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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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It's fascinating to me how thoroughly we've moved from a world of declarations of war being a core concept of international law, to existing in a permanent state of war across huge portions of the globe.

Famously Congress has never declared war since WW2.

What I've heard, and I'm not really competent to explain, is that it has to do with the UN and changes to international law post WW2.

There were a bunch of attempts to use rules to make war without the security council's approval illegal. Also major leaders were unhappy with countries who tried to stay neutral during WW2, so there are a bunch of rules that make staying neutral difficult. I don't remember the specifics, but it's something like letting one side's ships use your ports or pass through your waters makes you a co-belligerent. There are also some rules about trade.

So actually declaring war makes things extremely awkward for your friends and allies.

Perhaps it’s a technology thing. Declarations of war made more sense when war involved marching 250k men armies in fields or packing 5M men in trains towards the enemy. It’s really not clear when a “war” starts when you can chuck hypersonic missiles at some select targets once in a while

I don't think it's about technology. Even Putin called his Ukraine war a “special military operation” and it was pretty much a classical war involving large numbers of boots on the ground invading enemy territory.

Perhaps it’s a technology thing

It's probably also an accountability thing. For democracies like America it can be very damaging to have your name on a political boondoggle like a war. Arguably, voting for the Iraq War is what cost Hillary the Presidency. So it's easier to just let the President stretch his powers to wage what are effectively wars.

For other states a declaration of war would have to be withdrawn in a negotiated or imposed peace which may cause the regime to incur political costs it just doesn't want to deal with.

Arguably, voting for the Iraq War is what cost Hillary the Presidency.

please elaborate

Did she press Congress to declare war in old pre-UN style?

She was a senator, and Bush asked Congress for authorization (which totes wasn't a declaration of war, though) to invade Iraq. She voted in favor.

Declaring wars is for peer nations.

By contrast, empires ‘conduct police action’, as they claim the entire world as their own sovereign territory (aspirationally or otherwise).

I think you're right about the technology aspect, but I sometimes worry that we've normalized lethal force (literal in-flight ballistic missiles) as sub-casus belli because the (expensive!) technology exists to block those attacks, and that Peace In Our Timeniks believe that actually hitting back in these sorts of cases is the dreaded "escalation", rather than inaction normalizing escalating attacks everywhere.

There's an effortpost to be made on how the Iron Dome is, from a geopolitical standpoint, the most counterproductive technology of the past few decades.

I’d be interested, too. Judging by this graph there was no shortage of rocket attacks before the Dome went up. There are surges in later years, but how do we know they aren’t more about availability?

There's an effortpost to be made on how the Iron Dome is, from a geopolitical standpoint, the most counterproductive technology of the past few decades.

I would be interested to see that. My read is that (at least from a US or NATO perspective) the Iron Dome is hugely effective in preventing an accidental hot war between Israel and Iran.

Turns out stacking DEF and taking feats in riposte has no value if you can't prove you were attacked in the first place. All you get is a bloody sword, pristine armor and a dying lvl 1 goblin claiming it was just walking by.

The theories of a spectrum of state of conflict rather than binaries goes back a long time, arguably centuries, and has only gotten more polished and refined since. Before today was the countless insurgencies of the cold war, before the cold war was the great game between empires, before the empires were the contests of feudalism, and before feudalism there were constant migratory wars and civilizational collapses.

Non-formal war is practically a constant. What's new is that you can do it with rockets across other countries, not the principles behind it.

The vast majority of the world is not experiencing interstate conflict, you're just hearing about the bits that are because it creates explosive headlines (heh). Then your brain is automatically the availability heuristic (incorrectly). Simple as.

https://ourworldindata.org/conflict-measures-how-do-researchers-measure-how-common-and-deadly-armed-conflicts-are

This largely proves my point.

Looks like that backs up Ben’s description, no?

Most of the conflict is intrastate or non-state. Death rates are up from 2010 but down from basically every year before 1988.

Ya, I'm not disagreeing, just adding data to the discussion

It seems like part of a broader trend where Europe from like 1700–1945 was just a giant outlier and now we're returning to baseline.

Humans have almost always been in state of permanent undeclared war with their neighbors.

Declarations of war were simply a brief European affectation.

Were they?

Most of the classical world held the declaration of war sacred. I'm less familiar with Islamic or Chinese law on the matter.

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