What if the Europe of 1914 had figured out a way to avoid the Great War? What would European civilization look like today? Would the colonial empires have maintained their existence and by now have coalesced into a world completely dominated and controlled by Europe and its descendants? Would the scientific and commercial progress of this civilization have produced the first truly global state?
It’s an interesting question. But I think very mistaken. World War I (and World War II) happened because they had to happen. Humans (and Europeans specifically) have been struggling for the last five hundred years with the results of the Enlightenment. Enormous technological and sociological change have engulfed the world and we are nowhere near figuring out how to harness these changes safely.
And just in time to finish off what’s left of western civilization, we have Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland playing nuclear chicken with Vladimir Putin. For eighty years the existential nature of the nuclear threat has kept both the Americans and the Russians on their best behavior when it came to serious escalation. But all that has changed over the last decade or so. The CIA and the State Department have been embarked on a progressively more provocative series of “color” revolutions. And now they’ve culminated in the Ukraine War as the capstone. At least a hundred and fifty billion dollars of American aid and billions more euros have been transferred to Ukraine and something like a half-million Ukrainian lives have been sacrificed in this endeavor and now the neo-cons have pulled out all the stops and will allow the Ukrainians to use F-16s and long-range missiles into Russia proper. And Putin has responded with statements to the effect that tactical nuclear weapons will now be on the table if western offensive weapons are used in Russia.
It doesn’t appear that we have many more tosses left before something pretty bad is going to happen. If I were to guess what will precipitate the escalation, I’d say that it will be a major missile strike on Moscow. The Russians will respond with a major attack on the western cities in Ukraine and I assume they’ll attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian military along with killing Zelinsky. The question is whether they think they have to use a tactical nuke to achieve this.
But either way, the escalation will be extreme and the number of civilian deaths will be measured in the thousands. Now, it’s somewhere in this part of the escalation that I think we could see this whole thing spin completely out of control. Direct attacks on Moscow will eventually radicalize Putin’s reactions to this strategy. And especially if the civilian casualties are high, we run the risk that the attacks on Western Ukraine could spill over into Eastern Europe and trigger a retaliatory strike from Poland on Russian territory. And from there we have a direct path to a nuclear exchange.
Biden and Blinken seem to be the caliber of idiot that we could expect to bring on a nuclear war for absolutely no good reason at all. When people look back on this, they’ll probably try to identify the ideological reasons why war broke out at this time. What they should look for are Joe Biden’s college transcripts and Antony Blinken’s psych evaluation. For once the villain won’t be artificial intelligence. It will be lack of intelligence.
You may have stumbled onto Harry Turtledove, a PhD Historian who has written a series of “what if” books. They all were quite good and provoking with interesting premises.
I never have. Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to check him out.
1914 could have been avoided, the use of chemical weapons by the Germans brought the English, and other western countries into what was just another small expansionist move by Germany. They had been going to war appx every 20 years for almost a century, without getting anyone else drug into it, as they slowly nibbled away at the eastern border of France in the purpose of taking the mineral and industrial rich eastern sections of France one bite at a time. These wars were fought mostly to move the border a small amount at a time, in response to past… Read more »