KahanistLiberal: "the US and china can't attack each other. we own the businesses that employ them, plus we buy their crap. while they sell there stuff to us and provide cheap labor. neither can attack the other without harming itself. "
If only the world actually worked like that.
Study history in detail, and you'll soon wake up to the fact that most modern warfare has resulted from economic competition for world markets.
Yes, nationalism, tyrannical governments, religion, and other factors all play a role in justifying the reasons nations go at each other, but in the final analysis it almost always boils down to one or more nations beginning to feel "squeezed out of the action" by a former trading partner grown too powerful and too dominant in world affairs.
I suggest reading Patrick Buchanan's current article this week on China's recent aggression against Japan and the underlying economic reasons for it.
As made clear in the article, China has totally cornered the rare earth metals market to the extent that the U.S. and others are now reliant on her "good will" just to be able to make military necessities and vital industrial equipment.
Prior to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was selling Japan every piece of scrap iron and steel that could be found and put on a ship, as well as oil. Japan itself has almost zero natural resources and has always depended on heavy trade and/or colonization to meet her needs. Once Japan threatened the oil and mineral resources and rubber plantations of East Asia which the UK and U.S.A. considered "their turf", open hostility developed between the ongoing "trading partners" which eventually became a shooting war.
Business demands constant growth and expansion, which itself demands ever larger resources. Because resources in most cases are finite, businesses must ever be on the search for trading partners (or colonies) to procure new sources of oil, timber, minerals, precious metals, etc. As each country industrializes and modernizes, it finds itself needing to increase its trade worldwide to maintain its balance sheet. Nations, like individuals, want to become wealthier and stronger. The rule in business is "Increase and grow your business or you are going out of business." As the demand for vital resources to expand growth increases, nations usually spend a larger portion of their national budget on development of their military forces and weaponry, viewed as indispensable for "defending vital interests" around the world. To solidify their position of influence and power in the world marketplace, nations will usually enter into military alliances with other powers. This pattern continues unabated in cycles until eventually the biggest contenders for world markets bump heads competing for the same resources, and then big trouble starts, usually ending in war. All the rest of the stuff - the religion, political ideologies, past histories, etc., is just used to fan the flames for war once the economic casus belli is already well established.
Look at Iran. It is using Islamic Jihad/anti-Zionism ideology to motivate its masses and spread its influence throughout the Islamic world, but what it really is doing is increasing its access to resources and its market share of international trade, in order to modernize and develop high technology industries, which in turn demands that it expand the power and reach of its military. Meanwhile it is forging military alliances and signing treaties of mutual defense with Lebanon, Syria, Russia, Turkey, and others. Iran's actual purpose in doing all of this? To achieve unquestioned hegemony throughout the Middle East, and by so doing become a major player on the stage of world superpowers. The very last thing Iran could afford to have happen, at least for the present, is for Israel to disappear or be defeated. This is because such an event would leave Iran with no "boogeyman" to use as justification for all of her actions listed above.
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