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.

> a hegemon that largely avoided conflict

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.

> He clearly means on our doorstep.

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.

Not ignoring it. I think that's going to get worse too. Look at Egypt's resource issues, etc.

To put your comment in perspective: we had two world wars, such as the world had never seen before, last century.