[somedude895]

If globalization has one benefit, it's that it makes any war extremely costly for everyone involved, so with how entangled the world's economies are today, it's much more likely that tensions would be solved by means other than large scale all-out war. Though of course there's always a non-zero chance.

[philwelch]

This is also very much the feeling people had before World War I.

[ikrenji]

ok but this is not just a feeling. the world today is 100x more interconnected than the world before ww1...

[mikem170]

That might not be a good thing. A highly interconnected system is less able to adapt, becomes brittle, and tends to fail more catastrophically.

[DisjointedHunt]

Iran, Turkey, China, North Korea, Pakistan.

You may want to read up on the state of preparation these countries are going through to reestablish their perceived ancient kingdoms.

It is a constant debate in Military forums about the scale of ambitions these countries possess, but the indisputable fact remains that a) The administrations there have incorporated ideologies of grandeur into their legitimacy and b) Their military postures are targeted toward establishing specific, stated, highly provocative goals of expansionism / wiping out old foes.

[fakedang]

Iran is less expansionist, more "Everyone around us hates us and America hates us, so we can only preserve ourselves only by preemptively making them 'friendly'". Even Safavid Persia stopped expanding after its peak, following which the only time it went expansionist was under Nadir Shah. The "us vs the world" mentality grants the theocratic regime legitimacy. The Iran-Iraq war (Saddam's mad campaign in other words) did not help in soothing this mentality either - it still remains in recent memory for many Iranians.

The rest are of course expansionist.

[mikem170]

Actually it might be better if we split the world into smaller countries, like 10 million people each. Small countries don't fight big wars.

Leopold Khor wrote a book about this, best info link I could quickly find is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv9eJ8miMgA

[samus]

Small countries can still fight lots of small wars among themselves. It's just a question of time until they snowball into larger ones.

Also, there is nothing stopping countries conquering or otherwise merging with each other, in which case we'd quickly be back at square one.

[mikem170]

This is a fascinating topic. If you're interested you should read Khor's book on it, "The Breakdown of Nations". Lots of surprises and food-for-thought. The youtube I linked to is a fair introduction.

I guess I threw my above reply out there because I think globalism was meant to extend the power and wealth the elites already have, and that is its one benefit, not preventing wars. A lot of wars have been fought to construct and preserve this global order.

Khor makes a great case that the problems of staying small are less than the problems of bigness. There will still be wars, but small wars are better than big wars. Small countries can still gang up on large threats. He talks a lot how bigness always eventually leads to tyranny and aggression, just look at the history of every large country.

Khor speaks highly of federations, and what works and what doesn't. For example, he says it's great that the U.S. is made up of many states without being dominated by any one state. But I think he would be concerned if he saw a federal government grow so powerful that it can dominate all the states, not to mention the rest of the planet!

I share your scepticism about how to get from here to there. I think Khor does, also.