It's an unpopular opinion on HN which is US-based, but the US is being forced towards a terminal lack of diplomacy by two doctrines: "US Exceptionalism" and the "Wolfowitz Doctrine".
And the US of 2023 is not the US of 1942. The outcome is inevitable.
No current neoliberal, neocon, or narcissistic populist American leader would precipitate a nuclear exchange because they enjoy self-preservation too much.
The risks are primarily of 3 scenarios spiraling out of control:
A. India attacks Pakistan. Like Likud, India's government is full of crazy BJP war hawks.
B. Putin's power were threatened. His view is that Ukrainian aid is waning and the Hamas attack takes attention away, so he feels pretty safe for now.
C. China attacks Taiwan. Xi is an arrogant autocrat, expanding neocolonial with Belt and Road Initiative, and believe they own the South China Sea. I don't see how this could end without either China obliterating Taiwan manufacturing base or a wider exchange.
Furthermore, it's far more relatively "tolerable" by the international order to diffusely level areas by continual conventional munitions accomplishing similar end results of nuclear detonations: widespread destruction. So why broach an unthinkable red line when there's an equivalent substitute?
I have belief in MAD and self-preservation are the ultimate deterrents when leaders aren't suicidal.
I also believe MAD serves a purpose to prevent future conventional World Wars. Denuclearization, while aspirationally wonderful, would counterintuitively make the world less safe because the average person doesn't understand what actually keeps them safe: a strong military.
The US could get by on 1/3 the amount of defense spending. It's spending way, way too much on boondoggles, pork projects, and the MIC's revolving door of generals and defense contractors.
Having lived through Vietnam, Pol Pot, Munich Olympics, the height of the cold war and then the collapse of the Soviet Union and most Communism, Iranian hostages, Korean Air 007, any number of incidents in the middle east, more revolutions and coups in Africa than I can point to, bombings in Bali, Tianenmen Square, Falkland Islands, US invasions of Iraq, Grenada, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and on and on....
Why would I think that current events are different in some fundamental way?
So, I lived through a lot of that and feel like some of this is people either forgetting or not having experienced what it was like pre-cold war thaw.
On the other hand, Ukraine feels different to me for some reason and seems tied to broader territorial ambitions, which wasn't exactly the case before because the territory was put in place in WWII. There was Afghanistan etc but that didn't have the domino implications of NATO.
The Soviet state also seemed more stable to me than the current megalomaniac plutocracy.
China also didn't have the same presence it does now. There's more big players in some ways.
On the other hand, for awhile there in the past there were nuclear drills in classrooms, and it was for a reason.
I don't really see WWIII happening soon but if things continue to escalate everywhere it seems reasonable to wonder about it. People wondered then too.
I don't think they're different. I think in both those situations and today they all had a small chance of kicking off WW3. If we keep rolling that D20 eventually we will roll a 1.
> Why would I think that current events are different in some fundamental way?
They are different in a sense US Empire and its vassals are starting to lose wars and influence, so westerners started noticing these events as negative. Previously, they didn’t care.
The parent listed Vietnam. The USA lost Vietnam even more soundly than Afghanistan, including almost 50k killed, and 300k wounded. Pol Pot murdered 40% of Cambodia. Saudi almost collapsed with the Grand Mosque. Nothing today comes close to those strains.
I'm of the opinion that we're probably at the midpoint of what future historians will consider the preliminary period.
The Non-Western axis has been turning up the heat, there's been something like 8 or 9 coups in Africa since 2020 plus more coup attempts, there was the Myanmar coup in 2021 you've got troop build up along the Serbia-Kosovo border, you've got fighting again in Azerbaijan and Armenia, and now Israel and Hamas. I expect more and more of these coups and conflicts will arise in the coming year or two as the Non Western powers try to stretch Western military resources.
The future historians will consider the true start to be whenever a NATO country is officially drawn into one of the fights, the same way the UK and France were drawn in to the conflict in WW2 after Poland was invaded.
How does the rate of conflict in those places compare to the past few decades? I have no context to evaluate if 8 coups in Africa since 2020 is high relative to history.
Legitimate question, not trying to be snarky, is this not self-evident to you? The fighting in Donbass eventually leading to a hot war between Ukraine and Russia doesn't seem like a step up in the fighting? Israel dropping enough JDAMs into the Gaza strip to turn Khan Yunis into crunchy sand doesn't feel like things are getting worse? The political situation in the Black Sea feels like it has slowly but surely gotten more tense, the sites of the Yugoslav wars are heating up...
I don't have high confidence that what the situation feels like based on the media that is readily available to me accurately reflects reality. Especially when it comes to international relations. There's always news about how the sky is falling.
I honestly haven't followed the various conflicts around the world closely enough over the years to trust any gut evaluation I could make of the current situation vs, say, the conflicts in Syria, Afganistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, just to make a few, from the last few decades.
These conflicts are terrible, but what that actually means to the international community on the order of years is non-trivial and far from self evident AFAICT
It certainly feels like we are headed to an armed confrontation with a state armed with nuclear weapons. I doubt we will truly fight over Taiwan and the USA is bluffing and North Korea isn’t going to start a fight, but I think Iran or Russia or Russian proxies could easily devolve into all out war.
In the US, JCS chief Milley and some other guy (SecDef?) made a deal between them - and informed underlings - that if Trump reaches for nukes, nothing is released without the okay of one of them.
I wonder if there is a similar firewall of sanity between Putin and nukes. I mean, at some point he's goin' down. Isn't he?
Ironically he was probably the least likely of the last 6-7 presidents of resorting to nukes. Trump is a lot of awful things but you can’t really say he is a warmonger. If anything, the use of nukes would undermine his reputation as a deal maker. His ego would never survive the obvious dealmaking failure that the use of nukes would mean.
> A leading academic at the University of Cambridge told the i news site in March that the technology could, in an extreme case, “mistake a bird as an incoming threat and trigger a nuclear launch if no human override is in place to assess alerts from an AI-assisted early-warning system”.
With all due respect to the "leading academic", this is one of the most stupid things I read this year. But then I read this:
> Although no state is openly attempting to automate its nuclear weapons systems, “integrating AI with command systems seems promising and even unavoidable”, said Peter Rautenbach from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Pretty much. I see no realistic path forward that will lead to any kind of de-escalation in the world. Everyone just keeps poking the sleeping bear and adding more and more straw to the camel's back.
Yeah, I don't know who sprinkled AI on this. There's plenty to talk about around unexpected escalation around Ukraine, Taiwan, Gaza, and so on without adding that.
I don't see a runaway AI itself causing the conflict but I could see AI easily fanning the flames. Think both AI tools such as completely fake viral footage of war atrocities and other propaganda to win over public opinion and AI consequences such as massive unemployment causing internal problems and stoking the conditions for either internal or external war.
Alternatively and even more twisted, I could see someone scapegoating a runaway AI to start the conflict - "it wasn't us that attacked first, it was the AI malfunctioning, we're the good guys but they won't listen to us so we have to fight them now"
Middle East a powder keg. If it explodes, my predictions:
1-US get sucked into ground siding with Israel. Versus everyone surrounding Israel.
2- Russia markedly intensity in Ukraine, since U.S. is focused on Israel
3- China invades Taiwan, since U.S. now spread too thin
4- sleeper cells that have entered US via porous border begin to inflict unpredictable attacks on public venues
5- US, too focused on gender politics including Rainbow military, is totally unprepared
6- US economy enters severe recession
7- draft is reinstated
8- Trump?
Uncertain if US survives
The article is a bunch of hot quotes sequestered from various media sources (and from Putin very own Cerberus dog, Dimitri Medvedev), and does not make a case for a full-fledged World War breaking out anytime soon. Well it does say that AI error will fire-up the nukes, but let's not go down that rabbit hole. Maybe AI wrote the article itself.
Yes, Iran, Russia and China in particular have broad geopolitical aspirations that they have not been able to achieve with money and influence, ie. China's innocuous Belt and Road, Russia's imperial conflicts, support of the alt-right and misinformation campaigns and Iran's ever-lasting war on Israel. They now chose to leverage with the West by prying on Western aversion to armed conflict. But bullying, hacking and horrific terrorist acts are no foreplay to WWIII.
It's an unpopular opinion on HN which is US-based, but the US is being forced towards a terminal lack of diplomacy by two doctrines: "US Exceptionalism" and the "Wolfowitz Doctrine".
And the US of 2023 is not the US of 1942. The outcome is inevitable.