The reason Keynes observation in ‘The economic consequences of the peace’ struck a chord with me is that I can see something of a similar nature occurring where I live.

My town (the general region in fact) is one of the major hubs of the resource boom. Unemployment is low and wages (in the industry jobs) are relatively high. People with skills such as boilermakers, sparkies etc can just about name their price. But it wasn’t always this way and won’t be forever.

Thing is, anyone under the age of about 34 has never known any different. In speaking to them, it is astonishing just how many of them believe that the current situation will just go on and on forever. But I am just old enough to recall that previous to this boom, there was a long, slow period here with sluggish growth and few jobs. The towns population dropped fairly dramatically while I was in high school as people left to try and find work. I remember being told by the co-ordinator of a course I was put through by a local job seeker agency that there was 400 applicants for every existing job at the time. Many people under 40 here have no memory of that, they only know being able to pick and choose jobs as it suits them.

It’s human nature to become habituated to our surroundings and start to assume that the current state will be permanent, even though we should know better. But then, I guess that only comes with hindsight. So that’s what I was banging on about.

cheers again

No worries, and sorry for my grumpy tone!

According to google, that last quote you mention is usually attributed to Angell as well, but it also appears in a New York Times interview with Angell from 1913, but there appears to be the words of the journalist: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E07E1D6143FE633A25756C1A9609C946296D6CF A fuller quote concludes ‘[...] political and military power, therefore, can in reality can do nothing for trade’, which changes the meaning significantly. Also in that article is another bit from the journalist:

Mr. Angell’s critics have usually assumed that by “The Great Illusion” he means the danger of war. He does not; the illusion is not that war is possible, but that it is beneficial.

Most of the article is Angell’s words, though, and it gives a good flavour of his style. All the way through he is indeed trying to attack the idea that war is profitable. I haven’t got his pre-WWI book, but I do have a sort of expanded edition from 1938, which supposedly includes the bulk of the pre-war book unaltered. It doesn’t seem to me that he ever tackles the question of whether war is impossible or even increasingly unlikely, in fact the whole thing is a plea for people to think rationally about war for a change, to question their assumptions that you can make your country richer by invading another.

According to google, that last quote you mention is usually attributed to Angell as well, but it also appears in a New York Times interview with Angell from 1913, but there appears to be the words of the journalist: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E07E1D6143FE633A25756C1A9609C946296D6CF A fuller quote concludes ‘[...] political and military power, therefore, can in reality can do nothing for trade’, which changes the meaning significantly. Also in that article is another bit from the journalist:

Mr. Angell’s critics have usually assumed that by “The Great Illusion” he means the danger of war. He does not; the illusion is not that war is possible, but that it is beneficial.

Most of the article is Angell’s words, though, and it gives a good flavour of his style. All the way through he is indeed trying to attack the idea that war is profitable. I haven’t got his pre-WWI book, but I do have a sort of expanded edition from 1938, which supposedly includes the bulk of the pre-war book unaltered. It doesn’t seem to me that he ever tackles the question of whether war is impossible or even increasingly unlikely, in fact the whole thing is a plea for people to think rationally about war for a change, to question their assumptions that you can make your country richer by invading another.

Incidentally, Angell won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1933/index.html

Angell again.

I then wonder how surgical things will remain though, after Iran takes offense at its shiny nuclear facilities being destroyed and the US is then forced to widen the application zone to quell the maelstrom that is unleashed against merchant shipping in the Straits of Hormuz

Yes, the Straits are the critical issue here. If the war between Iran an dthe US turns hot, the US will have to try to deny Iranians access to those narrow, crowded, turbulent, vital waters. This will require an enormous garrison of military personnel — big fat targets for attrition of morale and the will to fight.

The clock is the biggest enemy of the US.

To tell the truth, I didn’t know who Norman Angell was until you brought his name up. He definately seems to be saying though, that he considers war – if not impossible – to be very (and increasingly) unlikely. I will have to read the entire book. Perhaps his veiw held much sway with “naively contended” Londoners. I have also heard it qouted, from 1911 apparantly, that: “international finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that…..political and military power can in reality do nothing”. I don’t know who supposedly wrote that, perhaps you can tell me?

JM Keynes however, was quite certain that they did not see it coming until it was too late.

I would not be surprised if the public’s anticipation of air warfare was rather higher after WW1 than in the years before it when such a thing had not previously occured.

But your area of study sounds interesting. I might drop you a line, thanks for the invite.

cheers

I then wonder how surgical things will remain though, after Iran takes offense at its shiny nuclear facilities being destroyed and the US is then forced to widen the application zone to quell the maelstrom that is unleashed against merchant shipping in the Straits of Hormuz. But I suppose that type of extended planning is too much within the hypothetical realm for a such reality based mob as the OSP to bother with.

I wonder what the Pentagon models for a war against Iran conclude. Cost-benefit wise.

I imagine that few of those models include occupation of Iranian territory.

I imagine that many of them include the word “surgical”.

One major difference in calculations about major war between 1914 and today is that in 1914 there was a widely held consensus of decision-makers on both sides that any war would be brief and victorious.

Shame that type of thinking hasn’t been superannuated for minor wars, too. If Rumsfeld and friends hadn’t been so mistaken about the brevity and triumph of their war against Iraq, half a million people would still be alive today are who tragically, of course, are not.

I wonder what the Pentagon models for a war against Iran conclude. Cost-benefit wise.

indeed, Katz.

I’m doing a PhD on which revolves around a specific aspect of the British public’s anticipation of war between 1908 and 1941 — viz., their anticipation of aerial war. Doesn’t mean you should just take my word for it but I don’t think we should derail this thread with this debate. So if you’re interested, drop me a line at http://airminded.org/contact/ and

Today, while there are nuclear war modellers who like to imagine a brief, cheap and containable nuclear exchange between the US and the PRC, I am fairly confident that most sensible people on both sides suspect strongly that any nuclear exchange between the US and the PRC, while perhaps brief, would be truly horrible in its consequencces for everyone, both winner and loser.

Thus, the historical parallel between 1914 and today falls down because rational actors in 1914 tended to plump for war between great powers, whereas rational actors today tend to avoid war between nuclear powers if at all possible.

I think people can be forgiven for thinking that he said that nations would no longer go to war with major trading parteners – especially because of the bit where he says that it’s impossible to ransack the goodies of another country by force.

He certainly casts great doubt on the likelyhood of wars continuing to break out from the time of his writing.

Sadly, he was wrong. Sucky as it is, nations will probably always go to war to acquire one anothers resources. George Dubya no longer felt like buying oil from Saddam so he decided to just take it ( methinks anyhow – but the way that’s going, Angell’s hypothises may just prove to have some truth in it)

G

Keynes – who lived through those times – demonstrated the extent of economic interdependence inside Europe in 1914 and also wrote of the “naively contented” inhabitant of London: “But most of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to excercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life”

Perhaps the observations made by Keynes during those times were inaccurate – but until it is proven to me that he was wrong then I will continue to assume he was accurately recording what he saw.

Or has he passed down “bad history”?

The argument that international trade was so great that countries would not go to war with each other is often attributed to Norman Angell, but in fact he only argued that it wasn’t in a nation’s interests to go to war with its major trading partners, not that they wouldn’t do so.

While I’m here, yes, Britain lost the American colonies (bar Canada), but it kept expanding its empire for another 140 years or so after 1783, and managed to see off Napoleon, the Kaiser and (just) Hitler. Whether that made it ’still number one’ or not I don’t know, but as the Pax Britannica only began a couple of decades after the American Revolutionary War, I’d say so.

Sorry, historical analogies based on bad history just get on my pip …

It is worth noting though that the symetric balance between the USA and the USSR was different in nature to the USA’s relationship with the PRC. The two opposing superpowers did not interact with each other economically – the economics of the world was split in two between eastern and western blocs. Not so with America and China today. Trade flows back and forth between them and while this might seem to make war less likely still, that was the way Europe looked just before WW1.

The growing economic strength of China causes some concern in the US. It’s enormous capacity for cheap production has hurt many US industries.

The US is a diminishing giant while China is a rising superpower. Will the old top dog bow out without a fight? The British empire went to war to prove that it was still number one and that it still owned North America. But they lost……..

Katz – both the PRC and USA are rational players at this game. The idea that the USA is going to attack the PRC on the grounds you discuss is illogical at best.

I agree MarkL.

That’s why I used the word “if” (twice!) rather than the word “because”.

I believe that the kind of modelling embodied in the work under discussion is therefore little more than and expensive version of Second Life.

US taxpayers should feel cheated by the money wasted on it.

The situation has been and remains (decreasingly) assymetric in the favour of the USA. It is developing into the classic symmetry we saw between the USA and USSR by 1970. Both the present assymetric state and future symmetric states are stable – because both sides are rational. Neither side is particularly worried by the others nuclear capability because both are rational players.

This is the classic case of capabilities vs intentions. In say, 1980, both teh USA and USSR had the capability to destroy each other – sowhat they focussed on most of allw as each other’s intentions. And they began a series of confidence building measures (CBM) to make sure that intentions could be read without ambiguity. Hence the strange internal logics of the ‘nuclear war-fighting planning world’.

Should a non-state actor such as AQ get hold of a nuclear weapon, there is no doubt about their intentions – they would use it. So people look at their capability.

The jokers in the pack are the semi-rational powers such as Iran and Syria. We cannot tell what their intentions might be, but they are neither fully rational or willing to ‘earn the respect and cooperation’ of the nuclear powers as India has done. SO both their capabilities and intentions are ambiguous.

This is a recipe for disaster, especially when such countries actively sponsor and employ irrational (indeed near-uncontrollable) non-state proxies such as Hizb’allah.

This is what makes the development of nuclear weapons by such powers a profoundly destabilising idea.

BTW, we have a bet going. Those with the appropriate knowledge assess that the chance of a so-called terrorist nuke (NOT delivered by SRBM) being used within 8 years is >50% (I’ll not discuss the actual assessed %). The top 3 targets are assessed to be London, Paris and Rome.

The strategies being discussed by ALL the major nuclear powers are, of course, all of them – that is what contingency planning is for.

MarkL
Canberra