A global general sanatorium
Public institutions are living organisms that develop their internal political cultures, administrative manias and economic relations. They compete for space in the interior of the State, where they can thrive and grow or decline and be extinct. Some are permanent (such as armies and courts), others are transitory (parliamentary commissions of inquiry). Each one of them tries to overvalue its mission, to consolidate or expand its power and increase the budget share allocated to it.
Armies are public institutions very susceptible to paranoia, as all they do is preserve the memory of the wars that took place in the past and prepare in the present for the wars that will take place in the future. Therefore, we can assume that each army is the victim of a specific type of paranoia.
Because of what happened during the decay and fall of the empire of China, the Chinese army is obsessed with territorial integrity. The reconquest of lost territorial portions before and after the civil war seems to be the key element for understanding the military strategy of the People's Republic of China.
Russia has suffered two major invasions in the last two centuries. In 1812, Napoleon invaded the Russian empire, devastated several cities and occupied Moscow before retreating and being defeated. In 1941, supported by several countries, the III Reich invaded the USSR causing tens of millions of casualties and an orgy of destruction.
In the US, the dominant obsession is the preservation at any cost of the hegemony conquered at the end of World War II. No other country spends as much money on its armed forces or has the same number of military bases spread across the planet. Even so, US commanders seem convinced their country is insecure and are working to expand military spending.
Defeated in World War II, the Japanese and Germans have small, frightened armed forces that automatically side with the US. Victorious in that conflict, the Brazilian army seems to be governed by the terror of the internationalization of the Amazon. In Brazil fear of communism is just a Fake News spread by the military to try to control our country's politics.
Military paranoia causes political distortions and even armed conflicts. The institutional inertia of armies and companies that supply them with increasingly sophisticated and expensive weapons is almost irresistible. This inertia has the power to shape the political space within each country and helps define the central lines of the foreign policies of China, Russia, USA, Germany, Japan and Brazil.
Pressured by its military, the Chinese government is forced to regain control of Taiwan. No one should underestimate the Kremlin when it announces it will not accept the US (and NATO) military presence near Russia's border. If they back down, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin could be overthrown. All of this puts the Chinese and Russians on a collision course with the United States, a country whose military believes it cannot give up its hegemony in Asia and Europe. But what really sets the stage for the tragedy is an unspoken fact: for five decades no US president has ever challenged the paranoia of preserving US global military hegemony.
The world doesn't need a war to get under rubble. In the US, several cities are falling apart because the military manages to drain almost the entire budget of the country. Japan and Germany fear a resurgence of militarism, but they cannot free themselves from the military pressure imposed by US foreign policy and its automatic submission to the Americans.
Russia and China are militarily powerful countries. This will not prevent them from being devastated in case of war against the US. The same can be said of the US, whose cities (wrecked or not) will also be devastated by conventional ballistic or nuclear missiles fired by Russian and Chinese submarines.
In Brazil, the people go hungry while the army stocks tons of rump steak. The obsession with maintaining control of the Amazon is destroying the forest and this will reflect negatively on the rainfall regime across the country.
The most important question at this point is: How to prevent the AI used for military purposes from not reproducing the specific paranoia that guides the strategies of each Army and its enemies?
It will never be possible to exorcise all these military paranoias. The world will remain a general sanatorium ready to explode. But this explosion is just one of the problems facing human beings. The pandemic and climate change are already causing damage, unemployment, despair, hunger and death.
“Ice on Mars, says Viking probe
But yet there is no chicken in my backyard”
In this context, it is better to listen to Raul Seixas and dream about a spider's war.