Normally I would say, “don’t be so sure”, but a book I just finished this weekend changed my mind: “The Guns of August”. I agree with you and do think the weste

Normally I would say, “don’t be so sure”, but a book I just finished this weekend changed my mind: “The Guns of August”. I agree with you and do think the western world would be really hard to bring into a world war nowadays. The amount the world and Europe in particular has changed since WWI is astounding. The entire world was deeply belligerent in a way that really surprised me and seems foreign to our modern sensibility. The only country of today that acts/thinks this way seems to be Russia, but leading up to WWI almost every single country in Europe was still planning for the conquest and destruction of their neighbors. Everyone (the major powers anyways) just assumed “ya, we’re gonna fight a huge multi-million person war and we’re gonna win.” I really don’t see that kind of belligerence in the minds of the world anymore. Of course, there were some academics at the time of WWI saying the same thing, so…