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Hmm... Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Pl

• testing22321 6mo ago
  The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. When all you have is a hammer…
  • tracerbulletx 6mo ago
    I mean we could just go back to talk softly and carry a big stick. There are options between pacifism and boisterous rabble rousing and picking fights that don't particularly need to be fought without good plans.
  • Apes 6mo ago
    The theory behind the US having a large military is that it acts as a sort of fleet in being - that the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily. In turn, having stable global relations and protected global trade provides the US with a huge economic boon to fund its large military. That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate. As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.
    • ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
      > the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran? Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.
      • kelnos 6mo ago
        Because the US doesn't want sole responsibility or complicity for the wars it starts. It looks a lot better if everyone is involved. And besides, even if you have a large, capable military, why not spread the cost (in lives and materiel) around?
        • Hikikomori 6mo ago
          US wants nato countries to buy US weapons.
    • testing22321 6mo ago
      > Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military. With fours times the population
  • nradov 6mo ago
    Bullshit. Those numbers are not to be trused. China simply lies about their military spending, but independent estimates put their spending alone close to the USA.
• CodingJeebus 6mo ago
  > Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight. And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
  • ACCount37 6mo ago
    That's a property shared by any large scale government spending. The difference between pouring 80B into a war and pouring the same into infrastructure is that one gives you a more developed MIC and a lot of munitions and a lot of explosions (exported), and the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
    • lotsofpulp 6mo ago
      A big part of this is that apparently, any president can unilaterally decide to go to war and spend $1B per day destroying things, but building infrastructure for Americans requires the agreement of 60 US Senators. Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”. Look what Biden had to do to try and get Americans a piddling amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave. And still 60 votes couldn’t be mustered. But if he wanted to bomb another country to the stone age, that was well within his capacity.
      • nradov 6mo ago
        US states are free to build infrastructure without any federal involvement or permission. California just spent $114M to build a wildlife crossing bridge over Highway 101. https://smmc.ca.gov/liberty-canyon-wildlife-corridor/ https://smmc.ca.gov/liberty-canyon-wildlife-corridor/
• poszlem 6mo ago
  I think the reason we can imagine conflict easier than peace is pretty structural. Wars usually happen because of disequilibrium, and we're sitting right in the middle of a big one. The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem. Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.
  • ACCount37 6mo ago
    I don't think there are major unresolved economic tensions between US and Iran or the likes. US isn't, somehow, mad because Iran or Venezuela are suddenly very rich and prosperous and independent - that simply isn't true. The closest to your dynamic would be that between US and China, and those two aren't at war as of yet. Iran is vaguely supported by China, but it's a low level of support, and it isn't China's proxy.
    • tmnvix 6mo ago
      One theory is that control over Venezuelan and Iranian oil is a means of constricting Chinese economic competition.
      • the_gipsy 6mo ago
        It definitely is control over the currency in which oil is traded.
      • XorNot 6mo ago
        Yes that's the "it actually makes sense" the more repugnant conservative pundits have been pushing because those guest spots on the right wing networks require you not to criticize the administration in any way.
• TheGRS 6mo ago
  Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets. If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
  • Centigonal 6mo ago
    I'll add to this by saying that globalization works as well as it does because the average person would suffer dramatically from a major war and the resulting breakdown of global supply chains. People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
      As a corollary: people who, because of geography, are unlikely to suffer any traditional or novel military consequences of a war in country <X> (e.g. Americans w.r.t a war in the middle east) are only going to have moral reasons for avoiding such a war, other than the risk to members of their family and friends. This makes the risks from such countries significantly worse than those who are militarily at risk should they choose to attack another. Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that). We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.
    • michaelt 6mo ago
      > People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace. Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants. Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike. Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.
• aaron695 6mo ago
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• rembal 6mo ago
  That could work if the actors were rational. Unfortunately, they are largely ideological.
  • tryauuum 6mo ago
    you don't have to be ideological. You can be perfectly rational and continue a seemingly useless pointless war, when the alternative is "armed men return home and start to question your power". Your goal is to stay in power and every move which helps you with it is rational
• roncesvalles 6mo ago
  >The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people. The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons. Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family). This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.
  • cindyllm 6mo ago
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  • llbbdd 6mo ago
    Of all things there's a relevant Tumblr post from nearly a decade ago that I often think everyone should consider (in agreement BTW): "If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."
    • kelnos 6mo ago
      That's a reflection/continuation of a very old meme (from before we called them memes). "Why your idea won't work" checklists were passed around USENET and other forums, and one of the checklist items was almost always something like "your idea requires immediate total cooperation from everyone at once". This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.
  • 6mo ago
• cladopa 6mo ago
  Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world. Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world. Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy. The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation. That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system. The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros. The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world. If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
  • ctippett 6mo ago
    Except America went to war with Saddam Hussein a full decade before the move to the Euro and was largely a reaction to the invasion of Kuwait.
    • coldtea 6mo ago
      Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself). Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
      • cogman10 6mo ago
        To add, the primary reason the US supported Iraq was because it didn't want Iran to send oil to the USSR. This was because the US didn't want a communist nation to have a good economy. That's the story of a bunch of the CIAs operations.
• pixl97 6mo ago
  >Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Because nature is filled with examples. Look at the plants around you. They are nice and peaceful, right? No wars with other plants, no battles for life and death and resources... Well if you don't know anything about plants that's exactly what you'd think. And I'm not really talking about animals and insects that are trying to consume them, plants themselves, rooted into the ground are in a constant war. Some breed very quickly to compete, making millions of seeds or growing at insane speeds. Some plants poison the soil around them with horrifically toxic substances so only they can grow. Some plants grow broad leaves flat against the ground strangling anything that tries to grow. Other plants make vast canopies creating a world of darkness below them to snuff competitors. Some plants have symbiotic relationships with bacteria to fix nitrogen so they grow faster than other plants. Some plants have relationships with ants and the ants keep competition away. War and peace are simply game theories in real life. Take your statement >Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Anything that doesn't involve you smashing someone's head in and instead doing anything that is even slightly cooperative is a peaceful scenario. Pretty much everything you do every day is just that. Furthermore you need to dream up every possible conflict idea that you possibly can if you want to defend against it. The difficult part there is not using it against others. This is why you see people worry about things like advance AI. Because while it could come up with all kinds of peaceful ideas, even just a few good conflict ideas could make mankind go extinct.
  • squibonpig 6mo ago
    Human cooperation is another survival strategy, and a very effective one when achievable. Peace in no way disagrees with what you said, anymore than plant cooperation with bacteria is a counterexample.
    • pixl97 6mo ago
      I think you're thinking of it the wrong way. Cooperation is effective if the party you're cooperating with has something to give in return that's within a couple of orders of magnitude of value. Just as much as war has a cost, peace/cooperation has a cost.
• TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  > Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped. Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country. While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".
• neonsunset 6mo ago
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• kelnos 6mo ago
  I would agree, except that de-escalation generally assumes there's a rational reason for conflict. That is, both sides want or need something that makes sense, and the failing to come to some sort of terms is what leads to war. In the case of both Russia/Ukraine and US/Iran, there's nothing rational here. You can't de-escalate in these cases, because the aggressors (Putin and Trump) are making war for ideological or ego reasons. Putin wants glory and more territory for the Russian Empi-- oops, I mean Federation. Trump wants to distract from Epstein and other problems at home (which hasn't worked as well as most manufactured wars often do), and is in general just someone who likes to break things.
• harrall 6mo ago
  I do not think mural understanding works. It just allows you to merely accept someone, but it doesn’t mean that you want to work with them. What America pushed after the WW2 was the “American world order” which was primarily “if we can trade, let’s forget about war and make money.” America would sit in the middle, protect shipping routes, provide a stable currency to ease trade, and encourage trade pacts. Surprisingly, unlike beliefs, religion, language, or almost anything else, wanting to make money is… somewhat universal. It breaks down barriers. Countries wanted to work together and make money from trade. It exploited human materialistic tendencies. But we are reaching the limits of it.
• procaryote 6mo ago
  Why do we insist on building cars to be safe in a collision when it would be so much nicer to not have accidents? Why do we build cancer treatment when not getting cancer is a much better option?
• AtlasBarfed 6mo ago
  If anything, the prospects for war are far higher now, because drones provide economic victory to a gigantic number of countries against a larger foes.
• _heimdall 6mo ago
  I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible. Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point. That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to take. It does mean one still needs to consider the next war though, in case its forces upon us despite wanting peace. I've had the same challenge when an argument is raised that nukes haven't been used since 1945 so they may never be used. It is quite a feat for sure, but in my opinion the only way a nuke is never again used in conflict is if we invent an even worse weapon and someone eventually uses that instead.
  • IAmGraydon 6mo ago
    >I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible. There is no post-WWII goal of permanent peace. It’s a side effect of the invention of nuclear weapons, which made wars amongst powerful countries a lose-lose scenario for everyone.
    • _heimdall 6mo ago
      The combination of globalization and nuclear weapons led plenty of countries and leaders post-WWII to claim we would have permanent peace.
  • poulpy123 6mo ago
    > I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible. You have to be an American sheltered from any war on your soil for 150 years to not understand the goal of permanent peace.