I think that's a failure of imagination, and that vision isn't one that history necessarily supports. Humans used to exist in small roving bands. Now we are organized into nation-states. I don't see a truly compelling reason why that trend towards greater organization can't continue. I am also certainly capable of imagining a world government that is responsive to the needs of people, maintains global peace and security, and focuses the vast majority of its budget towards constructive, not destructive, ends.
I recognize that this doesn't look likely in the immediate future, but:
- An alternative consisting of warring nations equipped with civilization-ending weapons is surely not the only path forward (it better not be, if we hope to stick around).
- We are increasingly faced with existential problems that require a globally coordinated response.
- Change often happens a lot faster than we think possible. The order of things is set in stone until suddenly it's washed away and everything is different.
The former is the answer to the latter here. Humanity is trending to a more unified, globalized, monolithic series of structures. Smaller cultures, countries and people groups have been conquered, dimmed, and "globalized". You can easily observe this in art and architecture.
To be clear: you need both. Ironically, thinking that you can exist without a defensive military response is the real failure of imagination :/.
Humans used to exist in small roving bands.
Now we are organized into nation-states.
I don't see a truly compelling reason why that
trend towards greater organization can't continue.
It's reasonable expectation for a person to care about the others in their "small, roving band." Evolution has selected for those that do, or at least it did for most of human history.
But how far does that scale? Can we truly care about everybody in a village of 100? What about a territory with 1000 people? What about a small country of 100,000? What about a nation with 1,000,000 people or 1,000,000,000 people?
We're not robots. If we were, then larger organizational structures would perhaps clearly be the way. Look at all the wasted, duplicated effort between countries and states.
But we're humans and we need some level of empathy and compassion for our fellow group-members for this stuff to work. When the organizational structure gets large enough it becomes dominated by cliques, infighting, etc. Now you just have warring nation-states with an extra level of abstraction.
I think we're seeing this right now in the United States. This country is too big, too populous, too divided to be effective any more. Unified successes like Webb are quickly becoming the exception, not the norm.
We now have the benefit of awareness. We can know what is happening to far away people. If anything, the current obvious changes in climate/weather and the associated impacts are evidence that we should have some motivation to care about things that impact those beyond just our own group (even though selfishly speaking it is because we know it ultimately will benefit our local group too).
When there is a major disaster, you will see people with very differing opinions drop their "simple" conflicts and work together. There is some recognizable human drive to help those visibly in need. Or maybe it's just an instintive behavior to ensure human survival.
Really, most of our political and ideological squabbles are manufactured by "leaders", and adopted by followers because we all have too much time on our hands. If we were collectively operating in survival mode, I think we might be a more cohesive society. Not that I'm asking for that; I like comfort.
When there is a major disaster, you will
see people with very differing opinions
drop their "simple" conflicts and work
together.
But does it scale to tricky, nuanced, thorny questions?
A natural disaster is an entirely unambiguous event. We all think, "Earthquake bad. People trapped under rubble bad." and want to help them directly or indirectly. Some of us help more vigorously than others and some do nothing, but we all agree that the earthquake is bad and we would like the poor victims to suffer less.
It's harder to scale this cohesion up to tackle issues that are actually thorny and nuanced. Look at how fractured many countries were regarding COVID-19 and the vaccines, for example. Or the eternal Israel/Palestine conflict. Or whatever.
You see this in business, where companies climb to the top through aggression and innovation, but then become laggards and protectionists (and ultimately fall away). You see it in countries. You see it in technologies. Heck, you see it in biological systems.
Perhaps that's just a normal part of the greater process, these cycles of growth, innovation, collaboration, etc., followed by stagnation and decay (and then death, or near-death, whereby the system returns to the growth effort).
The nice thing about being human is that we theoretically have the capacity to choose what our goals are (assuming our basic needs are currently met). As such, we could be choosing to work on goals such as "everyone always has food, shelter, and physical safety". This surely must be achievable, but maybe it would take virtually everyone working toward this goal. It's not really a sexy way to spend your time if you are already fortunate enough to have those things... such as if you live in a place rich in resources and with relatively few people. You would not be particularly compelled to contribute to the wellbeing of others, especially if you could not see them. But we have the privilege of awareness and knowledge, so we can see that there are still many people without even food or water. We could do something about this if we made it our focus.
And it might just turn out that having this collective focus would save our collective lives later. There's a reasonable chance that humanity will face a food crisis due to climate change and population growth. Practicing now at learning how to solve these problems might mean the difference between humans existing into 2100 or not.
As the great Gil Scott-Heron once said: "A rat done bit my sister, Nell with whitey on the moon."
I didn't know the reference, but I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nzoPopQ7V0 (2 min)
It's an illogical phrase to be sure.
"2 times (but instead of mutiplying do the oposite thing that makes it smaller)"
Is where the "logic" comes from.
Hm, I bet this parses as well:
"An hour is .5 times more then a half hour."
Although not quite as well.
that said, when I read it I did not notice. my brain automagically converted the phrase to half. the context was not lost but it is murky territory
Russia has been an excellent motivator for our allies to get serious on defense spending.
Our absurdly oversized military has prevented a lot of serious wars.
Obama also pushed for more spending in NATO - and got commitments to do so as % of GDP. Growth was generally higher but spending was moving towards the % committed to.
What the last guy did was tried to piss out allies off and destroy NATO. Even then most in the US generally agreed w.r.t defense spending, just thought he was going about getting our allies to do it counter productively and not recognizing the fact that they were spending more (mostly from commitments made during Obama's 2 terms).
Folks who worked with trump claim he was planning on pulling the US out of NATO in his second term:
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-nato-pay-fair-s... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/obama-warns...
https://www.businessinsider.com/bolton-putin-waiting-for-tru... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
The guys like him and Putin are ignorant little boys who will thankfully die off soon. We must try to find a different path.
I don't think it's that simple: stuff costs more in the US vs other big military spenders, large != effective, etc. If the US cut its military budget, it would have to give up capabilities, and that will have bitter consequences (e.g. the liberal order will shrink even further (e.g. goodbye Ukraine, Taiwan, Baltics), China owns the seas, etc.).
The theory is new to me, so I don't know enough about it to know how much I buy into it, but it's an interesting one.
While they continue to have more money allocated to them, operational mishaps occur more often, and navies look increasingly vulnerable in a real fight (see for instance the Moskva). Clearly "at least some of that military spending in the past was extremely effective and useful" isn't sufficient guidance on how to continue spending money.
I don't know how that calculus changes in the context of modern superpowers or China's ambitions for Taiwan but that's the reasoning historically.
A perfect reason a country may understate their military spending is to hide their capabilities. For that matter, they may overstate their spending as well.
Overstating their capabilities is perfectly understandable.
We are unlikely to ever fight a meaningful war with either Canada or Mexico, at least there are no signs of that ever being a possibility in my lifetime. Our adversaries are pretty much all overseas, and I’m pretty sure the Coast Guard could single-handedly defend against the threat posed by a possible Cuban invasion.
So we have to spend on logistics and overseas bases and support infrastructure for those bases, in addition to our nuclear arsenal, satellites, the War against rust, communications technology, aircraft carriers, aircraft, submarines and artillery and all manner of other things which are intended to keep us in the lead in terms of capabilities, effectiveness and deadliness.
As for freedom of navigation, China is also in favor of that. It's their lifeblood.
Sorta-kinda. It’s complicated.
Vietnam, the US, the Philippines and others have clashed with China over the “Nine Dash Line.” China— and Taiwan, oddly enough— refuses to respect the ruling of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Tribunal on this matter. They’ve harassed other countries’ fishing vessels and maritime police in the region, sinking at least one. There are ongoing tensions in the area between China and other countries’ navies. China asserts sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, while other countries and the UNCLOS disagree and assert their right to freedom of navigation for military vessels. This has implications for customs and maritime law enforcement.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/07/chinese-vietna...
Some people in Taiwan might be willing to give that up in exchange for a guarantee of independence but as far as I know this is not at all a settled matter for them. It’s very much like North Korea/South Korea.
China does not object to transit through the South China Sea. China objects to foreign military vessels entering into the territorial waters within 12 miles of what it considers its own islands. The US and its allies conduct these "freedom of navigation" operations explicitly in order to challenge Chinese sovereignty over said islands and reefs.
But what you're discussing here is sovereignty over a certain set of islands and reefs that China (and several other countries) claims, not freedom of navigation through international waters.
China's aim is, quite clearly, to prevent the US Navy from operating in the South China Sea in the case of a war. That's not a question of freedom of navigation, and the US "freedom of navigation" operations have to go out of their way to go near the islands China claims.
China is additionally interested in the resources under the South China Sea, just as all the other countries that occupy various islands and reefs are. This, again, is not an issue of freedom of navigation.
China isn't about to block shipping through the South China Sea.
But yeah, there are many things we could better be spending the defence budget on than galaxy formation research.
Trump stupidly described other NATO members as "owing" the US. Not only had several countries met their spending goals by the end of the Obama admin most of the alliance was on track with increased spending including targeted equipment upgrade spending. Trump's complaints were that other NATO members hadn't met their goals ahead of the agreed upon schedule. This was going to be used for a pretext for withdrawing the US from NATO.
NATO funding is not a simple issue. There's direct and indirect expenditures that "fund" NATO. It's not some protection racket. Funding can be direct funding I.e. military units/equipment maintained as a rapid response force or indirect funding I.e. spending to upgrade or buy equipment to keep up with the overall norms of the alliance.
I really don't see how our imagination has shrunk so far that we all participant and perpetuate this fantasy that a world full of violence, much of which is created by the US, is the world we must continue to live in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_the_Roman_army
The military was the “the largest item of state expenditure” during much of China’s Tang Dynasty.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-chinese-h...
Compared to this, 4% of the US GDP or 12% of annual US federal spending seems like a bargain, especially if you’re Germany.
I think this stop being true in 1945.
Huh? Russia (nee the Soviet Union) and the US are neighbors, if you've forgotten. They had a big ideological rivalry that started to get intense around that time.
The world changed.... You dont need an 800bn standing army any more.
There is no proof of that, not historic or otherwise. In fact there is evidence to the contrary, as previous times of less military spending seem to correlate with more peaceful times. Your claim on who lives in a fantasy world is entirely unfounded, and one can just as easily state that your description is the fantacy one.
What is the evidence? My impression has been militarily weak countries got invaded by stronger ones. Smaller countries were snapped up by bigger ones. I’m curious to see the evidence to the contrary.
Pre-industrialization, governments used to spend upwards to 90% GDP on their military, and tiny countries existed back then as they do today. Today there are quite a few smaller countries (and a handful of medium sized ones) that don’t even have military at all. I think your narrative of smaller countries being snapped up by bigger ones is not a historic pattern at all.
You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more money to spend on their military?
And even if you did manage to zero out the military budget without getting conquered, it's completely unreasonable to think that money would be reallocated to "research and science" in a democratic society. Almost all of it would go into stuff like basic infrastructure, social programs, and maybe culture war stuff. While comfortably employed geeks may sit in awe of the pretty space pictures, most people have more quotidian concerns they care far more about.
So the fantasy is really one about a science-enthusiast world-dictator securely protected by his secret police.