The Soft Dissolution

Possible Futures, Installment Five

There is one thing that might avert, or abort, the Long War within its first few years.

Because the wars of the disorder are limited by manpower, it is possible that the players involved decide, one after another, to do something unprecedented in the history of warfare:

Give up.

Not “surrender to the enemy,” but “give up entirely.”

After all, the coming famines (the current war in Ukraine has taken over a third of the world’s fertilizer and wheat production offline—consider also that China has now banned rice exports) will likely create a wave of refugees flooding north from Africa into Europe that will make the 2015 refugee crisis look like a church picnic, even as Europe itself is contending with food and energy shortages and terminal financial crises. In another time, this would create conditions for invasion, but now, the only country on that continent that would have a prayer of conducting a successful invasion is France. Granted, they’ve done it before, but it would require a deep culture change for them to be willing to do it again.

It is therefore possible that everyone will be just too busy with their own internal chaos (chaos which, though organic, will doubtless be helped along regularly by strategic adversaries) to worry much about attacking their neighbors. Alternately, it is possible that that after war ensues, internal chaos will force belligerents to withdraw from the front lines as soon as they’re certain their adversaries will not push back (as Russia did in World War 1 after its internal coups).

In such a scenario, wars would still happen, but they would not be as unrelenting as the scenario we discussed last time. And this is not unrealistic scenario.

Consider the obvious effects of severe famine, demographic collapse, economic collapse, and refugee invasion. Any one of these is enough to cause state failure. All three at once are virtually guaranteed to cause state failure in at least a few places, especially in southern Europe and perhaps in Germany as well.

Things won’t be a picnic in the US either, as we’ll be contending with minor versions of all these crises that are hitting the rest of the world like an extinction-level asteroid. Here, expect massive waves of internal migration emptying the coasts and the northern states and heading for the NAFTA states (New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennesee, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, etc.), which are so situated as to expect sustained economic booms as a result of their closeness to both the resource extraction industries and the labor supply.

Things elsewhere will be much more sedate, with older, faster-aging populations and much less economic opportunity.

This will be complicated, at least in the early years, by the war currently heating up between the United States and the Cartels south of the border, but, on the whole, the south and southwest are in for a bonanza while the rest of the country hits a protracted run of hard (or at least hard-ish) times.

As you might expect, this will have a fairly radical impact on politics inside all of the affected states (both those in boom and those in bust) and a lot of acrimony between the haves and the have-nots. It will re-shape national politics into a battle between those states who want the Federal Government to subsidize their dying ways of life and the booming states who—already generally anti-Federal—realize that they have the population and the economic leverage to go their own way and let the rest of the country scream about it.

In this scenario, one can expect the recent trend of states bucking Federal authority to intensify to the point where the Federal government largely gives up the fight, and power devolves, with very little fanfare, from the Fed back to the States, for good and for ill.

In all cases across the world, this soft dissolution of centralization will be aided by decentralizing technologies—everything from garage manufacturing and 3D printing, to waste-dump mining, to blockchain contracts, to AI-enabled legal services, to corporate scrip taking the place of US currency for local cash-like transactions. Corruption, too, will change its character from the massive international money laundering operations (i.e. SuperPACs and NGOs) that are today’s preferred avenue, to more direct payoffs from local interest groups, organized crime, and cartels.

In the end, this world will wind up looking a lot like the world of the 1890s, with limited but vibrant international trade, weak national governments, strong regional identities, and the return of both mercantilism and the spoils system of politics.

It will be a quieter world than the one we have today, and certainly much quieter than the one projected in The Long War, and smaller, too. In this world, nobody beyond church groups will care much about civil wars and famines in Africa, or dictators in Europe, or genocides in the far east, and why should they?

Everyone will have their hands full just keeping up with the local news.

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