Reply To: The North Atlantic Current

[Brian H]

texaslabrat wrote:

texas is right to some extent — where war is caused by desperation or actual imposed inequality. This is the minority of cases, of course. Try coming up with examples. There aren’t many.

Coming up with examples where competition for resources was the underlying cause for war? Um, WWII pacific theater (Japan attacking the U.S. largely out of desperation from the embargoes set on it by America). Both Gulf Wars (do you really think we would be involved in the Middle East if we didn’t need the oil?). The current “cold war” brewing with China at the moment. The attempted assisted coup in Venezuela not too long ago. And that’s just in the past 60 or so years that we personally were involved in. Leaders might rally the troops with calls of service to a higher power or whatever…but in the end it’s usually about money or its equivalent in natural resources. Extremely cheap power mitigates that to a very large extent. As I said, exceptions to every rule but history is chock-full of examples of this.

A huge breakthrough in solar power would also be welcomed (I don’t see that one must exist to the total exclusion of the other)..though that obviously has a capped limit in the amount of power per square meter that falls on the earth. Every watt helps though! Especially given the very real possibilities of the decades it might take for FF to be fully commercialized and socially accepted….solar and other renewables can prove valuable in the mean time.
Japan wanted both the resources and its military adventures (the embargoes were not just for fun or out of meanness!), and couldn’t have them. You will note that since it began depending on brains instead of guns, it is able to afford all the resources it wants.

As for the ME, oil was important for the globe, not just the US. Saddam in charge of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was not something anyone could accept. And the “cold war” with China is not a war, and won’t become one unless China decides to eliminate the local non-Communist competition. Democracies do not go to war with each other. Tyrants go to war with democracies (and each other), however.

As for Venezuela, it’s been controlled by a coup leader since Chavez took over, made especially clear by his permanent negation of any Constitutional restraint on his tenure. Despite its oil wealth, it is speeding into the economic dumpster (22% inflation, growing fast, with store shelves empty because retailers refuse to lose money on every sale under government controlled pricing), for reasons explained long ago by the first Secretary General of OPEC, a Venezuelan, who noted that every country dependent on the Devil’s Excrement had debased social and economic and intellectual conditions as a result of the ‘rentier’ mentality plentiful oil engenders. Chavez, of course, has the full proceeds of his (mostly expropriated) oil sales to throw around and foment mischief with, regardless of the state of the country. Whatta guy!

Yes, all that is true (with the exception of your assessment of China. A democracy? ROFL!)..however, it doesn’t counteract the fact that it was the natural resources that was the pivotal point in the conflicts I mentioned 😉 Hence my point that when the scarcity of said natural resources is taken away, most of the excuses for conflict either go away or become much less important 😀 There will always be the zealots who want to wipe somebody off the map “just because” (*cough* Iran vs Israel *cough*) but when nobody needs the natural resources they provide, nobody will care if someone preemptively turns them into a glass parking lot. Just sayin’.

I wasn’t suggesting China was a democracy, only that it would be at war only when and if it decided to suppress the local democratic opposition (Taiwan, S. Korea, Australia). It is an ideological tyranny morphing into a kind of oligarchy. Check out de Mesquita’s lectures on the core contrast between the two models: essentially, how small a percentage of the country gets to appropriate Public Goods (defined as the gross output of all individuals living there). In tyrannies, a small fairly well off ‘Selectorate’ keeps an Inner Circle very well fed, which supports an individual tyrant who dispenses favors. Recently, China managed to change tyrants without actually killing the old one, for the first time. A very rare occurrence.

As for Israel taking out Iran, it wouldn’t glassify the country (though it could; Iran should be VERY careful about tweaking that wee tiger’s tail!) The dispute is not resource-based, though the restraint on a democracy defending itself against a tyranny may be. Which does not support the thesis that resource shortage causes wars, quite the contrary! Israel, like Japan, uses brains to easily earn and thus afford all the resources it can use.