The last catastrophic war took place less than 90 years ago. In addition, the developed world has been "at peace" for only about 40 years (end of Cold War => MAD).
These are but rounding errors in the ~5000 year history of advanced civilization.
Looking though history major civilizations rarely fight their equals.
The world wars had a lot more to do with mechanized nations dominating their neighbors than you might think. Consider Japan crushed China and Germany crushed the majority of Europe. Those where not fights among equals.
Step back further and India and China both lost a fight with England. That's the kind of fighting that's appealing to first world nations, lot's of resources minimal effort.
I don't think Germany considered Russia even close to it's equal, and 1 vs 1 Russia without massive outside aid and unusual weather it would likely have folded quickly.
Japan attacking the US is a better argument, but the US was not exactly neutral either.
Anyway, I am not saying you're wrong, just that history is vastly more complex than just looking at the relative sizes of each nation on a map.
Even without US aid via Lend Lease, the only chance the Germans had against the USSR was if they had managed to capture Moscow and Stalingrad quickly. Once they failed to do so in the fall of '42, their fate was sealed. The Russian economy and population was too large and strong. The Germans were at the long end of a logistical tail, and weather in Russia (as Bonaparte found out as well) is a bitch.
The only thing that would have saved Germany was if Japan had fought the Russians in the Far East. But after the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol (1939) where the Soviets handily defeated the Japanese, this wasn't going to happen.
That's in context of a multi front war. In a 1 on 1 confrontation without vast foreign aid to the USSR it would have been at a massive disadvantage in 1941. Lend lease providing 30% of USSR's aircraft, 58% of their aviation fuel is no small thing. This was as far as I can tell a view shared by both sides with Stalin fearful of the German war machine.
So, I agree it was a strategic blunder, but perhaps a closer fight than many assume.
Lend Lease didn't begin to help the Soviets until middle of '42, though some British gear appears to have helped play a crucial role in the Battle of Moscow. If Germany hadn't achieved a knockout blow by Christmas, they were doomed by demographics and geography.
Lend Lease was critical before then. USSR lost ~20500 tanks late 41, that's the kind of production scale they needed to stay in the war.
It's true England provided a significant material directly at the end of 41, but IMO a larger role was covering critical shortages. The Soviet Union could cover gaps in their supply chain with foreign assistance vastly increasing the value of that aid independent from the total quantities of aid. A factory without a few critical pieces of equipment can be crippled.
On top of that, 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces at Moscow was from lend lease but that's not just useful there it also means they could spread forces around more of the front. Under a minimum number and tanks are far less useful and fairly easy to take out.
Longer term all those trucks and other equipment allowed the soviets to focus more production on the war effort. They had finite steel production for example and needed to make the best use of it possible.
So, assuming Germany a one front war where Germany would have advanced further and forced the USSR to deal with even more decimated supply chains. AKA, a pure 1v1 situation I suspect the USSR would have folded fairly quickly abet still inflicting heavy casualties.
Again though, this is an alternate history without a England or USA being involved so no resistance in Africa etc.
The war in Syria is mostly about bringing gas from the Persian Gulf to Europe. The civil war in Ukraine is mostly about bringing Russian gas to Europe, too. So the developed nations are already at war over resources, though not yet against each other.
That was the conventional wisdom before World War I... and World War II. But you may be right in that the war will actually be over something much stupider than dwindling resources.
The relevant time window here is the service life of the F-35, which is probably under 50 years and I'd say the relevant probability is still approaching zero on that timescale.
Only if you assume the concept of "nation" will outlast the concept of "war".
There are a number of reasons to believe that the future of warfare will look much more like Syria, i.e. states implode from within and then break apart into a number of warring factions, each fighting over territory & resources within the carcass of the state. Actually, most of the bloodiest 20th century conflicts were of this type (eg. Russian & Chinese civil wars, Rwandan genocide & Congo Wars, civil wars in Nigeria/Sudan/Ethiopia), and historically the highest death tolls have usually occurred in civil wars where an empire breaks up or in conquests when a much more developed power invades a less-developed power (eg. Mongol conquests or European conquest of America).
WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed nations. It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it led to the current international system of American hegemony and history tends to get written by the victors.
> WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed nations. It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it led to the current international system of American hegemony and history tends to get written by the victors.
Because major historical powers like Rome, China, Mayans, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Britain never fought any wars against other powers that were at their same level of development. Oh, wait, all of them did.
The anomaly is the past two centuries or so, which have been the most peaceful times on record, particularly between major powers. (Since the Napoleonic Wars, the sum total is Crimean War, Mexican-American War, Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, Spanish-American War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I, Russian Civil War, World War II [noting that there's a lot of related conflicts getting summed up here], Korean War, maybe War of the Pacific and the Russo-Turkish Wars). Compare that to the Early Modern, which is replete with constant conflict on Europe: 18th century alone has Great Northern War, War of Spanish Succession, War of Austrian Succession, Seven Years' War, American Revolution, and the French Revolutionary Wars, all of which were far nastier than the brief wars in the 19th century (save the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars).
Categorized into great power wars (between well-defined states of roughly equal power levels), civil wars (where a single state breaks up into multiple factions that then fight each other), rebellions (where a state breaks up, but into an asymmetric power balance between one province and the rest of the state), and conquests (where a much more developed power - at least in terms of military technology - invades and destroys a less-developed one) and ordered by death toll, you have:
WW2 (great power)
Mongol conquests (conquest)
Three Kingdoms war (civil)
Qing conquest of Ming (rebellion, against backdrop of civil)
Spanish conquest of Aztecs (conquest)
Taiping rebellion (rebellion)
Second Sino-Japanese war (great power, but against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War)
An-Lushan rebellion (rebellion)
Germanic wars vs. Rome (effectively a civil war in that Roman territory was breaking up and many of the adversaries were trained in the Roman army, but you can quibble about this)
WW1 (great power)
Conquests of Timur (?)
Dungan Revolt (rebellion)
Chinese Civil War (civil)
Spanish conquest of Incas (conquest)
Reconquista (great power?)
Russian Civil War (civil)
Thirty Years War (civil - breakup of Holy Roman Empire)
Ottoman Wars (great power)
Moorish Wars (great power)
Napoleonic Wars (great power)
Mughal-Maratha Wars (?)
Yellow-Turban Rebellion (rebellion)
Second Congo War (civil)
French Wars of Religion (civil)
Indian Rebellion of 1857 (rebellion)
Hundred Years War (great power)
Vietnam War (civil, but with great power involvement)
Crusades (great power)
Readers can draw the conclusion they like from that data, but to my eyes - if you exclude WW2, civil wars and conquests end up killing far more people and remaking the map more than great power conflicts.
There are several reasons that your data isn't correct, and I'm not going to sit down and poke at every one of them, but let me point out some major things.
You have a strong need to separate out civil wars from great power conflicts, but many of them, particularly the ones that lead to lots of deaths, have very strong international involvement, and the destruction is driven in large part by foreign involvement. The Congo Wars and the Russian Civil War are good examples of this. Beyond that, you basically jump at the opportunity to classify wars as civil wars: the Germanic incursions into the Roman Empire and the Thirty Years' War [1] are in no way civil wars.
Placing importance of wars on the raw numbers of people killed is a bad way to go about things. First off, we have trouble establishing these counts even in modern contexts where sophisticated bureaucracies exist to keep track of everything (these bureaucracies have a way of breaking down in war); historical counts involve a fair amount of guesswork, and especially in list mode, you're not seeing similar methodologies being applied to ensure that the estimates are comparable. Even keeping track of wars with similar methodologies is difficult: why do we roll up all of the 14th century Anglo-French conflicts into the Hundred Years' War, yet insist on keeping World War I, World War II, the Russian Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Spanish Civil War all separate instead of a Forty Years' War?
Most importantly, however, is that raw death totals don't reflect the impact of destruction. The deadliest war in US history is not the American Civil War, but King Philip's War, which killed 10% of the population. The Thirty Years' War was hardest in Northern Germany, where it killed about 50% of the people, while World War II only managed to kill 17% of the Poles (and most of that due to the Holocaust). Raw death counts inflate the relative importance of Chinese wars, since the Chinese river plains were historically able to support far larger population densities than in, say, Europe, so conflicts in China necessarily involve more people even at a comparable level of technological sophistication.
[1] For most of its existence, the Holy Roman Empire was not properly a country as we would understand it in our modern terminology. Admittedly, the Habsburgs were trying to reestablish it as a strong centralized state at the time, but the Thirty Years' War was effectively the point at which they gave up. It's more proper to think of the HRE at this point as closer to a 17th century organization akin to the current European Union than the modern United States.
Syria's "implosion" didn't just fall out of the sky, it was induced by the US and it's allies as a means to oust Assad. Nobody disputes that, the only thing in dispute is whether or not the ends justify the means, meaning is ousting Assad a desirable end that justifies the current proxy war or not.
> Syria's "implosion" didn't just fall out of the sky, it was induced by the US and it's allies as a means to oust Assad.
A bunch of Syrians (peacefully) protested Assad's power. He started killing people. The protests stayed peaceful for months, but eventually, the protesters got tired of getting killed, and the violence turned into a civil war. That wasn't "induced" by the US.
We already have that occurring right now in Syria, US and its allies are fighting a proxy war for Syria's resources. If the US wins then Israel will likely annex huge swathes of Syrian territory in some kind of "security zone" and begin pumping oil immediately.
If Russia wins, then Syria remains independent and Russia benefits somehow, perhaps with steep discount out for the next 50 years.
