Tensions are definitely higher than last decade and the decade before. The collapse of the Soviet Union and relatively good economy of the 1990s relieved a lot of tension.

But we’re still a ways from WW3. We’re back into a pretty normal range for the Cold War. We know China and Russia have the will and the means to try and expand. But they know we have the will and the means to stop them in certain places. That’s important because the first two world wars have very different start points that we aren’t close to meeting.

World War 1 was started by chains of alliances between countries. They were meant to keep balance but they were decentralized. So there was no committee ruling on Article 5 or bringing new members in. Which is how anarchists in Serbia set off the alliances like a chain of explosives. Both the CSTO and NATO contain rules preventing such a thing. WW1 was helped by cultural views on war. Europe hadn’t had a proper industrialized war yet. So everyone thought it was going to be another affair with picnics and a couple large set piece battles.

World War 2 was started by a specific ideology in a country run by meth heads. Hitler was as high as he was crazy. There were a lot of problems left over from World War 1 that gave him an opening but at the core of it all, if he had made a level headed assessment he’d have known he could never win against the US/UK/RUS alliance.

Neither Russia nor China wants the economic devastation that would result from a World War 3. They aren’t meth heads and the glory of war is long dead. There’s some rumors too that the Chinese are looking at what western equipment can do in Ukraine and they’re currently purging some officers who insisted we were exaggerating our capabilities. (They built plans and bought equipment over decades on those recommendations). Russia couldn’t invade a cardboard box much less a NATO country at this point.

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Now, American Civil War 2. It’s not likely for two reasons. One, fighting a war is far more complicated than it used to be. You could gather a bunch of rifles and cannons to have a serious force in 1861. Now days whoever the Army sides with will win in hours. It’s not an exaggeration to say a militia could run off a town’s police force, set up checkpoints, and take over. But while they were celebrating they’d get hit by air to ground missiles and 25mm rounds from a single helicopter they will never see or hear. And they certainly won’t see the special forces team in the woods designating targets. If for some reason they did need to be engaged by the regular infantry it would not go well for them at all. They need to deal with drones, snipers, mortars, artillery, and light tanks. Furthermore there have been head to head practice fights between veterans and militias. (Reality TV in the 2000’s got wild.) It never ended well for the militia. They would be outmaneuvered, pinned down, and dead, in about 5 minutes.

Two, the modern model is terrorism. In a Civil War you need a large percentage of support. You have to field whole divisions and the logistics therein. But for political violence you need support from 10 percent of the population in a region to have places to hide and logistics. Also, you can cause havoc with a force the size of a company.

I would say it’s highly likely we’ll see more political violence before we either come back together as a country or we allow a region to become autonomous or even independent.