[ForOldHack]

"The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. " The Navy is propanganding into Fear, Uncertainty and doubt. They said the exact thing about Nuclear Weapons. So... if we do not build them, then diplomacy becomes more important. What would we do without global war?

[Tanoc]

To a certain extent diplomacy requires intimidation. If both parties benefit from the negotiations but there would be no downsides to defying agreed upon terms the diplomacy has failed. The entire point is to place restrictions to discourage or disable externally harmful behaviour. You can't do that if you can't place hard boundaries, and sadly enough one of the few ways to place those hard boundaries is with the threat of violence. Be that economic, cultural, physical, or mental.

The dominant power in an era has always used that intimidation performed via the implication of violence to force everyone into the boundaries of the agreed upon terms.

The goal would be in the end transitioning away from tools of war to tools of enforcement. The issue is that the overlap between the two is vast and repurposing the latter for the former is very easy. Which brings things full circle when the diplomacy required for enforcement fails and intimidation has to be used. There is a time for one and a time for the other, but we as a species are really bad at transitioning because being the intimidator is incredibly advantageous and thus very alluring for the leading party responsible for enforcement. The only ways to stop it are for another party to exceed the limits of the enforcement too quickly to react to (what the U.S. did to the British), marathoning an expansion of violent capabilities (what the U.S. did to the USSR and what China's currently doing to the U.S.), or factions within the dominant party starving the faction responsible for enforcement before said faction turns to war (the only time I can think of this happening being Luxembourg to Prussia). As we can see from the article the most common tactic is the second.