<nettime> A scenario for World War III

[Keith Hart <johnkeithhart@googlemail.com>]

Sunam Son from Chicago wrote to me to ask what I meant by my occasional
references to a possible World War III. I wrote this in reply. It's not what
I think will happen, but all the nasty bits brought into one scenario.

http://thememorybank.co.uk/2010/03/05/world-war-iii/

1. The economic crisis has provoked historical comparisons with the 1930s,
but I consider another analogy might be when three decades of financial
imperialism went bust in 1913, leading to the catastrophe of 1914-45 of
which the 1930s was an expression, not the cause.

2. The crisis has accelerated the shift of economic power to Asia and the
Bric countries. The question is whether the West and the US in particular
will allow this process to continue peacefully. I once had a conversation
with a Pentagon official who said: “You Europeans have taken the moral high
ground from us. The Chinese have taken our manufactures. That leaves us with
just the weapons. I guess it’s double or quits”. I have no idea how serious
he was. Maybe he was winding me up. Nixon’s mad dog strategy was to make
people believe he could push the button and that would make them more
compliant.

3. The place of World War III has already been chosen. Afpak has the
advantage of being the most volatile area of the Muslim world, with Russia,
China and India on its borders and substantial Western military commitments
there already without being too close to home. If India and China can be
drawn into a shooting war, maybe this will slow down their inexorable
economic growth. What would happen if Muslim fanatics (put up to it by…) let
off a nuclear bomb stolen from Pakistan in India or China? Now that would be
another “shot heard around the world”.

4. Who would be “the allies” in such a war? The US, Europe, India and Japan
(aka “democracy”) vs Russia, China (“the evil empires”) and the Muslims
(already built up by Bush as the target of a new crusade). At least it makes
better sense than the idea that we are in Afpak to bring democracy to the
region. The Chinese want a port on the Bay of Bengal through Burma. India is
building up its navy and the Japanese have already complained about Chinese
naval aggression. Who do you think started the Cold War? Stalin?

5. There is the question of where we are in the global economic crisis and
what will happen next. The massive injection of money by central banks to
save the banking system has delayed the recession and injected a lot of
cheap cash into equity markets, but it has done nothing to restore demand
and it is highly unequal. This could lead to a sovereign debt crisis, wth
Britain, Japan and the Eurozone being particularly vulnerable. Basically,
the people who got us into this mess are still in power and they could push
us all over the brink by continuing with their bankrupt recipes.

6. The US is not out of the wood by any means, but I believe that America
would benefit from an escalation of the crisis at all levels since, apart
from its share of the world market (which would grow in a depression) and
its military monopoly and global reach, the fundamentals of its economy are
stronger than those of its rivals. The future of the world economy is
information services traded on the internet and the US still leads in
production of its hardware, software and content. The global imbalance
between US debt and China’s export surplus could lead to a bond crisis
(hyperinflation or monetization of the debt) with ramifying political
consequences, not to mention the mother of all exchange rate crises.

7. In any case, the world economy has lost and is losing aggregate demand
fast. Everyone is hoping to grow through increased export demand, but where
is that when home demand is contracting everywhere and governments are
cutting back in order to continue to borrow? A combination of deflation and
hyperinflation in different places could make 2010 a year to remember for
the world economy.

8. I explored these questions in a fictional conversation betwen
myself and Abdul
Aziz <http://thememorybank.co.uk/category/abdul-aziz/> from the Lehman
collapse to December 2008. This was written in real time against the
backdrop of the unfolding news. None of what I have laid out here is a
prediction. It is just a very gloomy scenario that I believe ought to be
given more of an airing than it has, so that a general political discussion
might influence the course of events. But people really don’t want to think
about these possibilities, since it makes it hard to sleep at night.

9. The unspoken truth of our moment in history is that the game is up for
the West and that makes our “interesting” times very dangerous. We have
lived off unearned income for 500 years and the rest aren’t going to pay any
more, if they can help it. No wonder that Britain and France are the two
most pessimistic countries in Europe or that fear and loathing of strangers
is now rampant there. The Americans have options and they are prepared to
use them. The game may be up for them too, but I don’t think they will take
it lying down, as the Europeans are.


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