Form: Mini Essay

—“Q: Curt: What’s your analysis of the potential for ww3?”–
Three questions:
1) Why do these threats still exist?
2) What is the potential for these threats to manifest as war?
3) What is the potential for a domestic or civilizational reset after a WWIII?

ANSWERS

I’ll answer them in reverse order I think – because it’s just easier.

3) Resets of the category we seek, are almost always the result of war. In fact, war – whether domestic or foreign – is the primary opportunity for reset throughout history because war produces the incentives to replace the internal networks of elites and dependency that emerge in times of peace. So, in some sense we should welcome that war – as long as it is non-nuclear. Nuclear war is effectively suicidal. The USA is now restoring its nuclear arsenal slowly. But not our production capacity of arms and ammunition – which is the hole in our power projection and defense. And the USA is in an arms race with China at the moment and china at least in raw numbers is winning. This is compounded by the fact that those numbers china is producing must only defend the route from the middle east past india to the south china sea, and the greater region around the south china sea. Meanwhile the USA must project power worldwide. And the most recent number I’ve seen, is that the USA can only respond to less than half of the requests for military aide it recieves today. So the chinese power is concentrated tand the USA’s power is distributed. In other words, the USA’s defensive strategy of distance and isolation is profoundly valuable, but it’s power projection is then costly.

2) The potential is almost certain if it is not carefully managed. The USA is ‘carefully managing’ that potential quite successfully … so far. However, if (a) Russia wins her expansion (b) China wins her expansion (c) Iran continues her expansion through proxies (d) or even if North Korea aggresses against a population-collapsing South Korea, the subsequent incentives for every other party to expand into war would multiply such that postwar postcolonial pressures to reform borders by war instead of by peaceful settlement would, as far as I can discern, result in an extraordinary volume of regional wars. The USA maintains that ‘careful managing’ by preserving the harsh reality that any such war would be far worse for an opponent than for the USA, and that a loss by that opponent would end their regime. In that sense the USA/NATO strategy would be best served by exhausting each of these remaining agrarian (despot) empires as much as possible while demographic developmental and economic reality erode them from within. However, if Russia, china, and iran conspired to launch their military initiatives at once the USA would have little choice because spread that thin, the forces are insufficient. And this is what I assumed would happen and appears to be happening – with the caveat that China has begun to understand that without the USA as a market it’s economy is over.

I should note that one of the strategies of that warfare the anglosphere (USA, UK, AU, NZ, and CA) – the Five Eyes Alliance – do have the choice to ‘pick up stakes and go home’, and leave the world to war and chaos without us. In fact, that is the optimum solution for the USA and the Anglosphere as well. As long as we have freedom of the seas between us, the rest of the world can descend into chaos and it will do nothing except benefit us. And that conflict would ‘end’ the globalists both economically and politically and very likely academically.

1) WWIII is almost certain because we did not finish WWI and WWII as the end of agrarian empires and the transition to industrial nation states. As long as some empires exist (Russia, China, Iran-wanna-be), and elites can capture wealth through corruption at vast scales, the elites that run those empires will seek to preserve and expand them out of little other than self defense – no people will tolerate hostile rule unless a perceived external threat.

In January of ’22 I said repeatedly that (a) Putin would invade, and (b) that the unification of the russian, chinese, iranian (n korean) block would for occur, and that they would unify against the postwar consensus built and funded by the USA. In other words, we would ‘return to world historical normal’. (c) That it wasn’t clear that the US/NATO strategy of ‘outlasting’ the remaining agrarian empires would fail, either. So that it was, is, a question of whether the USA can retain it’s ‘civilization-state’ or ‘domestic empire’ depending upon whether you have a positive or negative view of the federal government, long enough that the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese attempts at empire collapse from natural forces of modernity. (e) And as an aside, there is a non zero chance that the other civilization-state of India will continue to ascend the world stage without developing into a hostile force as well. This seems doubtful on the one hand given their culture and their existing government, but the necessity of india to contain the risk of islam is substantial and Modi is the first step in that process. India on the other side of that conflict may look very different from india today.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation

PS: curious what my friend RL @whatifalthist would say. Usually we don’t differ much.