Brian Folley, buddy, you got your info wrong. If you really want to know, China has one of the highest GDP in the world. Not even anyone country in the EEC is even close to it. Besides GDP per capita does not mean much in an event of war. India also has a very high GDP much more than you think. It is a well known prediction that in the next 50 years or so India and China will rise as powers that are much greater than the US and Russia.
With a social disparity and human rights situation infinitely worse. Yeah, a billion citizens each tends to give you a bit of muscle... but it doesn't ensure you will like what you get.
I hate to burst your bubble but india is not a majour power, nor are their nukes powerfull or accurate or good. China's nuclear arsenal is smaller than that of france and russia has too much financial dependance on other countries. And Yes china is growing extremely fast , india isnt...
Hahah, I couldn't resist. I'm sure everyone else here knows what a pathetic thing of an army Canada has, and with the population of California we wouldn't survive even if everyone was conscripted.
You've all done a great job of explaining why certain alliances would form if WWIII happened. But nobody has made a very convincing case for it happening. The only countries that have a proven taste for violence in recent time are the USA, the Muslim nations of the Middle East, and quite a few African countries. Communism was overthrown with almost no shots fired. Russia and the rest of eastern Europe are tired of war. Western Europe was opposed to joining in the Vietnam War or any of the Mideastern shenanigans. They are tired of war. Japan hasn't gotten over the shame of WWII. It'll be the last country to enter WWIII. North Korea hasn't fought a war since the Korean War. Kim may be a maniac but he's not stupid. He'll sell weapons but he won't shoot them at anybody. China doesn't need a war to accomplish anything, they're about to become the world's leading economic power. They would not hesitate to fight if they were threatened, but no one's threatening them. Ditto for India. The last thing their economy needs is the drain of warfare. Sure they have a historical problem with Pakistan but they're not dumb enough to piss off the entire Muslim world with an unprovoked attack. If there is a WWIII, it will be the USA vs. the World of Islam. Indonesia and Malaysia would probably eventually come to the aid of their Muslim brethren, but despite their huge populations they probably would not affect the outcome with their modestly equipped forces. Yeah, Canada will stick up for Uncle Sam like she always does. Bless you, Canadian brothers. Even Australia might join us, they haven't forgotten the attack in Bali. And England. God save the Queen. Crap, are we still a single people at heart? One gets in a fight and we all join in, no matter how stupid the conflict? The rest of the world will grit their teeth and sit it out while China and India take over the global economy. Obviously you don't work in I.T. If the entire industry hadn't stopped work on everything else and done nothing but Y2K remediation from July 1998 until Y2K, it would have been the disaster everyone predicted due to the shortsightedness of the non-IT managers who controlled the budgets, passing the buck and pretending that they couldn't read a calendar. There were plenty of Y2K failures in 1998 and 1999, and the "yellow blanket" systems kept failing on into 2001. I purchased expired food with garbly printed expiration dates. Fortunately they remediated the expiration dating systems on medicines first. I didn't get a correct mortgage statement for all of 2000 -- which BTW according to the bank had thirteen months. Fortunately they remediated the ATM system first. My power company didn't send me a bill at all for six months and then they sent one for enough money to pay for the entire city. Fortunately they remediated the systems that control the generators first. Y2K was the largest IT project ever undertaken. They were drafting retired Cobol programmers to review thirty-year-old code that the non-IT managers had casually promised us would be retired long before its Y2K non-compliance became an issue -- what they had meant was that they'd be retired too and the problem would occur on the next sucker's watch. Y2K was caused by non-IT people insisting they had plenty of time to get around to it later. I'm getting sick of non-IT people saying lookee it was no problem, when every IT professional on Earth was working his butt off for 18 months to make up for everyone else's don't-give-a-damn-it's-somebody-else's-problem attitude. If it weren't for us, those airports would have shut down, those elevators would have halted, those mental hospital doors would have been thrown open, those traffic lights would have flashed random colors, those truck dispatches would have stopped being generated, and those police and fire systems would have been overwhelmed and running on manual backup, just like we warned you. I was there and I saw plenty of non-compliant code that would have failed. The rest of the world isn't quite so dependent on computers as we are, but the USA really would have ground to a halt and nobody would have been able to help. It would have been "Dark Angel."
canada will never fall to the americans, america is considered evil by the majority of the populaiton, and that doesnt include those who just dislike it immensely.
Im sure canada is a majour deciding Factor in saving the world. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
WWIII already happened, it was the cold war. Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and almost every third world nation were the battlefields of WWIII. If you add up the dead from places like Indonesia and the rest of the World the death toll probably exceeds that of WWII. WWIV also has happened and is ongoing. The battlefield is Congo. When you have two million dead, five nations with troops in the field and many other nations tangentially involved then I think it qualifies as a World War. The USA for example was tangentially involved because of it's very close relationship with Uganda which is one of the Nations that sent troops into Congo. I don't claim to understand the war and the diamond trade and other minerals that seem to be at the heart of the war but I think we should call it WWIV. So what about WWV? I think the most likely scenario is that it will be another cold war. I think resistance to the Anglo-American alliance's attempt to control the world will be the cause of the war. So It will Start with China, Russia, Iran, Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, South Africa, and Malaysia resisting The USA, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, and assorted client me too states. The client me too states will fall into one of the following categories, 1: have a president who is deathly scared of the USA, 2: bought off by the United States, 3: relying on the UK and the USA and Italy to help smaller poorer EU states hold on to a larger share EU power verses the German French alliance. France and Germany will start of as swing states because while they resent the USA's grasping for the ability to dominate the world, their ruling elites (particularly the French) have a common interest with the USA in maintaining the existing networks of global corporate kleptocracy. As the Germans and French see a growing resolve by China and Russia and Latin America to resist the USA the French ,Germans, post Burlusconi Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Czech, India, Brazil and more smaller nations will join the anti-imperial alliance against the Anglo Alliance. Eventually Japan and Korea will join the Anti Americans and the USA will be bankrupted and defeated. The main physical battlefields will be the Middle East, former Soviet republics, South East Asia Pacific, Africa and Latin America. Equally important non military battles will take place in corporate boardrooms, at the WTO IMF and United Nations, with assassins spys terrorists and phony terrorists trying to create anger at the other side, smear campaigns, spin in the media disinformation world, in the media ratings world as new media emerges, in the blogosphere and at kitchen tables as families try to sort through the competing propaganda of the competing slates of political whores. Canada and Mexico will be neutral for the last half of the war. The war begins when the USA invades it's next large country or if somebody with an as aggressive as Bush Neocon mindset wins the 2008 US presidential election. The War ends when the USA's economy collapses. The war also ends if the American people understand what was ugly and stupid about the Neocon mindset and also the Neocon light/ CFR mindset and then the American people stop electing the followers of these mindsets.
The Congo doesn't count as a world war because the fighting is taking place in one area, not spread around the globe. Deathrates alone do not a World War make.
I see your point. Congo is just one country. On the other hand Congo is 905,000 square miles and France, Germany, Italy and Poland combined are less than 600,000 square miles. Once I add the Russian, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires I have no doubt the WW1 land mass will vastly exceed Congo but WW1 was not a global war in the way that WW2 was.
WW1 drug at least three continents into the fray and so qualified. WW2 wouldn't have been a world war if it didn't also take place in the pacific and north africa.
Fraggle Rocker - i was merely pointing out that theorizing about the future is a bit of silly buisness. Nowhere did i say that not a problem. Besides, we're not all American here. I was living in indonesia adn the American ambassador was telling everyone to be prepared and buy canned food adn duct tape. Maybe it was a problem for the west, but we sure as hell didn't have traffic lights in Jakarta. vslayer - I don't know what Canadians you know. We'll poke fun at the Americans, but i'm not really sure that Canadians hate anyone very much. That being said, the Canadian military is either overseas or of duty. We effectivly have no standing army at home right now.
call me an ignorant american but i do not see america ever being defeated. Firstly, the U.S air force has planes that have the capability to fire the first bullet, outmaneuver, and outspeed any other's country aircraft. They're air force would demolish everything that stood in they're path. The bulk of all the opposing's combined airforce would be the only that could possibly challenge the american airforce. Secondly, after the americans would acheive air superiority they could easily nuke their counterparts... (It is true that some missiles could be launched into the U.S but those are inaccurate and for the most part weaker. The U.S could directly drop them on Russia's Nuclear storage facility's and destroy there's. After that there wouldn't be many remaining nukes to launch. And thirdly the U.S would also have some allies as well; Austrailia could help out with Naval battles in the pacific, and the United Kingdom could carry the bulk of the atlantic battles. America will never be destroyed. She might get severely bruised and battered but will never be destroyed.
I was talking cold war. In a cold war defeat and victory looks like the defeat of the Soviet Union and the victory of the USA. A defeat of the USA means that the USA decides that it can no longer afford it's ambitions. In a defeat the USA pulls it's military bases out of most of the world. In a defeat of the USA in a cold war the world would gain freedom from being subject to the whims of the American president and American neocons would lose the dream of America becoming free from the whims of the world. America would become part of the world rather than master of the world. The Neocons think that the victory of the USA over the Soviet Union was an opportunity that should not be missed. Anti-Neocons think that the destruction of the Stalinist dream was the victory. Anti-Neocons think the victory was very expensive and now want to receive the peace dividend. Neocons loved the stuggle and can not accept the anticlimatic nature of a the victory in the cold war. The cost of the great American weaponry is the force that will defeat America. But cold wars do often include misery and destruction. Angola was an example of the misery and destruction of the cold war. Afghanistan and Vietnam were other examples. America was defeated in Vietnam despite our great weaponry. Had the Soviets been willing to kill all of the Afghans they could have won that war. Had America been willing to kill all of the Vietnamese people then America could have won that war but would it be a victory? With genocide off the table our great weapons lose their effectiveness. We really can't put genocide on the table while living in "the global village" economy in a easily outraged increasingly idealistic world filled with potential terrorists and filled with nuclear weapons.
