Are World Wars Predictable ???

Books about how World War I started, and to a lesser degree how World War II started, have tended in recent years to explain that these wars didn’t actually come as a surprise, because top government officials saw them coming for years. But these revised histories admit that the general public was pretty much clueless and shocked.

The fact is that anyone in the know or diligently seeking out the facts could see, in rough outline, the danger of World War I or World War II coming years ahead, just as one can see the threats of environmental collapse and World War III approaching now. But the general public lacked a decent understanding prior to the first two world wars and lacks it now on the looming dangers created by environmental destruction and aggressive flirtation with World War III.

What led to the first two world wars and allowed numerous wise observers to warn of them years ahead, even to warn of World War II immediately upon completion of the treaty that ended World War I? A number of factors ought to be obvious but are generally overlooked:

• Acceptance of war, leading to steady preparation for it.
• A major arms race, making instruments of death in fact our leading industry, with hope placed in a balance or domination of powers of war, rather than an overcoming of war.
• The momentum created for war by massive investment in highly profitable (and status and career advancing) weaponry and other military expenditures.
• Fear in each nation of the war intentions of the others, driven by propaganda that encourages fear and discourages understanding of the other sides.
• The belief produced by the above factors that war, unlike the tango, only takes one. On the basis of that belief, each side must prepare for war as self-protection from another war-maker, but doing so is not believed to be a choice or an action of any kind; rather, it is a law of physics, an inevitable occurrence, something to be observed and chattered about like the weather.
• The consequent, though seemingly mad, willingness by those in power to risk potentially apocalyptic war rather than to pursue survival without war.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/public-didnt-see-last-two-world-wars-coming-either.html

All these factors are in play today, perhaps even more so than in previous times. And note well that it is NOT Russia or China driving the world towards war ... once again it is the United States which is in that role and which refuses to do anything even remotely similar to diplomacy.