People often say that wars are foolish, and both sides would be better off if they didn’t fight. And this is standardly called “naive” by those engaging in realpolitik. Sadly, for any particular war, there’s a significant chance they’re right. Even aside from human stupidity, game theory is not so kind as to allow for peace unending.
I’m not saying obviously that ALL conflict ever is avoidable or irrational, but there are a lot that are:
caused by a miscommunication/misunderstanding/delusional understanding of reality;
rooted in a genuine competition between conflicting interests, but those interests only pertain to a handful of leaders, and most of the people actually doing the fighting really have no genuine stake in it, just false information and/or a giant coordination problem that makes it hard to tell those leaders to fuck off;
rooted in a genuine competition between conflicting interests between the actual people doing the fighting, but the gains are still not so large to justify the costs of the war, which have been wildly underestimated.
And I’d say that just about makes up a good 90% of all conflicts. There’s a thing where people who are embedded into specialised domains start seeing the trees (“here is the complex clockwork of cause-and-effect that made this thing happen”) and missing the forest (“if we weren’t dumb and irrational as fuck none of this would have happened in the first place”). The main point of studying past conflicts should be to distil here and there a bit of wisdom about how in fact lot of that stuff is entirely avoidable if people can just stop being absolute idiots now and then.
I’m not saying obviously that ALL conflict ever is avoidable or irrational, but there are a lot that are:
caused by a miscommunication/misunderstanding/delusional understanding of reality;
rooted in a genuine competition between conflicting interests, but those interests only pertain to a handful of leaders, and most of the people actually doing the fighting really have no genuine stake in it, just false information and/or a giant coordination problem that makes it hard to tell those leaders to fuck off;
rooted in a genuine competition between conflicting interests between the actual people doing the fighting, but the gains are still not so large to justify the costs of the war, which have been wildly underestimated.
And I’d say that just about makes up a good 90% of all conflicts. There’s a thing where people who are embedded into specialised domains start seeing the trees (“here is the complex clockwork of cause-and-effect that made this thing happen”) and missing the forest (“if we weren’t dumb and irrational as fuck none of this would have happened in the first place”). The main point of studying past conflicts should be to distil here and there a bit of wisdom about how in fact lot of that stuff is entirely avoidable if people can just stop being absolute idiots now and then.