Note that his includes the $1000 toilet seats, $90k screws or artillery shells (EU $8.5k, Russia $600). The graph maybe instructive for consumer goods, but absolutely not for the output of the Western MIC racket.
AsiaTimes (Noah Smith blog, really) engages in answering the question who would win WW3, hidden behind an euphemistic article title:
[asiatimes] – Sizing up the China-Russia ‘New Axis’
[noahpinion.blog] – Sizing up the New Axis (source article)
This is an interesting question, now that the world is on a seemingly inevitable path towards WW3, since the West crossed the Rubicon in Ukraine in 2014, thereby crossing a well in advance advertised Russian red line. Discussion of the entire article (in italics) below, for graphs see links above:
In a recent post, I tried to warn people about the substantial and growing chance of World War 3. My post was focused on the risk that a war will occur, but it didn’t really focus on the risk that the US and its allies will be defeated in that war.
Western hegemonists have a difficult time imagining such an outcome in the first place. If such a skepticism is to be found in the West, AsiaTimes would be your first address to look for it.
Yes, nuclear weapons are a factor, but there’s no certainty they’ll be unleashed in WW3, even by the losing side.
Using small nukes by a losing regime on the battle field against advancing armies is a near certainty, as a prelude to the logic of: “if we go, we drag you with us in the grave”. For this reasons where will never be either GIs in Beijing/Moscow, nor Russian/Chinese in Washington/Brussels.
So yes, there is a chance the US and its allies could be defeated by China and its allies in a major conventional world war.
How big is this chance of defeat? Obviously, factors like training and competence come into play, and these are in favor of the US.
Really? You may have missed Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. Or even WW2, where the US showed up at the last moment, hiding behind the broad back of the USSR that did the heavy lifting (for every dead American GI, 50 Soviet soldiers died), so the US could snatch away a Western European windfall empire. The US is a military paper tiger, today more than ever before.
Technological sophistication is also important and here as well the developed democracies probably still have at least a small edge over China.
Why leave Russia out, that is turning western weaponry to scrap metal in the killing fields of Ukraine, out-producing the entire West on its own?
But in World War 2, both skill/experience and technological sophistication slightly favored the Axis over the Allies at the start of the war. Nazi Germany started with the best ground equipment, while Japan had the best fighter planes and torpedoes, and arguably the best aircraft carriers as well.
But over time, massive US and Soviet production of ships, planes, tanks, and materiel ground down the Axis. And as the war progressed, the Allies learned how to fight and improved their technology rapidly, until by the end it was better than what the Axis had.
The Axis never really had a chance from the start:
Global GDP distribution 1941 in %:
| USA | 29 |
| USSR | 13 |
| British Empire | 11 |
| France | 5 |
| – | – |
| Germany | 11 |
| Japan | 6 |
| Italy | 5 |
Allies 56%, Axis 22%
In a long conventional war, production really matters. And China has, since the turn of the century become by far the world’s biggest producer. Even before the current massive splurge of production, China was the world’s largest manufacturer by far, making as much physical stuff as the US and all of Europe combined.
How different that is as compared to the original Axis, see GDP figures above.
The country’s current effort to increase that share even further threatens to make China the “make-everything country” in reality, turning the rest of the world into a de-industrialized hinterland.
That development can be halted by imposing tariffs and other measures, like forbidding ASML to export high-end lithographic machines to China. Paradoxically, such measures effectively halt the “global integration project”, spearheaded by the US-led West.
If that happens, the democracies’ edges in technology and training will prove short-lived, and they will likely lose a long war unless they can very rapidly remember how to make physical goods en masse.
“Remember” is good. Sounds a bit like hoping how a 90-year old Casanova will “remember” how good he was at love-making when he was younger, in order to refurbish him back into a James Brown-style “sex machine”. Seriously, there is no way that an aging western population, accustomed to cushy screen jobs in offices, can be persuaded to go back to the factories and produce weapons for an elite, whose only interest it is to replace said population with massive influx from the Global South.
I tried to illustrate the sheer size of the challenge that the US and its allies are facing in another post. It’s something we need to be taking very seriously. Anyone who scoffs at industrial policy or the idea of bringing back manufacturing in the US and Europe needs to be able to answer the questions raised by this post, which is republished here:
I wish I didn’t have to live through an era of renewed great power conflict. I wish the end of the Cold War had meant that such destructive episodes were forever relegated to the history books.
But unfortunately, those wishes did not come true. The Ukraine war means that the US is now definitely in a long-term Cold War-type struggle with Russia. And the substantial chance of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan sometime in the next few years means that there’s a high likelihood that the US will also soon be enmeshed in a contest with China as well.
The author studiously ignores that before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the US had invaded Ukraine in 2014, via an anti-democratic CIA-neocon-neo-Nazi coup (“Euro-Maidan revolution”), for no other purpose than to arm the country by stealth and use the country as a weapon against Russia, ignoring all the well-advertised Russian warnings that doing so would be a red line for Moscow.
Hopefully neither of these conflicts will result in direct war between great powers (especially because all the great powers now have plenty of nuclear weapons). I am not arguing that we are headed for WW3 here.
But sacrificing hapless proxies like Ukraine is fine, right? After all, weren’t it the communists who said that you can make an omelette without breaking an egg?
But a sequel to the Cold War — a protracted geopolitical struggle in which both sides prepare for the possibility that they might have to fight each other — seems extremely likely at this point. So likely, in fact, that the US can’t afford not to plan for it.
Poor, peace-loving America, that is forced to prepare for a new Cold War, where it merely sought to conquer the entire world since 1933, with Germany the first victim, well planned in advance.
That’s what the concept of the “War Economy” is about. As Anduril founder Palmer Luckey says, “current year is too late to care about current thing.” We began to prepare for a possible conflict with the original Axis several years before WW2 broke out, and in the Cold War we prepared for a WW3 that fortunately never came.
But the US must prepare again now. And that means far more than just spending money on defense; it means reorganizing the economy to promote certain industries, build or rebuild certain capacities, and reorganize supply chains.
The scale and nature of the task are determined by the capabilities of the opposition. In WW2, the Axis powers had advanced manufacturing prowess but small populations and a lack of access to fuel. In the Cold War, the Soviet bloc had a lot of fuel and a population similar to the US, but had a small and dysfunctional economy and struggled with advanced manufacturing.
In contrast, a potential “New Axis” of Russia and China would control enormous population, vast fuel resources, advanced manufacturing capabilities and a combined economy of enormous size. Except for the fuel part, this is all just China.
So this post is about how the US and its likely allies stack up against the New Axis in economic terms.
The Axis powers not only had relatively small populations and few resources, they also had no strategic depth. Stalin could afford to retreat to near Moscow, until he finally managed to halt the Germans, who had pre-empted a Soviet surprise attack with merely a few weeks, catching the USSR wrong-footed, while it was in a state of full mobilization for the final assault against Germany and the rest of Europe, almost nullifying a Soviet army equipped for assault, not defense. Another Allied advantage was that the Anglo media had a dominant position during WW2, which today is starkly reduced by an internet social media counter culture. Why would the Western population be persuaded to go fighting for Ukraine or Taiwan, traditional Russian and Chinese spheres of influence respectively?
Is there actually a New Axis?
Before we compare the two potential blocs, we should ask whether the New Axis is a real thing. “New Axis” is just a term I made up to refer to the combination of China and Russia (and whatever other allies and fellow travelers they can muster).
The idea that these two powers are de facto allies against the US is based on the joint statement they released before the Ukraine war. When I use the term “New Axis”, though, people occasionally scoff, arguing that China and Russia have too few common interests and too much mutual suspicion to form any kind of close alliance.
And maybe this is true. So far, China has been reluctant to offer substantial support to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine: Chinese companies, afraid of sanctions, aren’t even investing much in Russia.
It is true that Russia and China are no natural allies. Russia has a vast underpopulated landmass and lots of resources, where China is densely populated, has a 10x larger population, 4x larger GDP and few sources. On top of that, president Putin tried for 21 years to buddy up with Europe, but in the end was rejected by Europe on orders of the US, that wants to keep the Euro-bitch for itself.
[parisberlinmoscow] – Paris-Berlin-Moscow
[parisberlinmoscow] – Putin Confirms Ambition Paris-Berlin-Moscow Alliance
[parisberlinmoscow] – Russian EU Ambassador Offers Europe “Unlimited Cooperation”
But it’s worth remembering that the original Axis wasn’t that close of an alliance either. Germany and Japan signed some agreements and both fought against the US, but they didn’t work together much at all during the war.
They also didn’t team up against the USSR — Japan signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviets (which the Soviets themselves broke only in the very last days of the war), and notably failed to come to Germany’s aid in Operation Barbarossa.
Correct. Germany, Italy and Japan ended up in the same “alliance”, because there were no other allies to choose from. Naive Hitler had aspired his entire life to have Britain as his ally, as expressed from Main Kampf in 1925 until the desperate peace flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain shortly before Barbarossa in 1941, to at least have Britain of his back, since he realized since the Molotov visit in 12-14 November 1940 to Berlin that Stalin never had been serious about the Non-Aggression Pact. Even stronger, maybe Germany could even have won the war if it paradoxically had NOT been allied to Italy, that without consulting Berlin had undertaken to attack Greece, which provided the excuse to the British to use Thessaloniki as an airstrip to bomb the oilfields in Ploesti, Romania, forcing Germany to invade the Balkans to chase the British from Greece, losing three valuable months, which probably would have sufficed to reach Moscow in time before the onset of the terrible winter and dissolute the USSR, liberating Russia from communism and forcing peace terms upon the Anglos.
In order to be comparable to the original Axis, a New Axis of Russia and China wouldn’t even have to work together militarily or give each other arms. Russia would have to sell China fuel, but other than that, they really could just ignore each other and focus on fighting the US and its allies in separate theaters.
Even in this “minimal New Axis” case, the US and its allies have to prepare to oppose both Russia and China at the same time. As long as Russia and China don’t fight each other and Russia provides China with fuel, they might as well be allies in the new Cold War.
The only reason why China didn’t come to the aid of Russia so far, is because Russia didn’t need any help. Russia could increasingly dominate the battle field almost entirely on its own strength, only marginally aided by Iranian drones and North-Korean artillery shells, practicing demolishing inferior western armaments, operated by sub-competent Ukrainians. This experience could come in very handy in the coming years.
To size up the two blocs, we have to assign countries to them, and this is highly speculative. Even in WW2, the final composition of the Allies wasn’t determined until Hitler invaded the USSR; indeed, during the early days of the conflict, it looked as if the USSR might even join the Nazis, or at least sit things out. So there’s a lot of guesswork here.
That is a complete Allied propaganda myth. One of the best guarded secrets of WW2, and there are many, is that the US and USSR and their middleman Churchill since 1933 were joined at the hip in getting the European empires destroyed. Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill were in bed since 1934 to get a war started in Europe, that eventually would benefit the globalist powers USA and USSR by design. Churchill acted merely as a traitor to British interests and squandered the largest empire in world history, pure for personal financial gain.
On the New Axis side, I’m just going to include China and Russia. North Korea is also included but it’s very small and really all it can do is fight South Korea, so I’ll ignore it. Then there are a couple of wild cards like Pakistan and Iran, but these have generally low capabilities and little reason to get involved with a global great-power conflict, so I’ll leave them out too.
The author underestimates North-Korea immensely. It should be remembered that South-Korea is the only foothold the US has on East-Asian mainland, apart from Thailand, that doesn’t neighbor China and its ties with the US are undermined by China as we speak. North-Korea has nukes, South-Korea hasn’t. Under encouragement of China, North-Korea could be persuaded to invade the South, chase off the US troops and achieve Korean unification under a Chinese capitalist-authoritarian model. Additionally, North-Korean nukes could be used to stifle Japan into neutrality, a nuclear detonation 30 miles out of the coast from Nagasaki would suffice for that purpose. And then there is the distinct possibility of North-Korea nuking the US itself
[voanews.com] – ICBM Test May Soon Bring All of US Within North Korean Nuclear Range
To top it off, North-Korea has the most submarines of all countries in the world, surpassing even both the US and Russia, albeit of lesser quality. These subs could nevertheless be used as drones to detonate nukes in US West coast harbors.
The harder question is which countries would be on the US’ side in this new Cold War. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has united most of Europe against Russia and deepened transatlantic cooperation, which puts a lot of people and GDP and manufacturing capacity in the US’ corner. And Japan will likely be the US’ main partner in a conflict with China over Taiwan.
That certainly applies the US-oriented political and media elites, but not to the electorate behind the populist parties, that are currently growing fast and in some countries already participate in the government. As long as Russia won’t invade European countries (and it won’t), the political class will have great trouble mobilizing the population for an armed struggle against Russia and China. And the conclusion that US colony Japan is anxious for a war against neighbor China is highly premature. The Japanese government his little choice in pretending it will, but will it, once push comes to shove? The US can always run, and usually does, but Japan will be the eternal neighbor of China, the latter with a population 10x the size of Japan.
[thediplomat] – No, Japan Will Not Defend Taiwan
[japantimes.co.jp] – Will Japan intervene in a Taiwan contingency? It depends.
[economist] – Will Japan fight?
So I’ll include the EU, the UK, and Japan in the “New Allies.” I’ll leave out South Korea, assuming it will be tied down by North Korea. I’ll also leave out some smaller countries like Canada and Australia that would almost certainly be part of the New Allies; this is at least partially balanced by the fact that some EU countries like Hungary wouldn’t really cooperate.
India
The really big wild card here is India, which has a huge population and a reasonably hefty economy. The USSR was India’s protector during the Cold War and much of India’s military equipment still comes from Russia (though this is starting to shift). So India can’t be expected to enter into any conflict against Russia.
Very true.
But China is a very different matter. China is India’s main military threat, and the two countries have come to blows recently over a disputed border. They are also rivals for influence in the Indo-Pacific region. This is why India has joined the Quad, forging a loose quasi-alliance with the US, Japan and Australia whose purpose is obviously to hedge against China.
Thus, because India’s status is still pretty uncertain, I’ll do two comparisons: one with just the New Allies of the US, EU, UK and Japan, and one with the New Allies + India.
Because of the uncertain nature of the coalitions (and because of my omission of smaller coalition partners on both sides), these comparisons should be taken as rough and indicative rather than definitive. All numbers are the most recent available.
Wrong, China is not a military threat to India. India and China are separated by a vast mountain range, making it impossible for either army to invade the neighbor. There is indeed a silly low-temperature dispute about an economically useless border area high in the Himalayas, but that is merely about prestige, not vital economic interests. Further more it is silly to assume that India can be made to fight China by the US, but that Indian-Russian relations will be able to remain friendly. In a real world war, India will have great trouble to merely survive, even if it is not engaged in actual fighting. Acquiring sufficient food and fuel will provide enough head-aches.
Tale of the tape: population, GDP, and manufacturing output
“Quantity has a quality all its own.” – Joseph StalinFirst, let’s just talk about population. Obviously, that’s only one input to national power, but it’s worth looking at anyway:
[Population graph]
What this chart really just shows is that China and India are really, really, really big compared to every other country, and even compared to the EU. That’s a fact worth remembering.
It is. And even more important, these highly collectivist societies Russia and China, not to mention North-Korea and Iran, can take far higher casualties than the individualistic West, that begins to scream at 40k deaths (Vietnam).
Now let’s look at GDP. GDP is important for military strength because unless you’re operating a command economy, you have to pay for your army somehow, and GDP determines the available tax revenue.
There’s a debate as to whether it’s more appropriate to use nominal GDP or purchasing power parity-adjusted GDP in these comparisons. So I’ll just sidestep that debate by showing both, because they really don’t tell that different of a story:
[GDP nominal/PPP graphs]
Numbers here are in millions of dollars.
The basic story here is that the New Allies have a substantially higher GDP than the New Axis, with or without India on board. The difference is a bit narrowed when we use PPP, to a ratio of 1.7 instead of 2.3 (without India). The other thing we see from this comparison is that in economic terms as well as population, the New Axis is mostly just China.
Of course, we could expect these figures to change in the result of a war, as a result of sanctions, disruptions to supply chains, financial market changes, war production, and a variety of other things. So this is just an indicative measure of where we stand.
Basically correct, with the annotation that the US GDP is inflated by 40% due to its $ reserve currency. If that would stop, US GDP PPP would be half of that of China. Moreover, such a loss would bring unbearable social tensions to an already highly polarized US society, that according to many is on the brink of civil war.
[parisberlinmoscow] – The Unraveling of the United States
But anyway, paying for your army is one thing, but if your alliance can’t actually make the things you need to fight a war, then having a bunch of dollars is not so useful. Modern warfare requires making a lot of stuff — missiles, drones, ships, tanks, trucks, ammo, and so on.
So manufacturing output is probably important, above and beyond simple GDP; when a war rolls around, dollars that come from tourism, or from selling fancy wine, are going to be of less use than dollars of factory output. Anyway, here’s the comparison, again in millions of dollars:
[Manufacturing output graph]
Here we see it’s a much closer-run thing. India doesn’t manufacture a ton, so with or without India, the New Allies just barely out-manufacture the New Axis.
The reason, as before, is China. As Damien Ma says, China has become the “make everything country.” Before the turn of the century, a very large percent of the manufacturing in the world, in terms of value, was done in the old industrialized economies of the US, Europe, and Japan.
But in the last 20 years, China has emerged as a second center of manufacturing that rivals all of the old industrialized nations combined. On some deep level, I suspect this shift is why we’re seeing the revival of great-power conflict.
What this means is that while Russia itself can’t manufacture the materiel for a protracted local conflict with Europe, China can manufacture enough to sustain both itself and Russia in a conflict between the two blocs I’m envisioning here.
More or less correct.
Specific economic capabilities
“The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make.” – William T. ShermanThe manufacturing comparison in the previous section was pretty broad; the total value-added figure leaves out lots of important stuff. It doesn’t tell us how technologically advanced a country’s weapons systems are. It doesn’t tell us what percent of manufacturing capacity could be repurposed to military uses.
And most importantly, it doesn’t show how complete a country’s supply chains are. If you go into a war with manufacturing companies that depend on the enemy countries for critical components, it doesn’t matter how much value-added you produce in peacetime — your factories will grind to a halt.
Value added is calculated on the margin, in peacetime, while wartime manufacturing capability is inframarginal — it’s the amount you can make after wrenching changes close you off to your peacetime supply chains.
During the early Covid pandemic, the US painfully rediscovered this principle when it found itself unable to make enough masks, Covid tests, or ventilators. But later in the pandemic, the US had the advanced biotech supply chains to pump out huge amounts of mRNA vaccines, while China was the one to struggle.
Thus, it’s very hard to tell which supply chain pieces will end up being the choke points in a conflict. This is why the Biden administration is working feverishly on this problem, and I’m sure the Chinese authorities are doing the same. But there are a few things we can probably predict will be important.
First, fuel. (At this point I’ll stop doing the stacked bar charts and just show a map.) We can see that both of the posited blocs would have ample access to oil:
[Oil reserves graph]
Gas is also roughly similar.
So, on paper, both blocs have enough fossil fuels. For the New Axis, the question would mainly be whether Russia can get enough oil and gas to China — it would involve either moving a lot of tankers through potentially contested waters or building a ton of very expensive difficult pipelines across the vast expanses of Eurasia. Of course, the US would face a similar problem getting oil, coal and gas to its allies in Europe and Asia.
Major disagreement here. Europe is extremely vulnerable for its energy supplies on third parties, with extremely long supply lines, vulnerable in a situation of war and hardly has any resources itself. Major suppliers were Russia and still is the Gulf. The first thing that would happen if hostilities break out is Iran effectively shutting of the entire Gulf area, with nobody able to do anything about it. Submarines will torpedo US or African supplies to Europe. Norwegian pipelines will be blown up, after Nordstream gave the “good example”. Not much oil and gas will arrive in Europe, crushing the economy and raising public discontent about unnecessary wars with Russia and China over Ukraine and Taiwan.
To be sure, fossil fuels aren’t the only type of energy out there; there’s also renewables. Carting around the energy from renewables requires a lot of batteries (and maybe some electrolyzers), which requires a lot of minerals.
David Roberts has a good breakdown of mineral requirements for alternative energy, with some good charts showing where the minerals are located. Graphite and rare earths are concentrated in China, while cobalt and platinum are concentrated in Africa:
China meanwhile has 50% of its electricity from renewables, one of the largest shares in the world, making this part of energy supply invulnerable. US merely 20%, the EU 44%. Americans don’t really believe in renewable, at their own peril.
[Minerals and fossil fuel reserves graph]
Of course, this is just current production. The US and its allies will probably be able to develop domestic supplies of rare earths and graphite if they have to, just as Japan started mining rare earths when China cut it off. But finding and exploiting these resources takes time, so the New Allies should probably be looking at this right now.
Then there’s the question of where the minerals are processed. Here we see that the answer is mostly “China”:
[Selected minerals graph]
This seems like a real vulnerability for the New Allies. My suspicion is that there are a lot of other basic, “primary industry” type of tasks that developed countries have lazily let migrate en masse to China because they aren’t very high up the value chain. But in a conflict situation, “high up the value chain” suddenly means a lot less.
It is a major vulnerability for the West. And where the Chinese-Russian block has a vast Eurasian territory at its disposal, providing both of nearly anything they need, as good as invulnerable for hostile outsiders, Japan and Europe have to work with vulnerable supply lines from abroad. On top of that, many African countries are telling the West to leave Africa, especially the SAHEL countries, depriving France for instance of an important supply of cheap uranium and gold. Most of the Global South has more sympathy for China or at least the belief that China will supersede the West, causing many to vote with their feet.
Semiconductors — i.e., computer chips — are an additional consideration. “Chips are the new oil”, as they say, which means that semiconductors are used in pretty much every piece of machinery. That includes all the machines of war and war production. Currently, the New Allies produce most of the semiconductors in the world, though China is racing to catch up:
[Semiconductor manufacturing graph]
But despite China’s mightiest efforts, this looks like an area where the New Allies will maintain a decisive advantage over the next decade.
I completely disagree that the West has a “decisive advantage”. ASML may be able to produce EUV 2nm chips, of which China is currently deprived on orders of the US, but China is near 5 nm. This difference may be significant for high end wearables, it is not for industrial or military applications.
In general, what looking at supply chain chokepoints shows us is that neither the New Axis nor the New Allies represents a fully self-contained, integrated economic machine that can make everything it needs for a major conflict.
The past 20 years have seen China and the old industrialized nations develop a symbiotic relationship — they are deeply intertwined. (One would hope this would be enough to prevent a conflict but that’s almost certainly wishful thinking given past experience.)
What that means is that in the event of a conflict, each bloc would be scrambling to shore up its weak points — China scrambling to build more chip fabs and secure more oil from Russia, the US and Europe and Japan scrambling to rebuild the low-value primary industries that they outsourced to China.
Stiffest economic competition ever
I can’t say whether or not the New Axis is the most formidable military competitor that the US and its allies have ever faced. The original Axis was certainly fearsome and the USSR had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons ready to roast the world at the touch of a button.
But I think that the comparisons above show that the New Axis certainly represents an economic competitor like none the US and its allies have ever faced. And the reason is simply China. Russia is mainly a gas station with nukes but China has three things going for it:
1. China has far, far more workers than the original Axis or the Soviet bloc.
2. China has advanced manufacturing technology that probably rivals the original Axis in relative terms, and far exceeds the Soviet bloc.
3. China has the world’s largest manufacturing cluster, making it the “make everything country”, which neither the Axis nor the USSR managed to be.This is simply a unique situation in modern history. The Industrial Revolution began in Europe and spread to the US and the East Asian rim. The aftermath of WW2 saw central Europe and the East Asian rim incorporated into a US-led alliance that dominated global manufacturing in a way that the communist powers could never threaten.
Now, with the rise of China, world manufacturing is divided roughly in two. Much of the War Economy in the US and its allies will therefore be about rediscovering the manufacturing capabilities they neglected during China’s meteoric rise.
The author didn’t answer the question who would win WW3, so I will. Answer: nobody. There will never be western soldiers showing up in Moscow or Beijing, nor Chinese or Russian soldiers in Washington or Brussels, like Anglos and Soviets showed up in Berlin in 1945. So will everything remain the same when major conflict breaks out, like it already has in Ukraine? Far from it! The Western idea that Ukraine can be snatched away from the traditional Russian sphere of influence or that Taiwan can be defended, 10,000 km away from US mainland, is outright delusional. China will manage to remove the US from East-Asia completely, even the conquest of Australia is a real prospect in an all out war against the US (AUKUS). In reality, the imaginary “rules-based order” (meaning that everybody should follow Western orders), will be defeated, the world will become multi-polar and US hegemony buried once and for all. And once the European-American population will understand that the geopolitical version of the “American Dream”, namely planetary domination, is over for good, the already strong polarization of US society will come to a boiling point and the union will fall apart, like the USSR in 1991.
[parisberlinmoscow] – The Unraveling of the United States
An emerging identitarian multipolar world order, after US hegemony
Paris-Berlin-Moscow 