My heading reads, "People come to this blog seeking information on Albinism, the Miller kidnapping saga, the Duggar adultery scandal, Tom White's suicide, Donn Ketcham's philandering, Arthur and Sherry Blessitt's divorce, Michael Pearl's hypocrisy, Barack Obama's birth, or Pat and Jill Williams."
These are the main topics that have driven viewers to my blog for the last couple of decades, and I note that The Iran War is not listed as such a topic, even though I wrote on it prolifically back in 2012. It's ironic that what I expended so much effort on researching and predicting, when it finally happened, was such a non-event in the grand scheme of things that it's already been almost forgotten, less than a year later.
But such is the nature of war: every new war is fought because people forgot the lessons learned from the last one.
I grew up studying World War Two. The leaders of my day had all come up through that war, and one of the lessons they learned was that one typical cause of war is treating an enemy like a major trading partner, or a major trading partner like an enemy--especially when one swiches from one approach to the other.
Case in point, Japan. The US government disapproved of Japan invading China, all the while serving as a major trading partner, allowing Japan to build up a huge navy with steel purchased from America. But no problem, that navy wasn't being used to invade China, and the US wasn't at war with Japan. Right?
When the US finally decided that enough was enough and cut off Japan's supply of oil and steel, Pearl Harbor became inevitable.
But alas, the generation that learned that lesson is long gone from power, and the current generation are having to learn it anew for themselves. The West has spent the last three decades enriching Russia by buying their oil and gas--money which Putin stashed in Russia's war chest to get them through the inevitable sanctions that would follow his invasion of Ukraine--kind of like Japan frantically building the ships that would destroy Pearl Harbor in advance of the sanctions that would follow their invasion of China.
Ukraine, for their part, have largely removed the Russian threat--at least the conventional one. But what about China? Over the past three decades, the West moved most of its industrial facilities to this communist nation to save money, which means that now, should they decide to sanction us, we would be as outmatched economically as the American South was when they launched the War Between the States.
This is why wars are inevitable. The love of money drives free people to enable the leaders of enslaved countries, and greed for land drives the leaders of enslaved countries to invade their neighbors.
Free people could, should they so choose, live without supporting dictatorial regimes. But they can always live a little better when they do. But alas, dictatorial regimes are never content to enslave their own poeople; they are also driven to conquer their neighbors. So the cycle of: 1) Build up the enemy's resources while pretending they are not an enemy; 2)Finally admit they are an enemy and cut off supplies to their war chest right about the time it's full anyway; 3) Suffer attack and loss from the very enemy you enabled to infict it; runs its course at least once in every mortal lifetime.
I've lived long enough to see Russia go from a mortal enemy, to a major trading partner, and back to a mortal enemy again, with American-made missles soon to rain down destruction on Russia for the first time in their mutal history. Such is the inevitability of war.
Although as individuals humans do have free will, in the aggregate we don't: we follow patterns that can be predicted by physicists and confirmed by historians. Now that I think of it, the most tragic war in America's history followed this same pattern: the free states enabled the slave states to prosper by trading with them, even though they became more an more at enmity as the battle to, on the one hand, limit the spread of chattel slavery, and on the other hand, to expand it into new territories and states, became more and more heated until it inevitably broke out into full fledged combat. Forcing through the election of Abraham Lincoln (he didn't win a single slave state; in some of them he didn't get a single vote) was the final straw that channeled the pent-up tension into outright war.
ReplyDeleteSo, to wrap up, I think I can say that a war between the US and China is inevitable. Historians will look back at events that took place, and choices that were made, at the end of the previous century and well into this one, and line them up as the causes of the Sino-American War. The only question is, as always: how many decades can this process be prolonged until it finally reaches its inevitable conclusion? In Iran, it took barely a dozen years; in America, a full four decades. But as an individual, I can see it coming, and no human effort that I know of is capable of prolonging it for much longer. I may not live to see it--I hope I don't--but one of the lessons of history is that those who DO learn the lessons of history are forced to stand by in frustration watching history repeat itself anyway.