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.