I Made This Pitch to HarperCollins Canada in 2018. Their Sales Department Said No One Would Buy It.

World War III

Every major power in the world spends billions of dollars a year to be prepared for war. The Americans spend much more than everyone else combined.

But countries are always preparing for the last war. We build aircraft carriers, tanks, submarines and missile systems like it’s the fall of 1945. We recruit young men to be soldiers, give them guns and make them ready to shoot at other men.

But war has changed. Just like the generals who, in 1914, sent cavalry to charge machine guns, we don’t realize it. During the Cold War, the nuclear powers could not attack each other directly. Mutually assured Destruction (MAD) – the threat of world destruction – prevented that. So they fought proxy wars in places like Vietnam and Korea.

But another way to fight wars has emerged, and it’s happening now. Social destabilization by splitting the enemy into “tribes” that will not work together to protect their own country or even agree on what constitutes a threat (SJWs vs MAGA). The hacking of massive computer systems to gather both social and military information, which are now the same thing (Facebook and other hacks). The instillation of proxy politicians by using propaganda, money and hacking. The stripping of the country’s economic infrastructure and the use of the financing of vast national debt to turn governments into debt slaves. The creation of a new imperialism in places like Africa and South America, while claiming to be agents of anti-colonialism (China’s One Road).

Powers that want to win this war strip allies away from their opponents and fragment those alliances, the way the EU is being broken by Brexit. They install proxy regimes in places like Hungary, Ukraine, Austria and Italy.

The point of warfare is to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight back. In 1945, that meant going into Berlin and literally blowing the regime apart. The point of modern warfare, and the only way to win, is by crippling an opponent before it knows it’s even been attacked, or that its “friends” are not really its friends at all. A regime that has been crippled this badly has no ability to agree that it’s at war at all, let alone develop the consensus and cohesion needed to fight back. Conventional and nuclear weaponry ae ineffective because the regime has already been blown apart.

I will argue that’s what’s been happening since Putin came to power, that China and Russia are working separately on a mutually-beneficial project, and that this war is almost at an end. The West will not be occupied by a foreign power. It will be picked apart and become a backwater where people literally never knew what hit them. This is modern war, waged with technology and propaganda, rather than with tanks and nuclear weapons.