It is some years now since a lot of people began imagining the specter of World War III in the near or middle distance. This kind of thinking has been especially common since the U.S., with determination and purpose, provoked Russia to intervene in Ukraine three years ago this coming February. A few weeks later President Biden defended his decision to block the transfer of fighter jets to the Kiev regime by famously remarking, “That’s called World War III.”
It is obvious now, if it wasn’t then, that the Biden White House had already begun playing a reckless game of footsie with the Russians. Kiev now has squadrons of F–16s in the air, Abrams tanks on the ground, and Patriot missiles standing guard. Same story. When, in mid-November, Biden (or whoever makes decisions in his name) gave Ukraine permission to fire long-range missiles into Russia warnings of World War III came quickly. “Joe Biden is dangerously trying to start WWIII,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, said on “X.” You heard similar remarks from the Kremlin and the Russian Duma.
The risk of a new global conflict could scarcely be more evident as 2024 gives way to 2025. A sound survey of our geopolitical circumstances tells us the imperium, in an increasingly desperate state as its hegemony is challenged, is effectively spoiling for decisive confrontations with any power that threatens its longstanding but crumbling primacy. As I have argued severally these past few years, the policy cliques in Washington concluded they had reached a shoot-the-moon moment when they committed the U.S. to the proxy war in Ukraine, an all-out operation to bring down the Russian Federation. We must now read this hubristic ambition as part of a larger story, a worldwide story, a story of war everywhere you look.
But we need to get beyond all thoughts that we stand at the edge of a “World War III” of the kind that scarred the previous century. The phrase obscures more than it reveals. It prompts us to search the past for an understanding of our present, and — as is the case with so much about our new century — the past is not of much use to us. At some point — I would say after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001— we entered uncharted territory. The world is at war, yes, but ours are wars of a different kind by way of the technologies and methods used to wage them — to say nothing of the objectives of those who start them. The nature of power and how it is exercised have been transformed. When taken together, the sheer magnitude of our wars is — and I am ever cautious with this term — unprecedented.
Like it or not we are making history, to put this point another way. And when one’s age is making history there is no repeating or referencing history because the events of the age have no parallel in the past. The two world wars were waged in defense of democracy and ended with negotiations after decisive victories on battlefields. The wars we witness — let us be very clear about this — are destroying democracy, and those waging these wars make it bitterly plain they have no intention of negotiating anything with those they have turned into adversaries. This bodes very badly for the character of the transformation that is to come.
The wars that beset us — in Europe, in West Asia, in East Asia — are many. With or without military engagement, they have already started. But to step back even a small distance, they seem to me to be one. This is a war between a power that has reigned without serious challenge for half a millennium and the powers, non–Western powers, the 21st century thrusts forth in the name of global parity. The one is fading, the other emergent. The world is at war, and it is a war of worlds.
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If I had two words to explain why the world is in so perilous a state, I would have no trouble settling on “the West.” I have made reference to history. Let us have a look around in it in this connection.
The notion of the West is at least as old as Herodotus, chronicler of the Persian Wars, who described the line separating the West from the rest as imaginary. The term acquired many meanings over many centuries. But it was in the 19th century that the West was first understood as a modern political construct. This was in response to the modernization project Peter the Great had set in motion in the early 1700s. So “the West” was defensive from the first, formed in reaction. There was also something unconscious reflected in it. Russia was the East, given to communal forms of social organization and some dark, irrational peasant consciousness, pre–Cartesian and anti–Western to its core — and so an implicit threat, never to be any other.
Here is de Tocqueville, in the first volume of Democracy in America, which he brought out in 1835:
There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time…. Each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.
A dozen years later Sainte–Beuve, the historian and critic, made a more daring case:
There are now but two great nations — the first is Russia, still barbarian but large, and worthy of respect…. The other nation is America, an intoxicated, immature democracy that knows no obstacles. The future of the world lies between these two great nations. One day they will collide, and then we will see struggles the like of which no one has dreamed of.
A short while later Jules Michelet, the celebrated historian, was first to call for “an Atlantic union,” meaning a trans–Atlantic union. Michelet, it is worth noting, made it plain he considered Russians to be sub-human. So it was that by the 1870s “the West” as we know it was fully ascendant, as was “the East” as the Atlantic world’s great Other.
I have no idea why it was the French who proved so prescient on this question, but it is impossible not to be impressed by their foresight. Sainte–Beuve got it right as rain when he predicted a world-enveloping struggle of which no one had yet dreamed. It is our curse that we witness this today, 177 years after he made his observations.
At the same time we have to recognize these writers’ lapses and failures. The civilized-vs.-the-savage theme is prevalent in all these writings, unfortunately. De Tocqueville put this in terms of opposites:
The former [the young United States] combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained with the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword.
This is nothing more than clunky, Westcentric stuff — damaging to the extent it has since marked accepted thinking all the way to Joe Biden’s White House. And the French seers of the mid–19th century failed to see — it could not be otherwise, we have to say — that the collisions of which Sainte–Beuve wrote would take many strange forms and extend far beyond Czarist Russia.
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Craig Murray, formerly a British ambassador in Central Asia and now a committed critic of Western policy, published a piece in mid–December under the headline “Abolishing Democracy in Europe.” In it he described the effective disenfranchisement of a half-million Moldovan voters resident in Russia when presidential elections were held this past autumn. He goes on to consider the case of Georgia, whose president, a French citizen for most of her life, now point-blank refuses to leave office despite her defeat in elections this year. And he then takes up Romania, where courts recently disqualified the winning presidential candidate on the wholly specious grounds that he may have benefited—repeat may have, there is no evidence of this—from social media campaigns favorable to Russia.
Murray is right to treat these events together. All three involve Western-inspired political and institutional corruptions in the cause of installing Russophobic leaders who favor ties to the European Union regardless of popular preferences. This is war by any other name, in its way as vicious if not as violent as the proxy war in Ukraine. It is a theater in the war of worlds that besets us.
West Asia is another. There continues to be debate as to whether Israel runs U.S. policy in the region or whether the U.S. runs Israel as its client. I remain of the latter conviction, as I have made clear here and here. Israel is the great beneficiary now that Syria, a secular nation, has fallen to opportunist jihadists. All signs are that Iran is next on Zionist state’s list. But the imperative here is to understand the startling pace of events in West Asia as part of Washington’s larger quest to bring the entire globe under its imperial control.
Is war with China inevitable? I am not sure this is any longer the interesting question. If we begin counting from the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev in February 2014, it was eight years before a war few could see broke into open conflict. It seems to me that in the China case we are in 2014 or thereabouts.
A year ago a prominent general predicted the U.S. would be at war with the People’s Republic by 2027. Defense News, which reliably reflects official thinking, now reports that war the year after next “is a fixation in Washington.” Just before Christmas, Military Times reported that the Biden White House authorized $570 million in new military assistance to Taiwan; the Pentagon concurrently announced $300 million in new military sales. These are big numbers in the Twain context. Beijing immediately declared its vigorous objections.
Tell me, should we continue wondering whether war with China is inevitable? Or should we conclude that another theater in our war of worlds has already opened?
Yanis Varoufakis, that wise man of Athens, published a piece in Project Syndicate on Dec. 19 under the headline, “The West Is Not Dying, but It Is Working on It.” “Western power is as strong as ever,” Varoufakis begins. But he then argues that the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic clients are destroying themselves from within:
What has changed is that the combination of socialism for financiers, collapsing prospects for the bottom 50%, and the surrender of our minds to Big Tech has given rise to overweening Western elites with little use for the last century’s value system.
Democratic process, in other words, social or economic equality by any measure one chooses to apply, any thought of the commonweal, the rule of law—all have been foregone as no longer of use. This is not the triumph of the governing classes: It is the governing classes destroying their societies and so themselves. Such is Varoufakis’s case in sum.
I could scarcely agree more robustly. The West, just as the old French philosophers anticipated, has engaged its Other this past year and decisively demonstrated its power. But power and strength are two different things, as I have long insisted. Domestic decay, deindustrialization, rampant poverty and inequality, cultivated ignorance, addictions to self-deception, the utter absence of any kind of domestic consensus on either side of the Atlantic: These are passingly of benefit to the conduct and interests of empire. But in the middle distance nations reliant solely on power while neglecting the sources of strength enter a cycle of decline that self-accelerates.
America is losing in our world of wars and our war of worlds. I see no case otherwise if we consider history’s longue durée. But we must immediately note that America has never surrendered in war or negotiated from a position of weakness.
We may count Vietnam an exception, but the Americans did not abandon their war against the Vietnamese until, with the dramatic rise of Saigon in April 1975, they were forced desperately to exit in helicopters from the roof of the American embassy. Maybe Afghanistan is another such case, but in my view Washington continues to wage war by other means against Kabul.
The question remains in the large just as it is in Ukraine: What happens when a great but declining power loses a war, the very most decisive war, it cannot afford to lose? We have not been here before. History is of little use as a guide.
