It would appear that Richard Fernandez sees much the same future unfolding that I do:
Conventional wisdom has had a pretty bad run these last 15 years. For that reason there is little purpose to trusting it further. Instead it might be better to predict a future based on observable trends rather than scenarios that politicians offer. If those trends continue one would expect to see in 2025:
- The self-destruction of the Muslim Middle East;
- The rise of ethnic and national politics in Europe;
- The widespread resurgence of religion and cultural identity as a consequence of (2);
- Mass expulsions or segregation in large parts of the world to deconflict incompatible communities
- Everyone packing personal weapons like the Wild West
- The collapse of multi-ethnic countries into simplified pacts based around of national defense, with most social law generated by local communities and affinity groups;
- One or more large regional wars with casualties in the tens of millions.
- Several, possibly many WMD attacks on major cities involving radiological weapons, low yield nukes or biological agents.
Such a world would be rough, dangerous and in many places, miserable. Perhaps it will not even be as good as that; for the list above omits the occurrence of an event equivalent to World War 3, in which case we can describe the future with a single word: ruin. But it is the world we are building, absent any change of course. The oddest circumstance is that politicians still pretend without the slightest basis, that if we stay their perverse course we’ll go right through the ruin and out the other side and find the dream we glimpsed as we crossed into the 21st century.
I’m not concerned about nukes or radiological weapons. What concerns me are genetic weapons. I expect genetic research to be shut down and highly regulated in the relatively near future. In addition to the way advancement in genetic science keeps disrupting the Narrative, it also poses a genuine large-scale threat to Mankind that is very nearly unprecedented in human history.
The events of the post-WWII period desperately need to be chronicled in detail, because future generations need to learn from the utter idiocy of the international policy makers of the last 70 years. In the unlikely event we happen to have enough historians here, I have in mind a project like the Cambridge Medieval History series, where the different writers each focus on a different set of actors. If this is of any interest to you and you think you might have the ability to contribute a section, email me with POSTWAR in the title.
Also, in not entirely unrelated news, we still need 3-5 more non-fiction articles for THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. X. If you’re a published military writer, we’re looking for high-quality reprints, so if you’ve got any, let me know.