We have been living through an age of apocalyptic fears. The sky has been falling; nuclear winter was coming; climate change would end all life; gender politics would destroy the family unit and, therefore, the nation; pandemics would end humanity; autocracy would replace democracy, etc.
Now, the end of “the end of the world” is within sight.
“The end of the world” has always been highly overrated as a concept, even when it seemed tinged with real menace, even when the killings were at their most extreme. Ultimately, “the end of the world” has become boring, as it has become so in every iteration of it through history.
The feverish, breathless excitement as the tidal wave of impending disaster raised alarums, called us to arms, disturbed our sleep, and made our waking hours downcast has, in fact, run out of steam.
We are seeing how a globalist, totalitarian movement sputters to an end, even as most of the world’s population was unaware that it was even participating in either the juggernaut of anti-nationalism or the nationalist response to it.
It is worth noting that this particular “end of the world” has been different from its historical predecessors. In this interaction, we have witnessed the growing intensity and speed with which global mass psychoses can be developed and spread, largely because of technology and the biological willingness of societies to embrace fear rather than hope. The mass population rise and urbanization in the second half of the 20th century compounded the trend.
What evolved through the industrial revolutions, the massive and largely urban-inspired rise in economic well-being and increased caloric intake, health care, and lifespans was a transformation in the scale of social patterns. That was new. This led to a profound evolution in how wars would be fought, seeing an initial glimpse of the future in Emperor Napoleon I’s engagement of the totality of French (and captive) societies in warfare against his adversaries.
He began an early and perhaps unconsciously conducted form of totalitarian warfare. As with all such iterations, it was successful only as long as its momentum was maintained and victories piled upon victories. Napoleon’s decline began when his momentum was blunted in the Iberian campaign and at the gates of Moscow.
However, in his proto-totalitarian movement, he also sowed the seeds of the new total war concept, in which all elements of society are gathered into the energy to wage war. That concept of total war evolved dramatically through two World Wars and the third World War of the 20th century: the Cold War. Again, not that sweeping apocalyptic seizures were new to societies—nor were globalist, anti-national, locust-like plagues of surges such as those of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane.
Not only did the 20th century produce those three iterations of total war, but it also produced three globalist totalitarian movements. The first two, Nazism and Soviet communism, arose quickly and collapsed quickly when they lost momentum. The third totalitarian movement, which sprang from Soviet globalism, spun off into the 21st century under the Chinese communist movement. That, too, has, within the past few years, lost its momentum as strategist Stefan Possony said in 1970 that it would. Even before 2020, it was no longer steamrolling global society into accepting its inevitable and unstoppable rise.
What will happen, then, to the global strategic architecture and the balance of power when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-driven globalist totalitarian momentum disappears?
Globalist phenomena, historically often accompanied by religious or pseudo-religious beliefs, gather adherents at great speed. When the momentum is lost, they either settle into a sedentary situation and build institutions or disappear almost overnight. Soon, the world will enter its “post-communist China” phase, even though it will not be without turbulence.
Significantly, the Moscow-driven globalist totalitarian movement generated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) continued well after the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. The Soviet movement set in train beliefs that were adopted by broad swaths of target populations who did not recognize that they had been co-opted. Vladimir Lenin called the species “the willing idiots”: people who would unconsciously do the bidding of the movement.
The probability is that the collapse of the current CCP-led iteration of globalism will lead to the wind coming out of the sails of the anti-nationalist programs being engineered as part of Beijing’s efforts to undermine its opponent societies. The primary approach of warfare is not to engage in kinetic conflict but to defeat an adversary before formal warfare is engaged. The psycho-political momentum engendered through totalitarian mass movements and induced mass psychoses is designed to weaken the opponent’s cohesiveness and paralyze responses.
Thus, as globalist momentum consumes societies, it often—usually—induces a defensive response from nationalist movements that rally around concepts of sovereignty and the balance of urban-rural societies. That counter-revolutionary tendency has been gaining momentum in Western states for several years as the weakening and collapse of communist China began to become evident.
However, the battle between the Beijing globalists and the Western nationalists is still ongoing. It has been a bloody conflict, and the prestige and influence—as well as the productivity and innovation—of Western societies has been seriously compromised. At its end, and after the terminal years of conflicts to change the outcome, there will be a landscape of greatly diminished progress and the start of reconstruction.
The hallmark of the emerging period will be revived nationalism, even if it is not in the manner of the old nationalism of an empire. And with the emerging era of reduced global population, there will be a reconfiguration of trade and economics.
Already, the first rays of that era are evident.
