horse of george

"... the largest economy in the world is [was?] the EU's - yet this rise to supreme power was not accompanied by a military buildup - in fact in many ways the exact opposite. Why? Because they're protected by America and as like nations with ideological, social and cultural affinities with America they have no reason to fear it. Ask yourself a question: If China was a democracy, an open society with a fully free press and people etc etc, would they be building up their military to the degree they are now? Would they be threatening war over Taiwan? Would they be actively enabling the nuclear insanities of N Korea and Iran? It's the differences that matter - not the thousand things we can point to that seem innocuous - it's the differences. There are always very good reasons why countries shouldn't go to war - but they do anyway. The Second World War shouldn't have happened - but it did anyway. Now, I'm not gonna compare China to Nazi Germany [although there are correspondences: a wounded sense of national pride, the gnawing impatience of a feeling of fettered cultural/historical superiority, a socialist ethos resting upon a state driven capitalism] but the 30s were full of ostensibly intelligent people who praised to heaven Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia and imagined the barbarism of The Great War a thing of the past and counselled America to learn the lessons the upstart nations had to teach and accordingly adapt and acquiesce to the 'new' order. Didn't quite work out that way. Predictions of peace always fall short for the very simple reason that they are predicated on a view of the species governed by wishes and not facts. Anyone who believes conflict between America and China is not inevitable needs to go back and read their Hobbes, their Machiavelli - their Thucydides..."