( Seven-minute read) 

We are incapable of living in peace with each other as there will always be incentives for conflict. 

Wars are inevitable because of the disposition of man and if we are unsuccessful in tackling climate change we will be seeing lots more of them so the answer to this question is that wars will be inevitable.

The plagues of wars these days seem more elusive than a cure for Covid/Climate change…No end to the carnage seems to be in sight. A lucrative arms trade ensures that the world’s armies​—and guerrillas—​will continue to be grimly effective.

More localized for the moment and ironically, this wholesale butchery is occurring during an age that has seen unparalleled efforts to outlaw war as a way of resolving disputes between nations.

The machine gun is no respecter of the fittest or boundaries, with the bomb annihilating the strong along with the weak.

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf,  “Mankind has grown great in an eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish. . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.”

Over 2,000 years ago, Plato said that “only the dead have seen the end of war.” Is his bleak assessment a bitter truth we must learn to accept?

If war were inevitable, there would be little point in trying to end it.

War is not something created by the heat of passion. It takes years of preparation and indoctrination, weapons production, and training.

This is why we must use more effective and less destructive tools to resolve conflicts and to achieve security. Militarism has made us less safe and continues to do so.

War long predates Capitalism/ Communism.  War in human history up to this point has not correlated with population density or resource scarcity.

The idea that climate change and the resulting catastrophes will inevitably generate wars could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The looming climate crisis is a good reason for us to outgrow our culture of war.

 Hunger in the world must be abolished, inequality must be irritated and profit for profit sake   

Why?

Because weapons must be the arbiters of so many disputes.    

There is an interrelation between different factors that lead to war? 

All wars have some plausible situations in the eyes of the decision-makers such that the anticipated gains from a war in terms of resources, power, glory, territory, and so forth exceed the expected costs of conflict, including expected damages to property and life.

Thus, for war to occur with rational actors, at least one of the sides involved has to expect that the gains from the conflict will outweigh the costs incurred.

There has to be a failure in bargaining so that for some reason there is an inability to reach a mutually advantageous and enforceable agreement.

A lack of enforceable agreements is often one of the main ingredients leading to protracted wars. 

Being faced by an armed rational or irrational foe leads a rational country to arm to some level. In turn, this now means that either a foe who is irrational or a foe who thinks that I might be irrational will be armed, even more, and this feedback continues to build.

So here we are after two world wars still unable to have any real understanding as to why we are witnessing the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine.

Now, Ukraine is the pawn.

America has bombed a sovereign country every day for the last twenty years, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Yet that is never part of the story we tell ourselves.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have used NATO to surround Russia.

Despite assurances, NATO would not expand to include former Soviet bloc countries, we have done just that. We weaponized Ukraine, minimized diplomatic solutions such as the Minsk Protocol, played a role in the 2014 coup that ousted the government there, and installed a pro-Western one.

But it does not seem to prevent our pro-Western government, our news media, our own selves from repeating the war myth it now becoming our bedtime story, one that seeds a nightmare.

The West as the good guys and everyone else as evil. We have arrived at this point of peril in Eastern Europe because we have lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. 

It thus becomes impossible to comprehend the behavior of other nations, to understand their fears, their concerns. We know only our own created story, our own myth, we care only for our own concerns, and so are forever at war.

We become provocateurs rather than peacemakers.

Ukraine should not have to suffer invasion by Russia. And Russia should not have had its safety and security threatened by NATO expansion and weaponry.

A good portion of our overview of the causes of war is thus spent discussing a framework of different bargaining failures.

So how will this Russian/ Ukrainian war be ended?  

The same as all wars a tragedy, creating the ground for the next war.

We seem to be caught somewhere in an unplanned downward trajectory slipping lower and lower, circling around and around toward some kind of catastrophe that is as yet unvisualised and unseen.  

We are very close to passing some irreversibly turning point, after which we will not be able to go back.

Let’s see if maybe we can miss the huge disaster that now seems to be looming in our future. We need to turn our full attention to fixing our environment.

Are we truly incapable of resolving these concerns without slaughtering each other? Is our intellect that limited, our patience that short, our humanity so curdled that we must repeatedly reach for the sword? War is not genetically set in our bones, and these problems are not divinely created. We made them, and the myths surrounding them, and so we can unmake them.

We must believe this if we are to survive. 

This is a long hard battle to be won.  Let’s pick our own future.

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

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