Подходящий год для войны?

Аналитический портал National Interest, посвященный международный политике, опубликовал сегодня интересный разбор международной ситуации с целью ответить на простой вопрос — возможна ли очередная мировая война в наступившем году?

Events in the year that had just ended convinced Carnegie that 1914 would be the decisive turning point towards peace. Just six months earlier, his decade-long campaign culminated in the inauguration of the Peace Palace at the Hague, which he believed would become the Supreme Court of nations. The Palace was built to house the new International Court of Arbitration that would now arbitrate disputes among nations that had historically been settled by war. As the Economist noted, “the Palace of Peace embodies the great idea that gradually law will take the place of war.»

Carnegie’s Peace Palace captured the zeitgeist of the era. The most celebrated book of the decade, The Great Illusion, published in 1910, sold over two million copies. In it, Norman Angell exposed the long-held belief that nations could advance their interests by war as an «illusion.» His analysis showed that conquest was «futile» because «the war-like do not inherit the earth.»

However inspiring his hopes, Carnegie’s vision proved the illusion. Six months after his New Year’s greeting, a Serbian terrorist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke. Nine months on, the guns of August began a slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: «World War.” By 1918, Europe lay devastated, and a millennium in which it had been the creative center of the world was over.

As we enter 2014, war between great powers seems almost inconceivable. But if we start at the other end of the telescope by imagining that a Great War with some similarities to World War I actually happened, what could future historians find in current conditions that permitted events to ride mankind to another catastrophe?The National Interest

Анализ написан довольно понятным языком, хоть и отсылает периодически к древним грекам и событиям столетней давности. На мой взгляд, полезное чтение, в том числе и для понимания, почему весь мир не крутится вокруг Майдана.