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Fundamentally, all wars are over money. That money may be in the form of resources or land or whatnot that are sources of money (prices of whatnot are especially high this year*). Some would argue that there are wars over religion, race, or nationality. True. These are wars over which religion, race or nationality is allowed to have money. War is fought because one (or more) side believes more money is likely to be made in doing so than will be spent in the war's execution. And to an extent, this is true, especially when the money being fought over is underground, as is the case with Middle Eastern oil, African minerals, or cash crops that can be replanted next year, any amount of violence aboveground will do little to diminish the value of the resources below.

Of course, there is the loss of human capital to consider, but often the local labor necessary for purposes of extracting the value from the earth is of an unskilled manual variety, similar or identical to slavery. For purposes of labor of this kind, all vaguely able-bodied humans are essentially interchangeable, and thanks to the high rates of poverty and fertility in the region where such conflicts take place, they constitute an extremely renewable resource.

It is for these reasons that war is less common in and between developed nations of the global North; as diversified post-industrial economies, far more of their net value is located aboveground, where it might be damaged by warfare. A cluster-bomb dropped in Afghanistan won't destroy anything more than say, an entire community, which, probably consisting of rather shoddily-constructed homes erected hastily following prior conflicts, together having a value totaling a few hundred dollars, maybe. Take that same cluster-bomb and drop it in the middle of Paris, France, and you run the risk of damaging something important, valuable, even irreplaceable, like a museum. Millions of dollars of property damage would occur, and priceless works of art might be lost forever, a loss for humanity itself; mankind might even be left bereft of one of Monet's ruminations on haystacks. This would be felt around the world, and be remembered throughout history, unlike the mere annihilation of a few Pashtun families, which wouldn't make the evening news.

Not only that, but the people destroyed the bomb in Paris would likely be far more important than those Afghanistan's blotted out. One herder or farmer trying to eke out a living for his family is essentially as valuable as the next, but among the dead Parisian human capital it is more likely that there was an irreplaceable talent, such as a poet or philosopher.

For these reasons, in the 19th and 20th centuries up through the present, the Great Western Powers have increasingly attempted to restrict their wars to areas of the world where war will not take away anything they value. Even major exceptions to this guiding principle tend to reflect it. In the American Civil War, for instance, fighting was not restricted to, but was focused in the rural and agricultural South, and generally avoided the urban and industrial centers of the North. Similarly, in the Second World War, the largest part of the fighting and the largest part of the dying were on Russian soil and Russian lives, which have no other known use.

In response, the peoples native to some areas where the World Powers have chosen to stage their wars have objected with an unconscionable form of violence: Terrorism. Terrorism is a violation of nearly every rule of warfare:

Terrorists have no geographical homeland. All decent and proper wars are between countries, so that when the elites of one country initiate hostility towards another, those of the second country know which country's civilian population to punish. In response to terrorism, one is forced to take an educated guess as to which country terrorists currently reside in, and pepper it with high-yield explosives in hopes of killing them, or failing that, their families.

Terrorists have inexcusably consistently refused to wear uniforms as sensible armies do, so as to identify themselves as ethically murderable, and distinct from the population of native laborers whom they curiously resemble and to whose interest our military incursion was obviously meant to serve.

Terrorists have an alarming tendency to focus their murderous efforts in a different fashion than that of civilized countries as outlined above. They refuse to restrict their activities to the military, that section of our lesser classes specifically reserved to receive the brunt of whatever rancor we may incur in our efforts to spread liberty, democracy, and free-market neoliberal economics to an ungrateful world. Instead, they deliberately choose points of attack laden with people who have not consciously chosen to expose themselves to enemy attack. Worse, these points of attack are often catastrophically wealthy-tourist-heavy.

Etc.

With regards to war, it would seem to make sense that a country could begin to insulate itself from conflict by industrializing and subsequently diversifying it's economy, a process the World Powers are eager to expedite. Oddly enough, however, the developing world seems to shy away from the tried-and-true formula of putting themselves in crippling debt to foreigners and allowing them to take control of the local economy.

With regards to terrorism, combating it with conventional military forces is akin to repeatedly firing a shotgun into the ground in hopes of killing the gopher that's ruining one's lawn. More effective means of stemming the tide of terror will tend to sound familiar to anyone concerned with the economy; they mainly involve reducing the degree to which our economy is dependent on doing things that make people very angry. The classical example is reducing economic dependence on oil, which, it has been noted, has a tendency to be under irritable people's feet.

Furthermore, the US economy, in particular, has the problem of consuming even more than it produces (which is, it is easy to forget, considerable). It is conceivable that the somewhat rapacious nature of it's economy makes the US a target; giving the developing world a better share of the resources being extracted from it (the better to not have war waged on it as much as outlined above) might improve opinions of the US, as would the population not being staggeringly obese (perhaps a better modifier would be "waddlingly" wink . There are ways in which this deficit may be addressed. The simplest way would be for the American people to be slightly less maddeningly materialistic and consumptive, and thus spend somewhat less.

Assuming Hell does not, in fact, freeze over, ways must instead be found to increase further the American worker's productivity (already quite high). The main area of untapped productive potential may be the 1% of the American population currently incarcerated. Keeping such a large segment of the working-age populace in prison requires a substantial investment of capital (though theoretically not as substantial as the economic losses that would be incurred from the crimes they would be committing were they not behind bars - otherwise, why are we keeping them there?). Some of that investment may be recouped with higher-education programs for prisoners, which could increase inmates' potential as human capital after, or even before, release. Capital invested in such a venture may well have a higher payoff than had it been invested in students of traditional institutions of higher learning: prisoners make better students than students do, as prisoners have more free time for study, and unlike college students, prefer studying to hooking up. Alternately, capital could be extracted by simply increasing the use of forced prison labor.

*Whatnot is a relative of allspice, found in parts of southern Asia. Valued as a food preservative, and, in parts of Italy, an aphrodisiac, whatnot was a source of violent conflict between Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders in the 1550's.