Well, I'm not making an argument for general nuclear disarmament because I don't think it's realistic. It would be great, yeah - but it's unlikely to happen. Although, the US under Obama has made significant progress towards reducing the number of actual stockpiled nukes, which incentivizes Russia to do the same.Simon_Jester wrote:If we accept that nuclear arsenals are not going away, little is lost by saying "if you move an armored brigade across the Polish border, you get one warning before we start launching nuclear missiles at it." Because it's not like tank columns can invade a country on a noticeable scale by accident.
So... you're not making an argument against security guarantees and "nuclear tripwires." You're making an argument for general nuclear disarmament. Which is a respectable position; it's just a separate position.
My argument is simply that widening the mutual-defense umbrella to include Poland and Estonia increases the potential set of things that could occur that might cause someone to whip out the launch codes. Putin would be more likely to invade non-nuclear Poland, or bordering Estonia, than say, um... France, because it's easier. But with NATO, Estonia is now another nuclear trigger point. Now, I understand that you're saying that this trigger point is precisely what we can count on to reliably deter Putin from ever daring to invade Estonia. My response is simply: that's not at all clear. I mean, I don't personally believe Putin would ever invade Estonia, but it's possible he, or his successor, might find a good enough reason to do so, betting that the West just wouldn't really give a shit for the most part. I mean, he's managed to frame the entire Ukraine invasion as something of a humanitarian intervention, so who knows? And my argument is simply that the cost of nuclear war on human civilization is so, so, so very extreme, that we really should try to avoid creating these potential situations in the first place.
But that argument is not something I put much weight on. To me, the more significant argument is that NATO is just obsolete, because it turns out that after WW2 the global economy has developed to such an extent that we no longer need things like NATO. More on that below.
Except that just hasn't actually happened. Latin America is entirely non-nuclear, and yet the US doesn't exert too much tyranny over it, for the most part. So is Canada. Yes, we bully them sometimes and we invaded Panama, but those incidents are few and far between. And the UK and France aren't exerting tyranny over Germany, Spain or Poland, for that matter either. (Quite the contrary, Germany actually exerts more influence over all of them, despite not having nukes, because the German economy is fucking amazing, so it wields more influence over the Eurozone/EU)Simon Jester wrote:Now, the problem is that the logical outcome of this is that nuclear powers exert tyranny over any nation that does not have nuclear weapons, resulting in a multipolar world of violent empires held together and secured from external interference by nuclear terror, with various nations frantically seeking nuclear weapons to preserve their own safety.
Yes, but this is only a problem for developing countries with emerging economies. It is not so much a problem in the first world where the economies are highly developed and globally intertwined. Which is why I'm saying that the real, long-term solution to "end all wars", so to speak, is not to create fragile nuclear staring contests, but to develop the global economy to the extent that war becomes ultimately useless. Which is why I'm saying NATO is something of a relic - it may have once been useful, it may still even be useful for some things, but it doesn't represent a long-term solution to anything.Simon Jester wrote:This is pretty much the kind of thing that we're trying to avoid in, say, the Middle East- with Iran having nuclear weapons to make them unattackable by their Sunni neighbors and carving out a 'Greater Iran' from the Shi'ite areas to their west, while the Saudis seek the bomb so as to avoid being susceptible to nuclear blackmail, and while the Israelis double up on their nuclear arsenal and brandish it more and more threateningly and on a shorter hair trigger. Something like that.
War used to be highly economically fruitful, whether in terms of looting conquered nations, or the industries it promotes. But hey... it's 2015 so let's see... Lockheed Martin and Boeing are worth about $60B and $100B respectively - they could both be bought out by Apple, Google or Facebook without Tim Cook so much as blinking. Even the Chinese tech company Baidu is worth more than Lockheed Martin. Plus, a lot of these defense companies do a lot more than just develop weapons, so it's not like war is their only source of revenue anyway.
And yet, a lot's changed since the early 20th century when Kipling wrote that. The economy is truly globalized on an unprecedented scale. Shareholders of major US companies actually care about the stability and success of the rest of the world, because it effects their returns.Simon Jester wrote: People were saying (in essence) that this would work back before World War One too... Kipling poked at this idea in his 1903 poem The Peace of Dives.
By itself, it does not work very well, because (again) people are great at convincing themselves to act against their economic self-interest.
It works much better when war is 'impossible' for some other reason, so that economic ties have time and space to grow into bonds of mutual amity. And so that no one worries about a war in the near future, which makes it more profitable and sensible to keep those economic ties in place rather than guardedly watching and limiting them.
But for that to happen you need, well, some other source of security, of the conviction that "we will not be invaded." Nuclear weapons are actually pretty good for providing the assurance of "we will not be invaded" unless one believes the neighbors are insane... in which case you'd have the same fear of invasion whether you had the nuclear weapons or not.
We're in a transitory phase right now, where we have a global economy that encompasses much of the world, where US, European, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Russian multi-national corporations are financially intertwined and traded across various stock exchanges. The more isolated a country is from this economic network, the more likely it is to revert to old world hostilities (e.g. North Korea.) The US and Russia are probably the most threatening, in terms of stirring up instability with military interventions - but these incidents are isolated, and both the US and Russia are heavily invested in the success of the global economy.
Now, currently, it happens to be that there are certain "hot spots" of instability in the developing world, such as the Middle East, where nuclear hostilities are a real concern. Other parts of the developing world, such as much of Central and South America, don't have these problems to the same extent because their economies comprise many different sectors and they depend heavily on established trade relations with each other as well as with the US and other first world economies.
Of course, certain Middle Eastern countries are also highly economically intertwined with the first world, it's just that there are many other specific, non-economic related details that can work to destablize a developing region. With the Mideast in particular, (and let's be honest, the Mideast is the biggest problem here) - various details such as the existence of Israel, and four decades of radical Saudi Madrassahs plus slipshod US interventions have worked to destabilize the region. Even so, I think the current instability in the Mideast might be way more economic in nature than we usually assume. The Gulf nations stumbled upon the unlikely combination of a highly-valued resource to export and an absurdly backwards culture, which has severely stagnated the development of their non-energy economic sectors, and generally retarded development throughout the region. You know Arabic is the 6th most spoken language on Earth, yet Arabic websites only account for about 0.001% of the Internet? You know why? Because they have no fucking real tech sector to speak of - they struck oil and then pretty much called it a day in terms of economic development. (That's a simplification but whatever.)
Regardless, we can talk about the individual details that lead to wars in this or that region, but for the most part NATO doesn't help with any of this, because the first world (and to a lesser extent the former "second world", i.e. Eastern Europe) is becoming more and more economically intertwined to the extent that any large-scale war is really unlikely. Putin's current antics are most likely a distraction - his invasion of Ukraine is extremely alarming, but I don't think it represents any kind of reversal of the trend I'm talking about here. The Russian search engine Yandex went IPO a few years ago to an $11B market cap, and includes stockholders from all over the world, including US CEOs and congressmen, and of course the energy giant Gazprom is traded all over the world. The US and Russia aren't exchanging nukes any time this century, at least if Wall Street has anything to say about it. (Hint: it does.) And really, Putin is for the most part a (corrupt) businessman, even if he might have certain ambitions of expanding Russia's borders.
So NATO (or MAD) is not a long-term solution here. The long-term solution is continuing to develop third-world economies, and continuing to promote international economic entanglement. I think more than the EU, more than any political arrangement, this is the major reason for peace in the first world since the end of WW2.
