This is an article that I have been wanting to write about for years. This has been ravaging around in my head ever since Trump was elected President.
War is coming.
When Trump announced his candidacy for president back in 2015, I honestly thought it was a joke. At the time, I had completely given up on supporting any politician for candidacy. All of the previous politicians that I had supported, and that had won, left me feeling as though I had made a big mistake after their first couple years into office. My mindset at the time of Trump’s announcement was “Fuck it. Maybe he will be like a bull in a China shop and destroy the whole system”. That was my level of disillusionment with the political system. So I tepidly started supporting Trump.
Watching his stump speeches and rallies, something kept sticking out to me that I was not expecting to hear: international trade. Trump constantly brought up how America was getting the shaft when it came to trade deals with foreign nations and he was going to change that. Now, mind you, this was talk that has not been heard from a politician since the first Bush back in the 80s. Not necessarily talk about foreign trade but specifically talk about anything international.
On further inspection it became clear to me why this talk of foreign trade struck me as so odd. George Bush was the last president we had that had any sort of foreign policy whatsoever. Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama were all domestic focused presidents. They had no clear cut foreign policies unless they were forced to develop one, like in the case of Bush Jr. who became solely focused on terrorism because of 9/11. That was pretty much the extent of his foreign policy. President Trump has the exact opposite mindset. He is focused on international matters first and foremost, while leaving the domestic matters to the states, as it should be. This is such a turn from all Presidents for the past 30+ years that I honestly think people do not know how to take it. The American electorate has never experienced a President that was not all in on telling them how to live their lives. President Trump’s main focus has been to get the best deals he can against foreign nations.
This became an object of research and fascination for me. I wanted to see what this whole trade mess was all about. And, boy howdy, did that take me down a rabbit hole that has changed my perspective on the world. It is also why I am absolutely positive that a world war is right around the corner, the likes of which we have never experienced in history.
The first thing to cover is that the vast majority of goods being traded across the world are transported across water. This is something that is a completely obvious and logical fact but seems to be totally lost on most people. When I discuss this concept with people, I am always met with a startling recognition. We live in a world of international trade yet most people never really think about how stuff gets around. Yes, it is all shipping. Moving stuff over the water is the most economical and practical way to get things from point A to point B.
Before the second World War, there was no international trade in any sense that we would recognize today. The world had been ruled by empires for thousands of years. A nation would rise, develop a military, reach out, conquer lands, take their resources, and enrich the central nation. This is how empires operated. In order to bring back the loot from conquered lands, these empires had to develop sprawling armies and navies to protect their lines of travel. A nation would reach out to a conquered land, send out its ships to protect the goods being sent back to the central nation, and fight with pirates as well as other nations who also sent out ships to gather loot. Many naval battles were fought between nations protecting their shipping lanes. This naval warfare was extremely common for hundreds of years.
By the end of WWII, there was only one navy left standing. All of the powerful navies across the world had been destroyed through war. The once daunting powerful British naval empire was in ruins. There was only one navy left standing and that was the American navy. Luckily for the rest of the world, America did not take its quite formidable military and force the rest of the world to become colonies. I know that a great many people say that America is currently an empire. That we have “colonized” the rest of the world with military bases and economic warfare. But they could not be more wrong than if they were to say that the Sun is made of cheese.
After WWII, in a small town in New Hampshire called Bretton Woods, America gathered all of the leaders of the allied countries to hammer out how to function after the destruction of so many countries. America, instead of saying, as had been common of winning nations up to that point, that everyone had to pay tribute to America, we instead did something that had never been done before. We made a deal to help every nation stay autonomous and prosper. It was an extremely generous deal that has led to the longest era of peace and prosperity the world has ever seen.
The Bretton Woods agreement went something like this: America would open up its intact economy to other nations for trade while also ensuring that trade would be protected by America’s navy. This was an extremely generous deal. Extremely generous. It cannot be overstated at how generous America was in helping nations after the wars. Allied nations were able to trade with America, with lopsided deals in favor of the economically ruined countries to help them recover, all while allowing them to focus on rebuilding their countries under the protection of the American military. The allied countries did not have to put resources into defense because America would cover that aspect. That allowed these countries to dump nearly 100% of their gross domestic product into rebuilding. The American military started establishing bases all over the world, not for conquest, but to make sure that supply routes were secured and allied nations were defended.
There was a caveat to this agreement. While the Americans gave the allies a generous deal, it was not completely due to the benevolent nature of America. There was a threat on the horizon to everything America stood for and we needed help to fight it. The Russians, at the end of WWII, had a massive army at the borders of Europe. The European nations were devastated at the time and could not have put up much of a fight if Russia had decided to sweep across the continent with its Army. And America knew that they could not keep enough troops over there indefinitely to keep the communist regime at bay. America would allow lopsided free trade agreements with its allies so that they could rebuild their nations and America would supply defense for these nations until they could get on their feet. In return, America wanted the allied nations to keep communism out of their countries. Stay on our side in the fight against communism and we will protect and feed you, is basically how it went.
This agreement worked out splendidly for everyone involved. It was so successful in rebuilding and pushing back the communist threat that the agreement eventually started including other nations that were not in the original allied group. Over the years, more and more countries signed up for the deal. We would give lopsided trade deals to enrich a country, sign them up for military protection under the umbrella of American defense, and all we asked in return was that they keep communism out of their country.
Then an unexpected event happened that threw this alliance into a tailspin. Communism collapsed. With the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and then the subsequent fall of the USSR in 1991, the Bretton Woods agreement started to fray. All of a sudden, the threat of communism was no longer part of the agreement. That left America with a completely lopsided deal. Here we were providing protection for the world, protecting trade routes, and maintaining trade deals that were not economically beneficial for America all while defending against a defeated enemy that no longer existed. The agreement no longer had any benefit for America.
However, things kept going as normal. For decades after the fall of the USSR, and many decades after the allies had already been built back up economically, America stuck with the Bretton Woods Agreement. But slowly the American people started waking up to what was going on in the rest of the world. We were seeing European countries that we had helped rebuild and defended, giving themselves large amounts of benefits. Free health care, free college, generous pensions and welfare systems, and an attitude of disdain for the American way of life. We were mocked by our previous allies, who we had helped, for not providing our citizens the same benefits that they had. We were scolded for being world police. The European Union established a currency with the direct intention of supplanting the American dollar as the international reserve currency. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, after 9/11, we got tepid support from our allies. Then, to top it off, our European allies started giving aid and shelter to refugees that were adamantly against America. During the invasion of Iraq by the American military, the American people started asking why we were the world police. Movies were made decrying this sentiment. Prominent American newspapers started writing lengthy essays asking what in the world we were doing. Why in the world were we fighting with basically impoverished nations halfway across the world that posed no threat to American soil? American’s attitudes toward the new world order started to change.
History will document that our motive for the middle eastern wars was our need for oil. And they might not be wrong. Any developed nation relies heavily on oil. Without oil, a nation cannot survive in today’s world. America is the greatest consumer of oil and has a dire need to protect our oil trade lines. For decades, America has been dependent on other nations for oil imports. But that, too, changed. In 2018, America became oil independent due to the stunning advances in technology that has allowed fracking to boom in America. America has now absolutely no need whatsoever for foreign oil. We have, at this moment, over 150 years of oil reserves on our own land thanks to fracking.
This has proven to be the breaking point for the Bretton Woods agreement. We have no political or strategic need to protect the world’s trade routes, and it makes no sense to continue giving other nations sweetheart trade deals. We need no other country for our survival. We can make everything in-house for our own consumption. We have more than enough arable land to grow enough food to feed ourselves. We have an extensive infrastructure to get goods and services all across the nation easily. This ability to self sustain is surprisingly extremely rare in the world. Most countries are heavily dependent on imports and exports. Food, oil, and materials are not plentiful in most countries. China, Germany, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and many other nations are completely dependent on the current system of trade, protected by the American military. Without the American Navy making sure trade routes are protected, it becomes every nation for itself to get its food, oil, and resources.
America has been slowly withdrawing from the world order. The coming reckoning across the world will no doubt be blamed on President Trump, but it was going to happen regardless of who was president. America has no need to maintain the current system. Since WWII, America has kept an air craft carrier group in the middle east to ensure oil exports were uninterrupted. Over the past years we have gone months without any carrier group in the middle east. It is just not that important for us anymore. We are withdrawing troops from around the world. We are renegotiating our trade deals with everyone to make them more in favor of America. Since WWII, trillions of dollars have been exported to other nations under lopsided trade deals. Middle America has been hollowed out by exporting factories and work to other nations. This has left coastal port cities as the power holders on American mainland. It has caused a divide that we are seeing now between the haves and the have nots. And the coastal port cities are starting to panic because their grip on the American economy is starting to slip. Civil war seems eminent in America but we will by no means be alone in this phenomenon.
Civil war has been the most common form of war throughout history. We are getting ready to see a worldwide spread in civil war. As soon as nations across the world who have been living off of American largess start to have to deny their population the opulence they are used to, civil war will be common. The wars will not be limited to civil. Nations are going to have to fight for resources once again. They are going to have to defend their trade routes. They are going to have to reach out and form empires again. There are a number of hot spots to keep an eye on.
The Russian border with Europe is where shit is going to get real. Russia cannot defend its current border. It is too sprawling with not enough natural defenses for their dwindling army to hold. They must move inward to Europe to change their 2,000 mile defenseless border to something with more natural defenses so that their army will not be spread so thin. They also must retake Ukraine. Without Ukraine, Russia cannot feed itself.
Saudi Arabia and Iran hate each other with a centuries old rivalry that is destined to end in a bloodbath. A vast majority of the world’s oil flows past the Straight of Hormuz, which is a choke point between these two rival nations. The only thing that has kept them from killing each other is the American military in the region. Without us there, they will try to kill each other with reckless abandon.
China is damn near landlocked. It cannot be stressed enough how dependent China is on the current world order. China, as with most countries, does not have a navy that can protect their trade routes. Their navy is very anemic. They cannot project any sort of force over a thousand miles off their shores. They definitely cannot maintain a presence all the way to the middle east to protect their oil routes. Japan sits right off of the coast of China. Japan can throttle any form of Chinese encroachment into the sea. Japan currently is one of the few countries that has a relatively strong blue water navy that can protect its trade routes. At the time of this writing, the Japanese navy has already sent warships to the middle east to protect its oil trade routes. Plus, both countries hate each other. Expect to see live fire there soon.
These are just the major hot spots I think are going to kick of the world wars. There are many smaller spots across the world that could spark the blowup. America will survive all of this untouched. Our biggest worry should be civil war. If we were to sit back and let the world do its thing, America would become the most prosperous nation by many factors during this course of events. We are one of the few countries on the planet that can self sustain. We have a military that is unmatched by such a large margin it is almost unfathomable (as an example, 3 of our carrier groups have enough firepower to take on the rest of the world’s military combined. And we have 11 carrier groups. Our navy is the second largest air force in the world, right behind our Air Force. There is no nation, or group of nations, that could threaten us whatsoever). Our economy is still the world’s best. The rest of the world is going to be scrambling to find a stable place to buy weapons, food, oil, and to place investments. America is going to be the only safe place capable of doing all of that. If we do not destroy ourselves with civil war, we are going to be so flush with cash from other nations that our current economy will look like a third world nation in comparison.
War is coming. I see no way around it. It is going to be a vast world war and many civil wars. Besides us not killing ourselves in civil war, our biggest issue is going to be who we are going to help in the coming world wars. We are going to witness millions of millions, if not billions of people die. Starvation, pestilence, disease, combat, are all going to consume the world with very few exceptions. Everyone’s current understanding of how the world is supposed to work is going to be upended. The internet as we know it is going to no longer exist as nations start cutting it off and isolating. Consumer goods are going to skyrocket with the lack of access to imports and exports. Oil and food is going to cause bloodshed the likes of which we cannot fathom. Europe is going to go back to constant border shuffling as has been their history throughout millennium. Access to capital and the cost of money is going to skyrocket. The free flow of medication is going to stop. We are going to have a front row seat to all of this destruction and suffering. We will fight with each other over which nations deserve our assistance. These fights will be fierce but, in a relative sense, it is better to fight over who to help than fight over survival.
With all of that being said, America, as well as a few other nations, will be in a position to do very well. Any nation that can self sustain will be relatively well off. Those very very few that can project power outside of their borders will thrive. If America can avoid a civil war, we are looking at a time of plenty. War is coming. Let us do everything we can to keep it off our soil.