there's nothing strange about a country going to war over a resource. Has been happening for a long time in history, and there's no reason that anything in the modern world changed human nature.
Except that lithium isn't valuable enough to go to war over at the moment.
Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.
We've grown up in our latte sipping bubbles, far removed from geopolitical competition for resources.
America's postwar boom years resulted in a hegemon that largely avoided conflict. Now that power is more widely distributed amongst peer competitors, we're going to see the resource hungry animals we evolved as come to the forefront. There will be a great deal of contention, and some of it will be heated.
If I had to bet, we'll see more war this century than in the last. Ukraine is just a harbinger of what's to come.
I'm sorry but this ignores the history. Vast swathes of Africa, Latin America and Asia were in conflicts and turmoil, sometimes due to the same hegemon and her allies. The only region that was mostly conflict free in the post WW2 era was Europe and North America.
He clearly means on our doorstep. There are almost no Americans left alive who have ever lived through war coming to America. The worst we've had was 9/11 where 3000 people were killed. It lead to us flipping out, starting multiple wars over, and cheering on the government broadly restricting civil rights in a bout of mass fear, anxiety, and paranoia.
By contrast about 3% of all humans alive were killed in WW2, over 6 years. 3% doesn't sound too bad, so let's contextualize that. In the United States alone that would be more than 10 million people. That's about 4,620 people killed every single day for 6 years. The amount of suffering that actual war brings is something almost none of us living today in the West can even begin to imagine. I mean can you imagine multiple 9/11 scale events, every single day, for almost 2200 days?
Being honest, I actually had to double check my math because my god that's just an unimaginably vast amount of suffering and death. And WW3 will almost certainly be vastly worse because the first bloc to start losing is going to go nuclear - which will result in a comparable response from the other bloc. This whole hegemony thing has really got to end, or we as a species are going to end.
I didn’t read that in their comment, and since I’m not American I assumed that they are talking about the world. Everyone knows USA is a hegemon in a global sense and not a regional sense. The past 70 years were not some conflict free utopia for rest of the world.
But I agree with your general point that we need to avoid further conflicts else we’re doomed.
Nuclear proliferation is considered an antipattern for a reason. It's not about fairness, it's about reducing the chances of an accidental nuclear war. Yes, one factor is the power balance of incumbent nuclear states, but it does no invalidate the argument for avoiding proliferation.
> Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.
No it isn't. The US helped plenty of bad regimens get their hands on nuclear weapons and did nothing to prevent it. In fact, if its about nukes, then maybe Israel is the clear problem. They are non signatory to the NPT and almost certainty have secret nukes (likely developed partly with stolen data from the US). So if a 'thread of war' is appropriate, Israel should be the target, not Iran.
Iran on the other hand is a signatory to the NPT, they also have never attempted to develop nuclear weapons. Their program was always monitored under the NPT. A bunch of fake evidence for nuclear weapons was 'discovered' on a laptop in Egypt by Mossad. This evidence was widely reject by literally everybody outside of the Mossad, including the CIA. The whole global intelligence community agree, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons.
That didn't stop Israel right-wing to try to use it to get the US to attack Iran for them over it. According to them, Iran is 'one year away from nukes' literally since 1990 so this was just the latest in a long series of such claims.
Iran was not even developing its own enrichment, they had a deal with France to handle the fuel production and France would be responsible for monitoring and taking the nuclear waste back to France. This deal was then killed by the US (Bush) who basically threatened sanction on France. Only in response to that did Iran set up enrichment facilities.
This was then used around 2008-2010 to start a panic about Iran nuclear weapons in a blatant attempt to repeat the Iraq war against Iran. All the right wing think-thanks (with lots of money from Israel, Ratheon and Loockeed and friends) were busy publishing mostly fake nonsense base on manufactured evidence to push the narrative. Thankfully everybody was sick of that shit because of Iraq.
This lead to Obama years of extreme pressure and results in Iran implementing a monitoring regime specially developed just for Iran just they could prove that they were not developing nuclear weapons. Of course all that didn't stop Trump from instantly leaving the deal.
War with Iran is literally an insane concept. Like delusional level of insanity. Even if they developed nuclear weapons, it would be insane to go to war over them. Its a nation with 90 million people, horrible geography and the ability to blockade the most important oil export route in the world.
there's nothing strange about a country going to war over a resource. Has been happening for a long time in history, and there's no reason that anything in the modern world changed human nature.
Except that lithium isn't valuable enough to go to war over at the moment.
Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.