Sickness Slows the March to War - Contemporary Issues Essay Writing Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

As the novel coronavirus infects the globe, states compete for scientific and medical supplies and blame one another for the pandemic’s spread. Policy analysts have started asking whether such tensions could eventually erupt into military conflict. Has the pandemic increased or decreased the motive and opportunity of states to wage war? 

War is a risky business, with potentially very high costs. The historian Geoffrey Blainey argued in The Causes of War that most wars share a common characteristic at their outset: optimism. The belligerents usually start out sanguine about their odds of military success. When elites on both or all sides are confident, they are more willing to take the plunge—and less likely to negotiate, because they think they will come out better by fighting. Peace, by contrast, is served by pessimism. Even one party’s pessimism can be helpful: that party will be more inclined to negotiate and even accept an unfavorable bargain in order to avoid war. 

When one side gains a sudden and pronounced advantage, however, this de-escalatory logic can break down: the optimistic side will increase its demands faster than the pessimistic side can appease. Some analysts worry that something like this could happen in U.S.-Chinese relations as a result of the new coronavirus. The United States is experiencing a moment of domestic crisis. China, some fear, might see the pandemic as playing to its advantage and be tempted to throw its military weight around in the western Pacific. 

What these analysts miss is that COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is weakening all of the great and middle powers more or less equally. None is likely to gain a meaningful advantage over the others. All will have ample reason to be pessimistic about their military capabilities and their overall readiness for war. For the duration of the pandemic, at least, and probably for years afterward, the odds of a war between major powers will go down, not up. 

PAX EPIDEMICA? 

A cursory survey of the scholarly literature on war and disease appears to confirm Blainey’s observation that pessimism is conducive to peace. Scholars have documented again and again how war creates permissive conditions for disease—in armies as well as civilians in the fought-over territories. But one seldom finds any discussion of epidemics causing wars or of wars deliberately started in the middle of widespread outbreaks of infectious disease. (The diseases that European colonists carried to the New World did weaken indigenous populations to the point that they were more vulnerable to conquest; in addition, some localized conflicts were fought during the influenza pandemic of 1919–21, but these were occasioned by major shifts in regional balances of power following the destruction of four empires in World War I.) Stay informed In-depth analysis delivered weekly SIGN UP 

That sickness slows the march to war is partly due to the fact that war depends on people. When people fall ill, they can’t be counted on to perform well in combat. Military medicine made enormous strides in the years leading up to World War I, prior to which armies suffered higher numbers of casualties from disease than from combat. But pandemics still threaten military units, as those onboard U.S. and French aircraft carriers, hundreds of whom tested positive for COVID-19, know well. Sailors and soldiers in the field are among the most vulnerable because they are packed together. But even airmen are at risk, since they must take refuge from air attacks in bunkers, where the virus could also spread rapidly. 

This Essay Writing Assignment has been solved by our Essay Writing Experts at onlineassignmentbank. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+ Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.