Image by Valeriia Miller.

Reading all the news in my temporary flat at Cambridtge University, where my wife is on a year’s sabbatical leave, I’m able to view all the slaughter in the world and the chaos, increasingly blatant presidential power-grabbing and corporate influence in the US with a certain degree of detachment. That has made me think that it is time for a reassessment of the whole international political situation we’ve been mired in since the end of World War II.

These days seem so reminiscent of 1938, or even 1913, those years leading up to the two World Wars, when there was a grim, seemingly inevitable slog towards war in Europe and, in the case of WWII, also in the western Pacific. During both those antebellum times there were interlocking webs of mutual assistance treaties that had been created as bulwarks against a war, premised on the notion that if attacking a weak country would mean going to war against a number of countries bound by treaty to come to that country’s assistance, such an initial attack would not happen.

In the end, that idea failed catastrophically and in fairly short succession. Instead of preventing war, such treaties instead assured that any first attack would spread like the spark of a prairie fire that under dry climate conditions, or, in a political context, an environment of mutual distrust and paranoia, spreads out of control. In a span of just 31 years during the first half of the 20th Century, that resulted in a total of 85-107 million civilian and military deaths — 70-85 million of these occurring in WWII, and 15-22 million in WWi.

With the benefit of hindsight, I have to say it looks like the tired trope that WWII happened because British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased Adolf Hitler, has it wrong. Chamberlain was mindful of the incredible destructive power of the modern military war machines of the major powers in the late ‘30s and was trying to prevent a war from happening. He failed not because he was naive but because the network of treaties obliged Britain and France to go to war against Germany once Hitler and Stalin attacked Poland which then meant a war across virtually all of Europe and in its colonial possessions. Similarly, in 1914, a massive war was assured by the interlocking mutual assistance treaties among the European powers, who ended up having to go to war over a single anarchist’s assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne since not responding would have besmirched the honor of those bound by the treaties.

But surely both those wars could have been avoided and over 100 million lives saved — 100 million men, women and children!. As war clouds began to loom on the horizon both times, the governments of the various potential combatants should have held a grand meeting and worked out a rational solution to their disagreements, grievances, fears and perceived threats. Doing so would not have been seen by the populations of the nations as appeasement but as cause for relief.

In today’s world, where we have incomparably more destructive weapons that would make a global conflict vastly more lethal, with death tolls numbered in the billions, not millions, and could potentially wipe out what passes for “civilization,” quite possibly humanity, and even potentially life on Earth. (The........

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