How do wars start?

It’s all pretty much human, in the end.

Now the famous expression that “war is an extension of politics by another means” makes a good point.

So far, humans have always started wars. And so often these wars are started by human politicians in regional powers. Now most of these human politicians do have regional power, and use their own good judgments. Now these human politicians have probably worked hard, sacrificed a lot, and been a little crazy or egotistical. Too many have been expansionist, as in to assert their personal or national objectives on their neighbors. That is just the way things seem to have been in human history.

Now in the last 100 years, there have been two world wars. WWII was started by regional powers Germany and Japan. WWI was started in a small region, Serbia. But one can go far past these terrible wars to our more distant past, and always it seems we humans start the wars, and too often it is the current regional powers that start these tragedies. If one just should focus on all the USA involvements throughout the world just since WWII, one can get a hint of all this.

Two questions are begged. Just what is a regional power, and more importantly, what is a world power? Of course the time frame makes a difference in how one answers.

A third question is begged, too. Can diplomacy substitute for war?

Most hope so, but in this the common problem of how do disparate regions and peoples talk in some common language? And how do values and objectives get recognized and “negotiated”? Here the idea of “unintended consequences” comes to mind. In this is the unfortunate idea of eastern thought versus western thought, and values. Today, we simply talk past our human selves, all too much.

Now it is obvious we humans in the world are different. We have different foods, different values, and different customs. Even men and women are different, too.

So in all this is the idea of why wars start. Mostly it is human, and our leaders on all sides have both started it and failed because it started. Good intentions in the west, for example, are simply not respected in the east. We humans just think differently. And I might think of a diplomat as a kind of “translator” who has failed, or at least disappointed the human politician.

So sometimes we have to fight. What a shame. But that seems to be the human way.