I'm more optimistic. WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them. These days such a strategy is a complete non-starter because no developed nation can withstand an invasion.
Think of it like this: Silicon Valley is probably one of the richest bits of America. So imagine that some dictator decides to invade it, and that the US military try to stop him but fail in some improbable way. So this dictator now controls a bunch of ruins with no electricity containing broken computers. His troops are herding the geeks who used to program those computers into internment camps. How does this make him any richer than he was before?
If you conquer a third-world country then you can exploit its raw resources: a semi-literate population, farmland on which they can grow food, and maybe minerals they can dig out of the ground. That was essentially the thinking behind the Heartland Theory (see link). But it just won't work any more. These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[3] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[4] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[5] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay. J. D. B. Miller writes: "The 'Great Illusion' was that nations gained by armed confrontation, militarism, war, or conquest."[6]
While he was proven wrong, his point was correct: WWI and WWII were economically disastrous to everyone involved except for the US. And in that case only because the US suffered no major damage to its infrastructure.
There's no way rational actors would start a war on the size of WWII. Only human insanity can cause another one. While that's no guarantee, it is still a strong preventative factor.
In fairness WW2 was started by an insane dictator- nobody in Europe besides Hitler was particularly eager for it. And it was economically and socially irrational. Certainly didn't pan out well for Germany.
> These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.
You should rethink your assumptions. Yes, a lot of the new wealth is created by technology, but ask any oil company if they would give up their oil fields, or to mining companies, agro companies, etc. In the US the biggest example is the Koch family that made a fortune by controlling land and natural resources -- the same theme repeating itself over undeveloped countries.
But we're not talking about companies in a narrow sector of economy but about whole countries. The companies are large in absolute terms but not that large compared to the rest of the economy. All the oil fields in the USA plus all the mining resources in the USA plus all the direct agriculture in the USA together constitute something like 3% of USA GDP, and it's about the same for every developed country except for places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Even in the small and oil-rich Norway the oil fields contribute just 17% of GDP and the majority of productivity is elsewhere. In developed countries idustry & manufacturing is a much, much larger part of added value than resource extraction, and services are even larger part than industry & manufacturing.
If "mirror-USA" suddenly appeared next to it in the Pacific Ocean, and USA had the choice to go to war and capture all their land and natural resources, then that'd be a bad deal - a major war costs more than 3% of GDP, so gaining these natural resources (assuming that the remaining 97% of economy that's not agriculture/fishing/forestry/mining/extraction won't give you benefit because it's likely destroyed to the point that it just supports the local population and can't be "extracted") is not worth it.
You can't run any major resource operation without smart people. Unless you want to do it with shovels, you need smart people to set up the machinery and keep it running. You need trade agreements so you can actually get that machinery shipped in.
The main reason why China, United States, Russia and many other countries were or now are considered to be super powers is not because of access to raw resources but because of GDP and technology.
Technology is simply low value resources configured in such a way that it is now called technology. It is the physical crystallization of information.
There's no denying the fact that the transfer, production and copying of such information can only be done by expending energy. So the question is... Do we live in the information age or the age of oil? Only future historians would know.
I think another thing is that governments have lost a lot of their power and are now somewhat controlled by corporations. This is usually assumed to be a bad thing, but most corporations don't like war, it's bad for business. It disrupts supply chains, kills customers, and generally makes things unstable. (Except for military contractors, but they seem to do well if there is a war or not).
I think climate change could bring another big war, because then wealth will become food and water, and that can be taken by force.
That's certainly not entirely true. Dick Cheney got himself and some colleagues from affiliated businesses quite wealthy during Iraq [1]. After all, the US military ate 600b$ in 2018; tax payers' money that in large parts went into private businesses.
WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them.
The Gulf War [0] seems like a much more recent (1990-91) example of this - Iraq invaded Kuwait, taking control of their oil fields and deep water ports.
It rather illustrates the reasons for this rule - Kuwait economy is/was quite different from pretty much all developed countries in that it was so predominantly based on oil fields that this invasion made sense. The largest oil producer in the world currently is USA, and still the USA oil fields are just a tiny fraction of its wealth production.
You could capture half of Kuwait's wealth if you got control over its extractive economy. You can't capture half of EU or USA wealth if you get control over all their natural resources, not even close to that.
>These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.
Operation Paperclip, North Korea and Los Zetas would disagree. It's actually easier to capture that wealth with a gun, because that wealth is attached to someone who cares about their life and the lives of their loved ones. You can't blackmail a mine or a wheat field.
I think you're half-right, but we're entering an unprecedented age where global climate change really mixes up the desirability of certain geographical features. I strongly suspect this is why a lot of immigration phobias are being whipped up (mass climate migrants will mix things up IMMENSELY), and where at least some of the next large wars will come from. Lakes and rivers will dry out, floodplains will flood, and previous choice living locations will become some of the worst around. Stress this enough, and war can indeed break out.
Wars never really went away. It's just that we managed increase our productivity enough that the old limited resources no longer constrained us.
Farmland is only a limited resource if you are not using artificial fertilizer. The land no longer needs to remain fallow after harvest, you can just plant again.
Because we can now turn energy into food, wars are now centered around energy instead. Russia annexes Crimea, USA goes to war with Iran.
Another way to say that is that farming is 1% of GDP in America now -- so the traditional war aim of capturing lots of farmland with peasants to tax is laughable.
Industry is down to 20%; in WWII capturing centers of heavy industry was a big deal, but again this seems dated.
Maybe energy's importance isn't quite captured by such figures, it's a concentrated tap of money which is easy for rulers to control. The US is no longer a net importer, but IIRC it's still Russia's main export.
In this argument fusion energy would eliminate the need for wars, because all countries to safely generate huge amounts of energy, enough for desalination even.
China would conquer the developed country Taiwan in a second if Taiwan wasnt heavily armed and didn't have significant "allies" like the us. It would not be doing it to take over their wealth of course, it would be to cement their power.
China considers Taiwan a breakaway province (historically true one must admit) so it would be more like a civil war. They wouldn't call it conquest since its already Chinese.
It would certainly make for a diplomatic conundrum. Almost nobody recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation.
I've read that the USA Civil War cost more than it would have cost to buy all slaves at normal market prices and then set them free. So the war was not about economics. It was about something much more primal. Which is probably true of most wars. I think you'd have a difficult time finding a war that was fought for purely rational reasons.
The only military threat today to the US homeland is an accidental nuclear launch.
That concern is real even in peacetime because of the inherent conflict of interest in the design of the delivery systems. They must reliably launch in minutes without the possibility of recall, yet also have literally zero possibility of doing so unintentionally. How much of that chain of events is under the control of (potentially faulty) software, and highly stressed people acting on limited information with minutes to act and trained to not question the order?
We've successfully deterred intentional strike by all but the most deranged adversary by creating a machine capable of accidentally causing tragedy of historic proportions.
IMO wealth & power comes as much from brains as it does from nature/ground/territory, same as it ever was. One is dependent on the other. Also, wars are absolutely ingrained in how USA became the richest country in the world, undeniably, and lot only back then in WW2.
Also this:
`A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. This view, broadly analogous to the modern factoid that there has never been a war between two countries with a MacDonald’s outlet, became so well established that, less than a year before the Great War broke out, the Economist reassured its readers with an editorial titled “War Becomes Impossible in Civilized World.”`
Was he so wrong in stating that war between the great powers would be economically and socially irrational? WW1 certainly did not lead to long-term prosperity for the victors, and the attempted conquests of WW2 had disastrous consequences. Both conflicts largely ended the era of European supremacy.
Wealth nowadays is not rare resources but information crystalized as products and knowledge not easily transferred to other places.
A computer is made out of worthless silicon but it is not the silicon that gives the computer value, it is simply the way that silicon is configured and the knowledge on how to reproduce such a configuration. War nowadays cannot transfer such wealth across national boundaries.
We live in the information age, but it is not just about the internet. Information is about low entropy configurations of what is otherwise cheap materials into these things called technology.
If china wanted Americas technology how would they retrieve it? Not war, but through espionage. The cold war beginning with Russia has largely replaced actual physical battle.
That's not about capturing wealth but about capturing geopolitical goals e.g. Black Sea control, pressure on international political organizations and such.
All the contested regions - Crimea, Donetsk/Lugansk "national republics", Abkhazia and South Ossetia are actually a very good illustration of this concept. From the perspective of economic benefit, even ignoring the wider effects from sanctions and such, the captured (or, in some cases, captured-and-mostly-abandoned) regions have been and still are a net drain on Russian economy - they consume wealth of the mainland rather contribute back to it; you might or might not give these regions dotations to (re-)develop them so that they might be productive after a decade or two, but the results of these "adventures" clearly show that in the short term it's not reasonable to capture wealth of developed (or even not that developed; Ukraine as such and those parts especially are on the low end compared to most developed countries) countries by invasion because you don't really capture that wealth in an invasion, you generally just destroy it.
There probably are important benefits that Russian leadership is gaining (or expected to gain) out of these regions, but wealth capture isn't one of these benefits.
"WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them."
There were many reasons. I was not aware that "wealth" was one of them. For very advanced but small countries with a small population it may have made sense as a last grab to try to stay a super power.
"These days such a strategy is a complete non-starter because no developed nation can withstand an invasion."
I dont understand this statement.
"Think of it like this: Silicon Valley is probably one of the richest bits of America. So imagine that some dictator decides to invade it, and that the US military try to stop him but fail in some improbable way."
Silicon valley is rich because of knowledge, no because they have stored gold in the vaults or oil under the soil.
ALso: "The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct global warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, in as little as perhaps twenty years and as the leverage of technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination -- with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win." Brave new War, john robb
"So this dictator now controls a bunch of ruins with no electricity containing broken computers."
This won't be a dictator but a nerd in this parents basement doing DoS or running a CRISPER Lab from his garage.
"How does this make him any richer than he was before?"
I doubt that "money" was the driving force beyond most wars in the last century. Power. Fame. Ideology. But money?
The 3rd world war will make the last two look like Disney land trips.
War been generally bad for the economy might not be enough if it benefits the parts that have the ear of government, yet another reason why lobbying is a bad idea.
> If machine brain power starts exceeding human brain power
That is so ambiguous... ML abilities are far far from a one dimensional measure, in many ways it has already far exceeded mans mental abilities, and in many ways it has not and has little promise to do so in even the distant future. Machine learning is great at automating basic things e.g a subset of image recognition or extremely narrow and specific things e.g playing Go, because these problems are well defined and can be engineered at one level and emergent at another.
It's not good at being conscious, because that is a chasm so deep and wide and non-specific in content that it is not a topology that can be so easily engineered with intent. When most people talk about conscious AI they mean AI that imitates human without realizing it - conscious AI is not some inevitable progression from our current toys, it's as if we are playing with the beginnings of chemistry and assume an entire highly sophisticated biological organism is going to be the next step.</rant>
I think Putin's MO is making people in Russia complacent with the kleptocratic regime he heads - be it through relative economic stability/growth, or, lacking that, the pride that their country is feared by the rest of the world.
Still, you can only rely on the latter so much, so you want to be able to sell natural gas and oil without European/American sanctions getting in the way.
Keeping Europe politically divided would sink any chance of serious sanctions put in place against Russia. Keeping it from forming a military alliance would ensure that he can launch "hybrid warfare" at will without triggering a major military response.
When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin's popularity soared. But just two years before that, there were major protests in the streets of Moscow:
you mean, excluding actual capturof wealth after ww ii, like Crimea? Or soft ones like belt and road taking over Africa's infrastructure or the fight to keep Venezuela under US control?
Interstate wars are risky to the aggressor, because they require massive production capacity and supply chains to carry out in a way that avoids and immediate and crushing loss in a counterattack. Although the significance of frontline logistics has vastly declined since the role of aerial strikes, the role of countrywide resilience has risen.
Technological advances now allow retaliatory strikes to be aimed in places other than the opponent's advancing forces: you can strike their capital, or airfields, or ports instead, and the stricken state must not immediately devolve into unrest.
It's much safer, then, to wage an indirect war, where you first destabilize the target from within. Various adversaries around the globe can play this long game of instigating civil wars in the target state, or proxy wars in a third state, while they keep their homelands relatively conflict-free. The destructive potential of long-range weaponry can be credited with this "innovation".
Desperation and delusion are still big factors. It's easy to imagine some very populous countries that are resource-poor first devolve into a civil war in a struggle for resources, then be united under a strong leader who redirects their aggression towards an unfortunate neighbor. Lots of historical wars have fit this category. Then there's countries who fight repeated skirmishes over underutilized parcels of land whose realized value is largely theoretical. These countries may not wish to descend into full mobilization against each other, but they're a reliable source of combat deaths year after year.
Today, global trade works fairly well for many states, and the elites who capture most of this value have a vested interest in this arrangement to continue. But if there are no bread and no circuses, the discontent and despondent population will struggle among themselves along make-believe ideological lines, or conveniently preexisting tribal lines, that just mask the underlying economic causes, until some rise to the top. All the while, they'll make tempting beneficiaries of aid from states that want to peddle their influence without putting their own people at direct risk.
That "data" looks very suspect. For example, the graph titled "Violent deaths in conflicts and one-sided violence since 1989" appears to leave out the Iraq War. Maybe it relies on Iraq Body Count, which is known to undercount deaths by a factor of a few.
Even if one accepts this "data," however it's been put together, the 1970s and 1980s were extremely violent times. They may look tame in comparison to WWII, but we should remember that WWII is the bloodiest conflict in human history. The "long peace" really only refers to an era in which major powers did not fight one another directly, but rather through proxy conflicts in the Third World.
That’s a complex discussion. This page captures the overall state of the world in numbers; the number of active conflicts vary over time, but at least measuring it in terms of deaths, the world is generally getting safer.
I think it's important to keep in mind the current capabilities of nations to conduct war. A modern war requires preparation. You need advanced equipment and the doctrine to use it, along with well-trained officers. And if you want to fight a war on foreign soil, you will need the infrastructure and logistics to supply your forces. All those things don't pop up overnight.
The fact is that the US/NATO forces are one of the only military force capable of conducting an extended invasion and occupation of another country today. China has a strong military and navy, but it is largely positioned for limited operations in the South China Sea. Which isn't a knock on the Chinese military, it's intentionally how they have positioned themselves.
In short, I think it's unlikely we will see another total war scenario in the current political climate. The only war I could see that unfolding is US/NATO forces attacking a peer or a close ally of a peer (like North Korea), and the US and Europe are so reticent of conducting an all-out war I don't think that will happen.
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Think of it like this: Silicon Valley is probably one of the richest bits of America. So imagine that some dictator decides to invade it, and that the US military try to stop him but fail in some improbable way. So this dictator now controls a bunch of ruins with no electricity containing broken computers. His troops are herding the geeks who used to program those computers into internment camps. How does this make him any richer than he was before?
If you conquer a third-world country then you can exploit its raw resources: a semi-literate population, farmland on which they can grow food, and maybe minerals they can dig out of the ground. That was essentially the thinking behind the Heartland Theory (see link). But it just won't work any more. These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-is-the-heartland-th...
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[3] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[4] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[5] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay. J. D. B. Miller writes: "The 'Great Illusion' was that nations gained by armed confrontation, militarism, war, or conquest."[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
There's no way rational actors would start a war on the size of WWII. Only human insanity can cause another one. While that's no guarantee, it is still a strong preventative factor.
You should rethink your assumptions. Yes, a lot of the new wealth is created by technology, but ask any oil company if they would give up their oil fields, or to mining companies, agro companies, etc. In the US the biggest example is the Koch family that made a fortune by controlling land and natural resources -- the same theme repeating itself over undeveloped countries.
If "mirror-USA" suddenly appeared next to it in the Pacific Ocean, and USA had the choice to go to war and capture all their land and natural resources, then that'd be a bad deal - a major war costs more than 3% of GDP, so gaining these natural resources (assuming that the remaining 97% of economy that's not agriculture/fishing/forestry/mining/extraction won't give you benefit because it's likely destroyed to the point that it just supports the local population and can't be "extracted") is not worth it.
Deleted Comment
Technology is simply low value resources configured in such a way that it is now called technology. It is the physical crystallization of information.
There's no denying the fact that the transfer, production and copying of such information can only be done by expending energy. So the question is... Do we live in the information age or the age of oil? Only future historians would know.
I think climate change could bring another big war, because then wealth will become food and water, and that can be taken by force.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-chene...
EDIT: ok, I oversaw the last part of your comment, but still, military businesses need the occasional war to be legit, I am afraid.
The Gulf War [0] seems like a much more recent (1990-91) example of this - Iraq invaded Kuwait, taking control of their oil fields and deep water ports.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
You could capture half of Kuwait's wealth if you got control over its extractive economy. You can't capture half of EU or USA wealth if you get control over all their natural resources, not even close to that.
Operation Paperclip, North Korea and Los Zetas would disagree. It's actually easier to capture that wealth with a gun, because that wealth is attached to someone who cares about their life and the lives of their loved ones. You can't blackmail a mine or a wheat field.
Farmland is only a limited resource if you are not using artificial fertilizer. The land no longer needs to remain fallow after harvest, you can just plant again.
Because we can now turn energy into food, wars are now centered around energy instead. Russia annexes Crimea, USA goes to war with Iran.
Industry is down to 20%; in WWII capturing centers of heavy industry was a big deal, but again this seems dated.
Maybe energy's importance isn't quite captured by such figures, it's a concentrated tap of money which is easy for rulers to control. The US is no longer a net importer, but IIRC it's still Russia's main export.
Until the supply of phosphorous mass agriculture relies on for fertilizer runs out.
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p...
Or as more and more arable land is lost to erosion
https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/soil-erosion-and-degra...
It would certainly make for a diplomatic conundrum. Almost nobody recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation.
That concern is real even in peacetime because of the inherent conflict of interest in the design of the delivery systems. They must reliably launch in minutes without the possibility of recall, yet also have literally zero possibility of doing so unintentionally. How much of that chain of events is under the control of (potentially faulty) software, and highly stressed people acting on limited information with minutes to act and trained to not question the order?
We've successfully deterred intentional strike by all but the most deranged adversary by creating a machine capable of accidentally causing tragedy of historic proportions.
Also this:
`A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. This view, broadly analogous to the modern factoid that there has never been a war between two countries with a MacDonald’s outlet, became so well established that, less than a year before the Great War broke out, the Economist reassured its readers with an editorial titled “War Becomes Impossible in Civilized World.”`
http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-w...
A computer is made out of worthless silicon but it is not the silicon that gives the computer value, it is simply the way that silicon is configured and the knowledge on how to reproduce such a configuration. War nowadays cannot transfer such wealth across national boundaries.
We live in the information age, but it is not just about the internet. Information is about low entropy configurations of what is otherwise cheap materials into these things called technology.
If china wanted Americas technology how would they retrieve it? Not war, but through espionage. The cold war beginning with Russia has largely replaced actual physical battle.
Deleted Comment
What about Russia invading Ukraine?
All the contested regions - Crimea, Donetsk/Lugansk "national republics", Abkhazia and South Ossetia are actually a very good illustration of this concept. From the perspective of economic benefit, even ignoring the wider effects from sanctions and such, the captured (or, in some cases, captured-and-mostly-abandoned) regions have been and still are a net drain on Russian economy - they consume wealth of the mainland rather contribute back to it; you might or might not give these regions dotations to (re-)develop them so that they might be productive after a decade or two, but the results of these "adventures" clearly show that in the short term it's not reasonable to capture wealth of developed (or even not that developed; Ukraine as such and those parts especially are on the low end compared to most developed countries) countries by invasion because you don't really capture that wealth in an invasion, you generally just destroy it.
There probably are important benefits that Russian leadership is gaining (or expected to gain) out of these regions, but wealth capture isn't one of these benefits.
I am not.
"WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them."
There were many reasons. I was not aware that "wealth" was one of them. For very advanced but small countries with a small population it may have made sense as a last grab to try to stay a super power.
"These days such a strategy is a complete non-starter because no developed nation can withstand an invasion."
I dont understand this statement.
"Think of it like this: Silicon Valley is probably one of the richest bits of America. So imagine that some dictator decides to invade it, and that the US military try to stop him but fail in some improbable way."
Silicon valley is rich because of knowledge, no because they have stored gold in the vaults or oil under the soil. ALso: "The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct global warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, in as little as perhaps twenty years and as the leverage of technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination -- with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win." Brave new War, john robb
"So this dictator now controls a bunch of ruins with no electricity containing broken computers."
This won't be a dictator but a nerd in this parents basement doing DoS or running a CRISPER Lab from his garage.
"How does this make him any richer than he was before?"
I doubt that "money" was the driving force beyond most wars in the last century. Power. Fame. Ideology. But money?
The 3rd world war will make the last two look like Disney land trips.
War been generally bad for the economy might not be enough if it benefits the parts that have the ear of government, yet another reason why lobbying is a bad idea.
Deleted Comment
At least not until we have general AI.
If machine brain power starts exceeding human brain power, then be very afraid of who holds the reigns.
That is so ambiguous... ML abilities are far far from a one dimensional measure, in many ways it has already far exceeded mans mental abilities, and in many ways it has not and has little promise to do so in even the distant future. Machine learning is great at automating basic things e.g a subset of image recognition or extremely narrow and specific things e.g playing Go, because these problems are well defined and can be engineered at one level and emergent at another.
It's not good at being conscious, because that is a chasm so deep and wide and non-specific in content that it is not a topology that can be so easily engineered with intent. When most people talk about conscious AI they mean AI that imitates human without realizing it - conscious AI is not some inevitable progression from our current toys, it's as if we are playing with the beginnings of chemistry and assume an entire highly sophisticated biological organism is going to be the next step.</rant>
Still, you can only rely on the latter so much, so you want to be able to sell natural gas and oil without European/American sanctions getting in the way.
Keeping Europe politically divided would sink any chance of serious sanctions put in place against Russia. Keeping it from forming a military alliance would ensure that he can launch "hybrid warfare" at will without triggering a major military response.
When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin's popularity soared. But just two years before that, there were major protests in the streets of Moscow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9313_Russian_protes...
Deleted Comment
* https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#the-share-of-battle...
* https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#war-and-peace-after...
* https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#counting-world-conf...
* https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/08/ourworldindata_pe...
Also:
* https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/has_the_decline_...
Technological advances now allow retaliatory strikes to be aimed in places other than the opponent's advancing forces: you can strike their capital, or airfields, or ports instead, and the stricken state must not immediately devolve into unrest.
It's much safer, then, to wage an indirect war, where you first destabilize the target from within. Various adversaries around the globe can play this long game of instigating civil wars in the target state, or proxy wars in a third state, while they keep their homelands relatively conflict-free. The destructive potential of long-range weaponry can be credited with this "innovation".
Desperation and delusion are still big factors. It's easy to imagine some very populous countries that are resource-poor first devolve into a civil war in a struggle for resources, then be united under a strong leader who redirects their aggression towards an unfortunate neighbor. Lots of historical wars have fit this category. Then there's countries who fight repeated skirmishes over underutilized parcels of land whose realized value is largely theoretical. These countries may not wish to descend into full mobilization against each other, but they're a reliable source of combat deaths year after year.
Today, global trade works fairly well for many states, and the elites who capture most of this value have a vested interest in this arrangement to continue. But if there are no bread and no circuses, the discontent and despondent population will struggle among themselves along make-believe ideological lines, or conveniently preexisting tribal lines, that just mask the underlying economic causes, until some rise to the top. All the while, they'll make tempting beneficiaries of aid from states that want to peddle their influence without putting their own people at direct risk.
There has been a long peace between developed "western" economies. But the world as a whole since 1945 has continued to be full of violent conflict.
War deaths are down globally, not just in Europe. The middle easy in a recent exception, as they had an uptick starting in the 2010s.
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
Even if one accepts this "data," however it's been put together, the 1970s and 1980s were extremely violent times. They may look tame in comparison to WWII, but we should remember that WWII is the bloodiest conflict in human history. The "long peace" really only refers to an era in which major powers did not fight one another directly, but rather through proxy conflicts in the Third World.
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
The fact is that the US/NATO forces are one of the only military force capable of conducting an extended invasion and occupation of another country today. China has a strong military and navy, but it is largely positioned for limited operations in the South China Sea. Which isn't a knock on the Chinese military, it's intentionally how they have positioned themselves.
In short, I think it's unlikely we will see another total war scenario in the current political climate. The only war I could see that unfolding is US/NATO forces attacking a peer or a close ally of a peer (like North Korea), and the US and Europe are so reticent of conducting an all-out war I don't think that will happen.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-lack-of-military-readiness-dr...
https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf