The Roots of World War III

https://www.realclearwire.com/ ^ | 7/11/2024 | By Francis P. Sempa

[bitt]

The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century, and he wrote two lengthy books on the events that led to the outbreak of that war: The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order and The Fateful Alliance. He also included one of his lectures on the First World War in his book American Diplomacy. Reading these works of history gives one a better sense of the root causes of that war, which included policies, decisions, and events that occurred decades before June-August 1914.

When the war began in the Balkans after the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, few foresaw that the conflict would eventually engulf most of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and result in the toppling of four empires (Romanov, Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, and Ottoman), the deaths of more than 10 million combatants, the aerial bombing of cities, the use of poison gas, the carving-up of territories in the Middle East that would engender conflicts that continue to this day, the creation of revolutionary secular ideologies that led to an even more destructive war and a Cold War that followed it. When Kennan reviewed the major diplomatic and international events in the rest of the century, he remarked that “all the lines of inquiry” led back to World War I.

Today, with wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and a gathering storm in the western Pacific, there is concern that the world is lurching toward another world war. All three conflicts involve at least one nuclear armed power. Some respected strategists and observers believe that an “axis” of autocracies (Russia, China, Iran, and perhaps North Korea) are collaborating to undermine the global order

[Reily]

Brenner thought the Iraqis since they are among the better educated secular-oriented Middle Easterners were 1945 Germans. I heard him say this!

[MinorityRepublican]

Some truth to that statement. Baghdad is developing quite nicely today.

Afghanistan? Back in the Stone Age.

[AndyJackson]

This is foolish garbage. By 1993 NATO had run out of mission and the military agreement should have ended. Expanding NATO is how the NATO bureaucracy sustained itself. Survival of NATO required new members. So it expanded, willy nilly.