Meanwhile on the International front....

Plenty of public agitation and strife before Israel was even (re)founded.

Zion and Party Politics, 1944 - Jewish Review of Books

protest by Zionist Jews in Palestine 1936 Stock Photo - Alamy

The Palestinian Communist Party in the Interwar Period - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

Zionism was born in protest.

Opinion | The Zionist Founders of the Human Rights Movement (Published 2018)

 

I wonder how many of those college kids protesting in the 1960s are now 70-something MAGAs?

 

The only thing we're not doing in Ukraine vs. Russia so far is putting troops on the ground. We're bankrolling most of it, and keep moving the line on what weapons we're willing to send over there.
On the Russian side, they're forming up their own alliances. The BRICS stuff has drawn in countries we should think of or have thought of as allies (like Brazil, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the UAE). Russia is buying weapons, especially drones, from Iran and using them in Ukraine.
So now we're fighting a major proxy war with Russia, while opening a second front on a different continent against Iran and its proxies.

I wonder how long it was in 1914 or 1939-40 before everyone realized it was a "world war" instead of the countless others that had come before it? When the history of this era is written — if anyone is still around to write it — Feb. 24, 2022 and Oct. 7, 2023 should be ingrained as keystone dates like Sept. 1, 1939 and Dec. 7, 1941 were for our generation.

 

Russia has had multiple opportunities to engage our forces. They've declined every time. And our troops have been near theirs several times when dealing with Wagner. Russia didn't want to escalate. Now they want to?

 

I mean, the day Germany invaded Poland, France and Great Britain declared war. There wasn't exactly a long, slow simmer ....

 

True, but it was still more or less a European war at that point, and you did have a brief pause between the campaign in Poland and the invasion of France and Battle of Britain. We were staying at arm's length and providing material aid — much like we're doing now — without getting directly involved. Probably because our military wasn't anywhere near ready to fight, but still. It wasn't until Japan made its moves in December 1941 that it fully switched from a continental war to a worldwide war.

I guess the better analogy would've been 1914. When Germany went into Belgium and France it was similar to the dozens of smallish wars that had preceded it for 500 years, even if it was accompanied by fighting in Africa and elsewhere. It probably wasn't until early 1915 that everyone realized they had gotten in way over their heads.

 

Wut?

In about a month's time, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, Britain, and Russia were all at war with each other.

 

Yeah, but wasn't there a foolish sense (like in most wars) that it would be over pretty quickly?

 

I mean ... I guess?

But these things weren't a slow burn. They were at war quickly. Even during the Sitzkrieg/Phony War period of WWII, the Battle of the Atlantic was raging around the Atlantic and (occasionally) into the Indian Ocean.

Nevertheless: Do you know the last time two nuclear powers engaged in a hot war against each other?

 

Fair enough.

Was it China vs. Russia in 1969? IIRC, they almost did lob nukes at each other during a border dispute.

 

I mean ... that's basically the only time that it's ever happened. I guess India and Pakistan have fenced a bit.

But rational actors in the era of nuclear weapons have prevailed. Every escalation leads to nuclear exchange, which no one wants. So Russia isn't going to start nuking us because we're aiding Ukraine, just like we didn't nuke Russia because they were aiding Vietnam.