4. a. Blue

JC Cartwright on Oct 17

“—For example, WWI was mainly fought over how the lands of the Ottoman Empire would be carved up by the European nations.”

The immediate cause of World War 1 was not about the division of the Ottoman Empire it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist, which triggered a chain reaction of declarations of war due to the existing complex system of alliances between European powers.

That division of the Ottoman Empire was done by the victors in WW1 and was done without regard to cultural and historical considerations. To put it simply, those powers applied a ruler to a map and drew arbitrary lines and then installed sympathetic leaders to rule over the newly formed territories.

The causes for WW2, at least for the European component, was a direct result of the Treaty of Versailles and rooted in making Germany pay reparations for that war. It was a purely European problem, and the United States wanted nothing to do with it, choosing an isolationist position with regard to Germany and its’ ambitions. A position that was in effect at the beginning of WW1 as well.

The United States was an industrial powerhouse but was suffering through the Great Depression in the years that lead up to the beginning of WW2. It had the potential to supply a deeply depressed England and Russia and did so via the Lend/Lease program. This in turn provided much needed jobs for the American Economy and positioned the United States to become the world’s greatest power AFTER WW2 because of the huge expansion of manufacturing – but at a huge cost in terms of debt (another subject for another time).

After WW2, the United States did something for the first time in the history of warfare- it foreswore the easy solution to pay for that war, it abandoned the norm of Conquest Economics (and Colonialism) that had driven nations’ economies for thousands of years and produced a new solution – the Marshall Plan.

The Soviet Union emerged from WW2 with a deep-seated fear of future invasion(s) by the European powers and drew new lines of control along the borders that existed by their occupation of Eastern Europe after WW2. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union and to prevent the PERSEAVED spread of Soviet expansionism. Thus began the “COLD WAR” and the buildup of military power lead by the United States and a faith in the power of the Atomic Bomb, a device 100% owned, at the time, by the United States to keep the Soviet Union in check.

The rest is history, a history driven by two competing economic models – Capitalism vs Communism and the defense industry.

We can go into the finer details in later discussions, but in a nutshell, the competing economic positions drove the economies of both the Soviet Union and the United States. War is big business and employs a huge portion of nations’ economies. There are side benefits that are not directly involved in defense/offense considerations. i.e. Rockets and the Space Race that resulted in commercial use of Space and scientific exploration vs purely producing vehicles to deliver Nuclear destruction. Computers that were first used to derive artillery firing tables for modern artillery and then evolved into everyday personal computers used by millions today. War is good for business.