We don't know much of it anymore with the decline of Europe, but for several centuries the dominant geopolitical goal of most countries on Earth was to defend themselves from European invasion. Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
> Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?
Cause they started two world wars previously. The second one coupled with genocide, actually multiple separate genocides going on at the same time.
They started the first one too. They just did. Their politics was split roughly into two camps - war hawks wanting to start the war now and moderates wanting to wait for a year and then start a war.
It is not that other countries were full of saints ... but Germany did started both those wars.
You can say this but the people who need to hear it won’t listen. They lack the perspective of actually reading history to understand the scale at which people were killed before the world police era.
But even reading history isn’t enough. I think we’re fundamentally not equipped to understand what a large number of deaths actually looks and feels like. 10 deaths happening in our vicinity is an unbearable tragedy. 1 million deaths is just a number. So folks are struck by a nostalgia for a time when humans killed each other by the millions.
In some ways they remind me of the people who long for the days before vaccines eliminated a bunch of diseases.
Allow? It just happens, and when you're the weaker part in the equation, there's not much you can do against it. Where Russia and the USA give up power, China will grab it.
The EU is just about building up to the task of proper self-defence against Russia, and China is not at all interested in a world order except as it feels necessary to protect domestic order. So they do things like border-pushing against India, the nine-island line, wars of words with Japan, and surveillance of overseas Chinese nationals, but other than that they are a long way from anything like the European colonial or world war era.
A "world police" are useful to almost everyone (nations involved in international trade) for situations such as piracy or border enforcement on the high seas. OTOH being such police is a costly endeavor so most nations will do their best to avoid investment and get a free ride.
It sort of happens because in the absence of a proper world police, when one county tries to steal another countries stuff/land it falls to the most powerful decent country available to stop it. See Hitler sending tanks into Ukraine and Putin sending tanks into Ukraine.
100%. They should just step aside and let all those theocratic shit holes arm them selves with more nuclear weapons and wipe each other out. Problem sorted.
Of course you might get a bit of radioactive dust blow over the sea for a few hundred years but totally worth it.
