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I've been thinking over the conflicts that drive a plausible but still epic-feeling contemporary/near future grand strategy. Contrasted to the usual schlock where either Atomwaffen pops out from under your bed to start lynching people or Cambodia invades Kentucky to seize turpentine production facilities. I'm a big fan of when games use mechanics to communicate a thesis (Twilight Struggle, Victoria, and Axis and Allies are masters of this in different ways), when games use dynamic historical events (like Vicky) to gamify historical processes and conflicts (this is really what I get my pleasure out of with this stuff, and I hate focus trees) and when there's a sort of narrative in the mechanics (like Crusader Kings, Victoria mentioned before, and Terra Invicta).
I'm trying to collect it together, but so far it's got several layers all connected together with a big flashpoint around the Straits of Hormuz.
The year is 2016.
Universal Problems: The crisis of industrial civilization. Climate change (is fake and gay IRL but good drama) is disrupting the world, mostly in the Third World. Modern society is becoming very socially unstable in the First World. Demographic transition is hitting everyone, eroding the resource base everywhere. The industrialization of space raises the possibility of breaking geopolitical monopolies over strategic resources, but a great winner-takes-all race for access to these resources, with potentially catastrophic, "everyone loses" losses if frontier skirmishes turn into Kessler syndrome.
North America: Caesar vs Mandarins, the Storm Before the Storm: what happens when a legislature that, responding to the complexity of industrial civilization, delegates its authority to the executive, forcing a crisis of legitimacy when this undermines the Madisonian foundations of the state? Does power sit with Caesar (authoritarian populist strongmen), who is an expression of democracy but corrosive to its spirit and by making politics personalistic ultimately ends in charismatic dictatorship, or does it sit with the Mandarins (managerial elites), who are theoretically competent, institutionally captured and undemocratic in form as well as spirit? When - if - war comes, it likely isn't the culture war frontlines most junk predicts, but rather a last provocation by one side forcing people to, standing at a constitutional moment, decide which of the two is - in their judgment - a bigger existential threat to democracy. Amid all this, the rise of Californian nationalism as a coherent ideological program - marked by Governor Newsom in 2020, the first ever clear expression of the idea of a Californian "nation-state" in print - emerges as a side-crisis, a potential flash point.
Europe: The downward spiral of demographic transition, mass immigration within a "clash of civilizations" and the inevitable crisis of federalism. Demographic transition is eroding everyone's resource base as innovation (you're on the diminishing returns part of a logistic curve) slows, the short-term fix of importing immigrants makes this even worse when it ups social welfare payments down the line and destabilizes you. The Mandarins of Europe have genuine ideological commitments to alliance with a population utterly hostile to them, and the center cannot hold forever. Additionally, like every federal republic to ever exist, the bounds of union are likely to be tested in violent civil war, with a standing European Army as the flashpoint. Do nationalists win, Islamists win, or does globohomo achieve the unthinkable and actually turn out to be right and thread the needle of unifying the West and East into a single humanistic civilization? And when violence comes, it could come from anywhere: panzers once again crossing Polish borders to quell a secessionist nationalist Intermarium bloc, the French defecting in an identitarian populist upswell, and perhaps most scary, the Germans reawakening as the most captured European nation flips at breakneck speed and leaves a void in the system. Even if Europe falls, the end is just the beginning: Islamic expansionism with the intellect and underlying quality of European converts threatens not to turn Europe into a colony of Syria, but Europe into a launching pad for an Islamic Golden Age.
China: The single most dangerous demographic transition with the added terror of a massive population of young unmarrigable men. A housing bubble to end all housing bubbles (IRL already being deflated). A single failure point waiting to happen in the hydraulics of the empire. A government whose legitimacy is based on prosperity facing the threat of what happens when the prosperity fails and the Mandate of Heaven is lost, or when the middle class that prosperity created demands participation. A new religious movement in the form of Falun Gong seeking to topple the ruling dynasty. An empire who can delay all problems by threatening war, and whose demographic window to reunify the empire and build lasting legitimacy is rapidly closing. WW3 begins in the South China Sea when the CCP can no longer hold back the masses from exploding.
The Gulf: Reformation or Enlightenment: does Islam in the homeland resurge in militance, or does secularism finally take hold. The Middle East navigated a multi-sided and spectauclarly destructive cold war within a cold war for 80 years and now there are only two real combatants left: Wahhabi monarchism desperately trying to westernize itself and Islamic republicanism. The structural crisis of the Gulf Arabs and Saudis: the oil makes their water (desalination). The oil makes their food (imports). The oil makes the AC run. The oil makes the money they use to live and to bribe their people to accept poverty and repression. The world is transitioning away from oil. The oil runs down. New supplies of oil is found. They built palaces in the desert out of oil and their days are numbered unless they can find something else to survive on, and the answer has been attempting to tertialize, which means Westernizing, which means antagonizing the Quran-thumpers, and Iran has the ability to make the oil markets scream. (For Iran, the crisis is a population that rapidly is secularizing.) The path to becoming Islam's Enlightened despotism is dangerous, and Wahhabism and Iranian aggression (that's your Reformation side) can tank the whole world.
Israel: An ethnic fault line in Israel set up in the 1940s threatens to destabilize the world. Not Jew and Palestinian, but Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, rich and poor, Western and Middle Eastern, socialist and conservative, fearful of Europeans and fearful of Arabs. The Mizrahim became the core of Likud, and now this has born fruit in the form of Israeli Caesar, Netanyahu, facing potential civil war or regime collapse or a forever war to stabilize the regime. The clock is ticking for Israel like it is for everyone else; they have a limited amount of moral capital since the Holocaust became international mythos in the 1970s-1990s, and as they fight they burn through it, and as they burn through it they have to fight harder to outrun it, leaving themselves diplomatically isolated; when the US cuts them off, they are exposed. Additionally, total control of the American political system both gives them immense power to act freely now, and a serious risk when the exercise of that power fuels resentment...
Africa: "The end of the world is just the beginning" from Zeihan. When people start shooting at ships... like, say, in the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf... globalization collapses. When globalization collapses, Europe, the Orient and Africa collapse. For Africa, some states are just beginning to cohere and develop. For Africa, the crisis is independence and state resilience in the face of collapse. Neither superpower can be guaranteed on to even exist as a superpower, and when guns start firing there is little stopping Africa from being neo-colonized or starving to death under a breakdown of trade. Can African states become self-sufficient (not total autarky, but surviving a breakdown of the End of History world) and developed enough to stand alone in a multipolar world? Additionally, China sees Africa as a frontier of colonization for its hordes of single men. One of the more remarkable stories of mass migration: the ethnogenesis of an entire new race on a scale not seen since La Malinche birthed the mestizos.
Latin America: Nothing interesting ever happens here LMAO
Russia: I mean we all know what happened here. "Can you do Duginism, but, like, actually successful this time." Fucking pathetic Oriental-ass "White" country.
The Fate of Faith: My real-world prediction that's the most controversial: the next major world religion is born. It's born somewhere in Brazil, or Venezuela, or Rwanda or a pork packing plant staffed by Hondurans in Nebraska. It's a model we've seen since the beginning of time. A man of low or middling station experienced a vision, had an epiphany, developed an understanding. In a world of confusion he suddenly received the transcendental Truth that synthesized, in complete form, all of the teachings of all religious traditions before him. He answered the question, convincingly, of his era: how do you make meaning in a world atomized by modernity. His teachings were extremely morally demanding, uncompromising, and deeply hostile to the contemporary world. It was anti-materialistic (in the philosophical sense), anti-consumerist, anti-hierarchical (in a worldly sense), anti-statist, anti-modernist, pacifistic. Unlike the tenor of the secular world of its day, it was extremely pro-natalist and communal: shun the World, embrace the Family. It spread like wildfire, primarily through the Pentecostal mass movements of the Global South, drawing the hate and hysteria of secular society and established religions alike. States first violently repressed it, then courted it, as its expansion was inexorable, especially as the modern world collapsed. Trying to resist it is like Julian the Apostate trying to turn back the clock, and it has the raw manpower to bring man to the heavenly bodies.
When panpsychism wears the skin of Pastor Joe-Bob rolling on the floor flopping like a fish the same way Platonism wore the skin suit of Sophia or Aristotle Jesus on the cross
