«The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. I wonder what that means. The last thing written is in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters: they are coming. There is nothing more.» -J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
The wind blows against the ship, something has changed.
There is a rumour in the air, it mubles quietly into the hearts and souls of all the people’s of the west, it blows and races through the corridors of the White house and Versailles. Politicians try in vain to cointain it, the Hoi Polloi cannot muster the strenght to stand, they are blown away. There is a war coming, we cannot hope to steer clear from it’s way.
At this everyone is privy to the geopolitical situation of the world, the asinine reality of the 2010s in which the west (and with it most people living in it) ignored the issues on the world in order to satisfy itself with base materialism has been scattered to the winds. We know from our vantage point in 2025 that the 20’s of this century are far more disparate then the happy 20s of the last century. We know now that this 20’s (and probably 30’s too at this pace) are going to be ones of poverty, struggle, madness and necessity.
Why and How do we find ourselves in this situation
Of course, after ascertaining that there is this spiritual «malaise» plaging the world we must ask why did we come into this situation. The first question to ask is the following one; It’s war an unescapable phenomenon?. Yes, it is, unequivocally, war is the natural state of manking, it is a spiritual fact that grows man into his burgeoning self, after the spiritual fact comes the material one, one which Malthus laid it’s monolithic discovery, as resources are finite, and man requires said resources for sustinance, when mankind achieves a certain «critical mass influx» people naturally see war as means to achieve said finite resources, thus self regulating itself back to managable levels. War as Marinetti put it, in both the spiritual and material sense is the higene of the world.
The societal flows between peace and war.
That being said, how can we study the material conditions of the global populace; as David-Hackett Fischer in his book the «Great wave: price revolutions and the rythm of history» there are certain metrics tha can aid us to understand this process:
As we can see infationary practices in the economy, which delude the real value of the coinage , and thus the living standard’s of the nation and it’s people. Inflation is an economical process which only aid’s the wealthy class of a society, as it allows them to keep more wealth for themselves, as the real folk of a nation, it’s working class are thus thrown into a state of despair dragging themselves through the mud to get meager scraps and keep trudging along in a society whose managerial class do not care for them.
We also see the divorce of finance with the real economy, as we see the s&p 500 hit record highs when most people see their living standards recede lower and lower.
These «shrinking of the pie» then pushes the whole society into a tail spin, people start to understand that it’s ruling elites have fail them, or worse yet, that they never had their best interest in mind, and thus see to other, more vital and young aspirant elites to take care of the society and deliver them to better pastures.
We can see traces of this fact in the french revolution, for example, in which, the king, after a long period of inflation, economical recession and miss-management of the state, saw the power of the crown fall into the hands of the revolutionaries, and promptly be destroyed engulfing Europe into a period of war that lasted for almost two decades.
Thucydides, the geopolitical case for war
After delving into the societal case for the incoming war, we must also inquire about the current geopolitical state of the world, and how the superpower game affects the future prospects of conflict. To understand why war between states comes to pass we must study the ancient texts of the greeks, more concretely those of Thucydides.
Thucydides was an ancient Athenian historian and general, whose real politik and great power conflict thesis reverberate unto today, Thucydides «Dialogue of Melos» is renowned for it’s insights into real politique, and the debacle of the Athenian empire and it’s destruction under the hand of the Spartans.
The Dialogue of Melos is a dramatized retelling of the siege of Melos, in which the Athenian empire, during the Peloponisian war, set to the torch the city state of Melos, a neutral city state in the conflict, under the pretext and justification of nothing more than brute force. We can see paralels of this under the Trump administration, and the pretenses of the American state to steal Greenland out of the Danish Crown’s hands, this fact of course plus the backstabing of Ukraine in order to further its economical imperialistic pretenses under the «Rare Earths» deal pushed the previously gelded and vasallized European Union to start rearming itself, we can the come to the conclussion that threatening wether is your own allies or peaceful third parties, is never a good idea. As with Melos, which on the long term costed the Athenians their international reputation, and then their empire, the Greenish gambit might be the first domino in the dismantling of the American hegemony.
Another, and perhaps more important insight of Thucydides is «thucydides trap»;
«The Thucydides Trap, or Thucydides’ Trap, is a term popularized by American political scientist Graham T. Allison to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon.»
We see through history that when the world hegemon, see’s it’s power be threatened by a potential rival, it’s often in its best interest to squash it in war as early as possible so it’s chances of victory are as high as possible. This fact of life is one that we have seen in a myriad of ocassions; Spain against England, England against France, France against the Germans, the Germans against the Americans and Soviets and so one. The only time this has not happened in the last 500 years has been the Cold war between the Soviets and Americans.
The rising superpower of our age is China, an empire that has already stablished itself politically all over the Asian continent, as well as in Africa, and economically all around the world, this fact plus a resurgent and naturally drawn to expansionism Russia, present a great threat to America and we already have seen them knawing at the borders of the American empire, with the Ruso-Ukranian war and China closing around Taiwan.
The question is, it is time for America to strike? or has the strength gone over to the other side, and they are the in-waiting masters of the world, or will a resurgent militarized Europe reasert its place in the sun?