Re: “Nuclear weapons are super-dangerous, super-expensive, draw the world’s opposition, and have little to no usefulness in any real war. Why go there?”

There is of course the argument that Iran’s leaders saw what happened to Qaddafi and drew the inference that if Qaddafi had not given up his WMD (actual or planned) he might still be in power. So the intervention of the NATO countries in Libya may have had the unintended consequence of strengthening Tehran’s resolve to develop a nuclear weapon. File under “unintended consequences, example number 19 zillion”.

OTOH, imposition of austerity by institutions, such as the ECB, that are not democratically accountable, abetted by rather unpopular leaders (e.g. Sarkozy/Merkel), does not bode too well. Plus big divergences in ec. situations — ~7% unemployment in Germany vs. 23% in Spain, e.g. — is not good either. (And Greece has dropped out of the US news hole, pushed aside by the juvenile antics of the presidential campaign among other things, so I don’t even really know what’s going on in Athens.)

When I read your article, I kept flashing back to a quote from the comedy movie “Austin Powers”, spoken by Number Two (and I’m being quite serious here): “But you, like an idiot, want to take over the world. And you don’t even realize that there is no world anymore! It’s only corporations!” Interpret corporations as anything but a national collective and goals.

I would argue that wars aren’t on their way out, they are just evolving. In 2003 after the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, I would not have defined the Iraqi conflict as a war, but times and definitions are changing. The Philippine insurrection after the Spanish-American War was never considered a war, even though thousands died, and is what I would draw as more akin to the Iraq conflict than Vietnam. As much as deaths in war has reduced in number of casualties, this is only a trend, as conflicts before WWII fluctuated in their ferocity and whether or not they were “total” or “limited” wars (compare, say the Franco-Prussian war or WWI versus the Boer or Crimean War). War changes because of politics, society, and other factors, and hence so do military’s doctrine, strategy, and tactics (the American Army has become essentially a light infantry force from the armor pounding army in the Gulf War or even to the start of the Iraqi invasion in 2003).

War will always be there, its just how one defines it, how one fights it, and who’s fighting it.