[DidacticMind] LRFotS Cato the Uncensored left a highly perceptive and very appropriate comment on a recent poast of mine, in which I took Ornj Boi to task for the sheer insanity of bombing Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites:
We are in WW3 ... just not the hot kinetic part. Think 1937 (now) versus 1942 (2027).
Like the proverbial scorpion on a frog’s back in the middle of the river, the Izzies will violate the cease fire ... it’s their nature.
It is specifically the first part of this comment that I wish to expand upon and discuss further. The basic idea here is that not only is WWIII — or, really, WWIV — now fully underway, but that the West will LOSE, catastrophically. Indeed, there is literally no way the West can win, at all.
First, let us set some context. As anyone who has studied WWI and WWII in any significant detail can tell you, the first led to the second. And, if one studies history in tandem with economics, one will realise very quickly that wars revolve around a trinity of economic power, productive capacity, and social cohesion — of which military power, diplomacy, international relations, and victory in war, are all in effect first derivatives.
It is, of course, correct to state that WWII actually started long before the Nazi German invasion of Poland in September 1939, that precipitated the actual hot global war. Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria a full eight years earlier, and then a series of events, each more alarming and escalatory than the last, resulted in the full-scale outbreak of multi-party hostilities in 1939 itself.
WWI was the result of competing and expansionist empires — primarily the British and German — which rapidly industrialised, and which needed ever greater resources to sustain their substantial growth in populations and production. The outcomes of the first war never quite settled the root causes of the conflict — but instead inflicted tremendous damage upon the old world order of European monarchical empires that had, up until that point, provided a semblance of stability and (relative) peace on the European continent.
The result was a highly unstable world order, with a weakened and deeply aggrieved Germany, a Russian Empire that turned into an atheistic and extremely problematic Soviet Union, and a continent of European powers with unsettled scores and territorial disputes. There was simply no way to settle those problems, which multiplied and amplified upon themselves, without another war. The contradictions created by President Woodrow Wilson’s idiotic insistence on "national self-determination", which applied to some peoples, but not others, made sure of that.
The second war attempted to settle the discontinuities and problems of the first — and largely succeeded, at a truly colossal cost in human life. However, the outcome then resulted in the creation of two mutually hostile and ideologically opposed blocs, which proceeded to divide the world between them.
The world order imposed after WWII proved stable — for a while. But it could never have lasted. As we now know, with the benefit of decades of hindsight and the emergence of substantial data from both American and Soviet archives, the Soviet economic system was in fact an extremely unbalanced one. It created a globe-spanning military with tremendous power — especially in terms of the Soviet blue-water navy and air forces — but this required, according to CIA estimates, an average of 11-12% of Gross National Product spent on its military forces between 1965 and 1979. This alone is pretty bad — and gets worse once one realises that the USSR was never truly self-sufficient in grain production, and could not fully feed itself, despite having some of the world’s most fertile lands under its control in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.
On top of that, the USSR’s output was never particularly large. President St. Reagan Magnus of the Right predicated his foreign policy on his view — formulated over YEARS of thinking and analysis of available data — that the USA, on its own, could outproduce the entire Warsaw Pact.
It turned out that he was right.
If one believes the thesis that economic power determines victory in wars — whether hot or cold — then the writing truly was on the wall, especially once one realises that the USSR’s economy was shot to pieces, riven by the inevitable contradictions of a planned economy with no real ability to support or sustain a consumer-driven, price-based approach to allocating resources.
That is why the Cold War ended — and it is critical to understand that it ENDED, with an amicable and peaceful truce — in 1988, with Gorbachyov’s seminal speech at the UN, it was with a USSR that understood its need to shed the trappings of a burdensome and problematic empire that drained resources from the "core" of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the old Russian Empire, and redistributed them to unproductive peripheries in the Caucasus, the Baltic states, the Muslim central Asian territories, and especially to the resource-drain that was and is Africa.
But, again, that order could not last. The USSR collapsed because, as with all empires, once the economic centre weakens, the peripheries always try to break away. And they succeeded.
On top of that, the US learned all the wrong lessons from the Cold War, and especially from its extremely lopsided victory against a fifth-rate Iraqi army in the First Gulf War. It came away with the view that the US has the right, the obligation, and the moral responsibility, to play Globocop, and that the American Empire has absolute authority over everyone else.
Unsurprisingly, more than a few people take issue with this view. And, as with all empires, the FUSA has overextended itself. This is absolutely inevitable. Every empire, EVER, does exactly the same thing, at one point or another. It appears to be an iron law of imperial administration that nothing is ever quite enough, and empires always expand beyond their productive and cultural capacity to sustain that growth.
When the end inevitably comes, the results are catastrophic. The empire weakens from within, and then faces military disaster from without.
This is exactly what we see today, where WWIII — which, realistically, we should actually call WWIV, given the globe-spanning nature of the confrontation that was the Cold War — has gone active but not fully hot.
The FUSA is no longer the power that it was 30 years ago. Its productive capacity has been outsourced and eaten away. It is no longer capable of sustaining armies and navies in prolonged combat. Today, it seeks to protect the peripheries of an empire that it can no longer afford to maintain, and which suck colossal amounts of resources away from it.
The nation-states that it confronts — note, NATIONS, not empires — are by contrast unified, cohesive, and have a combined economic strength far in excess of what the US can bring to bear. China’s economy now dwarfs that of the FUSA. Its ability to produce all manner of things, ranging from intermediate raw materials like aluminium and steel, to finished goods of all kinds, is second to absolutely none. When measured accurately, using PPP data, its economy is something like US$40T — though one has to strip out the effects of debt in that calculation.
The US, by contrast, has an economy of around US$27T, and roughly 30% of that is made up of non-productive sectors that "make money from money", without actually producing anything of any use.
American economic power rests largely on having the world’s reserve currency, protected by an immensely powerful (even now) Navy and Air Force. The US is primarily a naval and air power. It is NOT, and never really was, a particularly good land power — as the Russians never tire of pointing out, its victory over Iraq in Operation: DESERT STORM, was an anomaly that should never be taken as a guide for future combat operations. The moment these core strengths are seriously challenged or disappear, the American Empire collapses and falls.
American policy-makers are acutely aware of these facts, which is why they have sought to start WWIV, and why the rest of us must suffer through their insanity.
| That would be the Biden Politburo’s work. |
This is why the FUSA has started up the Banderastan War, using Ukraine as a battering ram to try to break apart a resurgent, united, non-imperial Russia. The Russians, for their part, know perfectly well they face an existential crisis, in which they MUST win, or else they will lose their country. Unlike the Soviet leaders of the past, their current generation of leaders has absolutely no interest in expansionism or conquest, but seeks only to engage in trade with its neighbours and economic development within its own borders.
| If that’s what they believe, they should not have openly threatened the Baltic countries as being next on the list. |
This is why, for instance, the Russian government flatly refused to permit the breakaway regions of Georgia — Abkhazia and South Ossetia — to hold referendums to join Russia, even though there is massive popular support for that very thing in both areas. It is why the Russians were content to let Ukraine keep Crimea — which was never a part of any historical nation called "Ukraine" — up until the Maidan crisis of 2014. It is why Russia let Ukraine have the Donbass, but with promises of greater autonomy, through the Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015. And it is why Russia was willing to forgo any further conquest of Ukrainian lands in 2022, provided Ukraine recognised the independence and sovereignty of the breakaway bits of Lugansk and Donetsk that it did not then control.
China, for its part, has never really shown any historical desire to expand — contrary to Western narratives — since something like the time of the Ming Dynasty. It has taken the odd territory or three here and there, but has largely stayed within its currently defined borders, for most of its existence. The Chinese Communist Party has shown no particular desire to take territories in Vietnam, or Mongolia, or central Asia, even though it has overwhelming military and economic power, and could do so at any time if it so chose. Its primary concern is to keep its current population of 1.4 billion people quiescent and stable.
| Not 1.4 billion anymore, possibly never was. But yes, quiescent is their goal. All that social credit stuff might even work for a while. |
Only the FUSA, it seems, wants to change this situation — because the emergence of strong, stable, homogeneous nation-states with serious military and economic power, is a direct challenge to its own imperial ambitions and growth.
So, here we are, just like we were at the beginning of WWI, with an empire seeking to cover the decay and collapse of its centre with ever-greater expansion and resources, and with other powers seeking only to retain their sovereignty.
The result is a globe-spanning economic conflict that has not yet gone fully hot into a military one, but where open war is almost certainly only a matter of time.
And, again, if we consider economic power to be one of the primary determinants of the outcome of wars, the FUSA will lose — and catastrophically so.
This will lead to the shattering of American society, with a level of trauma so deep that it is likely to make what the Russians suffered through in the 1990s, look like a minor blip by comparison. Sadly, most Americans have absolutely no clue what awaits them.
They are about to discover that they cannot win a multi-front war against Russia and China. The Russians, ALONE, outproduce the entire Western military-industrial complex at a rate of about 4:1, and probably more. America’s record of fighting and winning wars over the past 80 years has been piss-poor, to say the least — and it is very clearly totally unprepared for the new realities of war in the age of drones.
| True as of last month or so… |
The Chinese, for their part, are not exactly great fighters themselves — the record of the People’s Liberation Army is actually quite bad. But they have the men, they have the machines, and — most importantly — they have the world’s most monstrously large industrial economy behind them.
| Has the writer been paying any attention to what President Trump’s tariff negotiations internationally and the DOGE team domestically have been accomplishing, not to mention the recessions bills passed and in the works in Congress? |
There is simply no conceivable way in which the US can win this war, which has gone hot in Banderastan,
| …oh yes, the Ukraine. So clever… |
and which the Russians have done their absolute level best to keep contained there. But now we see hotspots breaking out in Iran, as America’s Israeli extension has plainly lost its damn mind
| …way to completely miss the plot there, dude… |
and attacked a country that is ten times larger in terms of population, and three times larger in terms of economic output.
| Iran? Population, yes. But Iran’s GDP is $340 billon versus Israel’s $580 billion, and Israel’s is mostly cutting edge high tech of all sorts, not petroleum products necessarily smuggled out against sanctions. |
American "leaders" do not seem to understand the trap into which they have walked. They do not realise how delicate America’s position is. If the FUSA loses one to two aircraft carriers in the Pacific, or the Indian Ocean, then the entire myth of American military and naval supremacy shatters, instantly — which also means the primacy of the American dollar goes away.
The moment that happens, all those dollars start going back to the US from around the world, as countries and individuals frantically sell off their substantial holdings of American bonds. This will crater bond prices and cause their yields to skyrocket — which will in turn dramatically jack up the price of repaying America’s debt. That last variable already accounts for a TRILLION dollars of the American annual budget, at minimum — and the only way America can pay back the interest on the debt, never mind the debt itself, is by issuing more debt.
| Or there’s growing the economy… The purpose of President Trump’s tariff negotiations is to drive on-shoring manufacturing and increased exports vs imports… |
There is no way out of this cycle of indebtedness, EXCEPT by shedding the trappings of empire, and retreating back to the American continent.
If the FUSA were to simply abandon Europe to its own devices, withdraw entirely from Asia and the Middle East, and leave Israel to wither on the vine,
| …clearly the writer missed what Israel has accomplished on the various fronts of their current war: Hezbollah is prostrate, Iran is badly damaged, the Houthis’ missiles are mostly sound and fury, and 75% of Gaza is being plowed and furrowed while their leadership sips tea and watches from very, very far away. Meanwhile, despite so many off fighting the war, their economy continues as inventive as ever, and they’ve turned their hand to making the war matériel they used to buy from Europe, England, and to some extent America. It won’t be long before their former suppliers will be buying their excess production from them — though if I were in charge I’d announce that those governments that play silly games won’t have the option… |
while letting the various potentates and satrapies of the region to fight amongst themselves, the world would get a whole lot more peaceful, very quickly. The US is a blessed nation, with colossal natural resources, protected on two sides by vast oceans. All it needs is a powerful navy to protect its coasts, and a relatively small army to patrol its borders. It could become the world’s greatest trading and manufacturing hub, simply by sticking to its own business.
Instead, the FUSA has gone and provoked another global war, which will need to settle the contradictions and structural imbalances that came out of the Cold War.
And this time, there will be no "honourable settlement", the way there was in 1988. There will only be crushing defeat and the destruction of the American Empire, resulting in the collapse of the foreign-occupied power that is the FUSA into multiple fractured nations.
| Quickly Nurse — fetch the pink pills! He’s foaming at the mouth and twitching again! |
From those nations, another great power could one day arise — just as happened with Russia. But it will take a whole lot of pain, and an extremely severe dose of humility, before that can happen. 
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