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Brinkmanship is risky

Everyone my age (or older) will remember the Cuban missile crisis of the 1960s.

Russia had apparently shipped nuclear missiles to Cuba, a country perilously close to the US mainland. The US government, led at the time by JF Kenedy, considered this unacceptable and sent its warships to create a blockade to prevent further shipments and also demanded the removal of the missiles that had already arrived.

This was as close as we'd ever come to an all-out nuclear conflict between the (then) USSR and the USA.

The world was on tenterhooks as the world's greatest nuclear superpowers faced off against each other.

Fortunately for us, sanity prevailed and the USSR backed down, removing its missiles and committing not to base any such capability on the island nation of Cuba again.

Unfortunately for the world, it appears as if Donald Trump is quite happy to engage in a new round of brinkmanship with modern-day Russia.

In response to a whole lot of sabre-rattling by the former Russian President Medvedev, Trump has ordered a couple of US nuclear submaries to be stationed in more strategically valuable locations -- effectively upping the ante in this game of global nuclear poker.

Now, in what some say is a carefully crafted response, both China and Russia are carrying out artillery and anti-submarine drills in Sea of Japan.

I certainly hope this is nothing more than a coincidence and I expect that may be the case because such exercises probably take a lot longer to plan and deploy than the few days since Trumps nuclear sub announcement.

However, politicians are not always the sharpest knives in the drawer so there's always the risk that one or more of the players in this game will badly misinterpret the situation or act a little to agressively and thus trigger a conflict from which there can be no winners.

Many people I've spoken to in recent times believe that war is now an inevitability and the only thing uncertain is the timing of the first missile.

Some of this pessimism is built on the current world economic state. For too long, large Western nations have been borrowing from future generations by racking up huge levels of debt that the have no realistic way of repaying. The national debt of the US government for example, is around US$36 trillion -- that's over $100K for every man, woman and child in the country.

Unemployment levels are now headed upwards again and the rise of AI will hasten this increase. Graduates in the USA are finding it hard to find work and with hefty student loans to repay, the situation looks bleak.

Even those with once sought-after computer science degrees are finding it hard to get work, due at least in part to the surge in vibe-coding as an alternative to employing skilled programmers.

Trump's position is also being assaulted by the fallout from the Epstein affair and the highly contradictory claims he's made inrespect to the infamous "Epstein Files". This has shaken a lot of his support within the Republican party and he's obviously looking to create distractions that will shift the public focus away from things that could harm him politically.

Nothing unifies a nation more than war. Nothing solidifies a leader's support more than war.

War also has the amazing ability to make austerity palatable to the masses. Everyone is prepared to willingly make sacrifices if it means supporting their country and their brave soliders who are protecting it in the theatre of war.

Trump knows this, Putin knows this.

That's why, the worse things get politically and economically for them, the more likely these leaders are to leverage the greatest tool they have at their disposal, regardless of the cost to the people of their respective nations.

A war will effectively wipe all debt and create an economic reset with much lower expectations of income and living standards for those who are left behind. A war will cement the respective leaders' positions as strong-men.

There doesn't have to be a winner, which is important because there will be no winner in the next global war.

As a species we will survive and sadly, we will probably have learned nothing.

Let's hope that, just as in the 1960s, sanity will prevail but from where I sit right now, I don't rank either Trump or Putin particularly highly on the sanity scale so I will continue to type with my fingers crossed.

Carpe Diem folks!

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