Are you basing this statement on a general feeling or on a specific data-based metric? The military industrial complex greatly benefits from this common sentiment, but by most all quantitative measurements the world continues growing slowly safer, average lifespans increase, etc. While years-long aberrations exist (e.g. civil wars), the overall trend is very clearly antithetical to your statement.
As Pinker notes, progress is not monotonicly increasing. While it is true that things have gotten better on average across the world, we should be wary of those who do not champion enlightenment ideals, particularly in autocratic China with the apparently life term of Xi Jinpeng. We should be wary that those without our interests at heart don’t overtake us.
What are you advocating? Arming governments with autonomous killer drones in order to "protect democracy"? Because the world is a "dangerous place"? I don't even...
It's dangerous to imagine one is sitting on some moral high ground by refusing to work for the military. We all owe our freedom to previous generations of scientists and engineers who worked for the military, sometimes inspite of strong ethical concerns.
Nukes prevent any war from happening between any powerful nation.
The only use for the other types of weapons is to participate in some other civil war in another country that we shouldn't be in.
So no, I don't care if we "fall behind" because we still have nukes and those are enough to protect us in the conflicts that matter.
Being able to prevent friendly (and even neutral) countries from being bullied or going over to the dark side is also important because ultimately the best defence against rising autocratic forces is to ensure a broad alliance of friendly, democratic countries who are secure against interference by unfriendly regimes.
If a country like the USA can have its elections manipulated, how vulnerable might smaller democracies be?
The CIA could most certainly help you answer that quite quantitatively.
This has to be a joke, right? The USA has been responsible for undermining democracy all over the world more than any other country.
This is a just a partial list that we are aware of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
It is also implicated (though not directly proved), that USA was responsible for Arab spring.
https://www.quora.com/Was-the-USA-behind-the-Arab-Spring-upr...
So, in the universe you are writing from, the Kargil War would have been an impossibility?
US Nukes: 7300
Russia Nukes: 8000
India Nukes: 90-100
Pakistan nukes: 100-120
Everyone except the US and Russia nukes: ~1100
(source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/nine-nations-have-n...)
There's a reason they were all proxy wars and they never escalated into direct conflict on the scale of WWII (or beyond), and that reason is nuclear deterrence.
Nukes don't prevent “any war” from happening between powerful nations, though they do seem to have some utility in restricting the escalation of such conflicts.
(Now, you could argue that unilateral conventional disarmament would leave no choice but to escalate to nuclear war, which would improve deterrence and prevent even small scale conventional, politically-covered attacks, but that argument would be highly speculative.)
100 nukes is powerful enough.
Some might say this is the purpose of the second amendment.
Well no, that's just one aspect of democracy that can't even remotely serve as a sufficient condition for democracy.
Just think about what you wrote: "our enemies". Why do you (whichever country you are from) have enemies in the first place? What did your country do to make others hate it? A lot of people seem to focus on how to defend against "those who hate us" without spending a passing thought on the why of it.
Solving "why" also solves the "how", but those who profit from conflict have no interest in the former, as their livelihood depends on the latter.
Philosophically, it is strange to make agreeableness the standard for the behavior of nations. Being good is much more than being nice, and any thoughtful conception of moral goodness will sometimes require actions that upset others.
And finally, you seem to be assuming that my country is the only possible bad actor. But of course, that’s not true. My country could do everything “right”, only for someone else to start a war.
>Why do you (whichever country you are from) have enemies in the first place? What did your country do to make others hate it? A lot of people seem to focus on how to defend against "those who hate us" without spending a passing thought on the why of it.
Are you really arguing that it's Poland's fault for having a country in the same place that Hitler wanted lebensraum?
You have a very simplistic view of geopolitics.
What did Poland do to Germany in 1939 to make Germany hate it? What did the Jews do to the Nazis to make them hate them so much?
Wars get started for all kinds of reasons, some predictable, others not. It's a simple matter of survival to equip yourself as best you can to defend yourself.
And when was the last time the US actually defended its own territory instead of invading somone elses?
Not that I explicitly agree, but there is some theory.
Nope. Not even in the slightest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waves_of_democracy.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy#Waves_of_...
Look at the backsliding in Turkey, Phillipines, Burma, Venezuela, Egypt. Look at the regimes which have come to power in Hungary, Poland. And of course Russia itself. China, which at one time seemed to be heading for more moderation has taken a sharply authoritarian turn. I would argue just in the last five years things have turned sharply for the worse.
There's no regime in Poland.
You are right that the title says 2003 - i looked at the scale below which ended at 1998. I was not so much doubling down, but rather talking of a slightly different point that the ones you and jpollock were making. When I said democracies were in retreat, there are two or three different phenomena.
First - the western democracies seem to be internally weaker, and unable to arrive at consensus even for important national priorities. This may be because of the rise of social media echo chambers. In Europe there is a growth of right-wing parties in all countries, even Germany. As an Indian this worries me, because for all their warts, the liberal democracies of US and the European countries are the model of governance I would like to have succeed across the world.
Second - there seems to be no answer to the salami-slicing tactics of the autocratic regimes in Africa and Asia. You have to see the bullying of countries like Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Phillipines, even Vietnam and wonder. As the western democracies look to be in retreat, countries are surrendering their interests to the regional bullies. This will ultimately hurt all democracies in the long run.
Thirdly - there is the increasingly blatant and surprisingly successful interference in open societies from the closed ones. The US election is only the most advertised one. But similar interference has happened in Australia, in UK, in various part of Europe. There are at last signs of response to this - Australia has passed a law against foreign interference, and the Skripal episode has led to (some) concerted effort. But the response still seems much weaker than the provocation.
In summary, by "retreat of democracies" my focus was on their will and ability to stand up to autocratic forces, not a retreat of democracy itself (which i think is what jpollock and your responses were about). That may be why we were talking at cross purposes. I fervently wish i am wrong - and I hope i never try to avoid rational discourse.
The source of my claims is the book by Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature.
His conclusion from the data is that wars between great powers become less frequent but more deadly. Please read the book you're critiquing.
Pacifism isn't viable when some of the biggest countries in the world are run by totalitarian regimes. Objections to participating in the military industrial complex are a luxury of countries verging on global irrelevance. The proclivities of the West to engage in self-flagellation over these issues are well known to and exploited by less liberal regimes. If only it were not so, but I don't know what the alternative is, just as the physicists in the Manhattan project saw no alternative.
The military-industrial complex may have become far bigger and perhaps in some ways a burden, but the world is a dangerous place and becoming more so. In my view, there is a perfectly valid argument that working with the military is the right thing to do.
At the same time if individuals have pacifist leanings and do not want to work for the military, i would hope corporations respect that.