Am I Reading Into The World Too Much?

[Dill]

(10-15-2023, 08:58 PM)NotBigzo Wrote: We've lived in a time of relative peace since WWII. Sure, there have been proxy wars and long occupations, but nothing compared to past conflicts. A worldwide catastrophe/conflict to shake things up seems a bit overdue.
The global order of things is more fragile than people think. Boiling tensions and then, just like that, a straw breaks the camel's back and everything goes to shit.
All we can do is hope these conflicts stay regional and don't cause a domino effect. As bad as things may be for some of us, it can ALWAYS get worse.

I just want to tag a few notes onto this.

The WWII generation in all nations--including the Axis--realized that humankind had brought the greatest disaster in history upon itself.
So there was considerable effort put into figuring out what were the causes of the conflict, and the bad choices that moved it, so that
humankind could come together and prevent it from ever happening again.

That's how we got the UN, GATT, the IMF, the 3rd and 4th Geneva Conventions and protocols, and now an international criminal court, along
with historical and social scientific studies of authoritarianism and totalitarianism which (initially) informed some postwar policy and diplomacy.

And the resulting international order has worked well enough to prevent another world war, though over the last 80 years various states and non-state actors have not been on board with this program (including the US at times).  But at this time we do see a lot of the post-WWII consensus being challenged and rolled back now, in some cases more or less systematically. Authoritarianism seems to be on the rise, but not only abroad. The US is divided over the very definition of democracy right now, and many have resumed the kind of interwar thinking (America first!) that kept US out of world affairs until it had no choice and the cost of setting the world aright was much steeper than it needed to be. That post-WWII world order seems to be unraveling right now.

So I quite agree with Notbizo that the world is more fragile than people think.

In response to Leonard I say "maybe" and "yes."  I don't know if a world war IS starting up; it's not inevitable. But the potential is certainly there. There are a lot of separate conflicts; not all are connected (Myanmar, Azerbaijzan) but some of them are manifestly interconnected groupings of belligerents [Russia, Belarus China, and exploitation of rare minerals in Africa+the US and NATO] which at present seem separate but which could interconnect [Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, NK] or create a spiral that draws in the others [Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia+ Russia and the US] . Add a generous dose of non-state actors [Hamas, Hezbollah, corporatized mercenaries] plus cyber and nuclear warfare, and yes, I think that everyone should be concerned.

Certainly time to stop stepping back from engagement in the Near and Far East to allow bad actors to fill the power vacuum.