Our Unstable World Points To Large War Looming On Horizon

[Geee]

:

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we've seen before.

 

In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored.

 

The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power shifted, decline for some nations seemed like opportunity for others.

 

The same was true in 1939. The tragedy of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 was not that it had been too harsh. In fact, it was far milder than the terms Germany had imposed on a defeated Russia in 1918 or the requirements it had planned for France in 1914. Instead, Versailles combined the worst of both worlds: harsh language without any means of enforcement.

 

The subsequent appeasement of Britain and France, the isolationism of the U.S. and the collaboration of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany green-lighted Hitler's aggression — and another world war.

[NCTexan]

We could ask America... "Other than that... how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"

[Valin]

@Geee @NCTexan

 

On A Related Note.....

 

Vast Continent, Small World: America's Geopolitical Reality
Robert Kaplan

Dec. 4 2014

 

The United States of America constitutes a vast continent in the temperate zone of North America, bordered by two great oceans to the east and west and by the Canadian arctic to the north. This geography grants Americans a large measure of safety and separation from the infernal conflicts that dominate much of the globe.

 

Yet, it cannot be denied that technology has shrunk geographical distance. The world of geopolitics is simply smaller than it ever has been. The 9/11 attack on the American homeland, the impetus for which originated in the remote hills of Afghanistan, is the most obvious example of this. Then there is the new world of global financial markets, whereby stock movements in East Asia and Europe can instantaneously affect Wall Street. And, of course, as recent headlines show, there is the spread of disease, whereby a small country in West Africa suddenly looms geopolitically vital.

 

In short, the United States is more vulnerable than ever before to events in the outside world, and more influenced by them.

 

This is especially true of the elite that implement and help control foreign policy. Elites always exist in democracies and non-democracies alike. The masses may shape the political environment in which policy is made, but an elite is required to give it form and substance. And because of the shrinkage of geography wrought by technology, America's foreign policy elite are more cosmopolitan than ever before, meaning they have more professional connections with other elites worldwide than ever before, which has a profound influence upon the American elite's own values and how they think.

 

(Snip)

[NCTexan]

I'm waiting for "historical fiction" to repeat itself in reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared

 

 

The tiny (three miles by five miles) European Duchy of Grand Fenwick, supposedly located in the Alps between Switzerland and France, proudly retains a pre-industrial economy, dependent almost entirely on making Pinot Grand Fenwick wine. However, an American winery makes a knockoff version, "Pinot Grand Enwick", putting the country on the verge of bankruptcy.

The prime minister decides that their only course of action is to declare war on the United States. Expecting a quick and total defeat (since their standing army is tiny and equipped with bows and arrows), the country confidently expects to rebuild itself through the largesse that the United States bestows on all its vanquished enemies (as it did for Germany through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II).

Instead, the Duchy defeats the mighty superpower, purely by accident. Landing in New York City, almost completely deserted above ground because of a city-wide disaster drill, the Duchy's invading "army" (composed of the Field Marshal Tully Bascomb, three men-at-arms, and twenty longbowmen) wanders to a top secret government lab and unintentionally captures the "Q-bomb" (a prototype doomsday device that could destroy the world if triggered) and its maker, Dr. Kokintz.

[nickydog]

We already knew everything that VDH wrote, and yet to see it condensed into just two pages is really scary. I feel vulnerable and helpless, and we still have 2 more years of the Obama administration. And even after that, is this nation capable of finding the kind of leader we need?

[Cyber_Liberty]

FTA:

 

What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful U.S. either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.

 

Ding, ding, ding, ding!!!! Nailed by VDH, once again.