Generational Dynamics World View

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-06-2020, 02:16 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(05-06-2020, 01:25 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: If the Japanese took the unraveling character of America as soft and selfish to always be America's character, is that irrational?

Doesn't matter, because that's not how the Japanese took the character of America.  Yamamoto realized that his attack was a bad idea, but he did it anyway.  It was as irrational as nuking Beijing or Moscow on the expectation that China or Russia wouldn't respond - yet Yamamoto carried out the attack.

Quote:Were each alliance made by the European powers before the Great War sensible, or looking at the net result are you justified in saying all of them together put the continent on a hair trigger?  The leaders of the time should have known better?

Is irrational just mistake only bigger?

WWI was started by a Serbian agitator with the support of the Serbian government.  It was entirely rational, and even accomplished the intended objective:  Peter I of Serbia doubled the size of his kingdom as a result.

But hey, I guess the history of warfare is another area like Generational Dynamics where you think your ignorance gives you more knowledge instead of less.

I found on Quora a summation as to why Japan initiated the war, which pretty much agrees with mine without the S&H reference.  Japan viewed America as weak and likely to seek a negotiated peace.

Quote:The Japanese military saw war with the US as inevitable, and the goal was to grab as much territory as possible, then make the Allies bleed for every inch they’d try to take back until they’d call for a truce in which Japan could negotiate from a position of strength. They thought the US was soft and unwilling to take on a protracted fight - a horrendous miscalculation.

I would add that Admiral Yamamoto obeyed his national command authority.  Is following orders irrational at that level if you disagree with your superiors?  The blame for starting the war goes higher up than Yamamoto in my book.  He was guilty only of being right.  It was his superiors who misjudged the American character.

Still, is this misjudgment better judged a mistake or irrational?

I would agree that the Serbian use of assassination and terror was ‘rational’, but was that a crisis war?  How is that relevant to the question?

But that is not World War I.  That does not address the problem of interlocking alliance which was originally asked.  Each alliance may have been rational, but putting the continent on the brink was of questionable rationality?  It seems worth exploring.  If Warren is going to punt, opinions anyone?

I came to look at the rationality of war from a more abstract perspective.  Is war in general rational?  One way of looking at it was as a survival trait.  Looking far enough back, if your culture did not practice and have a policy of war, it got destroyed by those that did.  At that level war was rational, was a survival trait.

Somewhere between the invention of the machine gun and the nuke, that changed.  The power that one gained in war became not worth the cost.  An elite or a nation initiating war did not gain from it.  The idea of using armed force to gain resources, territory or reprisals became far less possible.  From that perspective, is all war irrational?  Or is all war a mistake?  Or does it matter?

Is 'irrational' only a mistake. but bigger?