How does wars start

Accordingly, anyone seeking to start a war will try to convince the public that the United States is facing multiple adverse trends and that its deteriorating position can be reversed only via military action.

The lesson? Such dark warnings rest on little more than guesswork about the future, of course, and typically depend on worst-case assumptions about where current trends might lead.

Because the future is always uncertain, fear of adverse circumstances that may never materialize is a poor justification for war and especially for a country that is as powerful, wealthy, and secure as the United States actually is. Notice further that the logic of preventive war implicitly acknowledges that the United States is still far stronger and more secure than any of these adversaries and need not go to war from a sense of panic.

Which brings me to No. As noted above, nobody launches a war if he or she is certain it will be long, costly, or likely to end in defeat. Accordingly, anyone trying to make the case for war has to convince him or herself and the public that it will be easy and that victory will be both inevitable and cheap. In practice, this means persuading people that the costs to the United States will be negligible, the risks of escalation controllable, and the likely outcome easy to foresee.

What does that tell us to look out for? Those are the signs that a government is convincing itself that it has lots of options that will wreak havoc on its foes but pose little danger to the country. Advocates for war typically promise that victory will solve lots of problems at once. Similarly, Bush and the neocons thought toppling Saddam would eliminate a potential aggressor, send a message to other would-be proliferators, restore U.

Hawks also like to argue the flip side: A failure to act now or soon will have dire consequences. In other words: If the United States uses force, other states will respect it, deterrence will be strengthened, and peace will spread far and wide.

The astonishing thing about such claims is how often they get recycled. The positive effects of vigorous never seem to last more than a few months — at least according to the hawks — and soon they are telling Americans that they have to blow something up again so that others will know they can and will.

Accordingly, hawks go to great lengths to portray opponents as the embodiment of evil and to convince the public that the enemy is morally repugnant and unalterably hostile. After all, if a foreign government does some bad things, and if its hostility to America will never, ever change, then the only long-term solution is to get rid of it.

The events that led up to the assassination are significantly more complicated, but most scholars agree that the gradual emergence of a group of alliances between major powers was partly to blame for the descent into war. By , those alliances resulted in the six major powers of Europe coalescing into two broad groups: Britain, France and Russia formed the Triple Entente, while Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy comprised the Triple Alliance.

As these countries came to each other's aid after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, their declarations of war produced a domino effect. CNN lists these key developments:.

As the war progressed, further acts of aggression drew other countries, including the United States, into the conflict. Many others, including Australia, India and most African colonies, fought at the behest of their imperial rulers.

But even the alliance theory is now considered overly simplistic by many historians. War came to Europe not by accident, but by design, argues military historian Gary Sheffield.

Second, the governments in the entente states rose to the challenge. A BBC documentary screened in , Royal Cousins at War , told the story of Wilhelm's difficult relationship with his parents and antipathy towards all things British and argues that this helped bring the world to the brink of war.

Unlike many family feuds, however, disagreements between the royal cousins exacted a geopolitical price. The engagement was disastrous for all three monarchs. The question of which country or countries caused the war is sometimes flipped on its head by scholars who have asked which countries — had they conducted themselves differently — could have prevented it.

Sir Richard J Evans, Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge disagrees, arguing that Serbian nationalism and expansionism were the root cause of the conflict. Despite widespread horror in the US over newspaper reports of German atrocities against civilians, the general feeling among in the early months of the conflict was that American men should not risk their lives in a European war. Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4.

Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, , ending World War I. At the Paris Peace Conference in , Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such devastating scale.

As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes of World War II. World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to replace men who went to war and those who never came back. The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use.

The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in , restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remains in effect today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. When World War I broke out across Europe in , President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the United States would remain neutral, and many Americans supported this policy of nonintervention.

However, public opinion about neutrality started to change after the sinking of the British For four years, from to , World War I raged across Europe's western and eastern fronts, after growing tensions and then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war.

Trench warfare and the early use of tanks, submarines and airplanes meant the The instability created in Europe by the First World War set the stage for another international conflict—World War II—which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating. Rising to power in an economically and politically unstable Germany, Adolf World War I was unlike any conflict the world had ever seen.

Europe by Almost exactly a century before, a meeting of the European states at the Congress of Vienna had established an international order and balance of power that lasted for almost a century. By , however, a multitude of forces were threatening to tear it apart.

World War I, which lasted from until , introduced the world to the horrors of trench warfare and lethal new technologies such as poison gas and tanks. The result was some of the most horrific carnage the world had ever seen, with more than 16 million military personnel Trenches—long, deep ditches dug as protective defenses—are When Nicholas declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in July , he was absolute ruler of a realm of nearly million people that stretched from Central On the night of April 3, , President Woodrow Wilson began to suffer from a violent cough.

Warfare also enables the expression of higher human qualities that often lie dormant in ordinary life, such as courage and self-sacrifice. This seems tantamount to suggesting that human beings fight wars because we enjoy doing so. In other words, we have to find alternative activities to give us that sense of feeling alive, of belonging and purpose. In stable, peaceful and more economically developed countries, such as the UK and the US, life is so rich and varied that there are many ways of satisfying these needs — through sport, our careers, entertainment and hobbies.

If these needs are unsatisfied, and if there is an obvious enemy or oppressor to direct them towards, then warfare is almost inevitable.