Posted on 07/11/2024 9:10:14 AM PDT by 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
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearwire.com ...
LONG BUT ....
Dems think ww3 war time prezzy is a shoein:-)
Only thing is how many DIE for a dem to stay in power!
Kennan was considered the intellectual architect of “Containment” after WWII, but he only meant it to apply to fortifying and protecting key western societies and weakened industrial countries of Japan, Germany and Italy from communism.
He thought fighting every local rebel in backward places like Africa, Vietnam (or even Korea) was foolish
Nature seeks equilibrium, ie a balance of power between nations, and abhors a vacuum. America has become a vacuum and dark forces must fill it.
It is a conflict between the US central banking system and the BRICS central banking system.
A "global order" that excludes 2/3 of the globe is a cause of war.
With the world's largest defense budget the US will undoubtedly propose to increase it to meet the threat of a new Axis Alliance. Hard to imagine how it is possible to squander an even greater amount of money. What do they do with it all?
Money, power and evil make it all happen. Nobody ever learns or gets enough of any of these.
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A big factor was the French-Russian alliance. And also the German generals belief that Russia was starting to modernize to the point where if they didn’t attack Russia by 1914, in a few years it would get to the point where it would be impossible to attack. So they were just looking for any reason, and the Russian mobilization provided it.
I surprisingly read the entire thing
Interesting approach.....
Kind of the like when mafia families would go to the mattresses. Was it Clemenza who said you need a war every few years to get rid of the bad blood?
IOW its just part of the global cycle of life
He thought fighting every local rebel in backward places like Africa, Vietnam (or even Korea) was foolish
He was correct.
As many as necessary.
NATO didn't seek to expand: the former Warsaw Pact states clamored to get in after two centuries (on and off) of Russian occupation and brutalization. Paris, Berlin and Washington dragged their feet about their admission. Poland was not admitted until 1999.
NATO also did not intervene when Lukashenko gained power in 1994. The West also did nothing during Russia's brutal suppression of Chechnya, respecting Russia's internationally recognized borders. The only questionable case was the war over Kosovo, simply because Kosovo was internationally recognized as part of Serbia.
In the 2000s NATO effectively disarmed, substantially reducing the size of it's militaries. Putin's responses were to violate the INF treat, the Conventional Forces Europe treaty, the invasion of Georgia and the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
The author also claimed that the US intervened in the Middle East in the 2000s simply out of misguided "nation building." This is of course nonsense, as the Afghanistan invasion was undertaken precisely because Afghanistan was a co-belligerent with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War was started because Hussain was firing on US aircraft, not respecting the UN inspection regime and still threatening Kuwait, all of which were violations of the Gulf War cease fire. The transformation of these conflicts into "nation building" was the misbegotten offspring of Bush's goody-two-shoes Methodism, which led him to grossly increase the objectives and costs of the wars while he simultaneously sought to reduce the US effort to achieve those objectives. This approach was, of course, doomed to failure from the moment upon which it was decided.
W should have been more like his father. Take out Saddam. But hand it over to the Ba'athist Army and leave in 6 months after the invasion.
That's what Bush 41 would have done he he had to invade Iraq in 2003.
You are absolutely correct. In fact, I think that was the original plan. But the Iraqi army didn’t surrender so much as disintegrate: there was no one left to pickup the pieces, although we could have quickly done so by paying off the right Iraqi army officers. If we had done so, Iraq would be like Egypt, minus a semi-autonomous Kurdish area.
Kurdistan would have been the wild card. Anyway, not our problem.
Bush 41 was smarter. He had more experience in the area. CIA. Former VP.
I wonder why didn't he do more to advise his son during the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.
Bremer was the worst guy possible for the role.
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