UN soldiers at a NATO base near Brcko, Bosnia, March 1998 | Juergen Schwarz, Reuters
This 1999 opinion in Foreign Affairs magazine, by Edward N. Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is relevant to today’s conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza:
An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively….
A cease-fire tends to arrest war-induced exhaustion and lets belligerents reconstitute and rearm their forces. It intensifies and prolongs the struggle once the cease-fire ends—and it does usually end….
Read more at Foreign Affairs
Colin Twiggs is a former investment banker with almost 40 years of experience in financial markets. He founded PVT Capital (AFSL number 546090), which provides income and growth strategies to wholesale clients.
Colin also co-founded Incredible Charts and writes the popular Patient Investor newsletter.
Using a top-down approach, Colin identifies macro trends in the global economy and then combines fundamental and technical analysis to evaluate opportunities in sectors that stand to benefit.
Focusing on interest rates and financial market liquidity as primary drivers of the economic cycle, he warned of the 2008/2009 and 2020 bear markets well ahead of actual events.