Remember that the bulk of the worlds population doesn't live in the Anglosphere, or Europe. E.g. if you're from the Middle East, or Africa then you might know a thing or two about revolution, if not war itself.

Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, then lived through the Great Recession are about to go into politics.

My prediction is that if we ain't seen nuthin' yet.

Thats the thing though, generations didn't serve in Afghanistan or Iraq. Even if you counted the some ~3 million service members engaged in those wars over their duration of the ~70 million Americans between 25 and 45 as all being in that age group thats 4% of those generations participating in the wars.

The power of past major war to avert the inclination towards future major war doesn't lie just in the experiences of veterans, but in that of the people connected to them, and of the people who are informed of their experiences through media, as well as that of people who have to live through the socioeconomic fallout of past wars. There are plenty of us around.

> Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war.

During the Vietnam war, the US still had the draft. The numbers deployed to Afghanistan are insignificant compared to Vietnam. There's a tiny fraction of a generation in the US who know all about war.

> There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, then lived through the Great Recession are about to go into politics.

And a whole nation, in Afghanistan, who grew up and lives in war. Eih, so easy to overlook when it just some news headline.

also, right at the border of continental Europe we had that "russia just annexed a part of ucraine" a couple years ago.

Have people already forgotten that?

That felt to me like the US neocons thought their cunning plan[1] would separate Russia from the Sevastopol Naval Base. That backfired bigly. Me I can't think is any Russian Government that would tolerate that.

[1] With the utterly incompetent Sen Clinton running the State Department no less.

Conquest is anachronistic.

The decline of agriculture as a proportion of the economy of advanced nations means that territory no longer has the value that it once did. Population is not as important as it used to be for military power. Physical capital (factories, labour, land) is now less valuable, certainly in the developed world, than human capital (education, skills, networks). This means the gains of conquest have reduced drastically.

Meanwhile, the costs of war have increased markedly. Only a small group of states can afford to build technologically competitive militaries. Nuclear war has made the cost of great power war mutual annihalation. Modern low intensity warfare, on the other hand, makes it extremely difficult for great powers to permanently occupy even small powers (e.g. the US in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan). This means that the costs far outweigh the benefits in almost all circumstances. Add to this that in the counterfactual, states can gain most of the economic benefits of war through peaceful means, i.e. trade, at a far lower cost. There's also simply a greater spread of uncertainty in war: it's a dictum of war studies that war is inherently unpredictable.

If international war breaks out in the near future, it will be a fight over global hegemony (US-China), regional hegemony (Iran-Saudi Arabia), revanchism (Russia, Taiwan), or most likely - by accident.

There are at least three major territorial conflicts ongoing for control of land at the moment. All east of Istanbul.

Crimea

That was not war. No single bullet fired there.

It's the population of one part of one country democratically deciding on a referendum they don't want to live in a country that is violating their basic human rights and threatening their existence, and decided to join a country that can guarantee peace and their well-being.

As a sarcasm that's a good summary. If you actually mean it, that's another story...