A question to you all

[planetbrain]

I think everything is primed toward a larger conflict. Also, I cannot see that Israel will ever allow Iran to get the bomb & how would that play out?

[MOS:96B2P]

It's arguable that we're already in one.

I had a pretty long discussion with former FSO buddy that works with the DOD and he pretty well agrees. 

The difference is that in this instance, the major powers involved NATO and allies vs Russia, China, India, North Korea and Iran, the war is unlikely to be fought directly in the major states and more with and among proxies.

Would India be on the same side as China?  I thought there was tension and occasional skirmishes between them.  Also India is a democracy and some Western businesses are thinking of moving production from China to India. I hope India would be on the side of the Western democracies.

[SirAndrewD]

Would India be on the same side as China?  I thought there was tension and occasional skirmishes between them.  Also India is a democracy and some Western businesses are thinking of moving production from China to India. I hope India would be on the side of the Western democracies.

Brookings institute considers them strategically aligned currently, but it's not a warm "friendship". 

I doubt you'd ever see them form a direct military alliance, but they currently are interested in creating a power bloc that is a counterbalance to western interest. 

Of the three big "Eastern Coalition" nations I'd consider India to be the one that has the least desire to risk a military confrontation with the west. 

An example of them would be Italy's place in the Central powers pre-1914.

[GDS_Starfury]

But the Iraq and Afghanistan wars took very long.

one could argue that the war part was fairly short and the occupation/nation building was very long.

[GDS_Starfury]

As did the Indochina conflict

funny how much faster that ended when we stopped dicking around and carpet bombed Hanoi.

[W8taminute]

I watched a video today that claims that ever since the creation of the united nations there have been more wars on planet earth than in any other time in history.

Need to dig a bit deeper but if this is true I would argue the world is getting more violent, not less.

[MengJiao]

I watched a video today that claims that ever since the creation of the united nations there have been more wars on planet earth than in any other time in history.

Need to dig a bit deeper but if this is true I would argue the world is getting more violent, not less.

  I'm not sure how you measure number of wars, but human violence over all has declined to an almost incredible degree.  The chance of violent human inflicted death is minuscule (less than 1%) in most 21st century societies whereas in the past it could be 60%.
Here's a visual thing:
 https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-slide

[SirAndrewD]

I would argue the world is getting more violent, not less.

No, it's not by an extremely considerable margin and it's not even being argued.  In fact most studies are exploring the overall decrease in violence and the reasons behind it and what it means for the future.

[Uberhaus]

We have also had long periods of peace which were interupted by war.  The Congress of Vienna comes to mind as the most extreme example, a century of peace followed by the two worst wars in human history.
There is also criticism of Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02148-1

[JasonPratt]

Wait, did someone just call the 1800s after Napoleon a century of peace??

[Jarhead0331]

I would argue the world is getting more violent, not less.

No, it's not by an extremely considerable margin and it's not even being argued.  In fact most studies are exploring the overall decrease in violence and the reasons behind it and what it means for the future.

I'm not sure how one would define "violence" when attempting to study whether it is increasing or decreasing overall worldwide. I'm also not sure how one might define "war" when studying the increase or decrease of armed conflict. The definitions could vary widely and so, therefore, could the results or findings. For instance, while "world-wide battle deaths" may be decreasing on average, wars could still be on the rise, again, depending upon how a "war" is defined.  Furthermore, "wars" might be found to be decreasing world-wide with "violence" overall still being on the rise. With this in mind, one could literally make a chart or conduct a study that shows a wide degree of differences or variations on the topic.

[FarAway Sooner]

Yeah.  Violence is on the decline globally and has been ever since the end of WW2.  The easiest of Pinker's reads is Enlightenment Now, but there are other scholarly works by other folks that try to measure violence and political violence and the world is doing fine right now by almost any standard imaginable.

Of course, easy access to cell phones means that, when a hospital halfway around the world is bombed, we don't have to rely on 5-day old newspaper reports to know it happened.  We see not just pictures, but video of the immediate aftermath.  That kicks our own fear instincts into overdrive, which makes people feel profoundly unsafe. 

Of course, making people feel unsafe is the best way to sell advertising (as Internet/media moguls figured out in the last 10-15 years), so there's more emphasis these days on media triggering emotional responses than on actually informing people.  This can be a wholly accidental byproduct of internet search algorithms and doesn't have to involve anybody trying to freak us out intentionally.

The whole problem is made worse by humans being fundamentally incapable of applying math to real world situations.

So, I think WW 3 is maybe more likely than it was 15 years ago, but still far less likely than it was for pretty much all of human history predating the end of WW2.  I think a Cold War-like scenario is much more likely than a hot shooting war.  But we'll all feel really unsafe, because of the nature of mass media that we've adopted.

Of course, climate change could wreck civilization and kill of 95% of the species on the planet anyways, so maybe we shouldn't be feeling cocky just yet.  (or is the media coverage of climate change all fear-based, too?)   

[SirAndrewD]

We have also had long periods of peace which were interupted by war.  The Congress of Vienna comes to mind as the most extreme example, a century of peace followed by the two worst wars in human history.
There is also criticism of Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02148-1

I actually agree with the criticism that Pinker is far too optimistic that human nature has improved leading to less military conflict. 

I'd argue more that the decrease in war is only partly tied to secular humanistic improvement but much more tied to the great powers being so financially interconnected and inseparable with weapons stockpiles so potentially catastrophic that war is increasingly not a palatable or profitable option.

This has been, to my mind, why wars have gotten smaller and fought more often with and among secondary or lower powers.

[W8taminute]

I would argue the world is getting more violent, not less.

No, it's not by an extremely considerable margin and it's not even being argued.  In fact most studies are exploring the overall decrease in violence and the reasons behind it and what it means for the future.

Looking at the x axis I see there are approximately 55 data points from roughly 1948 to roughly 2003.  Each of those data points is one kind of conflict or another.  I wonder what the data looks like from the previous 5 decades?

Edit - If you look at the cumulative deaths from the past 5 decades on that chart do they not exceed the death caused by WW2?

[SirAndrewD]

If you look at the cumulative deaths from the past 5 decades on that chart do they not exceed the death caused by WW2?

I would expect a 50 year span to eclipse a 5 year war even with limited conflict.