Re:Supply Chain Security Is the Whole Enchilada, but Who’s W...
by hollerith on Sunday October 07, 2018 @12:55AM
(#18158907)
Right before WW I European economies had become integrated to an unprecedented extent, and people were saying that the integration would discourage war.
Re:Supply Chain Security Is the Whole Enchilada, but Who’s W...
by dragonwriter on Sunday October 07, 2018 @10:20AM
(#18160650)
> Right before WW I European economies had become integrated to an unprecedented extent, and people were saying that the integration would discourage war.
And maybe it did; unfortunately, the myth of offense dominance guaranteed that diplomatic crises would escalate uncontrollably into war, masking any effect which discouraged war as a choice in its own right rather than as a preventive measure against the risk that an opponent would choose war.
It's very difficult to isolate and evaluate the effect of one factor.
Re:Supply Chain Security Is the Whole Enchilada, but Who’s W...
by repolfx on Sunday October 07, 2018 @07:55AM
(#18160125)
Yes. It's a very strange and basically un-contested idea that trade integration discourages war. If that was true then civil wars would be the rarest form of war, but the only type of war going on in the world today is civil war. And if you look through the 20th century, then other than the World Wars, most conflict was civil in nature. You can't get more integrated than a countries internal trade. So this idea that trade deals make war hard doesn't seem empirically supportable.
For example until the tariff war China was highly dependent on US agriculture (not just buying soybeans from American farmers, but by owning the largest pork producer in the US, Smithfield farms). Well they still are, of course, but they are aggressively looking for alternate trade ties.
The US and major European economies are intermingled tightly enough that it's unlikely that there could be a war between them. The NATO umbrella discouraged them from investing themselves in war-fighting capability (costing the US a lot less than the cost of fighting another war in Europe!). To that extent NATO is a fig leaf, an important one.