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War Likely

Rapid social, economic, and technological changes make it extremely likely


Mead 14 James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Professor of American foreign policy at Yale University (Walter Russell, “The Risk of Nation-State Conflict”, The American Interest, 11/16/14, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/11/16/the-risk-of-nation-state-conflict/) EK

While it is difficult to see into the future at all and impossible to make detailed predictions, everything we know about history and human development suggests that the 21st century is unlikely to be a quiet time in international relations. As the preeminent world power, one with global interests and concerns, the United States is going to have to navigate the next stage in world history deftly. While our goal is and will remain to avoid major wars by working with our allies and partners to build economic, political, legal and institutional frameworks for lasting peace among the world’s peoples, it would be dangerous to underestimate the challenges this strategy will encounter. For the foreseeable future, the United States must work for peace without neglecting the necessary preparations to be ready if our efforts for peace do not succeed. A careful examination of the past and the factors that will likely contribute to future change suggests that while national and international conflicts involving significant states and/or engaging the vital interests of the United States are not inevitable, the danger of future conflicts is troublingly high. The rapid pace of economic, technological, and social change around the world puts increasing pressure on existing states and political structures. That is likely to lead to enhanced tension and conflict within many states as well as between and among states. The relationship between accelerating social and economic change on the one hand and growing risks of war is not new. At the outset of the industrial revolution, European powers began to struggle to keep up with the rapid technological development going on in their societies, and with the attending social forces. They were not, on the whole, all that successful at avoiding bloodshed and political upheaval in their responses. At the same time as the industrial revolution was providing Europe with untold wealth and the tools to project power around the globe, it also began to tear at the political and societal seams of European society. As the industrial revolution swept east and south from its original base in northwestern Europe, ethnic and religious conflicts developed and ultimately broke up the large multi-ethnic and multi-religious empires of central and eastern Europe and the Middle East (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian) in a mix of catastrophic war, genocide and ethnic cleansing that lasted from roughly 1880 to 1950. Those conflicts (including both the Kurdish struggle and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) continue today, but a new wave of sectarian and ethnic tensions stretching east to west from Pakistan to Algeria, and north to south from Crimea to Kenya is taking shape today. While it is not inevitable that the tragic history of 19th and 20th century Europe and the Middle East will be repeated in this zone, the parallels are more than troubling, and wars in Syria and elsewhere underscore the seriousness of the situation in this explosive region. Well beyond this zone of conflict, rapid demographic change like that taking place in countries such as China and India can lead and in the past has led to greater internal tension and conflict even when economies are growing and living standards are rising. Mass urbanization is a revolutionary process that involves great cultural and social change. In China alone, urbanization has been a driving force behind the lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty, but urbanization has lifted them at the same time into a new political consciousness and is creating new sources of tension within China and, consequentially, in the region around it. History tells us that as people’s material comfort grows, they do not tend to stop wanting more. In fact, quite the opposite happens as societies move from pre-modern to modern conditions; people gain the time, educational background and security to turn their attentions to political and social desires. At the same time, because state policies matter more to people living in modernizing economies.

Numerous factors point to increased likelihood of conflict.


Emmerson, 1/4/13 – Charles, senior research fellow at Chatham House (“Eve of Disaster,” Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/04/why_2013_looks_a_lot_like_1913?page=0,0)Red

The leading power of the age is in relative decline, beset by political crisis at home and by steadily eroding economic prowess. Rising powers are jostling for position in the four corners of the world, some seeking a new place for themselves within the current global order, others questioning its very legitimacy. Democracy and despotism are locked in uneasy competition. A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade, and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness, is emerging as a result. Small-town America rails at the excessive power of Wall Street. Asia is rising once again. And, yes, there's trouble in the Middle East. Sound familiar? In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us understand the world we live in today? Let's get the caveats out of the way upfront. History does not repeat itself -- at least not exactly. Analogies from one period to another are never perfect. However tempting it may be to view China in 2013 as an exact parallel to Germany in 1913 (the disruptive rising power of its age) or to view the contemporary United States as going through the exact same experience as Britain a century ago (a "weary titan staggering under the too vast orb of its fate," as Joseph Chamberlain put it), things are never quite that straightforward. Whereas Germany in 1913 explicitly sought a foreign empire, China in 2013 publicly eschews the idea that it is an expansionist power (though it is perfectly clear about protecting its interests around the world). Whereas the German empire in 1913 had barely 40 years of history as a unified state behind it and was only slightly more populous that Britain or France, China in 2013 can look back on centuries of continuous history as a player in world affairs, and it now boasts one-fifth of the world's population. Whereas Germany's rise was a genuinely new geopolitical phenomenon in 1913, the rise of China today is more of a return to historical normality. These differences matter. Similarly, the strengths and weaknesses of the United States in 2013 are not quite the same as those of Britain 100 years ago. Then, Britain benefited politically from being the world's banker and from being the linchpin of the gold standard. Today the United States, though benefiting politically and economically from being the issuer of the world's principal reserve currency, is hardly in the same position: The country is laden with debt. (One can argue about whether it should really be such a big issue that so much of that debt is owned by Chinese state entities -- after all, Beijing can't just dump Treasury bonds if it doesn't get what it wants from Washington. But Chinese ownership of U.S. debt feeds a perception of American decline, and perceptions of the relative powers of states matter a lot to how other countries treat them.) There are other differences between Britain in 1913 and the United States in 2013. Britain was never a military superpower on the order of the United States today. There was never a unipolar British moment. Britain in 1913 had slipped behind Germany industrially decades before, living more and more off the proceeds of the past; the United States in 2013 is still the world's largest economy and in many respects the most dynamic and most innovative. Moreover, the global context in which powers rise and fall in the 21st century is not quite the same as the one of the early 20th. In 1913, a handful of empires, mostly European, ruled over most of the world. Only two countries in Africa -- Ethiopia and Liberia -- could claim to be truly independent. In 2013, the United Nations counts over 190 independent states among its membership. Fifty-two of these are African. In 1913, one in four of the world's people lived in Europe; now it's less than one in 10. And the web of international laws and institutions that bind the world together is much thicker now than it was 100 years ago, though it shouldn't be forgotten that the Hague conventions on the laws of war date from before World War I, while the forerunner of the International Court of Justice opened its doors to the world in -- you guessed it -- 1913. But the fact that historical analogies are imperfect -- and the analogy between 1913 and 2013 is far from being seamless -- does not make them useless. It simply means that they need to be interpreted with care. As Mark Twain put it: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The task is to listen for those rhymes and to calibrate our hearing to catch them. In the end, the utility of history to the decision-maker or to the policy analyst is not as a stock of neatly packaged lessons for the contemporary world, to be pulled off the shelf and applied formulaically to every situation. Rather, it is to hone a way of thinking about change and continuity, contingency and chance. Thinking historically can remind us of the surprises that can knock states and societies off course and, at the same time, can check our enthusiasm for believing that this time is different. The world of 1913, on the threshold of the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century yet by and large not expecting it, is a case in point. Sure, there is such a sin as misusing history -- abusing history, even. But there is a much worse mistake: imagining that we have escaped it. Technology is a common culprit here. It is often remarked that we live in an era of superfast, hypertransformative technological innovation, when history, as Henry Ford put it, is bunk. When innovation comes packaged in the form of a shiny new iPhone -- the subatomic functioning of which seems pretty close to magic -- it is easy to succumb to the technofantasy that we live in an entirely new age, a new era, quite unlike anything that has come before. Yet radical technological change is hardly new. The world of 1913 had its own revolutionary technologies. Radio telegraphy was being introduced, with the promise of improving the safety of shipping at sea and allowing market and strategic information to be pinged around the globe without the need for wires. Automobiles were coming off the world's first production line -- Ford's Highland Park plant in Detroit -- and being shipped around the world, including, in 1913, to the Buddhist monks of Mongolia. Oil was replacing coal to fuel the British Royal Navy -- the world's largest -- pushing the Admiralty to go into the oil business in southern Iran and inaugurating modern petroleum diplomacy in the Middle East. The first feature-length Hollywood movie began shooting at the end of the year, and the first Indian film reached cinemas in Bombay. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson even used a campaign film in the presidential election of the previous year. (Its theme would be well suited to 2013: Tax the rich.) In the end, technological advances, remarkable in themselves, change things much more than we can ever expect -- the speed of adoption of new technologies is hard to predict, and the second- or third-order impacts of adoption even less so -- but also much less. However new the technology, it is ultimately being grafted onto the rather old technology of the individual human, or the community, or the state. And even the newest of technologies can be manipulated for the oldest of ends. It took less than 10 years from the Wright brothers' first flight, a truly revolutionary and liberating event in the history of humanity, to the first use of aircraft to conduct aerial bombing: over the cities of Libya in 1911 and over the Balkans in 1912 and 1913. Similarly, while the Internet was hailed 20 years ago as a force for the liberation of oppressed people around the world -- and indeed many people still see it that way -- authoritarian states have begun to wise up too. At the end of 2012, a rogues' gallery of authoritarian states tried to use a U.N. conference to advance an agenda of much tighter state control of the Internet internationally. Domestically, such states are already using aspects of the Internet to contain or watch their people. The world's second-oldest profession -- espionage -- has rapidly adapted itself to operations in the open, online world. Technology may be a driver of historical change, but it is subject to historical context too. To the historically minded, the recurrence of particular themes, or particular rhymes, through history -- human greed, the manipulation of technology, the importance of geography in determining military outcomes, the power of belief in shaping politics, a solid conviction that this time is different -- is no surprise. You thought that the debt-fueled boom of the 2000s was different from all those other booms throughout history? Wrong. The ancient Greeks, with their understanding of greed, self-deception, hubris, and nemesis, would have been quite able to interpret the 2008 financial crisis without the need for an advanced degree in financial astrophysics from Harvard Business School. You thought pacifying Afghanistan would be a piece of cake because we have laser-guided munitions and drones these days? Not so much. You think that globalization is destined to continue forever, that interstate war is impossible, and that the onward march of democracy is ineluctable? Hang on a second; isn't that what people thought in 1913? The crucial point about the world 100 years ago, then, is not that it is identical to the world today -- it isn't -- but that there was a time, in the not-so-distant past, when a globalized world, not entirely dissimilar to our own, fell apart. And it wasn't because human societies were in the grip of the uncontrollable forces of destiny or that they were particularly dumb. Most just didn't expect things to pan out the way they did. People actually living through the year 1913 did not experience those 12 months as the moody prelude to catastrophe. In retrospect, there were storm clouds on the horizon. But at the time, many people found themselves living through the best of times -- or simply had other things to think about. The world in 1913 was dynamic, modern, interconnected, smart -- just like ours. 1913 was the year that the modern European art of the Armory Show conquered New York. It was the year the United States established the Federal Reserve, the essential precondition for the global financial power that it would later become, in much the same way that the emergence of the Chinese renminbi as a globally traded currency today is laying the groundwork for a Chinese challenge to American financial supremacy tomorrow. 1913 was the year Gandhi made a name for himself as a political agitator in South Africa, the year Australians laid the foundation for their new capital city, the year Russian Ballets Russes took the capitals of Europe by storm -- and then did the same in Buenos Aires, then one of the richest and fastest-growing cities on Earth. In 1913, China assembled its first democratically assembled parliament, weeks after the leader of its largest party, Song Jiaoren, had been assassinated -- a murder that perhaps changed the course of global history as much as the far more famous killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo a year later. In 1913, Lenin was living in exile in the mountains of Galicia; Russia was in the middle of an industrial boom, with many believing that the moment of maximum revolutionary danger had passed and that the Tsarist Empire was on its way to becoming the dominant Eurasian power. In 1913, Japan -- a country that in 60 years had gone from being a hermit empire to an expansive, industrializing Asian nation, recognized as a peer by the other great powers -- was dealing with the uncertainties of a new emperor on the throne and mourning the death of the last shogun. In the last year before the Great War, Germany was Britain's second-largest trading partner, leading many in the City of London -- and across Europe -- to conclude that, despite the rise of Anglo-German antagonism over naval armaments, a war between the two was unlikely. If the international solidarity of the workers did not stop a war, the self-interest of global finance would, it was argued. Of course, there were prognosticators of gloom and doom in 1913 -- just as there are in any era. But there were plenty of seasoned observers of the world then who saw the processes of internationalization all around them -- of everything from the measurement of time to the laws of war -- as the natural unfolding of history's grand plan. "No country, no continent any longer lives an independent life," wrote G.P. Gooch, a British historian, in 1913. "As the world contracts the human race grows more conscious of its unity. Ideas, ideals, and experiments make the tour of the globe. Civilisation has become international." Many noted that economic globalization made war unprofitable; some thought it made it impossible. In 1913, as in previous years, an international exhibition was held to commemorate the advances of the world toward greater integration -- held in Belgium this time, in a city that would quake with the sound of artillery shells within a year. In 1913, German Kaiser Wilhelm II was viewed by some as a peacemaker. A few years earlier, president of the University of California/Berkeley had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. What does any of this say about the world in 2013? Not that we are on the cusp of a new Great War and that, on reading this, you should head for the hills and hope for the best. There is nothing inevitable about future conflict between the great powers and there is nothing foretold about the collapse of global trade -- though I would argue that both are substantially more likely now than 10 years ago. But looking at the world of 1913 reminds us that there is nothing immutable about the continuity of globalization either, and certainly nothing immutable about the Western-oriented globalization of the last few decades. There are plenty of distinct and plausible shocks to the system that could knock our expectations of the future wildly off course -- and plenty of surprises that we can neither predict nor anticipate, but that we can indirectly prepare for by attuning ourselves to the possibility of their occurrence. To take an example of one of the more plausible shocks we now face, a miscalculation in the South China Sea could easily set off a chain of events not entirely dissimilar to a shot in Sarajevo in 1914, with alliance structures, questions of prestige, escalation, credibility, and military capability turning what should be marginal to global affairs into a central question of war and peace. In a general sense, while the United States in 2013 may not be a perfect analogue for Britain in 1913 (nor China in 2013 a perfect analogue for Germany in 1913), it is certainly the case that the world we are now entering is more similar to that of 100 years ago -- a world of competitive multipolarity -- than that of a quarter-century ago. Just as in 1913, technology, trade, and finance bind the world together now -- and rational self-interest would suggest that the integration that these forces have brought about is irreversible. Yet, over the last few years, the world has witnessed a rise in trade protection, a breakdown in global trade negotiations, totally inadequate progress on global climate discussions, and moves to fragment the Internet. There is a corrosive and self-fulfilling sense that the dominance of the West -- as the world's rule-maker and pace-setter -- is over. Humanity is forever condemned to live with uncertainty about the future. But thinking historically equips us to better gauge that uncertainty, to temper biases, question assumptions, and stretch our imagination. By understanding the history of other countries -- particularly those that are re-emerging to global eminence now -- we might better understand their mindsets, hopes, and fears. And when we've done that, we might find we need to think again about how to build a future of our own making, rather than one decided for us by events. The world of 1913 -- brilliant, dynamic, interdependent -- offers a warning. The operating system of the world in that year was taken by many for granted. In 2013, at a time of similar global flux, the biggest mistake we could possibly make is to assume that the operating system of our own world will continue indefinitely, that all we need to do is stroll into the future, and that the future will inevitably be what we want it to be. Those comforting times are over. We need to prepare ourselves for a much rougher ride ahead.

Great power war is possible and is a prior question

Gonsell, 12 Lieutenant Commander, and Orzetti, US Marine Corps

(April and Michael, USNI, “Now Hear This - ls Great-Power War Still Possible?” http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012-04/now-hear-great-power-war-still-possible, accessed 7-15-13, EB)



The Center for Naval Analyses recently published Grand Strategy: Contemporary Contending Analyst Views and Implications for the U.S. Navy , a survey of potential U.S. strategies being debated in the academic and defense communities. The study identifies four competing lines of strategic thought: maintaining American hegemony, selective engagement, offshore balancing, and integrating collective international efforts. Two additional options—isolationism and world government—are noted and disregarded as not viable. Under this list of strategic options a sharp division is apparent, dictated by the question, “Is great-power war obsolete?” This fundamental question must be answered before any logical strategic decisions can be made. If great-power war is possible, then the de facto existential threat to U.S. interests, latent in the international system, must be addressed before all others. There are enormous implications for weapon procurement, operational doctrine, and force levels driven by this single issue. Global strategists point to economic globalization and the proliferation of nuclear weapons as modern guarantors of peace among major powers. However, we contend that these very rational hedges against violence can still be shattered by decidedly irrational and reactionary forces. Thus, the possibility of great-power war between China and the United States cannot be ruled out. Economic interdependence offers benefits beyond the sheer transfer of capital and goods—there can be no doubt of that. However, history renders globalization’s deterrent effects at least somewhat questionable. Substantial economic interdependence existed throughout Europe prior to World War I, and Japan was hugely dependent on American oil imports in the years leading up to World War II. It was this dependence that made the U.S oil embargo intolerable, ultimately motivating the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. On the other hand, the existential threat of nuclear weapons has certainly resulted in a universal desire keep Pandora’s Box firmly shut. While we concede the remarkable ability of weapons of mass destruction to dampen the oscillations of great-power relations, it is unclear that the nuclear restraint against total war ever takes limited war off the table as a strategic option. More fundamentally, though, the arguments for a nuclear-based “state of peace” are constrained by the limits of rationality. Rational bounds do not apply to the ephemeral—yet extremely powerful—waves of bellicose nationalism that can sweep up an entire nation. National pride is embedded in the Chinese DNA—and rightly so. In certain segments of society, however, the sentiment manifests itself with a particular fervor, and some elements of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) epitomize this zeal. Alarmingly, the Communist Party leadership appears increasingly unable to act as a check on the military. Both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping had ironclad control over the PLA, having earned unquestionable credibility during the Long March. Neither General Secretary of the Communist Party Hu Jintao nor First Secretary Xi Jinping can claim a similar rapport with the PLA. Neither possesses a comparable level of control. Any surge of aggressive nationalism, either in the PLA or among the greater masses, could conceivably compel contemporary party leadership toward a bellicosity it does not desire. How might this happen? The two most likely scenarios deal with Chinese “core interests” in the Pacific: sovereignty in the South China Sea and Taiwan. The South China Sea is no stranger to conflict. Its location and material promise have led to a host of conflicting territorial claims and brought the Chinese and Vietnamese to armed conflict over the Spratly Islands in the late 1980s. After a period of relative calm, tensions have once again begun to flare. American commitment to freedom of the seas in the region, exemplified by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s July 2010 speech in Hanoi, Vietnam, provides ample opportunity for a Sino-American butting of heads. Similarly, the Republic of China remains a perennially sore issue for the Chinese; the furor over the sale of American F-16s provides an ample platform for future, more-polarizing interactions over Taiwan. War between China and the United States is unlikely. Economic interdependence and nuclear weapons are powerful, persuasive deterrents against it. However, Sino-American dealings, particularly in Taiwan or the South China Sea, provide instances in which the powder keg of Chinese nationalism could explode, effectively forcing party leadership into a series of irrational but irreversible actions. As such, the possibility of great-power war, unlimited or otherwise, cannot be ruled out. U.S. policymakers must plan accordingly.


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