Strange Coincidences Foretelling a New World War: We Are Just Like in 1930

In our world where attention spans are short, we seem capable of understanding wars only one at a time. However, conflicts have erupted globally: Israel against Hamas, Russians against Ukrainians, or Chinese democrats against the Communist Party. Yet, all these disparate struggles are actually parts of the same whole: a battle for the domination of the future.

This broader war involves the attempts of major powers, especially China, to secure natural resources by forming alliances with authoritarian regimes worldwide. In return, China supplies these authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa with various goods, including military equipment.

This de facto alliance, a modern version of the “Steel Pact” from the Second World War (the German-Italian alliance of 1939), truly has global coverage. It extends to Ukraine, the blocking of the Red Sea by the Houthi movement, and even Venezuela’s plans to conquer a large part of oil-rich Guyana. Rather than the end of history envisioned by Francis Fukuyama, we are witnessing the realization of Samuel Huntington’s grim vision laid out in his 2011 book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.”

This broader war aligns revanchist powers – China, Russia, and Islamic, Latin American, and African states – who feel unjustly treated by the West and liberal capitalism. On the other side are the West and its non-European allies, including Japan, South Korea, and, perhaps most importantly, India led by Modi.

Western leaders seem, like in the 1930s, more interested in diplomatic maneuvers than confronting a real and present danger. They believe that a conciliatory attitude toward Iran is pragmatic, but striking a trade deal with the United Kingdom is of negligible importance. One wouldn’t be far off characterizing U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, as recently done by Tablet magazine, as a “Neville Chamberlain with an iPad.”

Historical similarities are unsettling. The West’s firmness is in question not only in hot wars like Ukraine and the Gaza Strip but also in future conflicts. Just observe how the U.S. Navy responds half-heartedly to Houthi attempts to close the Red Sea or anticipates a likely timid reaction to a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan or Russia’s new attempts to recover lost territories.

Winning this general war depends on three things – a robust industrial base, military preparedness, and internal morale. Currently, the West seems determined to weaken its manufacturing industries, for example, by mandating the introduction of electric vehicles, which will favor Beijing. China maintains an almost monopolistic position in the electric vehicle battery supply chain: 80% of the global raw material processing capacity, 77% of global electric cell capacity, and 60% of the global component production capacity. China produces four times as many batteries as the U.S. and controls certain raw materials essential to production. China is also cultivating (still incipient) vassalage relations with countries in Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America that can provide specific resources.

China has come a considerable way toward achieving the status of the main global superpower by 2050, regardless of internal issues such as youth unemployment and demographic pressure. Since the 1960s, the proportion of value-added production by the U.S. and the EU has decreased from 65% to half. Climate policies act as an ever-renewed gift, as China, while Western nations struggle with unreliable renewables, is busy building coal-fired power plants and emits more greenhouse gases than all developed countries combined.

The military situation of the West is even more worrisome. The humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan pleased both China and Russia. European armies are weak and becoming even weaker. The UK, having the strongest military in Europe, has only 150 tanks, while Germany has enough ammunition for only two days of war. Even the U.S. struggles to consistently supply its allies. A recent study by Cynthia Cook at the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, even before the Hamas attack, the need to supply weapons to Ukraine had “raised concerns about the existence of sufficient residual inventory for training and executing war plans.”

Much American military equipment is now produced in China. This dependence would worsen if Beijing chose to invade Taiwan, a country many American industries rely on for essential components. A single company in Taiwan, TSMC, supplies Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, and Nvidia, among other “Big Tech” corporations. It also produces semiconductors used in the F-35 military aircraft.

The material issues of the Western world constitute a significant disadvantage. However, what could prove fatal is our spiritual degradation. Many young Europeans and Americans have been taught, sometimes from primary school, to adopt an essentially anti-Western view of “oppressor” and “colonialist.” A recent report by the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge found that support for democracy has declined in the West, most notably among those aged 18-34.

The democratic world is sleepwalking into catastrophe once again. Just when we need them most, it is nearly impossible to find someone in the West who resembles Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, or even Nixon or Reagan. The EU bureaucracy certainly cannot be a substitute for De Gaulle. The West cannot win, and cannot even remain relevant in the “clash of civilizations,” if it does not believe in itself and continues to neglect the physical means of protecting its own interests.