Heard Iran declared war on the US, Europe, and Israel. Just things IRL would love the tea from here though
marcos said that ww3 already happened, but the developed countries called it the “cold war” because it didn’t happen to them. it happened to the developing countries that lost millions of lives to violence and destruction.
he also said the 4th world war started almost immediately after the soviet collapse.
https://mondediplo.com/1997/09/marcos
i bring it up because that framing has plagued my thoughts ever since.
that’s great insight
Western leaders understood the nature of the conflict they were in. Robert McNamara himself said “Cold War? Hell, it was a hot war!”
I would make the argument that WW3 has basically been happening since 9/11/01
Just a constant series of military conflicts that coincidentally allow the USA to incroach upon other nations and strongarm its allies into supporting these campaigns
As for Iran declaring war on the USA, the USA declared war on Iran when they bombed their nuclear facilities
Yeah, amerika declared its intention to destroy Iran over 20 years ago, that 7 countries in 5 years shit. amerika was always the agressor.
I’m not sure how that is any different from pre-2001 US militarism. The only difference before and after seem to be the specifics of whichever bullshit excuses various American governments have used for any given invasion or bombing or whatever.
I think we’re clearly in an interwar period right now, which is to say that we’re in the prelude.
The Ukraine war is drawing down and I suspect that it will be about 12-24 months before we see a conclusion.
(Predictions: Russia takes Odessa and there’s a new Novorossiya that connects from Transnistria through Odessa, Crimea, and the Donbas. Zelensky’s government buckles and he flees under corruption charges. Ukraine exists as a landlocked rump state.)The US is publicly signalling retreat from its role as global hegemon. It’s still going to fuck around in West Asia for obvious reasons but it feels like NATO is going to be palmed off to a very economically weak EU for the most part. I expect that we’re seeing the US withdraw to a Monroe Doctrine era for the most part.
With that said, I have a very bad feeling particularly about Iraq. It’s going to be interesting to see how many fronts the US empire can maintain and which are deemed in its priorities. Venezuela is likely going to be more than the US can handle and, should Russia come through with its promises for military support if the US continues to escalate then I don’t see an open war on Venezuela being maintained for long.
The DPRK is largely safe, unless the Republic of Chaebols starts acting up again and reignites the Korean war (as happened not so long ago, which was an incredibly close near miss.)
I suspect that the US top brass are aware that the window for a limited naval conflict in the South China Sea to clip the wings of the Chinese economy has closed. Either it would need to kick off today, which is unlikely as there hasn’t been enough consent manufactured for it, and even then it would be a coin flip if it would actually pan out in the US favor or if it’s basically too late for it already.
The US will continue its fuckery with Taiwan but I see that as being likely to draw down as Chinese economic counterwarfare hits the US hard (have fun running a military industrial complex without access to synthetic diamonds, suckers - it’d be a real shame if you were technically able to produce your own but your entire economy is reliant upon an AI bubble that requires dizzying amounts of electricity under an already overtaxed electrical infrastructure and the production of synthetic diamonds is another hugely energy-intensive industry.)
The prize has been Iran for a long time. My concerns are that the US is signalling that they plan to Syrian Civil War Iraq (again) to activate Wahhabi militias (technically they’re already doing so in Iraq, but that’s a long story.) So that would look like refusing to recognize the newly elected Iraqi prime minister when the elections come or backing an Iraqi Juan Guaido to create a North Vietnam/South Vietnam kinda situation. This will be used as a stepping stone for bringing war right to the border of Iran and attempting to lure them into the fray. Obviously Wahhabi proxies will attempt incursions over the Iran-Iraq border.
This comes at a time when Iran faces a catastrophic drought so the timeline on this is likely going to be very rapid if it unfolds this way and it will be contingent on drought management and how bad the drought turns out to be but we’ve seen how droughts affect the political stability of the region via the recent history of the Arab Spring.
I genuinely don’t see the US being capable of a ground war in Iran unless they achieve air superiority. I’m not sure where Iranian air defences are at right now, post the recent strikes on Iran, but they have responded and they have been gearing up for it. Their hypersonics in particular mean that they will be able to pummel a beleaguered Israel and there’s a decent chance that making Israel scream would be equivalent deterrence to giving the US itself a bloody nose. Hard to tell whether it would be enough to get them both to back off or whether it would draw out more attacks, and it would depend on how effective Iranian air defences are and especially how effective their missile strikes are - I suspect that Russia will transfer their hypersonic technology to Iran if there’s enough time and that would likely make their missiles more deadly, although I’m no expert in military stuff so I’m spitballing on that part.
If there’s an open war on Iran we will see a regional conflict plus the US. I don’t think that current US partners will be very willing to participate much - the EU is focused on Ukraine/Russia and they can’t afford to scale up their own military capacity, let alone take the lead on NATO, let alone getting dragged into a conflict with Iran. Canada and Australia are both struggling economically and they’ll go along with it but the political situation in both countries is such that people will get really pissed off if hundreds of billions of their dollars go towards supporting Trump’s military adventurism in West Asia so I’d expect both to mostly provide support and special forces without doing much in terms of committing an actual fighting force.
So it will be interesting to see what happens.
DPRK? Probably very secure.
Russia-Ukraine? Drawing down, unlikely to flare up much except for a potential run on Kiev and a last-ditch effort to repel Russia or to hold on to whatever territory before a peace agreement or the total collapse of Ukraine.
The EU is sidelined and western Europe is relegated to becoming a backwater (and that’s without the ripple effect of the AI bubble popping) so count them as being largely sidelined.
Venezuela is going to be interesting but I think there’s a reasonable likelihood that the US isn’t going to be capable of maintaining a front there for long.
Africa is Africa, so it’s going to be the punching bag of neocolonial countries as much as they’re able to get away with it. Hard to tell if any big wars are likely to break out, but Somalia and Burkina Faso (or allied countries nearby) are the likely candidates.
Taiwan has lost their footing in regards to strategic importance with semiconductors, but this will take 5-10 years for the effects to really be seen. I foresee the US backing away from Taiwan due to military and especially economic reasons as reunification becomes an inevitability that the US can no longer stifle.
China’s a wildcard here. I’d say it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that the US will start a war with China except if there’s a huge economic or political collapse (😬) and they choose to shift to a war economy and Trump wants to maintain a state of exception by starting an open war with China, although there’s a good chance that Chinese missiles and drones would sink the US carriers in short order which would make it unviable for the US to maintain a war on China for very long.
Ansarallah in Yemen will be fairly secure.
Iraq and Iran will be the ones to watch. Hard to tell exactly which path to war the US will take and what timeframe it will unfold by. A war on China necessitates the US drawing down on a war on Iran though - either is likely to be the US biting off more than it can chew but both at the same time?? Lol good luck.
That’s not to say that we won’t see red lines being crossed or lots of countries being dragged into an expanding conflict but I foresee the highest likelihood of a regional conflict in West Asia between Iran, Ansarallah, Hezbollah, and Hamas on one side and the US, Israel, US puppet states in the region, and Wahhabi insurgent forces on the other side. This could be a briefer conflict than you might imagine.
Unless the US starts truly collapsing and then the everything is up in the air and we could see WWIII, the US starting a war to expand its borders (likely in South America), or a war with China.
I’m giving WWIII a forecast of having a 25% chance for the immediate future in the coming 5 years. Remember to ping me to heckle me when my assessment proves to be woefully incorrect.
Remember to ping me to heckle me when my assessment proves to be woefully incorrect.
And we’re all posting irl in the barracks? :3
Lol sure, if we’re in the barracks then you definitely have free rein to heckle me as much as you want.
I didn’t mention it in the comment above, and I should have, but I’ve been watching things develop in geopolitics and although I didn’t source anything or even reference a lot of what’s influencing my opinion on these things, it’s also based on more than just assumptions and gut feeling.
For example, the US has made statements about Iraq’s elections that are very similar to those made about Bolivia when Morales was running, they have warned of war coming to the region, the US his issued a stern warning about armed groups in the region “interfering” with US operations there (strange how sovereignty is a special little treat and a sometimes food, huh?), they’ve taken measures to demobilize forces organized to resist Wahhabi militants, and then probably scariest of all was that there was an unannounced shut down of GPS in Iraq that lasted over a week that went unexplained and nobody took responsibility for. I’d say that this was intentional and it was either used to cause economic disruption (less likely) or it was used to test out how well a blackspot in GPS coverage could work, very likely as a prelude to an upcoming conflict and very likely specifically to reduce the capacity for military drone use. Still running on hunches here but my guess is that the most likely candidate for this is the US and that they were either observing how this affected the logistical efforts of counter-Wahhabi forces or they were observing how well the US could operate on a back up GPS system or a GPS system that was isolated to US military equipment while excluding civilian and Iraqi military access to GPS (all highly speculative on my behalf but we know that if war really is coming to that region then it’s going to be a very drone-heavy war and this is very, very likely to rely on GPS so despite being a conclusion drawn from a long chain of assumptions this does feel very much like the purpose and if it was just a random outage due to technical issues it feels like this would have been announced publicly.)
Given this wall of text above that still doesn’t have links to relevant articles and anything more than broad brushstroke analysis, I’m sure you can tell why I didn’t lay out all of the factors leading me to my conclusions.
I know we live in scary times and I’ve been sounding the alarm about the potential for the next world war looming for years now so I’m not gonna lie and say that everything is fine and there’s nothing to worry about (because I wouldn’t be watching these things in the first place unless I was worried about it) but right now I don’t see any major flashpoints that are likely to boil over into a big regional conflict or something even broader than that. Of course there’s always black swan events and my biggest concern, perhaps partly because of how unpredictable it is, is what happens when the US economy or political situation (or both) turn sour rapidly. I can see Trump seizing power, I can see him starting a war with China to distract from a big economic crisis, I could imagine the government being replaced by ultra hawkish figures one way or another (dead Donnie, coup, next election etc.)
Currently the US and the EU are weak, Iran is in a relatively strong position, the axis of resistance in West Asia is powerful (although being at a low-ish ebb) but it’s mostly factions within countries (Ansarallah, Hezbollah, Hamas) so a regional conflict is unlikely to drag in country after country when, for example, the “official” government of Lebanon is going to do what they always do and that is to sit around waiting for their spine to spontaneously materialize, and so on.
All of this means that currently I see neither the capacity nor the appetite for a big regional conflict or a world war, especially not from the usual suspects. Even if there is the appetite, the capacity just isn’t there imo - the US and EU are militarily exhausted and it will take years to build up/rebuild. The US got a bloody nose from Ansarallah so they tucked tail and ran. The shape of war has shifted significantly and permanently away from aircraft carriers and air superiority, and the US has only ever been good at war post-WWII when they have been able to establish air superiority (and even then…)
In terms of capacity, imo Russia is the only big player that has it right now (hence a large part of the reason why the Ukraine war has been moving at a slow pace - Russia has been building up its military capacity both in terms of troops and in production rather than exhausting them as they are facing a possibility of a larger war with Europe so they aren’t going on throw everything at Ukraine just to put themselves on a weak footing to have Western Europe and the US steamroll them.) I don’t see Russia having the appetite for expanding the conflict, although the have their red lines so it’s not completely off the table (for example, this although fortunately for us the attack was thwarted. If they took out Putin then there’s a much greater chance of a European regional war or a world war.)
China does not have this same capacity as their military is very inwardly-focused and it’s very much oriented to defence and deterrence, so I don’t count them as having capacity to wage war in this way - they don’t even have blooded troops in their military and, broadly speaking, their military has had generation of unblooded troops training generation of unblooded troops so it’s really not the same as Russia imo.
The war on Venezuela is going to be messy and ugly but who is it going to drag in? Bolivia? Lol. Cuba? Not on your life. I don’t see it boiling over there.
The war on Iran will be much messier but I still don’t see it being a real risk of being a flashpoint for a world war.
That leaves China, who will avoid it at all costs and who is finally enacting export control measures on the US and it’s very much targeting the US military industrial complex. The longer effects of this will be to starve the imperialist war machine beast. And of course Russia who would go to war with more countries but they are very, very strategic and it’s really only NATO encroachment or serious attempts at subverting Russia domestically that would draw out a response like this.
It’s a tentative period of relative peace but it’s quite unstable too and certain actors seem hellbent on adding more powder to the powderkeg. The long-term forecast is gloomy but, at least for now, the short-term forecast is partly sunny with isolated showers.
Yeah. It’s why I treated it all like a meme when I heard about it. Was curious but not ready to read as much as I did. Can’t say I can argue in opposition to your take as I don’t know anything logistically to add, however I do hope dire prospects help to dissuade us and eu aid to Israel, and Israel to stop the genocide. But who knows.
You are probably referring to the recent statements of Masoud Pezeshkian.
I consider them to be mostly political rhetoric, nothing has really changed. Iran has been in a hybrid war with NATO and Israel pretty much since the islamic revolution. This conflict does flare up every now and then, for example in June of this year, or at the beginning of 2020. So far though, it never turned into a total war, and I don’t see why it would be different this time.
So just sabre rattling?
When russia crossed into ukraine there was “WW3 sign up list” graffiti in every construction site bathroom.
Random people IRL don’t know what’s going on
Yea. Sometimes it can be informative like learning about the battle of Blair mountain years before I run into a space like this, other times it’s just a firehose of misinfo
Direct wars between coalitions of the largest industrial powers can’t happen anymore. They all have nukes now, everyone would die before the actual war part started. And besides, these wars were a product of a multipolar political system, which we don’t currently have. We’re in a monopolar system that’s turning into a bipolar one. So the closer model would be Cold War 2.
Of course China’s foreign policy is very different from the Soviet Union’s, so I don’t think it’ll look like a series of wars between a US proxy and a Chinese proxy. If I had to guess, I’d say wars between US proxies and non-state organizations receiving material aid from nearby countries which in turn all happen to have strong economic ties with China.
As always, it doesn’t matter if a war is a “world war” to the people who live near it. Even a “small” war is a world-ending disaster for anyone near the front lines, regardless of this international political theory stuff.
Yeah. Just wondering the prospect of a ground war within the US and it’s terrible but watching the empire crumble and being held accountable while also experiencing what it does on the daily to so many innocents would be karmic in a way…
The only way a ground war in the US can happen is a civil war. Nobody wants to invade the US, nobody has the power to invade the US, and if somebody did, everyone would die in nuclear fire.
Also hoping for a war in the US is gross. The empire wouldn’t experience shit, it’s an abstract concept. The actual people who live there, and the people fighting, would suffer pointlessly. Hope that the empire dissolves with as few wars as possible.
Hoping in the same vein as
nothing more. I’ll be careful with how I say things.
you won’t see a mass mobilization until the memory of WW2 and vietnam are fully relegated to textbooks and half remembered stories from long dead relatives.
open war decs are very unpopular, and the average person in the west (currently) knows enough about geopolitics to realize we tend to only punch down. They’re also expensive. Mobilization is insanely costly.
War with big moving frontlines and big troop dedications is just something you’re unlikely to see unless the situation on the world stage changes in a hurry.
so much easier to use proxies and assassinations and spec ops bullshit to terrorize and weaken a nation than expend resources destroying and occupying it. There’s a very loud asymmetry in the ability of nations to power project. Where the US can drop a psycho squad anywhere in the world, kill whoever they like most of the time - what’s the point of a big war?
part of the revolutionary grievances for the american revolution was that the crown would dismiss judges and governors for not enforcing the crown’s will, right?
well i mean, we learned from the “best” i guess - because nowadays stepping out of line gets some psycho with DID and a boner for sticking his knife in people and canoeing heads. Minimal dollars spent, the problem fixes itself as the next guy to step up realizes there’s fucking nothing they can do to stop it from happening again.
This method is cheaper even with MIC grift
though the existential nature of the “war on terror” was largely fabricated, the idea of using terror and asymmetrical warfare was turned around and made into a method to more cheaply manage foreign matters, and now that nobody standing with any power gives a shit, those techniques are coming home more than they ever have (even though they’ve been here the entire time in their own way, the neocolonial operations are still coming home in a way they really havent)
there won’t be ww3 because there aren’t even nationalist porkies (only temporarily embarrassed national porkies) , everyone will just surrender to usa sooner or later.
everyone will just surrender to usa sooner or later.
amerikas power is fading. If anything they’ll lash out to try and preserve some regional influence. They’ve already hinted at this when they went back to focusing on South America.
Like, theyre still trying to sabotage China, and will keep trying but unless they nuke the world, they cant win that one
is it fading or is it not resisted at all no longer? they realized that china won’t do anything, like brezhnev ussr, so you can just wait for gorbie to arrive and sell you the companies later. kinda like ussr became non-factor after the 70s for usa, just an enemy to fuck with, rather than existential threat.
China might not do much to resist outside of its borders but its pretty clear they’ve developed tactics and weapons designed specifically for destroying amerikas pacific fleet. Theyre getting ready for something.
But, I was thinking about things like amerikas lack of production capacity after they sold all their ammo to ukraine and the like. I think amerika will continue to be a regional power akin to a rogue state or war lord and will terrorize the region but its global influence is fading fast. They already lost to China on ai (amerika cant produce enough power) solar and other renewables, fusion/fission/ E.V.s etc etc
The age of amerika is ending. How it reacts will be ummm interesting?
they are getting ready for something that will not happen, because why would it, there will be no multipolarity if one of poles won’t protect it’s holdings (i even ignore socialist dimension), china happily follows sanctions to get discounted raw materials or other stuff from iran or venezuela or russia, but they won’t even throw them military hardware under the cynical banner better them than us, so usa will just crush them one by one, china will lose their discount deals on materials, oh well no harm, no foul right? and that will continue until china can only invest in pax americana, because there is no other alternative (say under chinese security umbrella). why usa will fight such chumps, when you can just wait, steal profitable ventures in the meanwhile (like tiktok), until chinese zoomers will want the stonks to go up and open up financial deregulation to sell companies for pennies to usa porkies.
we’ll never win, will we?The conclusions I’ve drawn from doomerism is that the following are the only real options.
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Give up and just accept your place in the U.S. forever empire
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Embrace the winning team and shed any ounce of empathy you had, it’s useless anyways. Accept that white supremacy and the United States are the moral centers of the universe that can never be budged, they have divine providence from god or something. Why else would their enemies consistently lose and fail to resist them.
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Write essays about how bad things are on the internet and offer no solutions other than shaming people for not doing more
CW:
Suicide
i mean there is a ton of invisible stuff one can do, if one desires, to fuck porkies over, the left just doesn’t have that dog in them for now, but some will get it
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we will win by denying porkies what they crave - profits, i will spend time and money to deny porky profits cause i can, might just be the rest of imperial core left will continue spinning its wheels on electoralism with incomprehensible projects of redistribution without power. i literally cannot understand the “left” which will talk about tech oligarchy and then login into gmail or on twitch or on youtube, this is just pure larping at this point.
+china being dipshit idiots doesn’t stop them from fucking up imperial core production
the reason i mention tech, it’s fucking easiest to deny profits, you literally save money by avoiding it like a plague, they have the highest margins and thus the highest power (as one can see). diy medicine is much harder to achieve than tell your friends you won’t be on facebook or to send you videos not on youtube, yes, you appear as a crank, boo fucking hoo, you are already a commie.
and the profits will continue to fall for commodity producers, so that will fuck the system whatever china does or does not do.
If it does, can it wait until next Monday? I have plans this weekend.
Heh heh, I’m dead. ( I was executed for dodging the draft after we’ve sent our elderly and I’ve refused to join the queer qorps, reversing the exclusionary behavior that’s being maintained in the military)
Where did you hear that?
Hearsay from somewhat aware ‘normies’. Didn’t know if all the draft dodging talk had real merit. Have joked heavily that I should just hurry up and start estridiol and this would be the perfect opportunity, more than any other time
