According to Fiona Hill, we’re already in it. She doesn’t really indicate when we crossed the rubicon, but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment?
> but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment?
The official start of WWI was a month after Franz Ferdinand's assassination, even though it's so heavily identified nowadays as "the start of the war". It's entirely possible that in the future, the instigating event will be identified as something that already happened and it's just taking a while for the shooting to start as alliances solidify, and that people who think we're already in WWIII have the same "the instigating event is the start of the war" association.
Russia's incursion into Ukraine near the end of February could, for example, end up being it.
I agree with Fiona: the clear nuclear threat was over the line. Freezing the assets of the central bank of Russia was also unimaginable a month ago (they are not Venezuela). That's why I used the words containing/deescalating.
Nearly 9% of US presidents have been assassinated. Over a much much smaller timeframe. I would bet you would be less likely to have been assassinated as a Tsar than as a President.
That seems substantial, at least compared to Presidents, especially considering the threat of assassination was a serious consideration given all the political intrigue. Whereas AFAIU U.S. Presidents didn't take the threat of assassination seriously until the 20th century, exposing themselves to the public in ways that would be unthinkable to Tsars; or monarchs and, later, autocrats generally for that matter.
On the other hand, likelihood of death per year looks more comparable. For Tsars I get 2.1% (5 / (1917 - 1682)). For Presidents I get 2.3% (3 / (1917 - 1789)) or 1.7% (4 / (2022 - 1789)), depending on the range.
These days autocrats don't invest themselves much in establishing national political legitimacy or institutional legitimacy, focusing almost exclusively on building and grooming a power base where everyone in power has a vested interest in keeping the leader alive. So Putin probably doesn't have much to worry about, excepting perhaps some patriot military General.
EDIT: It's 27% of Tsars and 1.6% likelihood of death per year if starting from 1613, the start of the Romanov Dynasty. (Refreshing my Russian history as I go.) Numbers don't really change if we go back to 1547, Ivan the Terrible and first self-styled Tsar of Russia, as we add another intervening murder. And that's being charitable on the first metric given rapid succession and overlap during the Time of Troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_monarchs
I think it's hard to divine trends from such small numbers. 14 Tsars, 45 presidents. It's not even enough to determine if the odds of one outcome or the other is better than a coin toss. This is before getting into confounding variables like availability and quality of medical care. How would the numbers change if they all had access to emergency care available to the next person to face an assassination attempt? Or if they all had the Secret Service looking out for them. The President flies around with a world class hospital with some of the world's best staff.
My guess is both attempts and successes are fewer over time and will approach 0 until some structural change shocks increasingly complacent protections.
The factors in World War 2 were much different, public sentiment didn’t matter. Nazis would have taken Poland in 1939 and pursue the Soviet Union sooner, it was inevitably a World War. World War 1 was editable.
World War 1 was very much avoidable. Time and time again World War 1 has been called unnecessary because the original dispute that triggered the conflict was limited.
There were people who foresaw, if not perfectly, how bad WWI would be, and tried to stop it. Many of them were socialists - Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Jean Jaurès in France for example - and their final hope was that the proletariat of the European nations would not fight against one another, but we know how that turned out.
The problem was that there were not enough who were afraid, and that goes for WWII too.
There is also the view, which I think has considerable merit, which regards WWII in Europe as a continuation of WWI, and the Pacific war as a largely separate, though concurrent, event.
There is a thought provoking book about how terrible the repercussions of WWI really were. The author claims the world was on the verge of a renaissance in technology, medicine, energy, music, trade, etc. The thought of a world war was incomprehensible at the time—no one believed it could happen. Who knows how the world would look today without WWI.
(If any one is interested in the book I will hunt it down as I don’t remember the name).
This was discussed shortly in: A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee
Another anecdote that speaks to the sentiment of the beginning of the war is Britain’s initial deployment of troops. The troops were literally marching towards Germany with music and percussionists that was supposed to motivate the troops and strike fear into the enemy. I imagine an army like you would see in Game of thrones (walking from point A to point B and making camp in between). Germany used their planes and promptly dispatched the British troops which suffered devastating losses. After this event Britain changed their tactics and took the war seriously.
(This event may have been WW2 which would make the story even more ridiculous).
I think the point is that WWI was precipitated by a chain of events that could have, in theory, easily been interrupted if the belligerents had been sufficiently fearful of conflict.
I agree in a sense. But my point is that the memes don’t carry purpose or urgency because the possibility of a catastrophic world war feels remote. Just like the possibility that our democracy might vanish in an instant.
I’d say joining the army or building a factory that can crank out precision guided munitions is better to contain the threat of war than cooking up some spicy memes.
Ukrainians using anti-tank weapons to fight on their own land against a different nation trying to take ownership of the country is the definition of defence.
Escalation is what Russia is doing: cluster munitions, rolling elite troops in, and shelling apartment buildings. Sending weapons to the people who live there to fend off invaders, and imposing sanctions is a fairly tepid response.
