Today’s Newsletter is going to be a little different. I want to just talk about one issue today, and spend a little more time on it. The issue I want to focus on is: with all the international tension going on, how close are we to WWIII—or are we already in it?
Part of the inspiration for this is that yesterday the Free Press had an article entitled “Is WWIII already underway?” which I found an exceedingly intriguing question that I wanted to take on myself. Also, I’ve been listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series, and so I’ve been thinking about this issue in relation to the historical context of the previous two World Wars for a few weeks now.
I won’t pretend to have the answer to whether we’re in WWIII or not (or when it will happen), and I’m certainly not a historian, so I don’t even have “the” answer to why the First and Second World Wars began, but what I want to do here is lay out some causal factors and broad principles that were in play in causing the last two World Wars, and think about what’s different (if anything) now to come to a more refined picture of how to think about the causes of a potential upcoming WWIII.
A fundamental question in thinking about the origin of any particular is the broad question: “Why do wars happen?” Going to war is one of the most terrible things humans do to one another. It’s organized mass murder on a governmental scale, and it’s almost always extremely unpopular, so what makes us do it? I think Ayn Rand gives a mind-blowingly clarifying answer to this question in her essay “The Roots of War” where she talks about the prospect of nuclear war in the mid-1960s. Quoting her at length:
The overwhelming majority of mankind — the people who die on the battlefields or starve and perish among the ruins — do not want war. They never wanted it. Yet wars have kept erupting throughout the centuries, like a long trail of blood underscoring mankind’s history.
Men are afraid that war might come because they know, consciously or subconsciously, that they have never rejected the doctrine that causes wars, which has caused the wars of the past and can do it again — the doctrine that it is right or practical or necessary for men to achieve their goals by means of physical force (by initiating the use of force against other men) and that some sort of “good” can justify it. It is the doctrine that force is a proper or unavoidable part of human existence and human societies.
I think Rand is absolutely right about this. It’s the fact that some people and some countries think that force is a proper way of dealing with one another that leads to one country attacking another.
It’s no surprise then that dictatorships have always been war-starters: if they already believe that they can use force to in-effect declare war on their own citizens, then what’s stopping them from waging war abroad?
Both of the World Wars were started by dictatorships on the rise (in both cases, Germany, and in the Second War, Japan). They had had enough of using force inside their own borders and began using it abroad.
In each case, there were what you might call “test cases” where the dictatorships flexed their muscles in order to gain confidence that they could be more and more bold. Prior to the First World War, the Germans won the Franco-Prussian war, and prior to the Second, they took Austria and Czechoslovakia; likewise, before the Second World War, the Japanese Empire essentially conquered the Pacific Ocean and large parts of China.
Today, we’re in a somewhat similar position. China is a dictatorship on the rise, and Russia is a dictatorship that is fooling itself into believing that it is on the rise. They are both running out of victims within their own country and to distract their citizenry from their own crimes, they have already attempted to grab further victims. In Russia’s case, it's Ukraine, and in China’s, it’s Hong Kong.
Drawing these parallels one-to-one, the odds look good that China and Russia will continue to try their hands at grabbing more territory, and in doing so, they’ll run into the United States—either with NATO in the West or Taiwan in the East—and we will be at war.
However, today, there are certain anti-parallels with the past, particularly in the realm of technology.
In the 20th century warfare, while it technologically advanced far beyond ancient warfare, was still primarily an issue of raw materials and manpower. Technology played a major role, but (if you look for instance at the repulsion of the Nazis by the Soviets) one could overcome severe deficiencies in this realm if one was willing to expend huge amounts of resources and human lives. That is less and less true with every passing day. In the age of autonomous systems that can act more intelligently than human beings for an increasing number of military roles, my expectation is that the primary factors in war will not be resources and manpower, but resources and mindpower. What raw materials do you have, and what is the degree of your intelligence to use them to wage war on your opponents?
The arch-example of this in today’s conflict is Israel within the Middle East. Their population is substantially smaller than Iran’s, but they have successfully defended themselves from them by having access to some of the US’s resources and to their own vastly superior mindpower.
The result of this is that, while dictatorships have always been weaker than free countries, the disparity is only growing. The fundamental source of mindpower is freedom, and therefore dictatorships, by their nature, destroy their own mindpower. This was evident even in the Second World War where German Scientists helped engineer the weaponry that helped the Allies prevail, but it is only more true today.
In terms of bringing us closer or farther from war, the heightened impact of a country’s mindpower is projecting a visible sense of weakness from dictatorships. I’ve called Russia the “sick man of Asia” because it is losing so badly in Ukraine despite frankly low-tech American support. Iran is getting smashed in the war with Israel, and it’s only Israel’s lack of conviction that has prevented Iran’s complete destruction.
Usually, a country will only start a war if it believes it can win (and this is basically my analysis of why the Cold War stayed “cold” rather than descending into WWIII like so many thought was inevitable). The message that has been shown loud and clear to every dictatorship in the world (most strongly in Russia/Iran and least strongly in China) is that they are not clearly stronger than the free countries of the world.
There’s one final consideration that I want to bring up: moral weakness. In the Second World War (though perhaps not in the First—I’m unsure about this), the rise of Nazism’s power was enabled by a long train of appeasement by Western Countries. They did not have the combination of moral knowledge and courage that would have enabled them to act decisively to destroy Hitler and Mussolini before they became serious threats. As Hitler gained more and more power, he started to test the West to see if they would respond with devastating moral and military attacks, and they did not. This empowered him to take more and more land and become increasingly confident that he would not be stopped.
Appeasement has obviously been the story in the Middle East since 9/11. After an attack on American soil of 9/11’s magnitude, a morally confident nation would have leveled the Middle East to the ground, killing anyone and everyone they had to in order to ensure their safety. But today, the perpetrators of the atrocity—Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Iran (etc)—are all intact. And, as I’ve said, China has just successfully taken Hong Kong without any serious Western opposition.
What does this all mean?
If there is to be a World War, I think it will commence when China crosses the strait into Taiwan in an attempt to “reclaim” it as part of China. They will do so because of a combination of the West’s projected moral weakness (in large part substantiated by the Hong Kong incident) because the CCP needs to assert its legitimacy by a populace tired of living under servitude, and because they judge that their own resources, manpower, and mindpower are sufficient to deter a response or cope with whatever response the West brings. I think Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea will fall onto one axis, and the US, NATO, Israel, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea will fall on the other side. I don’t know when it will happen, I don’t even know if it will happen. Maybe it’ll happen because the US falls into a financial crisis or has some kind of major political instability (like a Jan 6 on steroids). I’m not sure.
There are some analyses of WWII that claim that, in effect, the Japanese were fighting WWII since the early 1930s when they invaded China. In this vein, if there is to be a Third World War, then I think Ukraine and Israel are already fighting it on the side of freedom. If there is not, then whatever success they attain will have played a major role in deterring it.
This is really gloomy stuff, and normally I end my newsletters with a piece of unambiguously positive content, so allow me to end by presenting my somewhat firm conviction that, if World War III begins tomorrow, I believe the US will win again. Freedom is a wonderful, powerful thing. It enables happiness, prosperity, and technology. When civilization has fought against barbarians, it almost always wins—and the technological benefits of civilization have never been as important as today. And, when push comes to shove, Americans are fighting for a system that is good and that they know to be good. The same cannot be said of the slaves in Russia or China. That difference makes a difference.
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Thank you for reading all the way to the end. It’s my first longer-form article that I’ve posted on this medium, so now more than ever, I’d appreciate any reactions or feedback you have on the article, how I handled any of the issues within the article, Flight of Phaethon more generally—or anything else. It’s a joy to share these ideas with you.
Read it twice…really interesting and forward thinking.