by Kylon » Tue 28 Oct 2014, 20:05:31
There will be, but not in the traditional sense of the word.
The kind of "World War" that occurs will be world proxy wars. Whenever a country with resources gets weakened, or is fighting an opponent and that opponent wants their resources or wants to destroy them, they will fund extremist/terrorist/civil war types in the opposing countries territory.
Russia has no real threat from the United States invading their country, due to the size of their army, and more importantly nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. However, the United States might find a would be dictator/warlord who wants to rule Russia, arm him, train him, and provide assistance in public relations, and everything else needed for a revolution, and then attack Russia from within with an insurgency. Every country has political winners and losers, the simple tactic would be to find some of those losers who are most aggressive, ruthless, least ethical, and most ambitious, and give them the backing they need to overthrow the legitimate government in that country. At the same time, in order to control the puppet government, they keep them relatively dependent on the country supporting the insurgency.
So what you will probably see is more and more "revolutions". Some of which will be genuinine, and exist out of frustration of a desperate population, and some will be manufactured.
But that's the kind of world war I envision, different "revolutionary/insurgency" groups, that are manufactured by foreign powers looking to overthrow the government that exist in order to replace it with a puppet government that will effectively pay tribute to the government/country/group that put them in power.
The reasons why I think that this will happen more frequently are-
1) Insurgency groups can hide whose their support base, which means countries like Russia might not know who to target with their nuclear weapons should the insurgency become a real danger to their control.
2) In times of economic desperation, it's easy to whip the population into a frenzy and fuel and power an insurgency. To put it simply, an insurgency becomes progressively more economical a way to fight a war, the more desperate, hungry, and ignorant the population is.
As a result of this tactic being used more frequently by all major powers, we can probably expect to see more and more police state like operations occurring, less civil liberties, fewer civil rights, greater control of weapons, and military related knowledge, and greater survelliance of the population.
This is both a function of corruption by all of the ruling elites in each society (as they attempt to hoard wealth both acquired ethically and unethically from the starving masses), and a means to protect against state supported terrorism by foreign powers (as most major adversary countries (for the U.S that might be China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela ect...) . But unfortunately that means that those of us who do not want to be political/military revolutionaries, and those of us who aren't politically connected will suffer as a result. We will all be viewed as potential terrorist because of the potential danger that a small part of the population pose.