It’s about as obvious as the fact that forests have trees, but lately I’ve been thinking about why human beings have been fighting each other non-stop ever since we began walking erect. Duh…it’s territory. There are currently about 150 border disputes around the world, which ensures that the hostilities will never end.
The more land a person or country controls, the more people and resources they can exploit, which turns into….yup, money. One of the most fundamental components of our makeup is greed, which is obviously a challenging impulse to control.
Thousands of years ago when Homo Sapiens emerged as the path to modern humans, the weapon of choice might have been a jawbone. Nowadays it’s a nuclear bomb.
Whether it was the Europeans conquering Native Americans, or Hitler trying to take over Europe, or Russia fighting for Ukraine, or perhaps one of the most dangerous campaigns yet - China eyeing Taiwan - they were, or are in a nutshell, simply out to steal someone else’s garden and eat their carrots.
Just this past year, the world’s military expenditures surpassed $2 trillion.
Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lakes Times Pilot (Iowa) presents a good assessment of the details of some of our current boundary disputes.
https://www.stormlake.com/articles/editorial-cool-the-china-rhetoric/