I doubt you’ve been paying much attention, but all the signals are flashing red as to the likely outbreak of World War 3.
I know. The fearmongers and media spinmeisters have been pumping up the apocalyptic imagination for decades now, but this time it’s actually starting to feel a little bit too real.
Especially when within the course of a week high-level defense officials from different countries are issuing almost identical alerts.
On Tuesday the Bundeswehr, or German military command, warned in a leaked secret document that Russia could attack NATO within the next few months, which could set off chain reactions elsewhere.
Almost simultaneously the British defense minister Grant Shapps admonished his country’s Western allies that “we find ourselves at the dawn of this new era – the Berlin Wall a distant memory – and we’ve come full circle, moving from a post-war to pre-war world.” He added that the West could be confronted with conflicts in “multiple theatres including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.”
Finally, a “Pentagon insider” advised on Wednesday that stepped up attacks by Iran and its proxies on global shipping heralded that “we are on the brink of World War 3.”
The myth of World War 3 has historically centered on devastating nuclear exchanges between superpowers, but now the portrayal more accurately resembles the run-up to previous world wars. Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands makes this clear in a recent article in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs..
Unlike the first decade and a half of the 20th century, however, the combustion zone is not the Balkans, but the entire Middle East. And, of course, the chief actor is not Serbia, but Iran.
Not only is Iran backing and arming the Houthis in Yemen, who have accelerated their missile and drone attacks on US Navy destroyers as well as global shipping, they have launched strikes against other Islamic countries such as Iraq and Pakistan, augmenting and complexifying the heightened tensions from the war in Gaza.
But Russia itself is the pièce de resistance for most of the turmoil that has been burgeoning across the Eurasian land mass.
Ever since NATO arms stalled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Putin’s regime has been quietly cementing alliances not merely with China and North Korea but Iran, which has been providing it with highly sophisticated drone technology.
Iran, in turn, has had to worry less about Western sanctions and has become a de facto military partner for Russia’s imperial ambitions that include not just Ukraine, but the Middle East.
This writer recently had a conversation with a retired US intelligence analyst who openly speculated that if Iran did not greenlight Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, Russia might have played a much larger role than the official narrative would countenance.
The classic question of cui bono (“who benefits”?) comes into play here. The brutality of the Hamas incursion was deliberately designed to ignite a war, and it is beyond the doubt that Western preoccupation with the events unfolding since October 7 have significantly displaced attention with what is happening in Ukraine.
The other major consequence of proliferating conflict zones from the Baltics to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is mounting war fatigue within the Western democracies, which in itself opens up a space for even more aggressive action on the part of their adversaries.
Even though its reputation as a global bad actor has become more pronounced over the last three months, its military and diplomatic influence has only been on the upswing. Russia has profited tremendously as well, not simply because the spotlight has been lifted from its atrocities in Ukraine, but because it has cynically been able to profile itself as an arbitrator, peacemaker, and honest broker in the Middle East.
The recent meeting between Putin and a delegation from Hamas in Moscow exposes the scornful game it has been orchestrating all along.
The American neoliberal establishment through its media mouthpieces continues to prate about the rising threat of “authoritarianism” and “fascism” under cover of the vague and overhyped bogeyman of “populism”.
But their paranoia is misdirected. The self-proclaimed Axis of Resistance each day more closely resembles the real historical “axis” of fascist regimes in the 1930s than anyone is comfortable admitting.
Just as an insouciant Europe ever mindful of the devastation of the Great War and an isolationist America allowed the fascist tsunami to swell up until it broke with devouring fury in 1939 and 1941, the West’s neoliberal elites have allowed the current situation to deteriorate to the point that if large-scale fighting actually does come to pass, the West is painfully unprepared.
Unlike the period prior to the outbreak of World War 2, however, the working and middle classes no longer possess the kind of automatic loyalty to the neoliberal globalist project that would be necessary to fight a major war and win.
If your leadership views half the population as “deplorables”, you can rest assured that the latter’s will to defend the country will be weak, or non-existent.
The magnitude of such a danger was underscored by recent public admonitions from top-tier military officials in Europe.
Last week Swedish civil defense minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin and military chief Gen. Micael Byden told its citizenry that they should prepare for war with Russia sooner rather than later.
Today Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, NATO military committee chair, warned that all of Europe not only needs to prepare for war, but that entire populaces need to be prepared to mobilize, much as it did 75 years ago, at an “industrial” level to stand up to imminent aggression.
There, of course, has been pushback by certain European politicians against what they consider the “alarmism” of these military figures. But Western intelligence officials, including those in the CIA and Britain’s MI6, have been steadily and persistently raising alarms in recent weeks. We ignore their opinions at our own peril.
The premier challenge comes down to how we prepare ourself mentally for the dangerous and uncertain future we are now confronting.
It has now been at least two generations since Americans have been stalked by the specter of all out war with tens of thousands of lives at stake. With its growing racial, class, and economic divisions the nation has been preoccupied in a struggle with its own inner demons, primarily in the form of a toxic hyper-partisanship that has brought us times closer to civil war than to facing up to foreign enemies.
But that set of conditions could change overnight, just as it did in September 2001.
The next “world war”, according to most experts, will not be anything comparable to what took place in 1914 and in 1939. More important than the conventional scenario involving standing armies clashing with one another on well-defined battlefields, the next world war most likely will consist of a shifting kaleidoscope of both symmetric and asymmetric battle tactics, including terrorism, drone and missile strike on urban targets, and cyberwarfare.
What is happening in Ukraine right now is a dreadful glimpse into what much of the world could look like before this decade is over.
The picture is not at all pretty, but denial is not an option either. The moral and spiritual corruption of the democratic nations of the West has been on the uptake for almost half a century now, and as the day darkens and twilight descends, the cows are all coming home.
One of the most salient, but overlooked, disclosures in these recent intelligence briefings is the new, heightened, and dangerous collaboration between international terrorist organizations and crime syndicates.
According to Israel’s Mossad which has been co-operating with European intelligence units, Hamas has been planning to expand its terrorist activities beyond Israel and Palestine through alliances witb Scandinavian street gangs and other criminal networks.
The widespread influence of organized crime over the global economy in tandem with the normalization of vice in the West’s moral syllabus, particularly its indifference to illegal drug use and sex trafficking in addition to the see-no-evil approach to financial crimes such as money laundering, is the direct consequence of the expansive corruption of the West’s cultural elites.
As they say about earthquakes on the San Andreas fault, the “big one” could happen as early as tomorrow. When it comes to the next “world war”, tomorrow may already be here.
Are we mentally, spiritually, and of course politically even remotely ready?