.
China is the only real rising threat, and even then, they have two or three decades of catching up to do. And ultimately, I'm not convinced there are any resources that China and the US both covet so much as to go to war with each other: both are large, geographically diverse countries with a wide range of natural resources. The Chinese also have very little to gain by a shooting war: they will naturally eclipse the US in a global economy in the next 100 years anyway, so why bother fighting a dangerous enemy on the battlefield when you have better economic weapons?