How about requiring patent-holders to show progress on their invention every X years, so that inventors can't just sit on an old and important patent they own?
Or, a more ground-up restructuring: what if owning a patent didn't give you full ownership of the technology, but just X% of profit made from it for X years after filing?
With this setup, you could further incentivize progress by granting an additional X% to the first one able to bring the technology to market.
Why should patent holders have to show "progress"? Isn't the invention enough? Would they have to invent more or advance it further? Or do you mean commercial progress, making money, building it, etc.?
The latter is called "working the patent", which is the opposite of what patent predators, née trolls do. Apparently some countries require holders to work the patent, and I'm a big supporter of fundamental patent reform in the US that would require people/corporations to produce and sell the invention in order to maintain a patent. That would almost vaporize all the patent predators out there.
Right now we have a system where you can just think shit up and write it down. Boom, you've got a patent (with the help of a lawyer usually). That's a ridiculous legal system. The system should be designed around actual market activity – the introduction of innovative products. I think it's an important right that someone who invents something should have exclusive commercial rights to it for a while, but not a right to just sit back and stop other people from using their brains too.
Your percentage of profits idea is something I liked for a while when I was thinking a lot about reform, but I now think that it would be way too hard to enforce. It would be such a mess to carve out exactly what the profit or revenue was that could be attributed purely to some part of a product that hinged on some dude's patent, along with all the other encumbered parts and features. It would be worse than the mess that is the income tax and corporate income tax.
> Your percentage of profits idea is something I liked for a while when I was thinking a lot about reform, but I now think that it would be way too hard to enforce.
If I understand correctly, you propose a tax that everybody in the industry pays, that is shared with all relevant "inventors". I don't think it's a workable sistem since it removes the free market from the distribution and replace it with a committee driven disbursal of fees, offering little incentive to disclose valuable ideas.
I would much rather see a large patent fee with annual inflation indexing for the patent holder. If it costs you 1 million USD each year to hold a patent, then you only acquire one for major, truly revolutionary ideas that will easily recoup that money. It's a sum that can easily be fitted in the budget of any significant research and development program, yet prohibitive for most submarine, defensive, or warchest IP operations.
A large anual fee forces you to "work" the patent, either directly or by licensing it. If you are not sure if your "idea" is valuable, then you don't deserve a patent.
> it removes the free market from the distribution and replace it with a committee driven disbursal of fees
In a (strained) sense, that's already what the USPTO is doing. Except it's also associated with all this technology innovation stuff, which we would like them to stay away from.
> If you are not sure if your "idea" is valuable, then you don't deserve a patent.
"War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations."
I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).
Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb.
The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinkably destructive, so the superpowers were already deterred plenty from provoking a third world war. Also, since the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so disproportionate to any strategic goal, its threat is for all practical purposes a bluff, which is why so many non-nuclear powers have defied nuclear ones since 1945. Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
In the past, such small-power wars generally began once the (at least failsafe) support of a larger power was obtained. This always had the risk that the conflict might escalating to a first-power war (such as the first Punic War which was sparked by a tiny-power conflict.) Nowadays, the downside of such escalation is obviously even sharper.
The U.S. was never going to chose between Spain and Canada in advance of actual fighting (or Canada and France re similar issues), because the larger nuclear-fueled conflict with Russia made dumping allies overboard foolish; whoever began shooting would have lost. I would argue that the nuclear standoff trickles down.
> Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
Frankly, this looks to me like Pinker is reasoning from a provably false premise. Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.
The Congo War killed ~4 million people, including 300,000+ via direct killings. The Yugoslav Wars killed 100,000+. The Second Gulf War, 400,000 deaths, 100,000+ from direct killings. The Syrian Civil War is 400k and counting.
The rejoinder, I suppose, is that Canada and Spain is a first-world example and none of my are. I don't buy it. First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict. Second, because Pinker's example is a silly one; both because war over flatfish would have been a money-loser and because Canada and Spain are NATO signatories operating under the nuclear shield of other nations. Shooting war between NATO member states is regularly described as a nightmare scenario that would escalate nuclear tensions worldwide; Pinker is naively or dishonestly equating "owning no nukes" with "lacking nuclear defense".
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
As for nuclear weapons being "disproportionate to any strategic goal" and "for all practical purposes a bluff"... I hope to god he's right, but tactical nuclear weapon use is back on the table in Russia and strategists don't seem to agree with him.
I agree re. 'Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.' Vietnam, Cambodia, Syrian War (as you stated) IMO have been primarily proxy wars that resulted in a lot of killings while helping the powers avoid killings of their own people. Who can say they would have fought/killed at the same rate anyways if they weren't pushed/armed to do so but it seems to me that the casualty rate would have been lower in Vietnam, for example, if the US and USSR/China had not been involved. EDIT: syntax.
> First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict.
Great powers have interests in every war ever, but when Yugoslavia broke up, the USSR and in 1999 Russia were too weak to be considered equal adversaries.
In the early 90s the country fell apart and a tyrant started three wars ending in ethnic cleansing and genocide. When he started a fourth one in 1999, a short and by modern warfare limited campaign finally stopped him.
Sorry, the conflation of Yugoslavia with "proxy war" was in error, you're totally correct.
The link to great power conflict I had in mind there was the pressure cooker effect of Tito's dictatorship, which suppressed the major conflicts of the region without solving them. But it's a rather different entity than wars with direct meddling, and I can't judge the counterfactual: would a lack of Communist dictatorship have caused an earlier and more peaceful dissolution, or simply hastened what happened anyway?
It's a bad example and I shouldn't have used it; thank you.
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
This is my main reservation about the Better Angels thesis: we may be replacing regular threats of (relatively)limited scope with existential threats. It seems like we are building a complex ratchet mechanism made up of entangled components. Many of these threats don't actually disappear, but are held in abeyance by continual technological progress, resource substitution, or our own fears of upsetting the ratchet.
I think Pinkerian thought is strong when it argues that we are currently in a much better time than, say, the Plagues of Justinian, where war, disease, and famine affected a huge part of the western hemisphere. But I wonder if our present condition is more fragile than our large population and social/technological advancement would lead us to believe.
The bomb is only a real deterrent amongst the superpowers. The cost of maintaining and deploying a modern military force is a bigger influence. Devoting a large portion of GDP to a standing army is only possible for demagogues and those few nations wealthy enough for the waste to not be felt by the populace. And even for the demagogues, their impressive manpower isn't all that well equipped or trained because it costs too much.
War is perhaps illegal, except in self-defence, but certain people interpret "self-defence" to mean "defence of (national) interests", but also, belt-and-braces, they don't actually declare war any more and claim that what they're doing, killing and maiming people, bombing hospitals, television studios, water purification plants, isn't a "war". Also, Geneva Convention does not apply because the victims are "unlawful combatants" or some such bullshit.
It still applies. It applies to the weapons we use, how we treat prisoners, and how we treat the injured. Bad things happen, but please don't ever think your solider's are willfully bombing hospitals or killing civilians.
Yeah. It seems to me that it's not so much that "war is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it." Or at least try to. That's probably a good thing, but it seems useful to me to approach it with a more accurate perspective.
"It seems to me that it's not so much that war "is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it.""
In some lines of thought, that's the definition of illegal...
OK, but even by that definition, it's not the UN that has made it illegal. The UN is pretty toothless.
I mean, yes, they have peacekeeping forces. Those forces are not keeping the peace by force. In fact, there have been times when they have stood aside while one side violated the peace, because the UN force's rules of engagement didn't allow them to use force to prevent one side from starting the war back up.
It can be pretty toothless, but the mere fact that it exists as a platform for discussion, expression if views and the firmation if consensus is a huge improvement compared to nothing. I think the experience nations get of working together on issues is also pretty valuable.
AnimalMuppet isn't making a general criticism of the UN, he's arguing that the UN isn't responsible for war being illegal under dfmooreqqq's operational definition.
Yes, but being explicit and acknowledging the concentration of power is better than saying pithily "war is illegal", as if it were shoplifting or loitering.
>Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45.
Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.
The 1/7 GDP figure is misleading. It is absolutely true that everyone had an incentive back then to overstate the USSR's position: Communists and sympathizers for ego gratification, American liberals to use as an argument for government intervention in the economy and internal reform, and the American Right to ramp up militarism and domestic repression. That said, the revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.
GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter.
For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO.
Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.
>revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think there are two factors at play here:
1. The USSR's power projection was really good because it's really hard to convince people to fight for capitalism. For communism, on the other hand, you always have a million volunteers.
2. The USSR's military credibility when it comes to a land war in Europe was based on the fact that they were preparing for a near-home or home defense scenario. So, instead of investing in expensive fleets, aircraft carriers, and bombers, they invested in tanks, close-support aircraft, and anti-air stuff. The Atlantic would prevent the US from effectively responding to massive columns of tanks, since tanks are very heavy and hard to transport and supply. However, it also means that the USSR wouldn't be going anywhere with its massive war machine. It wouldn't have any ability to threaten anything outside of euroope. So the obvious result of any conventional war would have been the US conventionally bombing every Russian city to dust.
The Soviets lost to the incredibly poor country of Afghanistan. Vietnam's GDP was/is a small fraction of Russia's, yet America still lost and communism spread through the region. If war came to Western Europe again, I find it unlikely that America could've won.
the cist of tye war to Russia was also ruinous and maintaining that level of conventional forces would have been a real priblem. Bear in mind they got a lot of material support from the Allies during the war and continuing without that would have been very painful.
One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.
"The Internationalists" makes the case that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact to outlaw war was what started the paradigm shift against war [1]. (Of course the thesis is controversial, as you say.) You might enjoy the book; here's an Op-Ed the authors wrote in summary [2], and a podcast interview with the authors [3].
> From 1816 until the Kellogg-Briand Pact was first signed in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one territorial conquest every 10 months. Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year... The average amount of territory seized between 1816 and 1928 was 114,088 square miles per year...
> Since World War II, conquest has almost come to a full stop. The average number of conquests per year fell drastically — to 0.26 per year, or one every four years. The average size of the territory taken declined to a mere 5,772 square miles per year. And the likelihood that any individual state would suffer a conquest in an average year plummeted — from 1.33 percent to 0.17 percent, or once or twice a millennium.
Neal Conan covered this in an episode of Truth, Politics and Power [1]. Can't say I completely agree with everything discussed but it's definitely a good listen. Both authors are on the episode and, as usual, Neal does a great job of giving them plenty of time to discuss their book and get their points across.
The Dresden firebombing is very well known outside of Germany. And if you've seen the 'before' and 'after' pictures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden you won't be surprised that people consider them to be on the same scale.
Bombing of Dresden is well known, of course, but it doesn't compare to a single bomb that can level cities when it comes to deterring your enemy. I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden, but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way (like Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo), so I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.
Robert McNamara points out that the firebombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 civilians. In "The Fog of War" he also says that if the Allies had lost, he and Curtis "Bombs Away!" LeMay would have been treated as War Criminals, because they were.
> No, there aren't. That's exactly why Dresden stands out.
I don't think it should be treated as a "most destroyed city" contest, but you should really research the scale of destruction in the cities I've mentioned. [1] looks quite comparable to [2], [3] looks arguably worse.
Those cities are larger. But the reason Dresden is used as an example in these conversations is not because such a huge number of people died (< 50K iirc) but because of the whole town very little was left standing. Those other cities are much larger, and even if in total more was destroyed also much more was left standing. Dresden was pretty much gone.
From [1]: "In total there were 222,000 apartments in the city. The bombing affected more than 80 percent of them with 75,000 of them being totally destroyed, 11,000 severely damaged, 7,000 damaged, and 81,000 slightly damaged."
From [2]: "By January 1945, between 85% and 90% of the buildings had been completely destroyed; this includes up to 10% as a result of the September 1939 campaign and following combat, up to 15% during the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 25% during the Uprising, and 40% due to systematic German demolition of city after the uprising"
It's not me underestimating the scale of destruction of Dresden, but rather you underestimating the scale of destruction in other cities.
It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids.
> It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids.
No. Dresden was bombed on 15 February 1945 [0]. The British continued night raids until the end of the war, peaking in March, and with the last raid on Berlin on the night of 21/22 April (76 Mosquitos) and the final raid on the night of 25/26 April [1]
Have you any source for that? It certainly raised questions but the war was winding down and destroying things the allies would need wasn’t in their interest.
Bigger raids happened after Dresden as well and Harris gave his opinion: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” Luckily he alone didn’t make describe I guess.
""War is illegal. This idea seems obvious."
Well, was has always been a privilege for countries. It is absurd that some German generals were executed after WW2 for "fighting an aggressive" war (not talking about war crimes).
Obviously the WW3 will make look WW2 like a piece of cake.
"Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation." 1983
I think the fact that liberal democracies don't go to war was the main reason - at least amongst western democracies. And even among non liberal democracies (eg China and Russia) as long as there is enough wealth and quality of lifestyle at risk amongst the ruling elite, there's not going to be much appetite for war.
Another factor making war less likely is the mass media. Remember how the Vietnam War was "the first television war"? Actually seeing what happens in war turns peoples' stomachs, and the propaganda of war's "glories" is revealed for what it is.
Which is why the Afghan and Iraq wars never made it to TV in the same way. Journalism was strangled in scope to conform to commanders' wants; else, no access.
If you consider war as (among other things) "a contest" (albeit a very grim one), do any of you think there'd ever be any traction in settling disputes via something more sportsmanlike and without such fatality and waste of human life on both sides? I am reminded of the pistol duels of ages ago (although those were often fatal). Something that could test the "will and skill" of opponents who agree to settle it in such a fashion...
I'm also reminded of the flavor of the Olympic Games during the Cold War as almost a "proxy war" between the Soviets and the U.S.
No, because a symbolic contest is not final in the way that the physical imposition of force is: a country who loses a symbolic contest has limited incentive to abide by the symbolic outcome if they believe they can nevertheless impose their will on the other country by force. Wars end when contestants lose the will or the ability to resist the will of the opponent.
There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.
Perhaps when it comes to sovereign states, but with individuals you have things like tort law, instead of simply killing the person you have a dispute with. Why couldn't there be something like that on the international level?
What incentivises individuals to obey the decisions of courts? In the end, again, it's force, as monopolized by the state. If you don't abide by the court's decision, the state will take measures against you: it will impose fines, garnish wages, take away various privileges, and ultimately imprison you. If there were no such unpleasant and inevitable consequences, many people would simply ignore a tort judgment against them.
There are examples of this principle[1], where each side would send a representative or representatives to fight on their behalf. Perhaps the most well known example of this is (at least in my cultural context) is David and Goliath in the Old Testament
This is similar to what you've said, but I'd say the issue is more that it becomes more advantageous to use them if the same people who would normally levy sanctions against you have all disarmed. Currently there's little risk of North Korea actually using nuclear weapons. If they could do so without nuclear retaliation, it becomes a much more likely scenario. Even if banning nuclear weapons makes it much more difficult to obtain them, the consequences of someone obtaining them become much worse.
> Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no?
Never thought about that. It's hard to tell, Everyone was in some sort of cold war with Germany before the two world wars. Nobody wanted to fight and this is what led Germany to conquer very quickly a number of countries.
How much of this is UN and how much is the new world structure and technology meaning any conflict can diverge into WW2 and nobody wants to end up being Germany again ?
I see this as the basis for cold wars and other international competitions, conflicts are converted into other outlets.
On top of that, I would argue that war was able to be made illegal because the major world powers found war among themselves to be incredibly ineffective. Many years, massive amounts of money, and hundreds of millions of working/reproducing aged citizens died for almost no gain by most countries. It makes a lot more sense to work things out through international policies and economics than by bombs and guns. All that being said, Russia still invades Crimea and Georgia, maybe because it's just easier and faster with absolute overwhelming force.
The US and Russia avoided conflict with each other before and after the atom bomb, and also before and after the UN made it illegal. I'm not sure either were essential or even effective deterrents.
In fairness, the US did come into conflict with Russia in a sense, by supporting the White Army in the civil war.
But setting that aside, when would they have come into conflict? Prior to WWI, the US did its best to stay out of international affairs, and Russia wasn't trying to export a political philosophy. In the gap between the wars, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with internal concerns.
It's very hard to compare the potential for conflict post-1945 between the two powers with any period of time before that. Russia and the US simply weren't all that relevant to each other (Alaska aside).
I wish the "War is illegal" thing would have more effect on stuff like Turkey's recent attacks on Arfin. Not much seems to happen on the legal front there.
We also had the horror of chemical weapons in WWI. It was becoming more and more clear that there were things men could do that men should never do, even in war.
Otherwise you could just crop-dust your downwind neighbors and be moved in before anyone could even report an attack.
I still don't understand why we're allowed to stockpile nerve gas given the past 100 years of warfare and treaties.
Actualy the reason the Germans didnt use nerve gas in WW2 was because they mistakenly assumed Britain and Russia also already had them. Hitler was otherwise pretty keen on them.
That's a popular theory, but not supported by the testimony of those involved at the time. For example Hitler ordered that tabun production be continued as the highest priority even though the precursor chemicals were in high demand and very short supply.
And any direct war that happened after 1945, had one belligerent that did not possess nuclear weapons, who turned out to be loser. That's the reason victor decided to wage war against him, citing some puny reason for the aggression.
Do you really think the Americans "won" Iraq or Afghanistan? 15+ years of war, many trillions of dollars spent, nearly a million civilian casualties in Iraq, and what is there to show for it?
I would argue that it’s just USA centric view of impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the damages where on par with “traditional” fire bombing.
So their role in ending the war is hugely overestimated for propaganda reasons.
I think the jist is that this was still successful because if the UN didn't exist we may have already had 7 additional multination wars (that is if the first 2 didn't kill everyone). Of course we don't know for sure if that would have happened.
The data shows a downward trend in interstate conflicts, colonial conflicts, and per capita battle deaths since the 40's. Civil conflicts peaked in the early 90's, but nukes aren't a factor in those.
There is other research[0] (also recently posted to HN, though it got a lot less traction than Gates and Pinker), that claims this trend may very likely not be there. It's very hard to prove.
Don't forget that the US has had a hand in very many of those wars, and have been responsible for massive amounts of deaths in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
The fact that a law is broken is not a counterexample of the law existing. War was once the default, and lauded. Now it is the exception, and is decried and worked against.
When a war happens we ask ourselves why, and the international community works to try to prevent it the next time. That would be truly alien to a world leader even a couple centuries ago.
Including by the countries supposed to enforce the rule (UN security council: Russia who annexed Crimea, China building illegal islands in the Pacific, US who started wars based on lies for oil..)
You could easily argue that most of the conflict the US is currently involved in - and there are many! with boots on the ground or otherwise[0] - have some motive involving petrodollar or other resources.
Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
You're saying it was about oil primarily. Yet the US didn't take Iraq's oil. The US didn't even secure an outsized share of contracts related to Iraq's oil. The US vaporized a trillion dollars, along with suffering tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, trying to stop the Iraqi civil war in which Iraqis killed hundreds of thousands of each other.
Simultaneously over that decade the US technologically unlocks its massive shale oil resources, making Middle Eastern oil almost entirely moot strategically. So much so, that the US is now merely about 10% of Saudi oil demand.
And the US got what out of all of that Iraq mess when it comes to oil? The US stuck its military where it shouldn't have been, and it did so for geo-political reasons, not economic reasons. The US was a massive loser economically from that effort to try to weaken Russia, it was an economic disaster. The net 'benefit' over two decades will be perhaps close to a negative two trillion dollars all-in.
> Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
> You're saying it was about oil primarily.
Those aren't conflicting explanations; the US is concerned about the friendliness of governments in the region largely because it cares about how they manage oil supplies (both for price and geostrategic reasons like making sure we have access and our enemies do not in a major crisis.)
Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today, and will overwhelmingly be tomorrow. Please explain to me how it was in the US interest to topple Saddam, lose a couple trillion dollars in national treasure, all so China could increase its power and influence by securing critical oil supplies and displace the US influence in the Middle East.
And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
> Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today
No, it's not, because the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy.
If we were in a major war with China now and that was true, it would suggest that the policy had been unsuccessful in achieving a key goal, but even then wouldn't refute that that had been the policy goal.
> And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
Perhaps (though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use) but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
> the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy
Of course it's about who buys (ie who can supply their economy with the energy it needs). The entire political value of oil is that it's critical to most economies. You keep saying that it's about controlling the oil, the point of that control is to use it for self-benefit. If the US were doing what you're claiming, it would be denying oil to China. You say that there is value in being able to deny oil supply to enemies - and then you pretend the US wouldn't have an interest in denying oil supply to China to slow its economic ascension (it obviously would benefit massively if it could partially suffocate China's growth via oil). These are contradictions in your theory, as China swims in Middle Eastern oil supply.
> though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use
Russian and Iranian oil production is drastically beyond their peacetime economic consumption. I can't imagine where you're trying to go with that.
> but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
You're refuting yourself there. Then why didn't the US deny Chinese access to Iraqi oil? China almost immediately began benefiting immensely from Iraq's oil as production ramped up after the worst of the shutdown. Saudi's primary customer is now China and that is going to get a lot more dramatic in the coming decade. Those two points collapse what you're claiming.
If the US wanted to press an advantage, it would destroy Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil supplies (use an ISIS-like mess), which would hammer China's economy by removing 1/4 to 1/3 of their oil supply. The US is now one of the few major nations that can fully support itself on energy. Instead, the US is actively protecting both Saudi and Iraq, while the largest US rival - China - benefits the most from that protection.
I agree that people probably overestimate the role of oil, but you have to keep in mind that the current world paradigm is not the world paradigm at the time of the Iraq war, and that there are very personal issues involving the Bush dynasty and its connections with the intelligence-executive infrastructure at play as well.
The US shale oil issue has also really flipped the script as well; it's something I don't think anyone was predicting at the time. The rapidity of solar and wind's rise is another surprising thing.
I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that. I just mean that, yes, China is dominant now, and there's a certain global socioeconomic-political dynamic. But at the time leading up to the Iraq war, the world was a very different place in terms of global politics and energy economics.
It is probably more fruitful to argue over whether or not the US government anticipated these geopolitical changes well enough. But to point to things that happened later as a rationale for what transpired before seems backward to me.
In some ways, the transition we've witnessed is from a oil-cold-war dynamic involving the US and Russia/USSR to a vacuum, made by renewable energy and Asian and European economic growth. As an American, I feel like we should sidestep issues about Euro-Asian supremacy and American-Russian decline, and take a hard look at what assumptions we often make, and what it increasingly looks like is that many of the old political blocs are starting to seem irrelevant to a prosperous future. I think America has a dominant role it can play, and will, if it just starts being forward-looking instead of backward-looking.
It didn't vaporize any money whatsoever, in fact, Halliburton (and many of the hundreds of military strategy companies in the MIC) did quite well with their new economy.
That's a false context setup. Show me Halliburton's chart where it collapsed down to $16 in 2008 after the commodity bubble burst.
All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26.
Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production.
If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.
That graph doesn't show an obvious uptick after the big red "WAR" dot. It's growing fast but seemingly was before just as much. What's it supposed to prove?
Nothing has had as large an impact on the maintenance of relative peace, at least between large/nuclear nations, as the atomic bomb. It's the MAD principle - mutually assured destruction. I think our discovery of nukes is actually pretty cool.
No question about it. Nukes accomplish something that no other deterrent can: they make world leaders personally afraid to go to war with each other.
Those who advocate nuclear disarmament are basically advocating a return to increasingly-bloody world wars every few years.
Of course, it's also true that the leaders who are afraid to confront each other directly are more likely to resort to proxy wars that cause massive pain and suffering in their own right. But that's a different problem that will have to be solved by different means.
How about requiring patent-holders to show progress on their invention every X years, so that inventors can't just sit on an old and important patent they own?
Or, a more ground-up restructuring: what if owning a patent didn't give you full ownership of the technology, but just X% of profit made from it for X years after filing?
With this setup, you could further incentivize progress by granting an additional X% to the first one able to bring the technology to market.