Patrick Degan wrote:
No, what you're doing is tossing out terminology and arguing on points which have absolutely fucking nothing to do with the fact of wars occurring despite a given perception of strength or weakness on the part of one opponnent against another in the given conflict (such as England challenging the vastly superior imperial power of Spain, to name one such example).
Spain was perceived to be vulnerable to challenge, you dumbfuck. There was a revolt going on in the Netherlands, her wealthiest European territories per capita, at the time of the English challenge!
You repeatedly ignore inconvenient examples, such as Nazi Germany getting pounded into rubble as the direct result of its attempting to apply massive force to impose its will upon its enemies;
Due to overreach - Application of force to impose will worked fine for the Nazi regime within its own sphere of power. You're intentionally ignoring context, dumbfucker, because it's the only way you can win this.
arguing over and over again its status as a regional hegemonic power and trying to blur the distinction between its initial successes and the war it found itself fighting —and losing disasterously— to make that example fit within the confines of your argument.
There
is a distinction. The conflict with Poland, France, and Britain didn't lead to the conflict with the USSR and the USA - and the conflict with the USSR didn't lead to one with the USA for that matter - except by the willfull actions of the Nazi regime. Its initial successes could have become permanent ones if it had limited itself to applying power within Europe!
And it also seems that you've latched upon some abstruse theory for defining supposed general, universal rules for international political conduct which is supposed to explain history or even predict it. While some geopolitical actions can be identified as following certain patterns, history is replete with examples of leaders and nations acting entirely according to their direct concerns, interests, or obsessions, which do not obey generalised rules of any sort. This is why there really cannot be any sort of "macrohistorical" model which explains or predicts everything, and why descriptions based upon such models are hopelessly flawed.
I'm not supposing general, universal rules - However, geopolitical functions do fall into broad terms. Those follow the lines of maximal realism as opposed to minimal realism. What I'm essentially arguing is that the use of power by a hegemon does not incite coalitions to rise against it, but rather disperses those coalitions before they can be formed (within the limitations of the power of the hegemon). It's hardly an exact science, and at least one war - the War of the Grand Alliance - I'll acknowledge appears to directly contradict it.
For example, Nazi Germany ended up going to war against the Soviet Union and then the rest of the world not because it "refused" to "accept its status as a regional hegemon" or whatever. The very survival of the Nazi government in power depended upon continual expansion. The interests which backed Hitler expected and depended upon it. Nazism promised a Greater German Reich which would rule Europe and either politically or economically would dominate the world, and upon this promise was the support of the military and the industrialists predicated. Plug Hitler's racial and religious obsessions into the equation and you see that a nonexpansive Nazi state was never going to be a reality under any circumstances. This is only one reason why theories which attempt to define "maximal realism" necessarily fail.
Hardly. It just indicates that the German State's leadership was bound to overreach. It doesn't mean that Germany didn't have the theoretical capacity to
not overreach and to consolidate her hold on Europe.
Which has nothing to do with the fact of the United States idiotically challenging a world imperial power when it lacked the requisite military force to do so successfully and nearly getting its ass handed to it. Don't you understand? The United States declared war on Great Britain despite the fact that she was the weaker power in the balance, and did so only in part upon any legitimate grievance against the British for violating the principle of free navigation of the oceans or illegal occupation of forts in the Northwest Territory and more upon the fevered cant of the War Hawks in the Congress and lingering dreams of "liberating" Canada.
And this invalidates the theory, how? There was a revolt in Yugoslavia as well, against the Nazi regime - Geopolitics is not a kind field, and perceived weaknesses will be jumped upon. We overestimated our capabilities and nearly paid a severe price for it. Or observe all the declarations of war by small states or South American countries in '45 against the Axis, hoping to pick up some meagre measure of the spoils once the outcome was no longer in doubt, by that show of support.
As for the British, they didn't devote greater forces to the war against America due to a distraction with France but because of an obsession with France and their inflated perception of Napoleon's naval strength. France wasn't an imperial rival, it was a mortal threat to the "natural order" of monarchy and civilisation as it was defined then. Beyond that, Britain declined to press the war to reconquest of its former colonies because, after the treasury-drain of nearly twenty years of on-and-off warfare, it simply wasn't worth the effort at that point.
At this point I'm reading about a view of the world that is so skewed I wonder why I even bother to reply to your posts. Do you smoke crack when you read history books? Britain was trying to prevent the
total domination of the European continent by Napoleon Bonaparte. That would have been an economic disaster for them and the long-term consequences to their own survival could have been quite grim. It was indeed a war for survival, and hardly just the survival of the monarchy.
None of these facts of that war have anything to do with theories of "maximal realism" or hegemonic structures. They were instead defined by messy realities which do not fit neatly into categories of political behaviour. And again, the argument necessarily fails.
Messy realities - Exactly. This is hardly a precise science, much more of an art than anything else. But it's one that leans much further in the direction of my argument than of the ridiculous idea that countries magically form coalitions to oppose evil aggressor states. The brutal fact of the world is that the use of power is quite effective on the geopolitical stage. You're just unwilling to accept that in your little fantasy land.
