[photochemsyn]

This blog post has some curious blind spots that, if taken into account, negate most of its primary thesis about 'the long peace'.

The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendation for a book about a naval battle in World War II. Hmm... what about Vietnam and Iraq?

This is pretty standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak, as seen in corporate media and Hollywood: lots of material on WWII, and on today's conflict. It's obvious why neither Vietnam nor Iraq/Afghanistan are mentioned in the post, those being the largest post-war conflicts the US was involved in. The Vietnam War was in many ways the result of European colonial powers (France) to hold onto their colonial possessions post-WWII; the US could have supported Vietnam independence in 1945 but chose to allow France to try to seize control again, and then took over from the French under JFK's tenure, and spent about a decade killing Vietnamese people in a futile effort to keep the puppet South Vietnam government in power. There was also an element of Cold War proxy fight.

The Iraq War is even less defensible; the WMD claims were deliberate lies concocted by the CIA on the orders of the Bush Administration and supported by the UK's Blair government. Basically a class A war crime. Similarly, the debacles in Afghanistan (NATO-backed), and Libya (NATO-backed) don't get any scrutiny.

As far as nuclear weapons, well, they haven't stopped war, just pushed the conflicts into various proxy wars, as seen in the India-Pakistan border region. The architects and profiteers of war don't want to get nuked themselves, though they are quite happy to send kids off to die in these conflicts, so nuclear weapons are somewhat stabilizing, barring some accident or other.

[reducesuffering]

The blind spots are entirely your own. The very first paragraph of the article includes:

"the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public. Surely they can list off any number of wars or other violent conflicts that happened recently. But the data here is actually quite strong (and we all know my attitude towards certainty on points of real uncertainty; this is not one of them) – violence has been falling worldwide for nearly 80 years, the fall has been dramatic and relatively consistent."

> standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak

"the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of"

[bell-cot]

He puts quotes around 'long peace', and links to his definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace. Notice all the disclaimers there - "absence of major wars between the great powers of the period" ... "period of 'relative peace' has been compared to the relatively-long" ... "wars have declined since the 1950s" "Periods of regional and relative peace" etc. etc.

Also, the record of America's post-WWII wars actually supports his thesis. Except when brighter U.S. Presidents had a "rush in, accomplish very limited objectives, rush out" game plan - those minor wars have ~all proven too expensive to continue. ~Nothing actually gets conquered, and on a military-prowess-per-dollar basis, the American armed forces come out looking pretty underwhelming.

[jcranmer]

> The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendation for a book about a naval battle in World War II. Hmm... what about Vietnam and Iraq?

That is not the focus of the post. It's a "Fireside Friday;" an abbreviated [1] discussion of some topic, combined with a generally unrelated list of recommendations. You're misreading a lot into the author to assume that there's some hidden agenda to avoid talking about America's modern wars. There's no discussion of the US here because the entire theory is essentially a pondering (not structured enough to be a full thesis) of "does long peace make countries into paper tigers?" where the US not having been at peace means it fails the precondition.

And as other commenters have noted, the author does have include criticism of America's foreign policy misadventures in this blog post, not to mention that there's been more forceful denunciations in other blog posts.

[1] Abbreviated here is relative; the author's in-depth discussions will be multiple blog posts on a single topic.