A. B. Abrams on Today’s Great Power Conflict for The Saker Blog
“A. B. Abrams is the author of the book ‘Power and Primacy: A History of Western Intervention in the Asia-Pacific.’ His second book covering the history of the United States’ conflict with North Korea is scheduled for publication in 2020.
He is proficient in Chinese, Korean and other East Asian languages, has published widely on defence and politics related subjects under various pseudonyms, and holds two related Masters degrees from the University of London.”
The world today finds itself in a period of renewed great power conflict, pitting the Western Bloc led by the United States against four ‘Great Power adversaries’ – as they are referred to by Western defence planners – namely China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. This conflict has over the past 15 years escalated to encompass the military, economic and information spheres with global consequences – and appears to be coming to a head as signs of peaking tensions appear in multiple fields from military deployments and arms races to harsh economic wars and a harsher still information war.
While the term ‘World War III’ has been common since the 1940s, referring to the possibility of a global great power war on a greater scale than the first and second world wars, the Cold War between the Western and Soviet Blocs was at its height as total, as global and as heated as the prior conflicts. As weapons technology has evolved, the viability of a direct shooting war has diminished considerably – forcing major powers to seek alternative means to engineer their adversaries’ capitulation and assert their own dominance. This has been reflected in how the Cold War, and the current phase of global conflict some refer to as ‘Cold War 2’ have been distinct from the first two world wars despite the final objectives of the parties involved sharing many similarities. I would thus suggest redefining what a ‘world war’ is and acknowledging that this current phase of global conflict is every part as intense as the great power ‘hot wars’ waged in the first half of the 20th century.
Had the intercontinental range ballistic missile and the miniaturised nuclear warhead been invented twenty years earlier, the Allied Powers may have needed to rely more heavily on economic and information warfare to contain and eventually neutralise Nazi Germany. The Second World War would have been very different in nature to reflect the technologies of the time. When viewed from this paradigm, the Cold War can be seen as a ‘Third World War’ – a total conflict more vast, comprehensive and international than its predecessors stretched out over more than 40 years. The current conflict, or ‘World War IV,’ is ongoing. An assessment of prior ‘great power wars,’ and the unique nature of the current conflict, can provide some valuable insight into how warfare is evolving and the likely determinants of its victors.
As of 2020 it is clear that great power conflict has become almost as heated as it can short of an all-out hot war – with the Western Bloc applying maximum pressure on the information, military and economic fronts to undermine not only smaller adversaries such as Venezuela and Syria and medium sized ones such as North Korea and Iran, but also China and Russia. When exactly this phase of conflict began – sometime after the Cold War’s end – remains uncertain.
The interval between the third and fourth ‘world wars’ was considerably longer than that between the second and the third. This was due to a number of factors – primarily that there was no immediate and obvious adversary for the victorious Western Bloc to target once the Soviet Union had been vanquished. Post-Soviet Russia was a shade of a shadow of its former self. Under the administration of Boris Yeltsin the country’s economy contracted an astonishing 45% in just five years from 1992 (1) leading to millions of deaths and a plummet in living standards. Over 500,000 women and young girls of the former USSR were trafficked to the West and the Middle East – often as sex slaves (2), drug addiction increased by 900 percent, the suicide rate doubled, HIV became a nationwide epidemic (3) corruption was rampant, and the country’s defence sector saw its major weapons programs critical to maintaining parity with the West delayed or terminated due to deep budget cuts (4). The possibility of a further partition of the state, as attested to multiple times by high level officials, was very real along the lines of the Yugoslav model (5).
Beyond Russia, China’s Communist Party in the Cold War’s aftermath went to considerable lengths to avoid tensions with the Western world – including a very cautious exercise of their veto power at the United Nations which facilitated Western led military action against Iraq (6). The country was integrating itself into the Western centred global economy and continuing to emphasis the peaceful nature of its economic rise and understate its growing strength. Western scholarship at the time continued to report with near certainty that internal change, a shift towards a Western style political system and the collapse of party rule was inevitable. The subsequent infiltration and westernisation was expected to neuter China as a challenger to Western primacy – as it has other Western client states across the world. China’s ability to wage a conventional war against even Taiwan was in serious doubt at the time, and though its military made considerable strides with the support of a growing defence budget and massive transfers of Soviet technologies from cash strapped successor states, it was very far from a near peer power.
North Korea did come under considerable military pressure for failing to follow what was widely referred to as the ‘tide of history’ in the West at the time – collapse and westernisation of the former Communist world. Widely portrayed in the early 1990s as ‘another Iraq’ (7), Western media initially appeared to be going to considerable lengths to prepare the public for a military campaign to end the Korean War and impose a new government north of the 38th parallel (8). Significant military assets were shifted to Northeast Asia specifically to target the country during the 1990s, and the Bill Clinton administration came close to launching military action on multiple occasions – most notably in June 1994. Ultimately a combination of resolve, a formidable missile deterrent, a limited but ambiguous nuclear capability, and perhaps most importantly Western certainty that the state would inevitably collapse on its own under sustained economic and military pressure, deferred military options at least temporarily.
The fourth of the states that the United States today considers a ‘greater power adversary,’ Iran too was going to considerable lengths to avoid antagonism with the Western Bloc in the 1990s – and appeared more preoccupied with security threats on its northern border from Taliban controlled Afghanistan. With a fraction of the military power neighbouring Iraq had previously held, the presence of an ‘Iranian threat’ provided a key pretext for a Western military presence in the Persian Gulf after the Soviets, the United Arab Republic and now Iraq had all been quashed. With the new government in Russia put under pressure to terminate plans to transfer advanced armaments to Iran (9), the country’s airspace was until the mid 2000s frequently penetrated by American aircraft, often for hours at a time, likely without the knowledge of the Iranians themselves. This combined with a meagre economic outlook made Iran seem a negligible threat.
While the Cold War ended some time between 1985 and 1991 – bringing the ‘third world war’ to a close – the range of dates at which one could state that the ‘fourth world war’ began and the West again devoted itself to great power conflict is much wider. Some would put the date in the Summer of 2006 – when Israel suffered the first military defeat in its history at the hands of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Using North Korean tunnel and bunker networks, command structures, weapons and training (10), and bolstered by Iranian funding and equipment, the shock of the militia’s victory, though underplayed in Western media, reverberated among informed circles across the world.
Others would place the date two years later in 2008 during the Beijing Summer Olympics, when Georgia with the full support of the West waged a brief war against Russia – and Moscow despite harsh warnings from Washington and European capitals refused to back down on its position. Post-Yeltsin Russia’s relations with the Western Bloc had appeared relatively friendly on the surface, with President George W. Bush observing in 2001 regarding President Vladimir Putin that he “was able to get a sense of his soul,” and predicting “the beginning of a very constructive relationship.” Nevertheless, signs of tension had begun to grow from Moscow’s opposition to the Iraq War at the UN Security Council to President Putin’s famous ‘Munich Speech’ in February 2007 – in which he sharply criticised American violations of international law and its “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations.”
It could also be questioned whether, in light of what we know about Western support for separatist insurgents in Russia itself during the 1990s, the war against the country ever ended – or whether hostilities would only cease with a more total capitulation and partition and with the presence of Western soldiers on Russian soil as per the Yugoslav precedent. As President Putin stated in 2014 regarding continuing Western hostilities against Russia in the 1990s: “The support of separatism in Russia from abroad, including the informational, political and financial, through intelligence services, was absolutely obvious. There is no doubt that they would have loved to see the Yugoslavia scenario of collapse and dismemberment for us with all the tragic consequences it would have for the peoples of Russia” (11). Regarding Western efforts to destabilise Russia during the 1990s, CIA National Council on Intelligence Deputy Director Graham E. Fuller, a key architect in the creation of the Mujahedeen to fight Afghanistan and later the USSR, stated regarding the CIA’s strategy in the Caucasus in the immediate post-Cold War years: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvellously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power” (12). The U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare’s director, Yossef Bodansky, himself also detailed the extent of the CIA’s strategy to destabilize Central Asia by using “Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiralling violence and terrorism” – primarily by encouraging Western aligned Muslim states to continue to provide support for militant groups (13).
Much like the Cold War before it, and to a lesser extent the Second World War, great powers slid into a new phase of conflict rather that it being declared in a single spontaneous moment. Did the Cold War begin with the Berlin Blockade, the Western firebombing of Korea or when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which accelerated the move into a nuclear arms race. Equally, multiple dates were given for the opening of the Second World War – the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war two years prior, the Japanese Empire’s attack on Pearl Harbour and conquest of Southeast Asia which marked the first major expansion beyond Europe and North Africa in 1941, or some other date entirely. The slide into a new world war was if anything even slower than its predecessors.
The shift towards an increasingly intense great power conflict has been marked by a number of major incidents. In the European theatre one of the earliest was the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002 and subsequent deployment of missile defences and expansion of NATO’s military presence in the former Soviet sphere of influence, which was widely perceived in Russia as an attempt to neutralise its nuclear deterrent and place the Western Bloc in a position to coerce Moscow militarily (14). This threatened to seriously upset the status quo of mutual vulnerability, and played a key role in sparking a major arms race under which Russia would develop multiple classes of hypersonic weapon. Their unveiling in 2018 would in turn lead the United States to prioritise funding to develop more capable interceptor missiles, a new generation of missile defences based on lasers, and hypersonic ballistic and cruise missiles of its own (15).
Another leading catalyst of the move towards great power confrontation was the Barak Obama administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ initiative, under which the bulk of America’s military might and considerable assets from the rest of the Western world would be devoted to maintaining Western military primacy in the Western Pacific. This was paired with both economic and information warfare efforts, the latter which increasingly demonised China and North Korea across the region and beyond and actively sought to spread pro-Western and anti-government narratives among their populations through a wide range of sophisticated means (16). These programs were successors to those sponsored by Western intelligence agencies to ideologically disenchant the populations of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union with their own political systems and paint Western powers as benevolent and democratising saviours (17). Economic warfare also played a major role, with efforts centred around the ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’ trade deal – or ‘Economic NATO’ as several analysts referred to it – to isolate China from regional economies and ensure the region remained firmly in the Western sphere of influence (18). The military aspect of the Pivot to Asia would reawaken long dormant territorial disputes, and ultimately lead to high military tensions between the United States and China which in turn fuelled the beginning of an arms race. This arms race has more recently led to the American withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, which paves the way for deployment of American long-range missiles across the Western Pacific – all with China and North Korea firmly in their crosshairs (19).
It is arguably in the Middle East, however, where the new phase of global conflict has seen its most direct clashes so far. The nine-year conflict in Syria, although far less destructive or brutal, provides ‘World War IV’ with something of an analogue to the Korean War in the Cold War. The conflict has united the Western Bloc and a wide range of allies, from Turkey and Israel to the Gulf States and even Japan (which funds the jihadist-linked White Helmets) (20), in an effort to overthrow an independent government with close and longstanding defence ties to Russia, North Korea, Iran and China. The conflict has seen North Korean, Russian, Hezbollah and Iranian special forces (21) among other assets deployed on the ground in support of Syrian counterinsurgency efforts, with all of these parties providing considerable material support (the Koreans have built and fully staffed at least three hospitals as part of large medical aid packages and continue to be a major supplier of arms and training) (22). China too, particularly concerned by the presence of jihadist militants of Chinese origin in Syria, has played some role in the conflict – the exact details of which remain uncertain with much reported but unconfirmed (23).
Syria’s insurgency involving a range of jihadist groups, at times united only by their intent to end the secular Syrian government, have received widespread support from the Western Bloc and their aforementioned allies. This has involved both material support, which according to State Secretary Hillary Clinton included turning a blind eye to Gulf countries’ considerable assistance to the Islamic State terror group (24), and active deployments of special forces from a wide range of countries, from Belgium and Saudi Arabia to Israel and the U.S. The U.S., European powers, Turkey and Israel have at times directly attacked Syrian units in the field – while Russian reports indicate that close Western coordination with jihadist groups has been used to facilitate a number of successful attacks on Russian positions (25). The conflict in Syria arguably represents a microcosm of the macrocosm which is a new world war – one which pits the Western Bloc and those which support the Western-led order, both directly and through local proxies, against three of its four ‘great power adversaries’ in the field.
‘World War IV’ is unlikely to come to an end for the foreseeable future, and its final outcome remains difficult to predict. Much like in the Cold War, the Western Bloc retains considerable advantages – today most notably in the field of information war which allows it to extensively shape perceptions of the vast majority of the world’s population. This has included the demonization of Western adversaries, the whitewashing of Western crimes both domestically and internationally, and portraying westernisation and increased Western influence as a solution to people’s frustrations from corruption to economic stagnation. This has been a key facilitator of the pro-Western protests engulfing states from Sudan and Algeria to Ukraine and Thailand. Economically too, only China among the Western Bloc’s major adversaries has posed a serious threat to Western primacy. Indeed, it remains highly questionable whether the other three could survive economically under Western pressure without Chinese trade and economic support.
Russia has made a considerable economic recovery since the 1990s, but remains a shadow of its former self in the Soviet era. The country’s leadership has succeeded in reforming the military, foreign ministry and intelligence services, but the economy, legal system and other parts of the state remain in serious need of improvement which, over 20 years after Yeltsin’s departure, cannot come soon enough. Even in the field of defence, the struggling economy has imposed serious limitations – and in fields such as aviation and armoured warfare the country is only beginning to slowly go beyond modernising Soviet era weapons designs and begin developing new 21st century systems (26). On the positive side, the country does remain a leader in many high end technologies mostly pertaining to the military and to space exploration, while Western economic sanctions have undermined the positions of Europhiles both among the elite and within the government and boosted many sectors of domestic production to substitute Western products (27).
In the majority of fields, the ‘Eastern Bloc’ have been pressed onto the defensive and forced to prevent losses rather than make actual gains. While preserving Venezuelan sovereignty, denying Crimea to NATO and preventing Syria’s fall have been major victories – they are successes in denying the West further expansion of its own sphere of influence rather than reversing prior Western gains or threatening key sources of Western power. Pursuing regime change in Venezuela and Ukraine and starting wars in the Donbasss and in Syria have cost the Western Bloc relatively little – the Ukrainians and client states in the Gulf and Turkey have paid the brunt of costs for the war efforts. Material equipment used by Western backed forces in both wars, ironically, has largely consisted of Warsaw Pact weaponry built to resist Western expansionism – which after the Cold War fell into NATO hands and is now being channelled to Western proxies. Libyan weaponry, too, was transferred to Western backed militants in Syria in considerable quantities after the country’s fall in 2011 – again minimising the costs to the Western Bloc of sponsoring the jihadist insurgency (28). The damage done and costs incurred by the Syrians, Hezbollah, Russia and others are thus far greater than those incurred by the Western powers to cause destruction and begin conflicts.
Syria has been devastated, suffering from issues from a return of polio to depleted uranium contamination from Western airstrikes and a new generation who have grown up in territories under jihadist control with little formal education. The war is a victory only in that the West failed to remove the government in Damascus from power – but Western gains from starting and fuelling the conflict have still far outweighed their losses. In the meantime, through a successful campaign centred around information warfare, the Western sphere of influence has only grown – with further expansion of NATO and the overthrow of governments in resource rich states friendly to Russia and China such as Libya, Sudan and Bolivia. Commandeering the government of poor but strategically located Ukraine was also a major gain, with states such as Algeria and Kazakhstan looking to be next in the Western Bloc’s crosshairs. Thus while Syria was saved, though only in part, much more was simultaneously lost. The damage done to Hong Kong by pro-Western militants, ‘thugs for democracy’ as the locals have taken to calling them, who have recently turned to bombing hospitals and burning down medical facilities (29), is similarly far greater than the costs to the Western powers of nurturing such an insurgency. Similar offensives to topple those which remain outside the Western sphere of influence from within continue to place pressure on Russian and Chinese aligned governments and on neutral states seen not to be sufficiently pro-Western.
While the Western Bloc appears to be in a position of considerable strength, largely by virtue of its dominance of information space, which has allowed it to remain on the offensive, a sudden turning point in which its power suddenly diminishes could be in sight. From teen drug abuse (30) to staggering debt levels (31) and the deterioration of party politics and popular media, to name but a few of many examples, the West appears at far greater risk today of collapse from within than it did during the Cold War. A notable sign of this is the resurgence of both far right and far left anti-establishment movements across much of the Western world. Despite massive benefits from privileged access to third world resource bases, from France’s extractions from Francophone West Africa (32) to the petrodollar system propping up American currency (33), Western economies with few exceptions are very far from healthy. A glimpse of this was given in 2007-2008, and little has been done to amend the key economic issues which facilitated the previous crisis in the twelve years since (34). The West’s ability to compete in the field of high end consumer technologies, particularly with rising and more efficient East Asian economies, increasingly appears limited. From semiconductors to electric cars to smartphones to 5G, the leaders are almost all East Asian economies which have continued to undermine Western economic primacy and expose the gross inefficiencies of Western economies. The result has been less favourable balances of payments in the Western world, a growing reliance on political clout to facilitate exports (35), and increasing political unrest as living standards are placed under growing pressure. The Yellow Vests and the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are all symptoms of this. With very real prospects of another economic crash in the coming decade, in the style of 2008 but likely much worse, Western economies are expected to bear the brunt of the damage. Their ability to survive remains in serious question. Effects of a crash on North Korea, Iran, Russia and even China will be far less severe. While the previous crash hit Russia particularly hard (36), an economic turnaround from 2014 and the insulation provided by Western sanctions leave it far less vulnerable to the fallout from a Western economic crisis.
Ultimately China appears to be setting itself up for an ‘Eastern Bloc’ victory – a coup de grace which could see Western gains over the past several decades reversed and the power of the West itself diminished to an extent unprecedented in centuries. While the United States reluctantly outsourced much of its high end consumer technologies to East Asian allies during the Cold War – namely Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – China is going for the jugular of the Western world’s economy with its ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative, which will see some critical remaining fields of Western technological primacy shift to East Asian hands. The Coronavirus, bombings in Hong Kong, the trade war, and the wide range of tools in the Western arsenal for destabilisation can at best slightly delay this – but cannot prevent it. In a globalised capitalist economy the most efficient producers win – and East Asia and China in particular, with its Confucian values, stable and efficient political systems and world leading education (37), are thus almost certain to take over the high end of the world economy.
Much as the key to Western victory in the Cold War was successful information warfare efforts and isolation of the Soviet economy from the majority of the world economy, the key to determining the victor of ‘World War IV’ is likely lie in whether or not Beijing succeeds in its attempt to gain dominance of high end technologies critical to sustaining Western economies today. This is far from the only determinant of victory. Efforts to undermine the effective subsidies to Western economies from Central and West Africa, the Arab Gulf states and elsewhere in the third world, and to ensure continued military parity – to deter NATO from knocking over the table if they lose the game of economic warfare – are among the other fields of critical importance. Based on China’s prior successes, and those of other East Asian economies, the likelihood that it will meet its development goals is high – to the detriment of Western interests. The result will be an end to world order centred on Western might – the status quo for the past several hundred years – and emergence in its place of a multipolar order under which Russia, Asia (Central, East, South and Southeast) and Africa will see far greater prominence and prosperity.
(1) Menshikov, S., ‘Russian Capitalism Today,’ Monthly Review, vol. 51, no. 3, 1999 (pp. 82–86).
(2) Yulia V. Tverdova, ‘Human Trafficking in Russia and Other Post-Soviet States,’ Human Rights Review, December 11, 2016.
(3) Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London, Penguin, 2008 (Chapter 11: ‘Russia Choses the Pinochet Option: Bonfire of a Young Democracy’).
(4) ‘The Death of the MiG 1.44 Program; How the Collapse of the Soviet Union Derailed Moscow’s Fifth Generation Fighter Development,’ Military Watch Magazine, September 16, 2018. ‘Russia’s Sukhoi Unveils Images from Cancelled Next Generation Fighter Program,’ Military Watch Magazine, December 17, 2019.
(5) Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, President of Russia, Kremlin, December 4, 2014.
Bechev, Dimitar, Rival Power: Russia’s Influence in Southeast Europe, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2017 (Chapter 1).
(6) Kristof, Nicholas D., ‘WAR IN THE GULF: China; Beijing Backs Away From Full Support of the War,’ New York Times, February 1, 1991.
(7) ‘Thaw in the Koreas?,’ Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, vol. 48, no. 3, April 1992 (p. 16).
(8) ‘Time to End the Korean War,’ The Atlantic, February 1997.
(9) Axe, David, ‘Iran Desperately Wants This Fighter Plane,’ The National Interest, January 4, 2020.
(10) ‘Hezbollah a North Korea-Type Guerrilla Force,’ Intelligence Online, No. 529, August 25–September 7, 2006. “North Koreans Assisted Hezbollah with Tunnel Construction,” Terrorism Focus, The Jamestown Foundation, vol. III, issue 30, August 1, 2006.
Dilegge, Dave and Bunker, Robert J., and Keshavarz, Alma, Iranian and Hezbollah Hybrid Warfare Activities: A Small Wars Journal Anthology, Amazon Media, 2016 (p. 261).
‘Bulsae-3 in South Lebanon: How Hezbollah Upgraded its Anti-Armour Capabilities with North Korean Assistance,’ Military Watch Magazine, September 3, 2019.
(11) Kremlin, President of Russia, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, December 4, 2014.
(12) Congressional Record, V. 151, PT. 17, U.S. Congress, October 7 to 26, 2005.
(13) ‘American political scientist: Western Intelligence used Azerbaijan to export terrorism into Russia,’ Panorama, May 30, 2015.
(14) Kremlin, President of Russia, Plenary session of St Petersburg International Economic Forum, June 17, 2016.
(15) Gregg, Aaron, ‘Military Industrial Complex Finds a Growth Market in Hypersonic Weapons,’ Washington Post, December 21, 2018.
(16) Mullen, Mike and Nunn, Sam and Mount, Adam, A Sharper Choice on North Korea: Engaging China for a Stable Northeast Asia, Council on Foreign Relations, Independent Task Force Report No. 74, September 2016.
Cartalucci, Tony, ‘Twitter Targets Hong Kong in US-backed Regime Change Operation,’ Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, October 15, 2019.
Park, Kyung-Ae, ‘Regime Change in North Korea?: Economic Reform and Political Opportunity Structures,’ North Korean Review, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2009 (p. 23-45).
(17) ‘Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,’ New York Times, December 26, 1977.
(18) Wu, S., ‘Why the TPP is an “economic NATO,”’ Huffington Post, October 19, 2015.
(19) Ait, Abraham, ‘US Withdrawal From the INF Treaty Isn’t About Russia,’ The Diplomat, October 25, 2018.
(20) al-Jablawi, Hosam, ‘The White Helmets Struggle Without US Funding,’ Atlantic Council, June 11, 2018.
(21) ‘North Korean Special Forces in Syria; A Look at Pyongyang’s Assistance to Damascus’ Counterinsurgency Operations,’ Military Watch Magazine, June 10, 2018.
(22) ‘DPRK Ambassador affirms his country’s readiness to support health sector in Syria,’ Syrian Arab News Agency, July 25, 2016.
(23) Pauley, Logan and Marks, Jesse, ‘Is China Increasing Its Military Presence in Syria?,’ The Diplomat, August 20, 2018.
Hemenway, Dan, ‘Chinese strategic engagement with Assad’s Syria,’ Atlantic Council, December 21, 2018.
(24) ‘We finally know what Hillary Clinton knew all along – U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding Isis,’ The Independent, October 14, 2016.
(25) ‘Inquiry Into Death of Russian Lt. Gen. Asapov Shows Data Leaks to Daesh – Source,’ Sputnik, September 26, 2017.
‘Drones used by Syrian terrorists “require advanced training” – Russian MoD in response to US,’ Sputnik, January 9, 2018.
(26) ‘Five Next Generation Russian Combat Jets We Will See in the 2020s: From MiG-41 Hypersonic Interceptors to PAK DA Stealth Bombers,’ Military Watch Magazine, January 1, 2019.
(27) Twigg, Judy, ‘Russia Is Winning the Sanctions Game,’ National Interest, March 14, 2019.
(28) Hersh, Seymour, ‘The Red Line and the Rat Line,’ London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 8, April 2014
Angelovski, Ivan and Patrucic, Miranda and Marzouk, Lawrence, ‘Revealed: the £1bn of weapons flowing from Europe to Middle East,’ The Guardian, July 27, 2016.
Chivers, C. J. and Schmitt, Eric and Mazzetti, Mark, ‘In Turnaround, Syria Rebels Get Libya Weapons,’ New York Times, June 21, 2013.
McCarthy, Andrew C., ‘Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Debacle: Arming Jihadists in Libya . . . and Syria,’ National Review, August 2, 2016.
(29) ‘Militants Bomb Hospital, Torch Quarantine Center as Hong Kong Braces for Virus Outbreak,’ Military Watch Magazine, January 27, 2020.
(30) ‘Class A drug use “at record levels due to young people”,’ BBC News, September 20, 2019.
(31) Buchholz, Katharina, ‘Industrialized Nations Have Biggest Foreign Debt,’ Statista, February 7, 2019.
(32) ‘France’s Colonial Tax Still Enforced for Africa. “Bleeding Africa and Feeding
France,”’ Centre for Research of Globalization, January 14, 2015.
Bart Williams, Mallence, ‘The Utilization of Western NGOs for the Theft of Africa’s Vast Resources,’ TedxBerlin, January 26, 2015
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfnruW7yERA).
(33) Wong, Andrea, ‘The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret,’ Bloomberg, May 31, 2016.
Spiro, David E., The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets, New York, Cornell University Press, 1999.
(34) ‘Banks have not learnt lessons of 2008 crisis, says Gordon Brown,’ Financial Times, October 31, 2017.
‘A decade after the financial meltdown, its underlying problems haven’t been fixed,’ The Guardian, August 6, 2017.
(35) ‘Fearing U.S. Sanctions Over Su-35 Purchase: What is Behind Indonesia’s Interest in New F-16V Fighters,’ Military Watch Magazine, November 6, 2019.
Rogan, Tom, ‘The very political reason Qatar buys different fighter aircraft from Britain, France, and the US,’ Washington Examiner, February 25, 2020.
Krishnan, Rakesh, ‘Countering CAATSA: How India can avoid American arm twisting,’ Business Today, March 6, 2019.
(36) Gaddy, Clifford G. and Ickes, Barry W., ‘Russia after the Global Financial Crisis,’ Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol. 51, no. 3, 2010 (pp. 281-311).
(37) Hobbs, Tawnell D., ‘U.S. Students Fail to Make Gains Against International Peers,’ The Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2019.
Turner, Camiilla, ‘Chinese students are two years ahead of their white British peers by age 16, report finds,’ The Telegraph, July 30, 2019.
This is quite an essay. Regarding the west’s information war, it is not invincible. Once a tiny crack appears in their facade of goodness their propaganda falls to pieces. Keep patiently exposing their lies and vicious intent.
Other than their will and ability to destroy countries, their big weapon seems to be control of much of the world’s financial system and threats against everyone else to support their inhumane sanctions. I think something is seriously faltering with this now. The debt market has been under pressure for a long time. It is in a super bubble. I see a major catastrophe is near and by design. Will the nations of this planet permit those who designed this criminal financial system to dictate what will replace it?
I’m getting a little old and am anxious for the final act to be played out. I think it is really going to hurt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AHCfZTRGiI
First Cold War, as this article refers to as WWIII, never ended. US hostilities never stopped. NATO expanded and wars in former Soviet zones were supported.
The Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union December 26, 1991
Officially, it ended. The USA and USSR came together, sofned some documents, and agreed it was over. USSR/Russia believed it was over, believed the USA would abide by their agreement. But the USA never quit the Cold War, and it has continued unabated, and so « Cold War 2.0 » is merely the continuation of the original Cold War, which the USA never ended.
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“Mod Policy:
“1) Absolutely no use of CAPITAL LETTERS (as this is considered SCREAMING). Abbreviations (DPRK, USA, UN, BBC, etc.) are, of course, allowed.” (from the moderator.)
In fact WW II never ended to begin with.
Check the facts.
No peace treaty of Germany with 54 nations, since the western occupants of germany always intentionally prevented that, till today, yes after 3.10.1990 onwards
The so called cold war was the continuation of WW II by other means.
And after the destruction of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (“dissolution is the wrong term) they needed a new pseudo-enemy to continue WW II, hence they invented the war on terror.
Also don’t forget the events of October 1993 in Moscow and that the currentconstitution is a colonial tool writted by CIA staff and similar “advisors”.
RSFSR is not a country, and how can the renamed RSFSR be considered one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Russia
In 1992, the inscription was changed from RSFSR (‘РСФСР’) to the Russian Federation (‘Российская Федерация’) in connection with the change of the name of the state.[2] In 1993, the Communist design was replaced by the present coat of arms (see the top of this article).
Moscow 1993 – the pictures to how the current RF constitution got introduced:
(warning, disturbing footage)
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=moscow+october+1993
Николай Стариков о Конституции РФ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErP6LZD0KQk
A very good article (but really long!). The author does a great job in compiling the array of situations and scenarios that comprise the geopolitical situation today.
Here’s an astute example:
Yes. That pretty much sums up the western sponsored protests in India being supported with fake human rights outrage day and night by the BBC and their Qatari understudies on Al Jazeera. Isn’t it interesting that these western sponsored protests (Soros who openly admitted his support in a speech at Davos) were crushed in one day right after Trump left India? Was that because the West got something it wanted behind closed doors and Modi got the go-ahead that the useful idiots the West was using to pressure India could be disposed of? or was signal from Modi to the West that we can put your protestors out of business at will? If western coverage of the crackdown finishes it will be the former if western propaganda outlets continue to whine and show more fake outrage for Muslims (people the West murders and drone every week) then it will be the latter scenario.
The same western sponsored fake protests in Iran and Iraq evaporated the minute those respective governments decided to close them down. The Hong Kong protests were different and succeeded because there were internal incentives of the local population to participate because their very personal security was threatened by the attempt by Beijing to able to grab anyone in Hong Kong that they deemed offensive. This caused real mass opposition and the local billionaires (who were the real targets of the new extradition law) didn’t back down in supporting these protests because it was existential for them and that also was the perception of common Hong Kong citizens.
I think the author is probably too optimistic with some of his conclusions: western high technology outsourced to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan cannot be cloned or duplicated by China in a timeframe fast enought to effective: consumer CPUs and other high tech components must increase in performance at such a rate that by the time you’ve matched a CPU spec and ramped up production, western equivalents 2-3 generations ahead will already be in the market and at a much lower cost.
Too much is in flux to be sure of such specifics. What is sure is that the elites in West have badly screwed up by dangerously angering their own populations with oppressive social engineering, reality bending lies about sexuality and attacks on the family unit and trying to normalize their own elite class perversions (like pedophilia, sexual ambiguity, etc) onto the productive normal classes of their populations. That as well the continued destruction of middle class income, purchasing power and ability to save is what will collapse Western power if the don’t fix it, not a relatively weak external force like China who isn’t even interested in global confrontation but just their own attempts at hegemony in Asia.
India has a history of communal violence.
“According to official figures, there were 6,933 instances of communal violence between 1954 and 1982 and, between 1968 and 1980, there were 530 Hindus and 1,598 Muslims killed in a total of 3,949 instances of mass violence. In 1989, there were incidents of mass violence throughout the north of India.’
Yes Bill you’re right, on first glance, it does appear that India has had a history of communal violence, but let’s examine your figures. I’m not sure whose official figures your quoting, but nonetheless, assuming they’re true, you’ve just made case that India has a negligible communal violence problem:
Over the period you mention 1968-1980 India had an average population of 614 million people, your figures indicate roughly 2000 murders/deaths due to communal violence over a 12 year period. That works out to less than 0.027 communal murders per 100,000 population, which is a ridiculously low number when you consider that the average murder rate of the US is 200 times higher per 100,000 population.
The current overall murder rate for India has very steadily been falling year over year to reach a low in 2019 of only 3.6 murders per 100,000 population (which is roughly half of Russia’s murder rate of 7 murders per 100,000), 0.027 communal murders per 100,000 makes up only 1/100 of all the murders that occur in India. This means communal murder is negligible in India.
Truthfully, communal murders in Pakistan is also very low if you exclude the massacres against the Shi’a community (my community is Shi’a, although I am not Pakistani but Dari speaking). That’s because the Sunni majority of Pakistan has wiped out all non Muslim minorities from 15-20% after partition to less than 2% today. As a Shi’a I feel safer in India than in Pakistan. As a human being, I feel safer in India than either the United States which has a murder rate twice as high as India and an open climate of hatred towards Shi’a and anyone they perceive as being Iranian. By those standards I’d be safer in India than Russia which has twice the general murder rate of India.
Can we park this now and get back on topic?
“Today we Hindus need to exhume dead bodies of Muslim women from their graves and rape them”
These remarks were uttered in a rally organized by Yogi Adityanath, CM of an Indian state, Uttar Pradesh, with 40 million Muslim population.
Wow. If true, what a whackjob.
Most importantly, it would be interesting to know how many agree with his statement.
May I suggest that you have not the southeast users what you’re talking about. The protests in India are not “western created”. That are because the Modi regime has been so totally incompetent at governing that it is now dependent on communal polarisation to keep power. Through Modi’s first term Muslims were lynched on a small scale and economically marginalised. Now the economy is, mostly due to Modi’s mismanagement and experiments, in free fall. The Modi regime has lost one state after another in local elections. At least one key Hindu fascist ally, the Shiv Sena, has defected to the anti Modi side. Now Modi has nothing except anti Muslim violence to justify his rule. The start of that was a law that is specifically against the secular Indian constitution, giving citizenship to non Muslim refugees. It’s not a law in isolation: the next law in the pipeline is too make everyone prove his citizenship. That law was already tried in Assam and more Hindus than Muslims couldn’t prove their citizenship, so now the idea is to automatically grant Hindus citizen status and disenfranchise Muslims. Also, the protests are leaderless, and that is very important because the Modi regime bought off both the Shia and Sunni leadership, but ordinary Muslims have ignored them. And the protests aren’t restricted to Muslims. Huge numbers of Hindus, especially the young, have joined in them. And far from being “crushed”, they are ongoing.
I assume that you are not Indian. It would probably be better for you to ask a few Indians before talking about things you do not know anything about.
@biswapriya
You are entitled to your opinion, but they just opinions.
In that past you’ve openly accused Saker of being a liar (the word “liar” was the exact word you used in your comment to Saker) based on no facts other than your conviction that your opinions and inferences were facts. That article in question was a well thought out analysis by Saker about why he believed Aircraft Carriers were obsolete.(Language removed.Do not insult a fellow poster,please.It’s good to post your truth.But not to attack other posters on the blog.MOD)
I’m pointing to facts that Soros has openly supported the protests and condemned your government, given Soros machievellian track record of destroying entire economies and funding ‘colored revolution’ fake protests to destabilize elected governments and flogging a globalist agenda, that’s a great indication that these protests are externally supported, organized and funded. Couple that with the fake sympathy the western propaganda BBC has shown the protestors and the scenario outlined by author Abrams in quote I emphasized fits like a shoe.
I rather think that the A-Z empire lost the initiative in the earlier part of the 21st century. They are weaker now than in the period 90s and 2000s. After NATO had pushed up to the Russian frontier there was nowhere else to go. Either a land invasion of Russia which has proven to be a very dubious proposition judging by past invasions. So there was a stalemate, which continues to this day. Moreover, regime change in Ukraine didn’t quite work out as planned. The dogged resistance in the Don Bas and the heavy defeats of the Ukie army in Ilovaisk and Debaltseve by the Don Bas militias, confirmed the widely spread belief that the Ukie Army had no stomach for the fight. There have been no more general offensives since 2015, apart from neo-nazi raids and shelling. Additionally, the people of Crimea exercised their democratic right to self-determination by voting for reunification with Russia. Like most colour revolutions this one resulted in a failure and disenchantment. The vote for Zelenski clearly demonstrated that the Ukrainian people wanted an end to war and a peaceful transition to normality. Only the oligarchs and neo-nazi fanatics want to carry on with a hopeless war. But judging from recent remarks made by Kolomoisky even this is doubtful.
Again in 2015 ISIS the AZ’s foreign legion was on the verge of victory in Syria, until the arrival of the Russian airforce turned the tide against the US/Saudi funded and armed Jihadists.
Every colour revolution which has taken place has lead to a deterioration of those states in which those ‘revolutions’ were launched. People tend to learn the hard way that promises made by foreign interlopers don’t actually make things better. Slowly but surely the momentum of the hegemonic offensive is being slowed down, contested, brought to a halt, lacking both a purpose and will to push on the the final objective, an objective which becomes more unrealistic as time passes.
It would appear the the empire is not as strong as it would appear, and this becomes increasingly apparent. How did Lenin describe Imperialism ”A colossus with feet of clay.” About right.
A very coherent and convincing argument.
But I think it understates to a very considerable degree the costs of failed US and crony military adventurism over the past 30 years, from Iraq to Libya to Syria to Ukraine to Yemen to Venezuela.
Financial and economic costs in the trillions.
Political and diplomatic costs.
Loss of credibility and prestige.
Domestic destabilisation through deteriorating living standards, increasing alienation and huge unassimilable refugee flows.
Unruly satellites like Turkey and Saudi Arabia have gone into the military adventurism business on their own account, with equally ill starred results, and this is continuing apace.
It was all supposed to be so easy. Assad was supposed to be deposed in 6 months at the outside. Ditto Georgia/ Ukraine/ Libya and elsewhere. But none of these adventures brought the planned benefits, and the costs have been off the scale. This will only become truly apparent with the passage of time.
The points you make are all valid. However I believe that it is a grave mistake to think that the survival of the US is absolutely essential.
The people who control the US at the moment are not interested in controlling this country or that one. They want to control them all and if the destruction of the US is required to achieve that aim then so be it.
I believe that the elites have already moved on to their next host.
Yes. In the 21st century, with international money, the power to buy real-estate anywhere in the world, and the ease of international travel, the rich can simply relocate their assets and themselves, and leave their host(s) behind them. Especially given the tendency of the ultra-rich not to care about the rest of the People of the World.
IMO this is probably the biggest conundrum : absolute mobility, and by extension, impunity.
…which raises the question : if there were a nuclear war, with nuclear winter and fallout (etc.) are there places on this earth which would be less affected ? Like certain latitudes maybe south of the equator, out in the vastness of the Pacific ocean maybe ? Or closer to the south pole ? Places where the super rich could relocate, « away from it all » ?
Excellent overview of events. A small event was not mentioned in the balance: the increase of the educational level on the Eastern side and the corresponding decrease on the Western side in the period of 1990-2020. This small detail will accelerate the movement.
I think he underestimates the deteriorating social system in the US. The PC-SJW movement is becoming stronger every day and will probably lead to a Civil War. Watch some Youtube reviews of the 2 CBS Star trek series. These are widely despised as SJW propaganda and terrible to watch. With its “soft power” waning and Trump dispensing with the Velvet glove, the naked mail fist of Western imperialism is getting obvious. The Democratic party seems to be embracing the white Men are evil movement. The social problems combined with the oligarchy’s not being able to find solutions to the economic problems does not bode well for the “West”.
That’s pretty close to my assessment too. If the elitists in the West don’t stop their unsustainable abuse of average people’s values, interests, culture leave aside their destroying their financial opportunities, they are going to bring about a a collapse without any help from China or Russia. The West regularly accuses the Chinese system as being autocratic and politically oppressive, and it is, however, the Chinese government is wise enough to leave peoples natural behaviors and cultural values alone and never to endanger the safety of their children by imposing twisted and harmful sexual values on them. As it stands now, you have a better chance of living a normal family life in China than in the West.
The sick and perverted elements of their elite in the West want to impose their sickness on the rest of society because they’re too emotionally weak to face the fact that they’re unfit and twisted and not just harmlessly different in a continuum of diverse normal human behaviour. Therefore, like the tail wagging the dog, they try to bend and warp society values and even objective science to force their acceptance of their deviant behavior as being normal when it absolutely is not. This idiotic policy is endangering the interests of the rest of the oligarchs, as represented by Trump, Wilbur Ross, mnuchin, etc. and hence you see the overt civil war amongst Western elites in the US, UK and Canada. If the SJW crowd and their hypocritical oligarch sponsors (like Bloomberg, Pelosi, Soros, etc) aren’t sent packing, then I agree, this genteel civil war playing out in their corrupt media, civil service, intelligence agencies and corrupt courts will transform from a genteel virtual civil war to a violent physical bcivil conflict in the streets. This is what the sane elements of the US elite are trying to avoid. Let’s hope that the same triumph of the insane looney American left establishment.
Oh dear, my sentence should have conveyed the exact opposite message, but thanks to autocorrect interference, it is totally garbled.
I tried to write: “Let’s hope the sane part of their elite triumph over the insane looney left russophobic side of the American elite.”
I apologize, for the error I would never want the insane SJW promoting faction of the American elite to triumph over the sane factions of America.
Magistral! A truly comprehensive overview of key players’ geostrategic game.
The ills listed by the author as the more likely to do America in – “From teen drug abuse…” – remind us of Putin’s warning in Munich 2007: that America’s “…hyper use of force in international relations” will recoil and cause it to self-destruct “from within.”
Highly perceptive submission; thank you, A. B. Abrams.
”Over 500,000 women and young girls of the former USSR were trafficked to the West and the Middle East – often as sex slaves, drug addiction increased by 900 percent, the suicide rate doubled, HIV became a nationwide epidemic corruption was rampant, and the country’s defence sector saw its major weapons programs critical to maintaining parity with the West delayed or terminated due to deep budget cuts. The possibility of a further partition of the state, as attested to multiple times by high level officials, was very real along the lines of the Yugoslav model.”
This was precisely the time when things looked so sweet and promising, but Fukuyama’s fantasy didn’t come off. If it had, then our planet would have been utterly destroyed by now, so there was some substance to his notion ”End of History” after all.
”On the positive side, the country does remain a leader in many high end technologies mostly pertaining to the military and to space exploration, while Western economic sanctions have undermined the positions of Europhiles both among the elite and within the government”
Yes, and the main lesson to be drawn is that the West’s ”Elites” are so deluded and arrogant that they believe they can dispose of bribery to get the consent of others. Now, that does work with Ukros and Polaks, so this kind of attitude is not entirely misguided.
”A notable sign of this is the resurgence of both far right and far left anti-establishment movements across much of the Western world. Despite massive benefits from privileged access to third world resource bases, from France’s extractions from Francophone West Africa to the petrodollar system propping up American currency, Western economies with few exceptions are very far from healthy.”
This is what lies at the very heart of presentday conditions of rot and decay throughout the West. Neoliberalism has intentionally destroyed the West’s erstwhile fiscal and industrial base, leaving only the parasitic misappropriation of other peoples’ natural resources and labour output to sustain its ”post-industrial” society. The West’s middle classes and labour aristocracies correctly feel that the Western ”Elites” are ditching them. This explains the emergence of the populist Right in particular.
Bottom line: This Fourth World War will either bring destruction of the West or destruction of the entire planet. Let’s hope for the former outcome.
Only God can destroy the entire planet, and at least a palestinian size portion must remain in the west to attempt the advancement of the evolutionary phase of humans, this much is a known.
I think any destruction here will come from internal sources, as we see what happens when todays peoples lose their job, a percentage of them return with their second amendment rights and go out mass shooting lone ranger style.
The days of organized mass shootings are long gone from the mass gvt surveillance programs.
The future is made up of the same things as today.
Fukuyama truly ate crow. After he had a sizable dish, he wrote two superb books:
The Origins of Political Order
Political order and Political Decay
The last one brings forth in a theoretical framework everything that is happening presently in the US. The books are really sobering. And it moves from the end of history to a cyclicity with no end of history in sight.
And then there is his other book on Trust, which is also fabulous.
I like this author, and there is no doubt that this article is very interesting and creative. Nevertheless, I do not particularly like the article. Why? I have some difficulties to explain my reasons. Probably, it is this academic style which pretends to be above the world. And the fact that the article puts aside the question of moral values and of justice. The West is hollow, a big head with no content.
Of course, a good and profound analysis is very valuable. Nevertheless, it is not the end in itself. There are also things like faith, commitment, dignity. I really hope that the West will be crushed; the peoples of the world deserve this.
These kinds of articles are an aggregation of facts that explain contemporary global happenings. Their main purpose is exactly to serve as academic/scientific papers that are close to the truth as much as possible. Their goal is NOT to moralize or bring the reader into an emotional state. Mind you, both types of articles are welcome. This one is for historical records one can point to.
Taking from others without appropriate compensation is called stealing or robbery depending on circumstances.
No society allows such parasitism, because it can take only a certain amount of it, without getting sick as a social organism. This organism usually has strong immune defenses against the parasitic vermin. If you want to try them, just go rob the nearest petrol station for example, and see what happens.
But again and again, it happens that an infection overcomes the social organism. Dealing with small numbers of criminals from the lower social strata is relatively easy for the social immune system. This task is much harder when the highly positioned groups and individuals start dealing in a wide-spread ‘zero-sum’ transactions. Namely, the immune system does not even recognize these prestigious people as a threat to the society. And as they can quite legally ‘liberate’ much more than a petrol station bandit ever could, they threaten the very foundations of the society. The things begin to happen.
Things like property transfer from the 90 percent of the working society into the pockets of a 0.1 percent minority, to such an extent, that there makes no sense producing anything useful. Who’ll buy it. It makes sense producing papers, money and stocks, for the parasitic minority to buy. They have all the money.
It also happens that an military airplane costs 450 grams of gold for a kilogram of its own weight. The money is created for the state to buy the plane, and this money multiplied as credit, feeds the stock market prices, while sweeping the property from the hold of the rest of citizenship incessantly. Another nice zero-sum transaction.
It happens that the manufacturer of such golden planes, confronted over price, lowers the price of his product for something like 10 million dollars without batting an eyelid. Could it be that it is heavily overpriced?
It happens, as well, that any of the very rarely done audits into the army funds finds such a chaos, that the authorities fear doing them at all. They always find tens of billions missing without a trace. Or they find army purchasing plastic toilet seats for 950 US$ apiece.
This is the economical picture of the damage done by the social parasitism. But this is not the worst consequence of such a social malady. The societies are based upon the egocentric psychology of their members. Such infections are the infections with the limitless egoism actually, and it brings ever stronger social fears into play in all strata of the society. And these fears produce more egoism.
That is where a a point of no return comes and a a society is doomed; it’s external enemies are then simply the last straw.
This is a description of decadence and corruption, what these terms really mean. And if you want to see it with your own eyes, just take a good look at the today’s west.
Fascinating essay. Thank you Mr Abrams!
Well, the Dow Jones has in the last few days seen the sharpest decline from a peak since just before the Great Depression. The shenanigans in the repo market since September show that the dollar-centric system is on ist last legs. I am 99% sure that the East will emerge on top from this.
Excellent read, well argued and logical. Obviously every aspect cannot be covered in a short essay, but a great general assessment.
I’m kind of dismayed not one sentence regarding oil? Michael Hudson provided some interesting info some time ago here:
/america-escalates-its-democratic-oil-war-in-the-near-east/
But this essay leaves us without any information which does perplex me. In fact just yesterday we are hearing reports about an oil glut due to the coronavirus and the price of a barrel of oil dropping and the havoc this could cause nations like Saudi Arabia that needs high prices a 75.00 barrel minimum just to cover their debts.
I really wish Abrams would have given his thoughts and take on the oil and gas industry and how it plays into a ww scenario?
It doesn’t, the talk of saudi oil price and debts are with the understanding that they carry a very low, if any, debt load. Selling off aramco shares brings in enough funds and they could always sell off U.S. treasuries to make up any funding shortfalls.
The larger problem with falling oil prices is covering the U.S. oil industry’s debt obligations and the defaults that would occur in a prolonged price decline environment. Once these company’s go bankrupt they can’t just suddenly come back to life once the economy regains its strength. The smaller ones get bought by the big company’s (sometimes overseas co’s), the equipment is lost at fire sale prices and to then build up the industry takes great pains and sufferings by the remaining players.
You get another monopoly fight of too few co’s making too much money and what took years to build up is gone in a minute, the law gets involved, inefficiency helps drags down the economy, the consumer wins in the short term, but suffers in the long run as the deflationary domino effect reduces assets as the hardship of paying off debt remains the same.
We have the largest consumer debt burden known to mankind right here today, the most homeless people of all time, a questionable health of the citizens and that cost is at an all time high, a virus is threatening everything, the congress cant be reasoned with, even w/in its self, you take away the ability of the consumer to service the debt load and the snowball of problems might not be able to be stopped.
So there is no appetite for world war, the war is among each and every individual fighting each and everyday, that’s future that is here today.
The U.S. is so proficient in Information warfare that it sets up the most vile actions with public approval. I’m convinced that the incessant demonization of Iran combined with our alleged need to have tactical nukes to counter ‘Russian aggression’ is really geared towards setting up an unthinkable genocide. If we ever pull the trigger, the FOX news crowd will be amazed that we waited this long.
We are developing a next generation tactical, nuclear warhead to be launched by submarine. Our evil planners want to do this to avoid Iran’s excellent arsenal of tactical ballistic missiles.
The author overestimates the effects of Amerikastani “information warfare”; most thinking people are aware that every statement by Amerikastan is a lie. The unthinking do not matter anyway. The author also ignores the effects of global warming and the rise of fascist regimes in the “western” and so called “neutral” world, which are far from cooperative with the project of handing over their sovereignty to Wall Street. I suggest that the crash coming to Amerikastan will both be far sooner and more devastating than envisaged, but that China will not pick up the pieces. Why should it?
Careful what you seem to wish for: China’s world dominance. They are not nicknamed the Red Dragon for nothing (see Pope Benedict 16). But God wins, using Mary’s heel.
Is this the Benedict who coddles pedophile priests and child rapists/molesters and the Mafia?
In general I agree with the article. It seems safe at present to assume the following:
1. The West will eventually come down, – within 5, 10, 20 or 50 years, – with Spenglerian certainty.
2. Only if a global hot war can be avoided will it matter which countries will be left standing after this (I do not want to use the word “victor”).
3. If the war will be brought to its (temporary) conclusion in any or all of the other ways it is already now being fought in, – that is informational, economic, cultural, social and environmental, – the interconnectedness as a consequence of globalization will make sure that the negative effects of acts of war will never be limited to the targeted side, but there will always be substantial fallout, effects that will come back to hit the aggressor side in various unanticipated ways.
The world will be messed up.
Therefore the most intriguing question in all this is not which countries or one country will take the lead when all is said and done, but whether or not their governing elites will be made of a moral fiber that enables them to resist the evil tool of usury as their central power source of choice to fortify their internal power.
I would not hold my breath in this respect.
In qualification of my previous comment I would like to add:
If I could chose the most desirable “winner” in this, in the light of the question of usury that I brought up, it would have to be an increasingly christianized Russia in the Orthodox sense, however more or less realistic that may be. Or Iran.
Why do you prefer Iran to Korea and China? Is there a reason? Having spend a lot of time in all three countries, I would strongly favour Pyongyang, Seoul and Beijing.
Shinzozo Abe
The reason I am not primarily thinking of the Asian powers is that I see the evil of usury being expressedly named and damned only in the Orthodox Christian as well as if in other ways in the Islamic tradition. I believe societies that still retain this negative identification of usury in their cultural toolkit will have perhaps a better chance to root out this disease of the human heart that this is. If in Chinese, Korean, in general in East Asian societies there were a cultural identification of usury as a core antisocial phenomenon, these powers also might become the leaders of a better world after the end of the West. I see that Maoism as such must share that position, only it is hard for me to see how this has a concrete effect on the policies actually applied in China since the eighties. As I live in Japan I cannot say anything much about China and North Korea.
It seems that regardless of where power will lie in the future, it is necessary to identify and neutralize this civilizational cancer if we want a more peaceful world. Because ..war is a racket.
I agree with the blog by Mr Abrams. There maybe more to the picture. Consider the following
Corona sympton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=1oLllJ5sSZw&feature=emb_logo
Something to think about
This link is probably more suited to the article “COVID-19 – What people say, and only 5 realities”, mod