> the great powers never make hard and fast alliances with smaller states, or aid them too openly.

Really? US-Israel? US-Saudi? Russia-Syria? All examples of basically untouchable alliances with smaller states and blatant, public military aid. If I were better educated/informed I'm sure I could come up with more.

That's absolutely nothing in comparison the Bismarkian international political structure that led to the first world war.

Did you watch 38 days? Great dramatization that brought that to life for me.

None of those are hard and fast alliances. None of them actually oblige the US to do anything in response to an attack on any of them.

Not to mention that the US is fond of breaking treaties left and right, though with the current administration it would surprise me if they didn't jump at the chance to attack anyone anywhere for the least provocation.

NATO does oblige all members to come to the defence of another member in response to an attack.

This is a good point, and I have an idea I want to toss out here- maybe what's really dangerous is to have a mutual defense treaty between a lot of states but still allow them to have separate diplomatic relationships.. so that a snafu involving one member state can blow up and involve a bunch of countries who didn't need to be involved. If there was a central agency speaking for all those states then there would be fewer ways for a disagreement to occur. So what I'm saying is that 20 small countries will a mutual defense treaty are much more likely to be involved in a war than one big country over the same area. I don't know if that's true or not- you'd have to do the number crunching to find out..

I truly believe the reason we have not had WW3 is because of nukes. It is one small frignge benefit.

It's the reason we have not yet had WW3. The jury is out on whether that is a good thing. Perhaps we'll find one day that several smaller conflicts (as horrifying as a WW without nukes would be) would have been preferable to one larger civilization-ending one.

Several smaller conflicts ... yep, sounds like the last 70 years of history since WWII. In a sense, we're in the middle of finding out. I agree the jury's out, but it's probably preferable to WWIII, or even a limited nuclear exchange.

perhaps we live in a multiverse, and only the surviver you-s still exist because their universes have still avoided WWIII... ;-)