The Capitalist Peace: Why a Capitalist World Means a World At Peace

[Selatius]

31. There were no huge wars because both sides had nuclear weapons, not necessarily due to trade.

The presence of nuclear weapons made the costs of major wars between global powers so high as to make it pointless to intentionally start one without the extremely high risk of annihilation.

There were, on the other hand, plenty of bloody conflicts on a smaller scale throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Several of those conflicts became proxy wars between the two superpowers, such as in Angola and Viet Nam. Other conflicts were very likely the result of a major superpower disapproving of the government a people elected, such as the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government in 1953 for nationalizing its oil fields or Chile's 9/11/1973 coup that toppled its democratically elected government in favor of the pro-American dictator Augusto Pinochet, a champion of total law-of-the-jungle capitalism and total privatization of social services.