Murphy: What do you think we need to do to avoid major conflict over the next 25 years? Or do you think it can be avoided?

Cowen: I just think there’ll be more festering conflicts. Consider the difference between World War One and World War Two. World War two is very decisively settled. That’s quite rare in history. And you had a clear, small number of victors that largely agreed. And US & UK set things up. That didn’t happen after World War One.

Yeah, there was a League of Nations that didn’t work. It collapsed again. Future conflicts will be more like World War One than World War Two. Yeah, there’s too many nuclear weapons out there, for one thing. Are we really going to decisively defeat Russia in anything, ever? Who knows? But I wouldn’t count on it.

I’m very struck by this recent conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which is a nothing burger, but I think people are making a mistake by ignoring it. What it’s showing us is that two countries can find it worthwhile to conduct a nothing burger war every now and then a few weeks, and it’s never really over.

It never really escalates. It just goes on and I think we’ll just see more of that. East Africa feels quite dangerous at the moment.

Murphy: I mean, Azerbaijan.

Cowen: Things like that. And they’ll just multiply and not quite. You know, some of them will be settled. But as a whole, they won’t be settled, and they won’t give birth to, like, the new UN, the new Bretton Woods, the new whatever. The A’s will build their own institutions. Let’s wish them luck.

That was recorded several months ago with Nebular, here are the links:

We’ve just published the video on YouTube, X, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. We also published some extended show notes and the transcript on Substack.