Postmodern Medieval Pandemonium with AI & Nukes

We often seemed trapped in the past regardless of how far we peer into the future. It’s part of human nature. We trust in what we know. Or, rather, we believe in what we think we know. So future world wars may be more kinetic than World Wars 1 and 2 with missiles, rockets, cyberattacks, killer robots, swarms of AI drones, economic strangulation, space combat, EMPs, and total mobilization of the nation by the state. Then as the losing side, or rather those who fear to be losing, grow desperate, they resort to messy chemical and biological weapons. At some point they unleash nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. The other side does the same almost simultaneously. Humanity and most life in Earth ends in a scared fury of omnicidal madness.

A future world war may resemble the European Wars of Religion more than the Second World War. Nation-state regimes lose their power and status as stateless-nations, religious groups, and ethnic tribes reassert themselves. In addition, other non-state actors such as terrorist groups, transnational corporations, mercenary groups, criminal gangs and cartels, and private militias continue to assert themselves. The Westphalian System of governance breaks down as a neo-feudal, neo-medievalist world with current technology rises into primacy. Instead of world government, even a democratic world republic, we get a hodgepodge of overlapping, quarreling jurisdictions waving many flags.

Instead of the gigantic, multinational alliances that arose from the Second Hundred Years War (1688-1815), a global network of successive, overlapping wars, to dominate the World Wars (including the Cold War) of 1914-1991, humanity may revert forward to a postmodern revival of feudal anarchy under loose, nominal post-imperial empires that shun the term, “empire.”

The new Axis of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Myanmar, Venezuela, Cuba, and a few other countries are not a formal alliance. Each has their own strategic agendas and differing timetables as when to go to war. The NATO countries and their allies in the Indo-Pacific are not ready for war. No one country is ready for war. Not enough weapons and ammunition are stockpiled. Many weapons systems may already be obsolete. The economies are not on any war footing. The demographics of so many nation-states do not favor populations united by strong patriotic nationalism but riven by political, ethnic, and religious polarization. The polarization is increasingly ugly and violent. With some exceptions such as North America and India, national populations are in demographic decline. Not even the despots of Russia, China, and Iran can fully mobilize their populations in the same way Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could theirs. Even the North Koreans, which are perhaps the closest to an all-out slave state, have problems controlling their people. And over in the States? The Americans came together despite their racial and class divides after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 only to fall apart further and further from one another as they did in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and now in the wake of one insurrection after another from 2011 onwards. 

The Great War was preceded by a succession of overlapping local and regional wars. Its end was followed by even more local and regional wars, including civil wars and revolutions. These continued nonstop across the planet from the Central Powers surrender in 1918-1919 to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The wars around the world were finally recognized as a global war by late 1939-1940. We are seeing the same pattern of spreading conflagration today. With the doom-and-gloomers prophesizing civil wars, coups, revolutions, and national breakups in America, Russia, and China, today’s Big Three, perhaps a future world war will include opposing alliances on the opposite side of multiple civil conflicts. 

We don’t know for sure. Predictions often go awry with unexpected developments and interventions. Other factors such as global climate disruption, solar megaflares, giant asteroid or comet impacts, the AI singularity, and new pandemics can overturn any and all expectations into pandemonium and extinction. Hopefully we humans will muddle thru this Age of Chaos without triggering an omnicidal world war. If we fail to muddle thru, well, then, as far as nomenclature goes, any future global conflict will likely be called World War III or World War 3. Yes, the Cold War was a world war in which millions died, but the nuclear superpowers never descended into all-out MADness. The Global Long War on Terror was and is still fought all over the planet, but is too small and fragmented in scale of time and place to be in the same category as a true world war. Regardless of names, however, there might not be many left to speak and write the name of tomorrow’s possible apocalypse. Now, breathe. For if we can just get thru these next few years…

William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 27 December 2023
Tuesday 6 February 2024

Copyright © 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.