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> But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive. People
by retrac 15d ago
> But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive.
People talked like that before WW I. There hasn't been a major war in Europe since 1870 almost half a century and trade is such a large war would bankrupt all the major powers and so would never happen. The Great Illusion was published in 1909 and was positively received at the time:
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4][5] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[6] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[7] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay.
- jltsiren 15d agoThere was a major war between Russian and Ottoman empires in 1877–1878. And if you look outside Europe, there was an even greater war between Russia and Japan in 1904–1905.
- jopsen 15d agoThese were small wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War Smaller than the one in Ukraine today.
- jltsiren 15d ago0.15% of world population was mobilized to fight in the Russo–Japanese war. That would correspond to ~12.5 million combatants today. Napoleon's invasion of Russia saw more casualties from combat, starvation, and disease, but it involved a smaller fraction of world population.
- nostrademons 15d agoI assume you're going off the 1.365M + 1.2M combatant strength listed in the Wikipedia article? Those are figures for the total size of those national armies at the time. It'd be like saying the Iran war involved 3M people because the U.S. has about 2.1M in uniform and Iran has just under 1M counting reservists. Meanwhile there've been precisely zero boots on the ground in Iran, and the total number of military personnel directly affected is on the order of tens of thousands. The text of the article has the Russian far east strength at about 95,000 at the start of the war, with another 410,000 trained in over the course of the war. The best proxy for Japanese (and Russian) combat strength might be the Battle of Mukden [1], which had about 250K Japanese and 292K Russian troops. These numbers are smaller by a factor of about 5x. The present-day Russo-Ukrainian war is significantly larger. Estimated Russian deaths are 500K+, higher than the total number of Russian soldiers involved in the Russo-Japanese war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mukden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mukden
- jltsiren 15d agoIf you continue reading the article, it mentions that Russia had mobilized almost a million soldiers in the Far East by the end of the war, and that mobilization largely happened after the Battle of Mukden. Without the naval defeat at the Battle of Tsushima, Russia would have had the upper hand at that point, and the war would likely have reached a different conclusion. Industrial armies were massive. By the standards of that era, current US military strength exceeds 60 million. But they mostly relied on reserves, which were slow to mobilize. Japan's quick decisive victories ended the Russo–Japanese war before it had a chance to escalate further, potentially reaching the scale of the Eastern Front in WW1. But even then, the Battle of Mukden was one of the largest land battles in history until that point