Bi-Weekly Discussion - Are We Headed For World War 3?

This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry — it's easy to use and free to join.

Here's the link to the event: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85267793484?pwd=MERjSUQ2b2hYVVZpQnlvcFdCQm4xQT09

Meeting ID: 852 6779 3484
Passcode: 209208

ARE WE HEADED TOWARDS WORLD WAR 3?

HOW WILL STEVEN PINKER'S "BETTER ANGELS" CONTEND WITH CLIMATE CHANGE, THE RISE OF CHINA, WMD PROLIFERATION, AND CYBERWARFARE?

INTRODUCTION:

Following up on our last meetup where we looked at how the "liberal international order" attempts to maintain a balance of power and avert major wars, this time we'll look at current trends that could influence the chances for international conflict in the near future.

Let's start with the good news... As some of you may be aware, several scholars have tried to push back on the widespread doomsaying in the popular media and point out that, in the long term, the levels of violence within societies (measured in homicides per capita) and between societies (measured in war deaths per capita) have decreased over time. The best known case for the "decline of violence thesis" was made by Steven Pinker in his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature". Pinker identified 5 historical forces that have favored humanity's peaceable motives and have driven multiple declines in violence, especially since the Enlightenment of the late 18th century:
(1) The Leviathan – the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary "with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force," which "can defuse the [individual] temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent... self-serving biases."
(2) Commerce – the rise of "technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners," so that "other people become more valuable alive than dead" and "are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization."
(3) Feminization – increasing respect for the "interests and values of women," but also a gradual shifting of male gender roles away from violence.
(4) Cosmopolitanism – the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media, which "can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them."
(5) The Escalator of Reason – an "intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs," which "can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

Now for the bad news... There's several new countervailing forces that many international relations scholars think could counter the positive effects of Steven Pinker's "better angels", and in this discussion we'll review 4 of them:
(1) "Malthusian Conflict" brought on by population growth, climate change & dwindling resources (especially fresh water & food);
(2) The so-called "Thucydides Trap" that leads to conflict between an established world power and a rising power - in this case, China as a potential challenger to the United States' status as the global superpower;
(3) Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), in particular the spread of nuclear weapon technology (we'll save biowarfare technology for a future meetup);
(4) The Rise of Cyberwarfare which could potentially allow minor powers or terrorists to wield power comparable to WMDs if they can collapse a country's electrical grid.

How can we get a sense of what the foreign policy experts think about these risks? Well, we'll delve into this in greater depth below under each subtopic, but briefly there's 3 good sources we can look at - the first deals exclusively with international conflict, while the latter 2 also look at the risk of major accidents & natural disasters as well:

1. The Council on Foreign Relations annual "Preventative Priorities Survey" - https://www.cfr.org/report/conflicts-watch-2021
2. The World Economic Forum's annual Global Risks Report - https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021
3. The Global Challenges Foundation's annual Global Catastrophic Risks report - https://globalchallenges.org/new-release-global-catastrophic-risks-2020/

RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:

Back in Nov. 2019, we had a meetup entitled "What Causes War?", which looked at realist theories about war like the "bargaining model" and "deterrence theory", as well as constructivist theories about the psychological & cultural causes of war like cognitive biases, media hype, militaristic honor culture, and/or ethnic & religious tensions: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/txqhxqyzpbfb/

In September of 2018, we had a meetup entitled "Can We Predict Geopolitical Conflict?" which is also worth checking out. We talked about Philip Tetlock's book "Expert Political Judgement" which cast doubt on the predictive powers of experts, but we also discussed Tetlock's "Good Judgement Project", a geopolitical forecasting project that has shown that even amateurs can make relatively accurate geopolitical forecasts if they master a specific skillset:
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/254920242/

Thirdly, the Skeptics in the Pub meetup had a discussion in May of 2017 on "The Historical Study of Violence" that's relevant to this discussion. Here's a link to that outline:
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/239822337/

In the outline for the Skeptic discussion, look at the 1st section that addressed Steven Pinker's "decline of violence" thesis and Nicholas Nassim Taleb's objections that the so-called "Long Peace" since WWII could just be a statistical illusion. Taleb, writing with a mathematician, Pasquale Cirillo, released a paper in 2015 with a detailed analysis of the statistics of violent warfare going back some 2000 years. The paper emphasized the properties of the tails of the distribution of warfare —i.e.  the likelihood of extreme events— and it strongly suggested that hopes of a future with significantly less war are NOT supported by anything in the recent trend towards relative peace.

Also, article #10 listed in the outline's 3rd section is also relevant to the 1st section of this outline that deals with the possibility of a Malthusian catastrophe. In the Skeptic discussion, we looked at a paper by Safa Motesharrei that used a model that predicted a near-term "civilizational collapse" due to a combination of resource depletion & income inequality. The paper cited the historian Joseph Tainter, but when he was reached for comment Tainter said the study was "deeply flawed" because "there is no evidence that elite consumption caused ancient societies to collapse".

Note that in the 4th section of today's discussion we'll be talking about the rise of "cyberwarfare" - that can mean several things involving computers networks: espionage, sabotage, and/or information warfare with propaganda. We'll mostly focus on sabotage today, but we discussed the rise of information warfare in the 5th section of a meetup in the spring of 2017 on "Foreign Influence":
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/xvbrznyxfbxb/