World At War, Almost

I've noticed something about conflicts in the world. It's that most of the wars or conflicts currently on-going are internal ones. That is, nations don't or don't want to fight each other anymore. The price of armed conflict with another country would be too high for all involved. Nations  now seem to prefer fighting internally. I wonder if the old nation vs. nation war is passé. Surely, given modern war technology, the damage from a war between two or more nations today would likely be catastrophic, perhaps too catastrophic to consider. Even the tyrant Vladimir Putin agrees. He is conducting his efforts to take over the Ukraine, not with a full military invasion of Ukraine, but rather as an indirect invasion through stirring dissent their and then siding with whichever side of the civil war is the strongest.

The old fashioned war between nations is today seen as not only too dangerous a game, but as antisocial as a belch in the face of a clergyman. Better to fight by promoting dissent within the opponent's nation, then siding with the stronger side to gain control. Among the nations today fighting civil wars or something close to violent conflict from within, include practically every Arab nation in existence. Most of those conflicts are attempts by one faction of Islam to gain control of the government in order to promote an agenda based on a religious stricture. By and large, they are not undertaken to overthrow tyrants or change the political structure of the country. Instead, they are conflicts pitting the modern world against the reactionary world that is currently in power.

That same kind of thing is going on in sub-Saharan Africa too where the old world has not yet accepted all of the new. But even the industrial western nations are today in conflict with themselves. Massive immigration from the third world into Europe and the United States has created a war of words that is being fought on the plain of immigration. Those who feel their nation's economic and cultural viability are threatened by the influx of those immigrants with different ideas stand on one side, while those who want "diversity" and feel a country's culture must change to survive stand on the other side.

Thus, in the west, anti and pro immigrant groups slug it out on the political playing fields. And this brings about great tension and conflict, a kid of war of words that might escalate into an ugly French style racist, xenophobic, politics directed against immigrants. Well, at least it keeps the leaders of those nations, as in the case George Bush's Iraqi and Afghanistan invasions, busy only dabbling in other countries because "we must fight them over there to prevent having to fight them here". As revolting as that is, at least it beats wars with armies slaughtering each other and civilians who stand in the way. I wonder if the new war is not mostly an internal one.