Trade wars, what else?
“Human Evolution and Human History: A Complete Theory” lives up to its bold title: it’s one of the most thought-provoking academic articles I’ve read. The argument is that the central trend of human history is towards increasingly large coalitions, from the hunter-gatherer band to the global empire; and that this trend can be explained by a single factor, the increasing range of weapons, from the spear to the ICBM. Long-range weapons let you impose your will on coalition partners, preventing them from defecting; in turn, as weapon range increases, bigger coalitions can be held together.
In this theory, coalitional enforcement of kinship-independent social cooperation is the fundamental thing humans do, in the same sense that flight is the fundamental thing birds do. Without exception, everything uniquely human—language, cognitive virtuosity, and so on—is either a facet of this foundational adaptation or a subsidiary adaptation allowed by it.
Humans are uniquely cooperative because they are uniquely able to threaten cheaters using ranged warfare in which a majority can always outweigh a minority, by the logic of Lanchester’s Square Law. And that’s why we’ve taken over the planet.
I don’t know whether this theory is true, but I thought of it when watching Trump’s Liberation Day and the market chaos that followed.