Ken; many "Banana Wars" were in the inter-war years when there was quite obviously no relevance of German actions in Latin America. I wasn't aware that this terms stretched to pre-1914 times in its meaning. There's no equivalent term in German.
According to wikipedia, the Venezuela affair was not covered by the term "Banana wars", which only covers U.S.interventions on soil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
Besides that, the representation of the Banana Wars as being in the interest of the intervened countries was pretty absurd.
The inability to prove alternative outcomes is irrelevant. If that was a requirement to determine that anything in history was wrong, all history would have been perfect. Which is obviously not true.
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I see the disagreement here, and I'm pretty sure about the reason. A part of the disagreement is different culture.
The disagreement stems from a different approach.
A state is just an imaginary concept to serve the people, which become citizens. Rousseau's contract social could be mentioned, as somebody referenced Clausewitz.
A war is in my understanding only won if the sum of its activity can at least be understood to have been positive for the citizens of the state (in comparison to no war). Some wars are kind of pyrrhic wars. You lose even if you win.
It's rather easy to agree that a potentially successful fight for the own sovereignty is worth almost any effort. The problem that we cannot weigh the loss of human lives against any gains (at least not agree on it) can be ignored as sovereignty (=freedom) is such an important value.
Small wars are rarely about your own sovereignty. It's much more difficult to consider wars like, for example, Iraq as a "win" if all gains and losses are factored in.
It's pretty much impossible to reason that small wars in overseas are unavoidable, necessary. It is in fact possible to just sit on your butt. It's not always "the communists/nazis take over the world" time.
We're living in plural societies and used to express our opinions - which happen to be different due to different input and working of our brains. You despise isolationism? OK. It would have been a better choice for dozens of countries in hundreds of instances, but that's ok.
The real core here is that albeit small wars happen more often than major wars, the major wars are usually much more critical (especially for a nation that fights overseas). It's like small wars are luxury. The prestige, ego and possibly your trade opportunities in a small part of the world suffers (for some years) if the major country loses, but that's not really critical.
The major wars are the critical ones, those wars can be about world order, world power balance and sovereignty.
This different impact of small/major wars should be considered just like the different quantity.
I felt it was about time to mention the different relevance as people tend to see the side of the coin that favours their position. For small wars-occupied people this is the quantity of small wars, for major conventional war-occupied people it's the superior relevance of major conventional wars.
The discussion quickly drifted into by comparison pretty irrelevant details, I'm sorry for that. My attempt to point out the inferior importance of small wars wasn't understood.
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