Dickson C. Igwe. Photo: VINO/File

It also developed soft power, leading the world in media, culture, education, ideas, travel, and so on.

War, in spite of its tragic culture of mass death, is a driver of innovation, invention and discovery.

World Wars One and Two saw the establishment of myriad inventions in medicine, engineering, construction, telecommunications, rocket technology, maritime science, aviation, agricultural production and more. World War 2 sped up the invention of the atomic bomb.

Humanity was simple cannon fodder to the powers that drove war: the raw material of war is suffering humanity on both sides of a conflict, soldier and civilian.

Modern warfare targets civilian populations as legitimate for bombs, missiles, and poison gas. Mass murder and genocide is normal in wars in the 21st Century. Terrifying an opposing population is how cruel leaders win wars. The Geneva Convention becomes meaningless in the heat of invasion by a world power.

War is the game of power driven by strongmen, dictators, and democratic leaders with a good dose of hubris plus a strong vision for freedom and democracy: men such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

The USA was the key beneficiary of the economic and scientific drivers of war, however. The USA built the social, industrial and military infrastructure of a devastated Western world after the war ended in 1945. It furthermore established the institutions that controlled world finance and politics. This reality was the reason for American global hegemony.

The USA influenced how the world behaved both socially and economically. In response to American power, the world responded very convincingly in the favour of the USA and the institutions created at Bretton Woods.

World War 2 destroyed Europe, including Britain. War reduced Europe and Russia, including Japan and much of the Asian Pacific, to rubble. Bombs, including two nuclear bombs, left Japan pulverised.

The USA, separated from the rest of the world by two vast oceans, survived. It was unscathed by war. It then won the peace by engineering the idea of Dollar debt as a tool of finance to loan to war-devastated societies. Devastated economies had no option but to adopt US finance, know-how, and power to rebuild. Seventy million people perished in World War 2.