There's an old saying attributed to many different people, but whoever originally said it, it remains true: History may not always repeat, but it frequently rhymes. There are a few broad rules history seems to follow, such as governments, any kind of government, always growing larger, more controlling, and more intrusive over time; just look at our own federal government and its evolution from 1800 to now.
Various theories of societal progress through history claim to explain this. But most of those theories have one thing in common, that being that history has major pivot points, major events that history builds up to, events like major wars, following which everything is different. The last such event was, arguably, the Second World War, which began in the 1930s and concluded 81 years ago.
Could we now be seeing events leading up to a third world war? A recent article by Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center, makes the case that we may very well be seeing just that.
The global situation is eerily similar to 1913. In the years leading up to World War I, European leaders created an intricate system of alliances. France and Russia signed a mutual defense pact. Germany and Austro-Hungary had a similar arrangement. The Russians also had a cultural bond with their fellow Slavs in Serbia.
So, when Franz Ferdinand and his wife were murdered by a Serbian nationalist in June 1914, the resulting diplomatic crisis and war declaration by Austria-Hungary against Serbia pulled Russia into the war. The Russian mobilization prompted the Germans to mobilize. In quick succession, the Germans declared war on Russia, France, and Belgium. When German troops entered Luxembourg and Belgium, Great Britain declared war on Germany, and World War I began for real. The international network established by those early 20th century leaders was so precarious, it only took a relatively minor jostle in a forgotten corner of Europe to bring the entire system crashing to the ground.
World War 2, when it began, wasn't even generally seen as a world war, but as a series of local skirmishes and brush wars, starting in China:
Consider this as well: we may already be in the beginning stages of a global war. Victor Davis Hanson wrote about how World War II only looks like World War II in hindsight. For the people living through it, especially in the beginning, World War II looked like a series of rather ordinary border conflicts and territorial conquests. The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and then further expanded the conflict with China in 1937. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938, and occupied the Sudetenland six months later.
Note the one common thing, namely, that both wars had one seminal event that suddenly produced an escalation, drawing in major powers. In the Great War, it was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. In the Second World War, it was the German invasion of Poland.
What might such a black swan event now look like? Personally, I'm skeptical of Iran's ability to launch such an event. The only thing that might bring about a broader-scale conflict might be the successful political assassination of a major world leader, which could unequivocally be traced back to Iran. That's not impossible. Iran almost certainly has agents in the United States. Thanks to four years of wide-open borders and non-existent immigration enforcement, there may be hundreds, maybe thousands of trained Iranian operatives. There may be orders of magnitude more random Iranian-sympathizing scumbags who would spread mayhem at every opportunity. In fact, we're already seeing that happening.
But Iran isn't a major power, and soon, it won't even be a regional power. If such an event is to happen, it would be far more likely to involve the major powers: The United States, Russia, and China. Russia is tied up in Ukraine, its population is crashing, and they have already lost a generation of young men.
But China?
Iran's oil infrastructure has, for now, been left mostly in place. That's not a bad idea. Any reconstruction of a post-theocracy Persia will require standing up their petroleum industry as fast as possible, to resume sales, to get some currency flowing into the new nation. But at present, Iran's primary customer for what oil is being shipped, is China: China buys about 80 percent of Iran's exported oil - some reports claim as much as 90 percent. If a reborn Iran decides instead to sell oil to, say, Europe, what might China do?
Here's where some skepticism is in order. China, at present, doesn't have the capacity to project power the way the United States can. Nobody has that capacity but us. China can't send a fleet and a half-million troops to Iran. They can't send them overland unless they are willing to push troops and vehicles through Afghanistan, Pakistan, or possibly India. That's a tough nut for China to crack.
It's hard to see a World War 3-level black swan event coming out of this particular dust-up, but we are, if you look at history, overdue for a major war.
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But here's what bothers me about the notion of a major war: As I've said and written for years, while the Great War was the war of chemists and World War 2, the war of physicists, World War 3 will be the war of biologists, and that should scare every thinking, breathing person clear out of their wits. A bio-agent release would be a black swan, all right - and it doesn't take a superpower to cook one such attack up.
If you ascribe to any of these historical theories - I've read some about the Strauss-Howe generational theory - then you'll be familiar with the various predictions that we are overdue for a major historical turning point. And if we look at the previous two such events, the Great War and World War 2, we'll not, with some consternation, that most folks didn't see them coming.
