Does anyone believe there will be a World War 3?

Answer 1

Answer
Yes, I believe there will be a WW3. It's starting to happen all around us right now and it's like sitting on a powder keg. The long and short of it is that certain countries are competing for world power. Secrecy as to whom has what weapons in this world is always a mystery and do we ever get the truth? I doubt it. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
No one knows what will happen in the future and WW3 can start in weeks, years, and it's best to just get on with life. Along with technology comes more weapons of mass distruction and man has failed themselves. When you really think of it there are no winners in wars.
Marcy Answer
Really well put post and I enjoyed the read. Society as a whole has a whole lot more power than they think they do, but Westernized countries are too spoiled to "do without" for a bit to prove their point. I agree with the poster on the price of oil and the consumer is really getting stiffed on this one. I live in British Columbia, Canada and we now pay up to 116.5/liter. The liter as you know is less than an American gallon. I do realize the U.S. prices on gas are much higher and before we know it they'll be up even more in time for summer. It's a game! We know here to buy are gas in the middle of week instead of waiting for Friday or a day on the weekend. There is no shortage of fuel. Canada could sustain themselves.
If you study business there are 5 extremely wealthy families that rule and these families (won't name names) play the world like they're playing chess! They don't care about the blue collar workers and never will. Still, I believe in fighting for our rights and we can make a difference if we got off our butts. For instance, our government wanted a company in the U.S. (that develops weapons for the use in war) to do our Canadian Census. As a society we bulked and we fought and guess what? The Census taking stays in Canada where it belongs!
Some people think Canada and the U.S. don't get along, but it's an old battle trick "cause a fuss and turn one Western society against another" and we'll come in the back door. The Canadian and U.S. governments are getting along just fine and making some sweet deals (that won't do the U.S. or Canadian citizens any favors) but will certainly line their pockets. Just wait! By the end of summer you are going to see some of those "sweet deals" take some action and it will be right in our faces.
Marcy
Yes, population has a lot to do with wars to some degree. If there were no wars the world wouldn't be enough space on this earth to live.
Yes there will be a WW3, it will be started as a result of a number of factors including but not limited to: Over population. As the number of people expands the ability to feed your family will decrease and wages will decline because of the cost competition from massive cheap labor and automation. Corporations masquerading as governments: (Why did Hu visit Microsoft and Boeing before Bush?) They will drive wages down in the never-ending quest for higher profits. With an increase in the disparity of income between the rich and poor. Religious fruitcakes: My God told me your God is evil and I have to bomb you to make you pure. Look at the religious names both sides place on the WW3 build up conflicts we are fighting now and the go to heaven excuse used to commit suicide and murder. Raw Materials: This fits in with the first reason, over population. The Earth is not a hollow ball filled with oil, water and food. As the corporations strive to shift money away from the majority to the few, they will tell the governments they own to invade countries with the commodities they want so they can dictate the price and increase their profit margin. All of you that paid $3.00 and more for a gallon of gasoline paid for Exxon/Mobile�s record profits last quarter. How much do you love your Hummer now?




I would agree that there will be World War III and I would also agree that we are in the thick of the gradual build up to it; we saw the same gradual build up to the First World War and the Second World War, in which there is imperial rivalry and small regional conflicts, which are dragging in the empires or as many like to say in political correct tone, superpowers. However I would disagree with followup answer. I believe that it will start out the way the Niall Ferguson showed in his book "The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West", in which he explains that the reason the hotspots of the twentieth century, central and eastern Europe and far east were so violent was because of the following factors: Economic Volatility, Ethnic Disintegration and Empires in Decline. Its at really bad economic times that violence and extreme ideologies gain foot hold in societies that are in turmoil, in which it is really integrated multi-ethnic societies, where there is a large of amount of successful assimilation of ethnic minorities, including high levels intermarriage, in which causes anxiety among racist nationalists of the ethnic majority, who black lash against it (example: Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews, resulting from anxiety about successful Jewish integration and intermarriage into German society) and it is along the geopolitical fault lines of rival empires that are decline, in that they are in turmoil and when the fragemnt and collapse, even more violent empires, who want be to ethnic pure central nation states, but want more "living space", end up committing ethnic cleansing or enslaving of other ethnic groups in the lands they want (example: Nazi Germany's ethnic cleansing of Slavic people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) and of course it was along these fault lines where the most killing fields were (example: Poland, the Baltic States, Russia and the Ukraine where were the Nazi's genocide against the Jews, Gypsies and the Slavic peoples took place; this was the fault line between the German Reich and Russia). This continued on the Cold War throughout the Third World, in places like Cambodia and Guatamala, where rival empires competing in areas that were ethnically and economically volatile and where empires had broken and fragmented. According to Ferguson the region that has all the three E's (economic volatility, ethnic disintegration, and empires in decline) is the Middle East. The regional superpower of multi-ethnic Iraq, which was economic destitute and destroyed as a regional power, is now a power vacuum, as the United States, the world's leading empire is in decline, in which the various different ethnic extremist are engaged in sectarian violence. Also he points out that China and America are becoming a lot like Germany and Britain pre-1914; deeply economically intertwined, but becoming economic and imperial rivals, with the possibility of war over Taiwan, which in many ways is like how Belgium was for Britain and Germany.


I would also add, that like the First World War, part of this conflict will be about imperial rivalry, but also about imperial preservation. The empires of the 19th century were decline, because of their several failures and failing policies and thus war was about a last desperate attempt to preserve their empires, which turned out their greatest failure. At the same time you had rising new empires to challenge the old ones; Germany and Japan for Britain and now China and Iran for America. However the Second World War, while on one hand was still a war of preservation (intertwined with delaying for through appeasement), it was also resurgent, revanchanist empires who wanted to reclaim what they lost in the first war; Nazi Germany, and some level Japan and Italy, who even though they had fought on the side of the Allies in the First World War, had felt cheated at the end.
To me Russia looks a lot like post-1919 Germany. with the collapse of the Soviet Union, ethnic conflict ripped through the Soviet Union and more importantly the capitalist system which was supposed to uplift Russia and Eastern Europe, in fact created chaos. Political and ethnic conflict raged in the Balkans, the Caucuses and Russia. While the Yugoslavian Civil War mirrored the Russian Civil War of 1918, in terms of brutality and ethnic cleansing, the chaos in Russia, both economically and politically, mirrored that of post-World War I Germany, in which Russia, like the Germany, lost a conflict ( granted, a protracted conflict, of proxy wars, economic competition, and nuclear arm races) and was in a deep economic depression, because of Yeltsin's poor economic policies and corruption, which would last up until 1998. In fact, like Germany, Russia was relatively new to democracy.

Then there was a miracle; Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, who turned Russia around, by ushering economic recovery, thus ending the political chaos and diminishing the popularity of the ultra-Russian ethnic Nationalists and the paramilitaries, who in many ways mirrored Hitler's Nazi Brown Shirts and SS, while in other cases, the Freikorp. But Putin also inspired revived nationalism, granted not on the bases of ethnicity. This in turn shows that Putin is not the Russian equivalent of Germany's Adolf Hitler. In fact his popularity was of because of economic recovery and now because of the current economic crisis, Putin, who recently stepped down as President to become Prime Minister and his new President, Dmitry Medvedev , are in fact losing popularity. In fact he has set up the stage for the potential rise a ultra-right wing, ethnic Russian Nationalist and militarist dictatorship. First he and his new president, have failed to solve the economic crisis; it is during times like these that political extremes becoming more popular. Second, while he has not played the racist card, he has guaranteed Russian passports to ethnic Russians outside of Russia, who are minorities in former Soviet countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Third he has pursued geo-political goals of reclaiming former Soviet territory back into Russia's influence. In fact the recent war with Georgia was very much like a violent version of the Munich Accord, in which like Hitler claiming of the ethnically-German Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, Russia took away from Georgia two regions, one of them, South Ossetia, a region which is made up of ethnic Russians. Now if Russia goes economically and politically chaotic, in which a militant nationalist regime comes to power, they could use Putin's foreign policies for their own purposes and play the ethnic nationalist card, in which the ethnic-Russian dominated Crimean peninsula in the Ukraine, which is a geo- political hot spot of contention between the two countries, could become a spark for war; a 21rst Century version of the Danzig crisis of 1939. We have seen this before. German President Hindenburg, unable to solve the political and economic crisis appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor in 1933. Hitler had used the card of ethnic nationalism and of the unity of ethnic Germans, as an justification of German territorial aggression; in fact the area he wanted to conquer, Eastern Europe, was already an object of interest by the German Reich in World War I, although they, like Putin, wanted to turn Eastern Europe into a region of satellite states, while Hitler wanted to conquer them.

This is why I think World War III will happen.