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Originally Posted by DicheBach
Yup! You nailed it.
Course it isn't a strictly modern problem. The French suffered similar issues as a result of the guerrilla war in occupied Spain, and even Alexander's armies were bothered by it in India and Afghanistan of all places.
We "Westerners," particularly those of us of a "secular humanist rationalist" bent find ourselves in a real philosophical pickle. A true Catch-22.
Most likely it is a problem that the kids being born right now will still be dealing with and quite possible for generations after that too.
Honestly I'm not that worred about either Vlad or Trumpolini. Trump talks too much, but he doesn't want war. Vlad has about as much as he can handle with his forces in Ukraine having been ground to a halt and the various occupied territories in his toy box always posing some risk.
China is in my opinion a powder keg--has been for decades, but with recent financial events, even more so. The regime there has to walk a delicate line between maintaining control and allowing enough civil liberties that they avert coups and civil wars.
As long as one is okay with periodic spree killers shouting Allahu Snackbar every now and again (along with the interminable drug cartel war in Mexico and the civil war in Syria) as well as the inevitable continued violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. I'd say we're looking at another 8 years of "peace."
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Fully agree, the PRC is a definite concern, especially with 'Trumpolini's (I wonder if he'll get American trains to run on time?
) economic policies looking to hurt China where it counts for the most at the moment and that's their wallet. The growth rate got revised down from 7 to 6.5% the other day, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it go down further within the next five years, and that's big trouble for Beijing. If things really go south I couldn't rule out some kind of Maoist uprising from the interior and that would be some real bad news for the west if the Maoist hawks take over.
Ultimately it's hard to say which is the biggest threat for us, or if, indeed, we are our own biggest threat, which is a bit existential but like you say it's a philosophical dilemma, which admittedly we are fortunate enough to be in the position of being able to have, unlike those caught in the middle of the mess in the Middle East.
As for the snackbar campaign, I think it's unfortunately something that you can't really defend against without radically altering what it is to be a western nation. So, you have to factor in some kind of losses in the 'war on terror' because it's inevitable that some will get through and will get far enough to be able to carry out an attack. It is the cost of war, and when you figure in the death tolls on both sides, civilians included since 2001, even with 9/11 thrown into the mix we are still far far less bloodied than those we have engaged in warfare with, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and so many other places that I can't really think of them off the top of my head. I think the ratio, for America at least, is about 100 to 1, and that's military and civilian fatalities, and that's a conservative low estimate because we'll probably never know the true number of fatalities amongst civilians of these countries.