Is it 1938 as historian Tim Snyder said in a conference in Vilnius? Or maybe 1939? Either way, it is 2024. And we are perilously close to WWIII. The latter part is the contention of Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, it is 2024 and our world order has effectively ended — though most Americans have failed to notice. A mass delusional psychosis has seized America; armchair activism turned to safe spaces turned to ‘diversity committees’ which ended in the greatest wave of anti-Semitism in America in a century (maybe ever). A utopia unmoored, the desperate yearning for perfect balance which might bring us back to the garden we left so long ago — where all ideologies pretend they are taking us. But we no longer even believe in the garden anymore; isn’t everything in our past wicked?

A perfect empty utopia of the moment, no past and no future and tailored over by cheap Chinese slave-labor textiles funded by our budget deficits (our middle class have become a pass-through from the FED and our trillion dollar deficits to the Chinese Communist Party) and our trade deficit ($500,000,000,000 a year, at least, foreign exchange China uses for the most aggressive military buildup in world history).

Sometimes there’s a moment that pierces the nonsense like a laser, and it’s good to witness (see SNL spot below on our problem), but usually we just plunge further into the fog.

WWIII, sponsored by Shein and Temu.

The enemy is cohering. Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Azerbaijan, Belarus. They are working together: Iran supplies drones to Russia, North Korea sends ammunition to Russia, China buys Russian oil, Azerbaijan launders Russian oil for Europe, Belarus hosts Putin’s nukes. They are one massive contiguous landmass, Eurasia Aleksandr Dugin called it 25 years ago but nobody was listening. Robert Kaplan wrote about it once, for the Pentagon, “The Return of Marco Polo’s World”. “As Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres.”

Putin’s Russia is farther along, they are already in a hot war. Their military, bumbling and incompetent two years ago has been honed into a tremendously powerful blunt object as they churn their way towards Kyiv. They are learning, improving, testing new weapons; their entire economy is on a war footing, a footing it likely won’t retreat from. Xi is stronger, he hasn’t started his hot war yet — like a storm cloud that is building on the horizon just out over the waters, gathering power and energy before charging inland. Iran has lit the Middle East on fire: Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Yemen and Gaza. Israel is fighting a seven front war.

They seem to be keen to avoid the mistakes of previous wars. Likely they won’t try a “Pearl Harbor” event that galvanizes and energizes the American giant. Leave us buying Shein crap, sending our money to China so they can buy bullets with it. There are outstanding stressful issues on the horizon that I don’t know how they will play out. Taiwan, first and foremost. Likely our unipolar moment ends if China takes Taiwan. From there they will have the control of the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” (Kaplan again) lodged in the South China sea — to project power to the Philippines but really Indonesia. They need Filipino labor (China has a terrible demographic crisis) but more importantly — just like Japan in WWII — they need Indonesian oil and minerals.

Our happy fat days are likely coming to an end, whether we like it or not (or whether we notice or not). But there is a moral rot that has entered America. Positivist ideas have polarized society (like they did in the Weimar Republic). A dearth of discipline. Making sure we don’t repeat our depression of the 1930s, the FED stepped in (in 2008) to give us all a soft landing, turning on the spigot which now they can’t seem to close. It’s pretty dramatic; if I sound discouraged it’s because I am. 25 years on the front lines, fighting every way I could think of (including my novels, my latest a dystopian exploration of the collapse):

Only to find the principles I’ve worked my life to defend emptied of meaning to be filled up with DEI committees and the bitter politics of envy. Oh well, no sense crying over water under the bridge. We fight on — the times ahead are gonna be wild.