We tend to exaggerate the effects of ideologies and personalities when contemplating global affairs. The international system operates pretty much on the same principles as it did in Pharaoh’s time. Nation-states seem to function pretty much independently of their cellular human components. National organisms compete, prey on one another, and engage in territorial or resource conflicts and alliances as if they were conscious entities, and to a crude extent, they are. At lower resolutions, and longer time scales higher order structures start to emerge.

I remember in high school getting into a lot of trouble when I observed that the last thing we wanted was a capitalistic China or Russia. I even predicted that a capitalist USSR and PRC would even be more formidable opponents than their big bureaucracies crippled by centralized state control and rigid ideological orthodoxies. But they would remain opponents, or at least, rivals. Far be it from me to smugly proclaim “I told you so…”, but I do believe history has borne me out.

Our conflicts and rivalries with other states are not a result of the psychologies of the leaders or the internal organizations of their governments and economic systems any more than they are of the collective cultural or psychological properties of their peoples. Other forces come into play.

Big countries have clashing interests. Look at World War I, there was absolutely no human reason for Europe to go to war. It can be argued that Hitler was a sort of Asimovian Mule, but he was an exception, not the rule. The same could possibly be said for Bonaparte. In either case, you had continental and maritime powers with different interests and relying on different strategies that eventually led to rivalry and conflict.

This is not a radical insight, look up Halford Mackinder and Alfred Mahan over a century ago–geopolitical geography is nothing new. It isn’t the “explanation” of history, nothing is, but its just another POV, another insight, another part of the elephant for a blind man to grab on to.

In Germany there is a conflicting history, but apparently there was no significant insurgency. Also, there were no foreign nations willing to arm or supply an insurgency.

Now, especially in the Middle East, all it takes is one of the current superpowers to be willing to arm an insurgency and it will go on for a long, long time. The US, China, and Russia cannot prevent any one of them from arming an insurgency. And soon India will also be a ‘big’ if not superpower, able to influence events without fear of reprisals.

Superpower conflicts are carried out by proxy. In a way, nuclear weapons prevent major wars, but the risk always exists of an accident, fanatic or maniac letting things get out of hand.