No sane person wants a world war. They’re bad enough without nukes and cyber warfare. Diplomacy and cool heads, some compromise and concessions of pride can go a lot f way to preventing them. There comes a point though when your choices are basically world war or new world order. Alliances and treaties create formal friendly relations between nations, but they also create a threat of force against aggressive or hostile forces. The friendly relations of nations with pacts allows peaceful resolution of disputes and the threat of force often stops wars before they start. For this system to work those agreements must be more than empty promises. That means that when someone violates them or when someone calls for aid as promised in an agreement, there is a point where it must be honored to preserve the framework for peace. Country A attacks B, and country D and C have an agreement to help each other of attacked. So C fights A, but A has an agreement with D so D fights B and C, and then…
.. neighbors and allies and adversaries and alliances etc. get dragged in and you have world war. The problem is that both with these agreements but also with a general idea of sovereignty or peace, when that is violated if you do nothing, you’ve sent a message to the offender as well as anyone else out in the world that peace is a request not a rule. Remember that all these things like borders and sharing water ways and airspace and such- they’re all just concepts. They work because they are mostly agreed upon and it is mostly at any nations discretion to follow the rules and manners or not. The only real compelling reason anyone has to go with things is it offers them some sort of benefit. At the least, if you aren’t a nation that “plays well with others” you’ll tend to get shunned on the international stage, sanctioned economically and diplomatically and such. But- if you are self sufficient enough to not rely on such things or don’t care about international feelings as much as…
.. the power and prosperity of your country- why would you care? Let’s use.. Random pick here… Russia. So say Russia has treaties across Eastern Europe and they then violate those treaties by invading an Eastern European country to annex its land and resources. Well, they wouldn’t do that because then their other Eastern European treaties would look empty and Russia might not have good relations with other eastern euro countries right? Unless they were just going to absorb them all- then it wouldn’t matter much. But Western Europe and abroad might get upset. Well… Russia is a giant country with nukes and giant Allie’s with nukes, so they may feel pretty confident they can get away with some bullshit because who wants a world war, especially over a bunch of countries that until a few decades ago mostly were part of Russia anyway..?
So like a child trying pushing the boundaries to see what mommy or daddy will let them get away with, Russia decided to test the waters. If that test was met with no response or a weak response, they’d know they could get away with things. Really the world made this war happen when Russia didn’t get the shit slapped out of them for Crimea years back. We told Russia they could poke across the border and take. And that maybe was trying to avoid world war- a concession, fine, take that peninsula and stop there and we will all it square to avoid world war. And for a short time they stopped there. And then they poked back to take some more because of you let them sneak a piece once, they’d feel confident they could do it again.
So how does that proceed and which is better? Avoid world war by sitting out, maybe Russia loses on their own or maybe they win and stop with this next little piece. But maybe they then regroup and when they are ready they take another little piece and another. Even if they stopped their expansion at their former Soviet borders that’s not a great place to be at, the return of the USSR. Which- would probably lead to them taking little pieces here and there down the road. If not Europe or Scandinavia then Africa or South America perhaps, or maybe the islands, a way to extend nautical claims and strategic reach for global assets. The next battle waiting to be fought is space, there have already been weapons developed for the purpose and we’ve already had “accidents” up there resulting in damaged or destroyed infrastructure.
So no decent and sane person wants world war. War generally sucks. No one, save perhaps pro Russian nationalists, asked Russia to invade Ukraine, almost everyone asked them to leave. Almost everyone then told them to leave. Almost everyone then warned them to leave, then almost everyone levied sanctions and such and said more would come if they didn’t leave. And they haven’t left. And they whine and moan about the unfair treatment and foreign aggression, and there is a simple deal to be made- the “west” can stop this “aggression” against Russia of Russia stops its aggression. We just cut out all the aggression. The ball is and has been in Russias court. The only people who are deciding if we go to world war or not are the Russians right now.
But they are still banking on a win. They are banking on being able to end this whole war in a way that the net result benefits Russia. The problem is attrition. To get an aggressor to relent they either need to walk away with something of enough value to make them feel it outweighs the costs of continuing, or they must be defeated to the point they have no will or capacity to fight. Russia is big and has lots of people. They send mercenaries and convicts and those who are more likely to go unnoticed in their society to reduce the impact and strain. With will power, Russia can sustain heavy human losses for almost indefinite periods.
A total defeat is unlikely and if pushed into a corner where a defeat seems possible they have nuclear threat or retaliation to fall back on. But if they are able to benefit from aggression the take away remains the same. That it profits their government or elites to wage these wars.
So there is a lot to balance. War can change the path of a nation. The US drastically improved its wealth and power by simply choosing to not sit out a single war which it largely could have theoretically avoided. We live in a global community now. What happens across the world from us impacts us now and later. We should not push for war but we cannot allow unchecked aggression or create a standard that such actions sent just tolerated, but beneficial to the aggressor.
People comment often on the US and it’s global policing. It is not the job of place of the USA to police the world- the world should police itself as a global community. So when taking and reason and bargaining fail and every second spent talking g is in bad faith with an actor who is merely using the talk of peace to stall while they work at winning an aggressive war, you have to make a call. It’s primitive and sad but it’s who we still are as humans. We haven’t grown past it. Force is the universal language. I hope we avoid world war. I hope that Russian sons and daughters return home to their families immediately and that Ukrainian lives can stop being destroyed and the world can stop holding its breath over the ambitions of of some old men holding on to ideas that already ran aground 40 odd years ago. Enough people have suffered for the wounded pride of old soviet war hawks who feel the power of an iron grip slipping away and long to bring back a time they felt powerful.
A total defeat is unlikely and if pushed into a corner where a defeat seems possible they have nuclear threat or retaliation to fall back on. But if they are able to benefit from aggression the take away remains the same. That it profits their government or elites to wage these wars.