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Ask HN: Is World War III imminent?

7 points by rblion ↗ HN
I have recently read Niall Ferguson’s “War of the World", which gives a new history of the 20th century. One that was one long 100-year war spanning from set up for WWI which led to WWII which led to Cold War.

He argues that the same types of thinking and scenarios are unfolding once again in the 21st century, “Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the 20th century. ... These may be summarized as ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline.”

This is a very serious question of mine and would like to hear any thoughts, speculations, etc on the matter.

A quick review of the book: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/books/review/Montefiore.t.html?pagewanted=all

9 comments

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smeg
When the oil runs out.
trafficlight
It'll be tough for the world to power it's armies when that happens.
smeg
Why don't you go back in time and tell that to Napoleon. And Genghis Khan.
tokenadult
extreme violence of the 20th century

Maybe he should read Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Nature-ebook/dp/B005...

Here's a discussion of the main point of that book:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/qa-with-steven-pinker/

Any amount of violence of one human being against another is deplorable, but the most recent century of human history is characterized by how remarkably little violence it has had compared to any previous human century since hunter-gatherer bands turned into tribes and then nation-states.

j_baker
One could argue that violence by more organized societies is worse. I mean, there's no way a loosely organized band of hunter-gatherers could come up with an Atomic Bomb. Nor could they fight a World War.
sidcool
Well it's not imminent at this moment. Although it's possible, I personally believe that a conflict of the scale of the WW2 is less probable now. There will be relatively smaller conflicts throughout the century.
tsotha
Won't happen, at least not without a sea-change in defensive technology. The new ingredient in the mix is nuclear weapons. Any victory in all-out war these days is going to be Pyrrhic, and the people in charge realize that. Otherwise WW III would have been fought in the 1950s.
washedup
I think as the world becomes more connected (in terms of trade, culture, the internet, etc), the probability of a world-war increases. Violence/war itself seem to be an inherent characteristic of our species. Although the per-capita amount of violent acts in the world may be decreasing, there are still large systematic shifts in power that can happen as a result of our highly structured and connected networks of economy, culture, and information. In other words (and I sincerely hope I am wrong), the probability of another world-war is only increasing. However, this highly connectedness exposes a world dichotomy in general philosophy of leadership, religion, and politics. Hopefully the spread of information through the internet will allow this dichotomy to become less of a problem. Answering the question of predictability is much more difficult.
j_baker
If the economy keeps going down, we could be. Bad economic times have a tendency to put extremists in power. Do you think it's a coincidence that Hitler rose to power during the great depression?