"Morning Briefing": The war, a miscalculation

Updated on 2/14/2022 at 9:01 am

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Gabor Steingart’s morning briefing – controversial, critical and humorous. Knowing what is being discussed politically.

Good morning, dear readers,

is the favorite instrument of these days the war drum. Politicians, the military and the media hit outright lustful alert. For days, the American military have been launching the rumor that on Wednesday the Invasion of the Russian soldiers imminent in Ukraine. Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier set one yesterday – on the occasion of his term extension dramatic appeal away:

“Mr. Putin, untie the noose around Ukraine’s neck.”

In many media are already analogies to the situation drawn before the First World War. That should sound instructive and meaningful. Only: With the political, military and economic reality in the 21st century and these analyzes do not have much in common with objective Russian interests.

It is the Israeli historian and best-selling author Yuval Noah Harariwho recalled in the current “Economist” that the classic War its function, the expansion of power and wealth, has largely declined in modernity. Therefore be him war between the great powers too de facto extinct:

“The new peace is not a statistical stroke of luck, nor does it spring from a hippie fantasy.”

They are as follows five reasonswhich took the war from the historical norm of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries to the Exceptional phenomenon of the 21st century promoted:

1. Wars are always the expression of technological possibilities and the economic one cost-benefit considerations the ruler. Harari says:

“Unlike gravity, war is not a law of nature.”

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That means: the technological and the economic changes requirementsso will the Character and frequency of war.

2. The ability of nuclear powersto destroy each other has robbed war of its rationality and turned it into one act of collective suicide transformed. That’s why the major powers China, Russia and America still fear him nuclear war, but they do not prepare him. War has its own for them controllability lost.

© Media Pioneer Publishing AG / Gabor Steingart

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3. The most important sources of wealth used to be raw materials and food, i.e. gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. the most important source for prosperity in today’s world knowledge. But knowledge cannot be conquered with a tank, nor can it be exploited with a torturer. Harari sagt:

“As a result of this development, the profitability of a military conquest has dropped significantly.”

4. As Reflex on these economic and technological changes the voters of the nation states no longer prefer the type of military conqueror. Even George W. Bush and Donald Trumpnot to mention Merkel and Co, says Harari, are therefore different types of politicians than Attila the Hun king. The normal politician owes his rise not to the war, but to one Promises of internal reform.

5. On top of that the Arms of the past decades regularly ended in disaster for the attacker. Russians and Americans had to ruefully leave Afghanistan. Also the wars in Vietnam and Iraq did not bring the warlords the desired results. Since 1945, says the historian, international borders have rarely been redrawn. Not a single state disappeared since then by war from the map:

“The descent of war can be summed up in numbers.”

However: one mental loophole the historian still allows for his argumentation: As little as they existence of classical war was a law of nature, be that too disappearance of war in modernity no law of nature:

“A single wrong decision by an irrationally acting person can lead to war even today.”

Or in other words: We are in the case of Russian-Western threats of competition the contemporary witnesses of an intelligence test carried out in front of a large audience.

I wish you a confident start into the new week. I greet you warmly,

Her

Gabor Steingart

“Steingart’s Morning Briefing” provides information about current world and economic events. The “Pre-Breakfast Medium” is a modern form of the miniature daily newspaper that publishes news, commentaries and graphics as well as exclusive interviews with opinion leaders from politics, business and culture. The podcast of the same name is Germany’s leading daily podcast for politics and business.

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