<nettime> Toward World War III?

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

World wars are thankfully uncommon. The hierarchy of international
relations does not usually shift in a few months, or even a few years. The
rage of foreign battles rarely penetrates the hearts of distant citizens.

We have not yet crossed the line where the unthinkable becomes real. But
the Ukraine and Gaza wars bring us closer.

When the present economic order was set up in the 1990s, under the banner
of globalization, many warned that it would end as the globalization of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did. Having read Karl Polanyi
(1), we predicted that predatory resource extraction, unequal terms of
trade, foreign interference in local cultures, environmental degradation
and the surging inequalities resulting from all that would have a very bad
end. Just as it did in 1914. Three decades later, Israel-Palestine is the
Balkans, the US/EU are the Austro-Hungarian Empire and all of us are on the
verge of a world war, waiting for China to take on a belligerent role - or
not, hopefully. So what are the dynamics of the present conflict?

In addition to *causus belli* - the immediate reasons for hostilities -
insurgency and war are often analyzed in terms of *opportunity structures*.
What's meant is that any degradation of existing security arrangements
opens up possibilities for insurgent forces, including subordinated states.
A third category, *organizational resources*, refers not only to the
availability of arms and other material inputs, but also the capacity to
mobilize populations for battle (2).

I'm going to assume that the post-WWII security arrangements and their
vicissitudes are relatively familiar, and focus on the analysis of the
present. The aim here is to understand the conditions for a third world war.

First, a few contextual points about the possible causus belli. It's known
that the liberal free trade regimes enforced by the British and the
Americans over the last three centuries give an immense advantage to the
largest economic actors, whose industries can flood the world market and
whose commercial sectors can bring down prices by playing one
resource-producing country against the next. During the major economic
crises (think 2008) this becomes unbearable for entire classes and
populations. However, the strength of free-trade liberalism since WWII is
to bring the resulting conflicts into the fold of multilateral
institutions, from the UN and the World Bank to the WTO and the World Court
in The Hague, so as to constitute what is claimed to be a global rule of
law (expressed diplomatically as a rules-based international order). In
short, free-trade liberals believe that economic interdependence and
international justice will resolve the tensions that cause wars.

With this in mind it's worth reading the new book "Underground Empire: How
America Weaponized the World Economy" by political scientists Abraham
Newman and Henry Farrell. The book explores how after 9/11, the United
States came to exercise new-found infrastructural powers through its
earlier creation of the global dollar clearing system and then the
Internet. These and other global affordances promote interdependence, and
yet also open it up to abuse by the largest central actor. The US arsenal
of coercion now includes unlimited data-gathering and surveillance
(extremely familiar to nettimers), as well as the ability to declare and
enforce binding economic sanctions, block financial transactions, and even
"freeze" the assets of individuals, corporations and states. All these
powers, along with traditional export/import controls, are being
spectacularly exercised on Russia right now. Yet at the same time, they
have driven a wedge between the US and the EU, due to both industrial and
governmental espionage, and privacy-wrecking surveillance capitalism.
Newman and Farrell show how broadly the exercise of infrastructural power
has destabilized the current world order - and I think this is really a
book that nettimers would like to read, because it's exactly the stuff we
have been talking about for decades.

A bit less obviously but quite a lot more importantly, the US abuse of its
dominant position has pushed China into an acceleration of its longstanding
effort to create a new trading system among the countries of the Global
South. The relative success of this effort was demonstrated last summer
when Brazil's Lula proclaimed that Vladimir Putin would not be arrested if
he attended next year's G20 summit in Rio. Lula walked back that remark
(after all, Brazil is a member of the International Criminal Court) but he
then led a large delegation to China to explore economic cooperation and
development opportunities, as almost all African and South American
countries are now doing. With these gestures Lula exemplifies the attitude
of the great majority of countries in the Global South. The current
economic order, they believe, is just as unjust as the bombs that the US is
now sending to Israel.

What Newman and Farrell have analyzed - under the now-ubiquitous keyword of
"weaponized interdependence" - may someday become the causus belli for a
war with China (cf the book Chip War)(3). But its major effects so far are
on the opportunity structure and the organizational resources for smaller
states or non-state actors seeking to change the balance of regional power.

It's clear that the decay of a global diplomatic and military alliance
system creates opportunities for attack. Enter Donald Trump, the failed
bully, who used the full arsenal of weaponized interdependence against
China, while also threatening core allies and international institutions.
This represented major decay in the Western diplomatic system, driven by
internal conflict in the most powerful countries. What's less clear in the
newspapers and specialized journals, however, is that the identitarian
populism of Trump, Farage, Netanyahu and their like has severely weakened
the global security system. Hamas saw their opportunity in the political
crisis over Netanyahu's attempt to neutralize the Israeli Supreme Court, a
crisis that had military officers out in the street right up to October 7.
As the Hamas attack occurred, the US House of Representatives was
completely inoperative due to internal conflict, while in the Senate, a
patriarchal bigot from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, was blocking all military
promotions (including for a commander of the Marines), all because the
military supports female soldiers crossing state lines for an abortion.
Meanwhile, US streets are full of leftist protests against the Gaza War,
real anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise along with attacks on
Palestinians, and wholly unjustified accusations of anti-Semitism are being
hurled at anyone who criticizes the brutality of the IDF invasion. These
kinds of internal conflicts not only provided an opportunity structure for
Hamas, but earlier, they did so for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
Indeed, those internal conflicts have in part been strategically provoked
by Russia, whose secret service agents were very aware of domestic Western
weaknesses.

As for organizational resources, since 9/11 we all know that the spread of
communications technologies has greatly benefited non-state insurgent
actors. What's happening now, though, is that the Russia-China axis is
providing material inputs, financial flows and treaty architectures in a
vast attempt to exit from the covertly hierarchical interdependencies of
1990s-style globalization. This attempt is a direct echo of the
underdeveloped countries' aspirations to South-South collaboration and a
New International Economic Order back in the 1970s - aspirations which were
crushed by the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the emergent hegemony of
neoliberalism (4). Today a state actor like Iran, which has been a
consistent target of US economic sanctions, is able to provide material and
organizational support for a regional war. In addition, major countries
outside the core of the Western alliance, such as India, have not ceased
buying oil and arms from Russia, with payments in rubles. And of course,
Russia itself is militarily and diplomatically supported by China, which
continually beats the war drum over Taiwan.

If we add all the BRICS nations, and all those who have signed on to the
Belt and Road, then you can see an emergent alliance system which could
entirely cut itself off from the West - setting up the conditions for WWIII.

Causing some controversy, I noted a while ago on nettime that the US was
engaged in a proxy war with Russia, and that this war was being exploited
by the Biden administration to reboot the decayed NATO alliance system in
view of the containment of China. I believe that this US strategy has now
become obvious to the entire world - and hey, I'm neither an anti-Semite,
nor a Putin explainer, nor a China dreamer, nor any of the things that
everyone who refuses to toe the official lines now gets accused of. I'm not
a knee-jerk pacifist either, because the whole world is now in a gravely
dangerous situation which merits military considerations alongside many
others.

What I am is a critic of economic imperialism, which I take as one of the
underlying causes for war. The extraction of resources, the exploitation of
labor and the dumping of commodities in distant markets is what it takes to
sustain the contemporary middle-class lifestyle - or what the Viennese
scholars Brandt and Wissen call "the imperial mode of living" (5). Such
imperialism is always accompanied by the control compulsion that you can
see in both Israel and the US, and by a willingness to dehumanize the
opponent in order to apply overwhelming military force. This is now
dramatically increasing the chances for world war, as those two countries
and their allies show unequivocal and highly emotionalized support for IDF
brutality and the fascistic Netanyahu government.

All of this is occurring in the teeth of a technoscientific revolution
(AI), and in the perspective of a global industrial project (energy
transition). Elites at all levels know this, and they know that in a
pacified world a new economic boom is almost certain, despite the
increasing ravages of climate change. This is why the specific facts of
each regional confrontation (Ukraine, Gaza) are overdetermined by
maneuvering at global scale. What you're seeing is open, armed competition
over the future shape of the world: the power to be gained in it, the
profits to made from it.

My point is not to say the regional conflicts don't matter, that Russia had
good reasons for invading Ukraine, that Hamas's terrorism is justified by
Israel's atrocities - no. The point is that the conduct of the Western
countries has contributed to the hostilities, and rather than setting off
on a jingoistic warpath, it's our responsibility to change that conduct. We
watch bloody murder every day, we stand on the verge of a world war, and
behind that is the Anthropocene abyss. It is time to cease thinking that
it's all someone else's business, and I'm just gonna do my job and have my
fun. It's equally time to cease thinking that because of collective guilt
over the Holocaust, Israel should be supported in everything and at all
costs - including that of creating a world full of enemies.

Even if we escape a major global conflict (which is entirely possible), the
future is going to be increasingly difficult. It needs serious strategic
responses from citizens, not just elites.

I have a lot more to say about the world that could be. But to change
reality you first have to face it as it is.

soberly, Brian


A few notes

1. Polanyi, Karl.. The great transformation. 1994/2015
2. Gledhill, J. (2018). Disaggregating Opportunities: Opportunity
Structures and Organisational Resources in the Study of Armed Conflict.
Civil Wars, 1–29.
3. Miller, Chris. Chip war: the fight for the world's most critical
technology. Simon and Schuster, 2022.
4. See Michael Hudson, Global Fracture: The New International Economic
Order, 2d edition, Pluto Press, 2005, for an introduction to this failed or
defeated attempt to rewrite global economic rules.
5. Brand, Ulrich, and Markus Wissen. The imperial mode of living: Everyday
life and the ecological crisis of capitalism. Verso Books, 2021.
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