The tragedy of great power politics

The twentieth century was a great international violence. In world War I (1914 - 18), roughly nine million people died on European battlefields. About fifty million people were killed during World War II (1939 - 45), well over half of them civilians. Soon after the end of World War II, the cold War engulfed the globe. During this confrontation, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies never directly fought the Untied states and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, but many millions dies in proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Millions also died in the century's lesser, yet still fierce, wars, including the Russo-Japanese conflicts of 1904-5 and 1939, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, the Russo-Polish War of 1920-21, the various Arab-Israeli wars, and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88.