Can we avoid the “inevitable” clash of nations?
As Kevin Rudd explains there are many paths besides confrontation and many factors involved. Is world conflict inevitable whether US vs.China, or Russia or whatever combination of countries and alliances might develop?
From my perspective, I’m optimistic for a number of reasons:
If all of us do business with each other, it is harder to go to war. I know Rudd mentions one study looking at the early 20th century saying that it wasn’t always a deciding factor to stop war, at least in WWI and WWII. However, there were less democracies in WWI and WWII times and more dictators and empires, stirring up national fervor. Ideologies, both religious and political which were huge factors in the instigation of war…think Ottoman, German, Austria-Hungary and Russian empires in WWI, think Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese empire in WWII. It is a much different world today. Nothing like those guys around, no empires, no Fascists, and nothing like the scale of Stalinist or Maoist Communism is left. Soviet Communism is gone and Chinese Communism is quite tempered and rather capitalistic, despite as iron-handed as it yet is. The Chinese now, since Nixon dared to initiate normalized relations with China way back in 1972, have huge investments in the US, students all over US campuses and a population of nearly 3 million Chinese American US citizens. Why should we hate and wish to fight the Chinese and vice versa?

Another factor is that not just the elite travel around the world, but huge numbers of middle class even lower income folks travel, and all over the world. We are much more a global culture than anytime in history.
AND
The Internet is a huge and very new factor operating as well to connect us all.

Also the very recent attack on religion and all over blown ideologies that once dominated our daily lives is SO new. The religions do not have the sway they once used to. People who yet identify with one religion or another are not near as religious as their parents or grandparents. Religious leaders are not as influential as they once were as well. Who would bother making a deal with the Vatican as prelude to taking power and building a war machine as Hitler felt was necessary in 1930’s Germany? Who identifies with any ideology, either religious or political to anything like the extent we used to: think Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Fascism. Who would “die for the glory of the empire”? There are none left.

All of these changes: reduction of the grip of ideologies and the swing to recognizing individual freedoms…all over the world really tempers things, I believe.
Most of Communism is gone, at least in Europe, replaced by democracies, and most dictators are gone, North Korea is an exception. Even Communist China is not the ideological bastion of insanity it was during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, it is very capitalistic, very individualistic, Rudd’s trade figures and anecdotes attest to that.

AND women I think, both in political power and in the economy along with the Internet are a huge new factor in the relations of countries going forward. I hope we get a woman president, just to get rid of more good old boyz running the show. It is time, especially in the US. Our political gridlock is mostly male posturing. They are fucking idiots. More women involved in political and economic decision making may produce more compromise and less posturing and confrontation.
This isn’t 1914, 1939 or even 1950 and the superpowers may not be in an inevitable dance, a power clash of past proportions. Putin flexes like a snotty little dictator, but even he is greatly restrained compared to times past as far as what he can do. He is not the emperor, not a Stalin nor a Hitler in fanatical ideology nor power.

I hope Rudd is right and there is a lot of room for interaction that will not repeat history.

When we were kids in the 60’s we were waiting any day for the bomb to drop, and WWIII to start. History repeating itself was the daily expectation. It never happened. 60 years hence it still hasn’t. The Cold War ended. Nuclear proliferation and MAD, (Mutual Assured Destruction) are a large deterrent to international conflict as well. The scale of world skirmishes and genocides tho still ugly has diminished tremendously…I’ll take Boko Haram and ISIS over Hitler, Stalin or Mao anyday.
They each killed in the 10’s of millions…Muslim terrorism as horrendous as it is, accounts for 15-20,000 deaths per year and is confined to mostly other Muslims.
AND the world is getting real tired of Islamic bad behavior that accomplishes absolutely nothing but mayhem. It is getting harder and harder for Muslim apologists like Resa Azlan and Karen Armstrong or Ben Affleck to deny “it is the religion, stupid.”
I’m hoping after a few more attacks like the one in Kenya this week, that the world effort grows MUCH bigger to eliminate these groups wherever they pop up. Might be something to bring the world together… to fight religious fanaticism.

So I thought Rudd was on point, so to speak. It was amazing to hear an educated, enlightened politician…we don’t have many of those, just our current US President.
That’s one reason why he is hated, the other is he is black. As ugly as that attitude is, the level of racism has diminished incomparably since the 60’s. No way would anyone imagine a black president within 40 years back in 1968. No fucking way.

So much of what I listed here was unprecedented change, and utterly unpredicted.
No-one predicted the end of the Cold War and 60 years without a WWIII. No-one guessed we would have black President. No-one predicted cheep world travel, and everyone missed the Internet and smartphones. No one expected the rise of democracy and the dismantling of ideological power, nor the current relaxation of criticizing and leaving religion and the worldwide appreciation of individual rights and freedom. Freedom to be educated and live a good, violence free, individually free life.
Studying history so as not to repeat it’s horrors and mistakes is all good. But it seems the huge world changes, now even more rapid in this Global Information Age, that occur without precedent, wholly unpredicted have been and may be the deciding factors in how the world progresses from here.
I’m optimistic that the trend of international connectedness allowed by the continued if not accelerating demise of divisive political, religious, racist, and national ideologies mediated by world travel and the Net in the palm of most of the world people’s hands may influence our ability to forestall national violence in ways never seen before.

We are one species, we could be one tribe.

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