These kinds of breakdowns were troublesome enough in the economic landscape of the early and mid-20th century, when the last global wars occurred. This is why countries hold strategic reserves of things like helium, pork, rare earth metals and oil, coal, and gas. Sometimes - such as occurred in the Siege of Leningrad during World War II - the supply of food can be cut off. Many goods, intermediate components or resources - including energy supplies like coal and oil, components for military hardware, etc, may become temporarily unavailable in certain areas. Shipping becomes more expensive due to higher insurance costs, and riskier because it's subject to seizures, blockades, ship sinkings. In a global war, global trade becomes a nightmare. And it takes gallons and gallons of oil to ship all the resources and components back and forth around the world, until they are finally assembled in China, and shipped once again around the world to the consumer. These raw materials are turned into components - memory manufactured in Korea, semiconductors forged in Germany, glass made in the United States. Aluminum from bauxite, perhaps mined in Brazil. Plastics forged out of oil, perhaps from Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or Venezuela. It incorporates metals like tellurium, indium, cobalt, gallium, and manganese mined in Africa. An example: The laptop I am typing this on is the cumulative culmination of thousands of hours of work, as well as resources and manufacturing processes across the globe. Today consumer goods like smartphones, laptops, cars, jewelery, food, cosmetics, and medicine are produced on a global level, with supply-chains criss-crossing the planet. More importantly, nobody in power wants to be the cause of Armageddon. Sure, accidents could happen, but the possibility is incredibly remote. Instead, the great powers now fight proxy wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan (the 1980 version, that is), rather than letting their rivalries expand into full-on, globe-spanning struggles against each other. The possibility of complete annihilation provided a huge disincentive to launching and expanding total wars. It's no coincidence that the end of the last global war coincided with the invention of atomic weapons. So what's changed? Well, the first big change after the last world war was the arrival of mutually assured destruction. Instead, we must look at the factors which have led to the reduction in war and try to conclude whether the decrease in war is sustainable. But we should not just assume that the past is an accurate guide to the future. Steven Pinker's studies into the decline of violence reveal that deaths from war have fallen and fallen since World War II. This is certainly a view that current data supports.
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