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> Nobody is going to start a war with China. Hopefully you are right, and I share your opinion (if that is what it is) that there will be no war in the immedia

> Nobody is going to start a war with China. Hopefully you are right, and I share your opinion (if that is what it is) that there will be no war in the immediate aftermath of covid-19. But I need to point out that the cited remark represents a kind of absolutist statements about the future that have had a chronic tendency to be wrong up through history. There is definitely a risk for war with China as long as the US have a considerable number of weapons pointed against China, a war triggered either by intent or by mistake. The best way IMO to avoid the risk of war is to work towards total disarmament under the oversight of transparent and neutral international agencies. And discredit the warmongering on all sides. Somehow and unfortunately I don't anticipate that such initiatives will be accepted by the world main powers, or by a frightened and easily manipulated public, any time soon.

philwelch 7y ago
Disarmament doesn’t prevent war. It only prevents winning. “Transparent and neutral international agencies” are a pipe dream. Furthermore, remember what I actually said. The main reason there won’t be a war with China is because China is too dangerous to attack. When China was less well armed than they are today, they ended up at war much more frequently. Why does the US “point weapons” at China? Same reason. We don’t want them to attack us or our allies, though our commitment to those allies has turned less credible in recent years. In both cases, the basic principle is the same: si vis pacem, para bellum. That is the only way to preserve peaceful coexistence between states that have fundamental differences and distrust between them. Which, after all, is the same basic reason different countries exist in the first place.
- stareatgoats 7y ago
  You make it sound simple, and simple is certainly compelling. It is however just a theory, and as it happens it's the same theory (to the extent that logic and theories has anything to do with such) that has lead to 2 devastating world wars. It's time to reconsider, and try a different theory, before the 3rd one wreaks havoc on us all. I have great faith in the prospect of brilliant minds finding solutions in the face of adversities like this race towards mutual destruction. Unfortunately, many if not all of our brilliant minds are either tied up in how to convince people to buy stuff, or how to enable first-strike capability (enabling 'winning' in your theory). It doesn't bode well.
  - randallsquared 7y ago
    > as it happens it's the same theory (to the extent that logic and theories has anything to do with such) that has lead to 2 devastating world wars. It appears that you are arguing that those starting the world wars did so because they were suicidal. On the contrary, it seems probable that they started those wars believing it was possible to win them.
    - stareatgoats 7y ago
      No, you misunderstand in that case, sorry if I was unclear. I think people who "start" wars are an anomaly, the vast majority of wars are started as a consequence of a long chain of events, among which the notion of mutual deterrence and the accompanying need for an arms race is one of the most important. Outbreaks of world wars are the empirical proof of failures of that doctrine, and it has happened 2 times with devastating consequences. Let's understand that mutual deterrence is not the way to prevent world wars already. Let's urgently try other options.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    Hey, you left out brilliant minds moving virtual representations of stocks and futures around to shave off fractions of a cent millions of times a day.
    - stareatgoats 7y ago
      sorry - my bad!
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Quite the contrary. The road to the Second World War, at least in Europe, was paved with the good intentions of pacifism and appeasement, and the naïveté of assuming that someone like Hitler could be negotiated with. Britain and France could have chosen not to involve themselves in Hitler’s war (France even tried to make that choice once it started going poorly for them) but that would have done nothing to stop the war from happening. There was a fundamentally irreconcilable difference between Poland and Russia, who wanted to exist, and Germany, who wanted to forcibly depopulate Poland and western Russia and resettle that land with Germans.

philwelch 7y ago

Disarmament doesn’t prevent war. It only prevents winning. “Transparent and neutral international agencies” are a pipe dream. Furthermore, remember what I actually said. The main reason there won’t be a war with China is because China is too dangerous to attack. When China was less well armed than they are today, they ended up at war much more frequently. Why does the US “point weapons” at China? Same reason. We don’t want them to attack us or our allies, though our commitment to those allies has turned less credible in recent years. In both cases, the basic principle is the same: si vis pacem, para bellum. That is the only way to preserve peaceful coexistence between states that have fundamental differences and distrust between them. Which, after all, is the same basic reason different countries exist in the first place.

stareatgoats 7y ago
You make it sound simple, and simple is certainly compelling. It is however just a theory, and as it happens it's the same theory (to the extent that logic and theories has anything to do with such) that has lead to 2 devastating world wars. It's time to reconsider, and try a different theory, before the 3rd one wreaks havoc on us all. I have great faith in the prospect of brilliant minds finding solutions in the face of adversities like this race towards mutual destruction. Unfortunately, many if not all of our brilliant minds are either tied up in how to convince people to buy stuff, or how to enable first-strike capability (enabling 'winning' in your theory). It doesn't bode well.
- randallsquared 7y ago
  > as it happens it's the same theory (to the extent that logic and theories has anything to do with such) that has lead to 2 devastating world wars. It appears that you are arguing that those starting the world wars did so because they were suicidal. On the contrary, it seems probable that they started those wars believing it was possible to win them.
  - stareatgoats 7y ago
    No, you misunderstand in that case, sorry if I was unclear. I think people who "start" wars are an anomaly, the vast majority of wars are started as a consequence of a long chain of events, among which the notion of mutual deterrence and the accompanying need for an arms race is one of the most important. Outbreaks of world wars are the empirical proof of failures of that doctrine, and it has happened 2 times with devastating consequences. Let's understand that mutual deterrence is not the way to prevent world wars already. Let's urgently try other options.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  Hey, you left out brilliant minds moving virtual representations of stocks and futures around to shave off fractions of a cent millions of times a day.
  - stareatgoats 7y ago
    sorry - my bad!
- philwelch 7y ago
  Quite the contrary. The road to the Second World War, at least in Europe, was paved with the good intentions of pacifism and appeasement, and the naïveté of assuming that someone like Hitler could be negotiated with. Britain and France could have chosen not to involve themselves in Hitler’s war (France even tried to make that choice once it started going poorly for them) but that would have done nothing to stop the war from happening. There was a fundamentally irreconcilable difference between Poland and Russia, who wanted to exist, and Germany, who wanted to forcibly depopulate Poland and western Russia and resettle that land with Germans.