When The Future Stops Being Born

Demography, Natalism, and the Future of Civilization

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This piece is long and your email client may choke on it. Read the original at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com.

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The world is changed.

I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.¹

Back in 2005, I was a young and scrappy independent filmmaker riding high on the last stages of the Indie Film Revolution in the San Francisco Bay Area. In retrospect, the defining feature of the era were the coffee shops. This was back before coffee shops had been domesticated. Back then, they were still places you went to meet people, have vigorous arguments, and write revolutionary poetry, scripts, and novels.

Back then, everyone knew that population increase would spell certain doom for the environment and, as a consequence, everyone who depended on it.

Everyone, that is, except for Randy (I never learned his last name). Randy knew better, and he argued about it at great length. He argued about it in enough depth that I looked into it myself and discovered a startling, liberating truth:

Population increase was basically a fleeting accident. Between prosperity, women’s education, propaganda, western media, and gods-knew-what-else, the birth rate everywhere was falling fast, and the population on Earth would peak and start to quickly crash sometime between 2040 and 2050—long before any of the looming environmental catastrophes actually had a chance to sink their teeth too deep into the civilizational fabric.

Problem solved, done and dusted, nothing further to worry about.

Better than that, the human race could look forward to a future of material progress without having to worry too much about filling up the planet. People who live in plentitude have fewer children and invest more in them. Those children get better educations, and become wealthier over time. Quality, in the long run, wins out over quantity. Thanks to technological uplift, we need not worry about the next Einstein or Brunell spending his life as an under-educated farmer, his genius going to waste on designing agricultural implements and struggling with revolving seasonal debt.

Humanity wasn’t just going to survive, it was going to get rich enough to go to the stars, and to do so in style.

Or, that’s what I thought at the time.

As naive as that (or, at least, some of that) sounds, the facts on the ground at the time seemed to support that kind of vision.

Since then, some facts that were previously hidden from the public have come to light, and other facts on the ground have changed…and not for the better.

Now it looks like losing four billion people over the course of a couple decades might create a far bigger problem than just a temporary spike in funeral home revenues.

And the hell of it is…

…in any other world, this wouldn’t be the case.²

Have We Been Here Before?

There are somewhere around eight billion people alive on Earth today—more than has ever before existed at one point (and starting to get close to some estimates of the total that existed in all of recorded history before the 20th century). Since the early 20th century, population has been on a trend-line pointed nearly vertically—and this is despite two world wars and over a hundred million people being killed by non-war political genocides in that time, along with a few plagues here and there.

The amazing increase in population is due almost entirely to five factors:

1. Collective immunity. The exploration of the Earth has turned the planet into a more-or-less common petri dish for humans. Diseases from Africa (such as HIV) or tropical climes (such as Yellow Fever) can spread pretty easily across the planet, exerting a constant selective pressure on all populations. While vaccines and other medical miracles put the final nail in the “plagues are a regular thing” coffin, the lid had been gradually closing for a hundred years beforehand, as centuries of relatively easy travel had made viruses less virulent and humans more hardy.

2. Better medical care at the beginning of life (most people in the before-time died in childhood—an arguably greater percentage than are now culled by abortion or prevented by birth control).

3. Better access to food (which not only allows more children to grow up healthy, it also reduces infanticide, which was a human norm in most of the world before the modern era), which is entirely a by-product of the petrochemical industry. All those fertilizers that make modern agriculture hyperproductive (if also highly destructive of soils and nutritionally somewhat deficient)? Those are synthesized from petroleum feedstocks (crude oil and natural gas). If the oil companies don’t drill, you don’t eat. The oil flows are (or were) in turn, assured by the US Navy (and were the basis of the dollar’s status as the international reserve currency).

4. Better old-age medical care (which extends life).

5. The professionalization of war. Before the 20th century, wars were fought by ordinary people who were pressed into service. Since the first world war, wars have been fought by professional soldiers. Confining warfare to the professional warrior classes drastically reduces its demographic footprint.

Over a century-plus of uninterrupted population rise is pretty unusual in human history. Previous eras battled periodic plagues, regular generational wars, and high infant mortality. These things, in addition to the occasional famine, kept the population down. Oh, there were fluctuations, and a general upward trend, but on a local level human population increased relatively slowly, with each generation not-much-larger or not-much-smaller than the last, outside of a few extraordinary seasons.

On a global level, the human population almost never decreased throughout recorded history. Such an event is so rare that it hasn’t happened, even once, in the past seven centuries or so.

But almost seven hundred years ago, a bacterium infesting a flea rode on the back of a rat off of a ship docked in Crimea, and as that flea bit other animals, it spread that bacterium to other fleas, which eventually started biting humans.³

The result was a massive, persistent series of plagues that swept across Europe, going by a succession of names like “bubonic” and “pneumonic,” that has entered the collective memory of Europeans as “The Black Death.”⁴

Over the course of a decade, half of all Europeans died an agonizing, fluid-oozing, ugly death that left vast scars in the collective memory of the continent, and upended the entire world. The moral authority of the Catholic Church took a heavy hit, the ossified social order of the High Middle Ages shattered, and the political shape of Europe turned chaotic (even by European standards).

The world that emerged after had a labor shortage, sending wages through the roof and funneling wealth to the commoners. Feudalism unwound, industrialism started gaining steam, economic and intellectual and social freedom started becoming realistic aspirations. From the ashes of the Black Death rose the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Age of Empires, and the entirety of the world you and I know.

All it took to get there was a devastation so profound that the only thing left to make sense of life were the small-scale, individually-mediated relationships between people who knew each other in real life (and the cultural traditions in which those individuals were embedded).

So, have we seen massive depopulation before?

Yes.

And was that depopulation, on balance, a good thing?

At least from the perspective of the distant descendants of the survivors, yes (though the people who went through it had a very different opinion).

Did Western civilization benefit from the Black Death?

Undoubtedly. The spring-back from the plague launched the Western World from a millennium-long civilizational backwater (China, Arabia, Anatolia, Iraq, Ethiopia, Nubia, Central America, North America, South America, and India all had thriving civilizations—and several full-blown empires—during our post-Roman insularity) to dominating the world in the space of a couple centuries.

With this in mind, what can we expect from our current impending depopulation?

The Surprising Similarities

History doesn’t repeat itself; but it rhymes.
—Mark Twain

On the surface, our current world couldn’t be more different from the world of the High Middle Ages that the Black Death laid low.

Their societies were traditional, feudal, and local.

Ours are modern-progressive, democratic, and global (or, at least, global-ish).

Their economies were artisanal.

Ours is industrial.

They were religious.

We are secular.

And those look like some pretty stark differences…except that none of them are really all that accurate. Beneath those cosmetic differences lurk some interesting similarities.

First, the easy one:

We are a lot more religious than we look—we just have a religion without a named god, and a theology disguised as an ideology. The state religion of the American Empire (and the British Empire before it) is shared by the bulk of the developed world:

Progress.

Every sacrifice, atrocity, and grand achievement we create is done in its name. Every major ideology—conservative, liberal, fascist, communist, socialist, or traditionalist—is but a denomination of this grand church.

And, at least in the privacy of our own hearts, damn few of us actually believe in its teachings—which is more-or-less exactly the position of the educated and ruling classes of the High Middle Ages (it might also have been true of the lower classes, but they left no written record).

But there are some more compelling similarities between our time and theirs.

Oversaturation

For example, medieval European civilizations were bursting at the seams, population-wise. Their governments, guilds, abbeys, seminaries, and universities were positively choking on candidates who wanted a piece of that sweet, sweet prestige. There weren’t enough positions to go around, and any time a new industry sprang up it quickly saturated and grew a guild, whose business it was to (literally) disfigure anyone who competed in the industry without permission from the guild.

The “surplus population”—the homeless, the vagrant, the itinerant, the mercenary, and the criminal—was uncomfortably large, and executions (along with capital offenses) were common as a result.

Courts were very overused—the principles of justice were so sacred that even animals got their day in court.⁵

And, as a result of all this, upward mobility was basically non-existent. There was no “upward” to mobile oneself towards (or, at least, there was no room up there).

Europe of the High Middle Ages had, in other words, reached a civilizational End State—given the constraints it operated under and the structures it was premised on, there was simply nowhere for it to go. Something had to give.

That “something” was half the population.

Our world today is similarly characterized by insular, choked hierarchies with ever-diminishing levels of opportunity for upward mobility. From business to academia to government, the only parts of our economy or society that show any vitality are those frontiers opened by new technologies—such frontiers are so rare that they get saturated, regulated, systematized, co-opted, stamped, numbered, and filed in a generation or less after they get their boots on.

And sooner or later, something’s gotta give.

Paralysis

The feudal world of the time was also characterized by intense networks of alliances—networks so thick with treaty obligations, debt, family ties, and fraternal obligations that the powerful could barely sneeze without knocking over a tapestry in a castle half a continent away.

The lack of flexibility for the ruling classes meant that knowledge and technological advance—which, despite what you’ve heard, proceeded at a very healthy clip during the middle ages—stalled out pretty powerfully toward the end of the period. It also meant that political maneuvering became more and more difficult, destabilizing, and destructive.

Today, as well, we see a civilization-wide ennui: stalled economic development, stalled scientific advance, stalemated geopolitical structures, and trade relations that are so entangled that the wrong move threatens to send everything spinning sideways. Debt has accumulated to the point where no government any longer has much economic or geopolitical maneuvering headroom, and industries are regulated to within an inch of their lives through a combination of formal regulations, actuarial requirements, union contract stipulations, and case law.

But not everything is the same. There are two very important differences between our world and the world of late medieval Europe.

The Important Differences

Technological Dependency

Despite its technological and cultural sophistication, Europe in the High Middle Ages had relatively short supply chains. Even industrial-style manufacturing (there were occasional factories driven by water wheels) tended to co-locate all the important steps in the process. Sheep might have been pastured and slaughtered in the hinterlands, but the rough wool was cleaned, beaten, spun, dyed, and sometimes woven into cloth within a fairly small area. This had the effect of concentrating expertise, which was important in a world without much in the way of written records: institutional knowledge was kept in the heads of the artisans. In addition to controlling competition, the guilds helped ensure the continuity of their craft through their systems of apprenticeship.

Contrast this with today. We live in a world where—literally—nobody knows how to make something as simple as a pencil.

This is to say nothing of more complex objects, like cars, computers, cell phones, radios, or anything else you touch in your day-to-day life.

This represents a danger unique to our time, especially once you consider how short our product life-cycle is (a few years) compared to that in the medieval world (between a lifetime and several generations).

Our institutional knowledge is no longer stored in people’s heads, but it’s also not stored in books anymore, either. It’s strewn across thousands of computer systems across supply chains thousands of steps long, employing highly-trained experts in dozens of countries on several continents, requiring massive diesel-driven container ships to connect it all together.

In the medieval world, if half the people died, it would take under a generation for the young artisans who knew their craft to rebuild things. The debt load getting wiped out would clear the way for wealth building.

Our world is different.

The Face of the Reaper

Our die-off, of course, is of a new sort. We’re not going to have our population culled by a plague, but by age.

For a population to replace itself, every woman needs to have (on average) 2.1 children—given the minimal modern-levels of childhood mortality, this translates to every adult being replaced by a child during the course of their lifetimes. This doesn’t mean that literally every woman must have children. Even in high-fertility, low-mortality times (such as the post-WW2 era), some women don’t have children, and some women have several. But the average birth rate must say above 2.1 children in order for a nation, a civilization, or a planet to maintain its population.

In the past, this was a pretty easy thing to do. In the past, pretty much everyone was poor. Poor people have lots of children, because poor people need them: Children provide stability and labor in family businesses, they provide care in old age, and they form the organizing principle of any society that has not advanced (a description of evolutionary trajectory, not moral desirability) sufficiently that the apparatus of state supplants traditional community-based functions such as social insurance, welfare, education, medicine, regulation, etc.

In the developed world (excepting Argentina, the US, France, New Zealand, and India) births have been below replacement for a long time.

In the rest of the world—including some of the world’s poorest countries in the global south—the birthrate has also broken or is poised to break below replacement. Pretty much anywhere that television or the Internet shows up, birth rates drop, though it is unclear if the relationship is causal (due, for example, to aspirationalism or propaganda) or coincidental (i.e. if the arrival of access to TV and the Internet and fertility drop are both due to another causal factor or basket of factors).

This means that the people who are gonna die off in the population crash are all the old people.

In a normal world, this would actually be a pretty good thing—the older generation that dies off after a long-and-happy (or at least prosperous) life. Their retirements and deaths leave a lot of open space for the youngsters, and basically everybody wins in the long run. This is a good, solid, basic intuition for anyone who grasps the basics of supply and demand in labor markets (and also other markets).

But the world we live in is far from normal. The “markets” for labor and capital aren’t really markets, anymore, so much as they are highly regulated boutiques where some players get paid to put their products on the shelf, and others have to pay for access.⁶

The world we live in runs on one thing—and it isn’t oil, or electricity, or political power.

It’s debt.

Governments sell debt to buy the favor of voters (through welfare payments, pension schemes, medical benefits, education, etc.), so that voters won’t notice that the bulk of their tax money is going into the pockets of the politically well-connected.

Individuals go into debt to buy homes, cars, educational credentials, experiences, and consumer goods.

Companies go into debt to get started (and damn few companies start without debt anymore).

Farms go into debt to buy their seeds and maintain their equipment, commonly going through a full debt cycle every year.

The finance industry exists to furnish debt, but it makes its loans against assets held. Those assets are created somewhere. As I explained in The Economy Is Stupid, wealth comes from creativity—the province of your ordinary working schlub.

Money isn’t wealth, it’s simply a way of keeping track of who has a claim on how much wealth from whom, and on what schedule.

Those assets which banks and other financiers use to back their loans come from the spending and investing habits of everyday people.

This has some rather startling effects once you start to look at how spending habits shift over the course of a lifetime.

Children generally don’t create wealth and, in advanced economies, are generally barred from remunerative activities (family farms and businesses, and “non-profit” activities being the current sole hold-out exceptions). But they do require a lot of seed capital to raise to full height.

Once they get to full height, a ridiculous percentage of them then go into debt to get a college education. They may be working, earning an income, and spending during these years, but that economic activity is generally trivial next to the debt they accumulate.

This trend of indebtedness accelerates in early life, especially if the young adult finds a partner and starts a family. Consumer debt, vehicle loans, mortgages, etc. all get piled atop the ruinous educational debt burden—which is to say nothing of the taxes they pay on all of the exciting new income they’re earning.

Things start to turn around as the kids grow up and careers mature. By the time your typical adult reaches late middle age (45-55), he or she is paying more into the system than they’re taking out. They’re not making major necessary purchases anymore, they’re sitting on a pile of home equity, and their now-substantial paychecks are being heavily taxed—and they do what they can to avoid those taxes by pushing as much of their paychecks as they can into the capital markets (i.e. retirement savings).

Those taxes fuel the bulk of their governments’ budget and pension programs, and those capital market contributions are what make up the civilization’s available capital for the starting of businesses, the maintenance of farms, the buying of consumer goods, and the carrying of outstanding balances on the books of hospitals.

This situation carries on until they retire.

And then, once they retire, they simply stop.

They don’t contribute to the capital markets, or (much) to taxes, or to the labor pool anymore. They draw down their pensions, they take their existing savings out of the markets, and, from a contributory point of view, they more-or-less cease to exist.

But they do still have to eat.

And buy medicine.

And pay property taxes.

And to do that, they need to spend their savings and/or rely on assistance.

Which, because of the ever-expanding footprint of the State in the lives of its people since the late 1940s, and the ever-diminishing supply of descendants, means that they have to be supported, in part or in whole, by the State.

Which is funded from the taxes of the middle-agers.

A cohort that gets smaller and smaller with every succeeding generation (with the exception of a bump for the Millennials in a few exceptional places on the face of the Earth—most countries don’t have the Millenial bump).

And, at the same time, smaller follow-on generations don’t just mean “fewer taxpayers,” it also means “fewer consumers.” When the demand for goods and services and commodities et.al. collapses, the companies and distribution systems and regulatory structures and governments and financial markets that were built to serve the previous large demand must downsize.

Because the players in these markets are so insulated from the direct signals of those markets (sometimes due to government intervention in the market, but also through triangulation⁷), and because they are staffed by people whose livelihoods depend upon the world continuing on much as it has in previous decades, many are not situated to downsize deliberately. This means that, inevitably, many players will collapse, and dissolve, which will have tectonic ripple effects on surrounding players.⁸

So, in our modern world, we don’t really have a situation where the old fogies are gonna die off and make room for the youngsters. And, if they did, it wouldn’t necessarily solve all the problems caused by their sheer numbers.

We instead have a situation where the entire engine of the modern world—debt—can’t be sustained by the only people of working age who are left to maintain it.

Which means that, for a lot of folks on this planet, their nation, their civilization, and their people will simply stop existing…someday soon.

The Stillborn Future

Some civilizations—like Rome—enjoy a long stately decline.

Some—like the Maya—simply vanish in the space of a generation.

Some—like the Bronze Age civilizations—implode in a startling cascade.

In our world, the nightmare scenario isn’t “half the people will die in a decade,” it’s “half the people will die, slowly, over the course of three decades, and they will bleed their descendants dry in the process.”

In our world, when the current aged cohort goes, they take with them the institutional knowledge that runs the Internet (how many people do you know why can reverse-engineer COBOL and Assembly code?).

The institutional memory of running the international system disappears (to be fair, it seems to have mostly disappeared already).

The lack of available capital means that the global supply chains could disappear as well—assuming that local political revolt, famine, or state failure in places like China don’t do the job first.

And sure, the lack of sufficient numbers of middle-aged people means that a lot of debts will get wiped out through insolvency, which could have some upsides if the shipping companies could still get insurance, the farmers could still get seeds, the builders could still get their construction materials without paying for them until the houses sell, and the governments could still sell enough bonds to fund their militaries and pensions and welfare programs.

In a world without massive amounts of liquidity parked in retirement accounts, there isn’t enough credit to finance the operations of governments, businesses, and consumers. In a world where nobody knows how to do anything, this is a recipe for rapid state failure, famine, and a lot more death than we should expect through simple attrition (especially since those doing the attritting are the old people who know how to make things run—and didn’t pass that knowledge down).

In this way, state failure, trade failure, famine, plague, economic collapse, and a return to kinetic warfare are all bound up together with depopulation in a big fat ball of ugly. And the situation is made weirder because of the nature of civilization going through the die-off.

This is the nightmare scenario staring us all in the face:

Twenty years from now, the world will have a population of 4-5 billion…

…who are rapidly dying off (due to a total collapse of technological civilization and the energy and agricultural flows upon which it depends), and to the thousands of local wars that will break out (and, indeed, are already breaking out) to settle the question of who gets to rule over the ashes of human civilization.

And, if nothing in the current calculus changes, this is exactly where the world is heading.

The Tale of the Phoenix

Phoenix Reborn, gouache and alcohol marker, by Alexis Dasher

The galling thing about all this, of course, is that money isn’t a real thing. Like so many other things that run our lives, it’s a collective fiction that we all tacitly agree to live by.

Debt doesn’t always have to be paid back. It can be cancelled by the lender. If the debtor dies or goes into bankruptcy, it can get written off. You might institute programs (like Canada’s MAID program) to kill your dependent population (the elderly, the infirm, and they young-but-depressed) in order to reduce your social welfare spending.⁹

If you control the terms of the currency in which the debt is written, it can be inflated away (in which case it gets paid back, but with relatively worthless currency).

If you’re very clever, you can get rich a lot faster than the loans come due, and you can pay them down as if they’re trivial (assuming you have the discipline not to borrow again against your new wealth).

You could try to import the new generations your country isn’t producing, so you can prop up your system. If you’re willing to trade your country’s culture away, this could work, for a while…at least, until the imported peoples also stop breeding.

You could incur more debt to finance future generations—giving mothers tax breaks,¹⁰ for example, or paying for day care.¹¹ Pity that no such policies have yet moved the needle.¹²

On a geopolitical level, the best way to make sure that your debts don’t come due is to get rid of the people holding the debt. Force the countries that hold your debt into collapse, force the governments to turn over, declare that the new nation doesn’t get to be party to the loans of the past, and write the debt off.

This might sound familiar.¹³

And, of course, if you know that supply lines are likely to collapse or encounter problems, and your own population collapse will soon make it impossible to secure them, you might try to build yourself an empire with high walls, where you can weather out the demographic storm. This may also sound familiar.¹⁴

You might try to bleed potential adversaries dry through proxy wars, such as have characterized the current world war (and yes, we are in a world war).¹⁵

You might pursue autarky—move all your important manufacturing and resource extraction industries back to places where you can control them, so that you can keep your nation safe and manufacture war materiel if you need to. Even if it risks a major depression and political disruption, if you time it right you could own the future…hold on, I think we’ve heard of this one, too.¹⁶

You could use a naked scam—such as, for example, the AI industry—as a pretext for building nuclear power plants that are immune to major shifts in the price of fuels (such as coal and natural gas) that are traded on the international market, and might soon be needed to secure the alliance for the current age of geopolitical conflict.

If you were successful in one or more of these gambits, your civilization might wind up ruling over a relatively empty planet (and, as a consequence, wind up owning the entire solar system).

If you can somehow preserve institutional knowledge.

If you can somehow wean people off of the wrong kind of technological dependence.

If you can revive the abilities of your people to create on a wide level.

If you have the political will to untangle the nest of legal tentacles that have locked wealth up in a very few hands and have hamstrung the wealth creation potential of the many.

And if, that is, you can solve the problem that caused all the trouble in the first place:

How do you convince people in a failing, digitized, atomized, anti-physical civilization that the future is worth creating with their own bodies…so they can finally reach for the stars?

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1. Apologies to Treebeard.

2. This article grew out of a brief exchange I had on Substack Notes. You can see the original exchange between me and

DeepLeftAnalysis🔸

here (click to be taken to the full conversation):

3. This is the most-accepted account of the first introduction of the Plague into Europe. There are other, competing theories.

4. An interesting side note that has nothing to do with the tale at hand: descendants of Plague survivors are far more resistant to HIV infection than the human average, which is one of the factors which saved the European sphere from the kind of devastation by AIDS suffered by the African continent.

5. You can find a run-down on this custom, along with a link to the definitive historical source, here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-truth-and-myth-behind-animal-trials-of-the-middle-ages

6. This is, by the way, also how grocery stores actually work—if you want to study a perverse market, retail distribution is where it’s at.

7. A triangular business model is one where the consumer isn’t the customer. McDonald’s, for example, is not in the business of selling hamburgers, it’s in the business of selling hamburger franchises (which is a real estate play). Thus, its primary concerns don’t have much to do with what people who eat its food care about (which is, in turn, why its prices can go up and up and its quality can go down and down until it finds a floor beyond which the diners will not support the franchisees).
The other ready example of a triangular business is social media—the user gets the service for “free,” but his data is harvested and sold to data brokers, and he himself is subject to endless advertising.
Thus, in both examples (and in all other triangular businesses, including anything involving an agent) the consumer is the product, while the customer is the person who desires access to the consumer for whatever reason.

8. An illustrative scenario:

A major manufacturer of tractors experiences a severe drop-off in demand. Because of sunk costs (such as union contracts) and regulations (such as emissions standards), the drop in the customer base—or in the customer base’s available cash/credit—makes it impossible to continue operating at scale. It shuts down. Its assets are sold off to (incompletely) satisfy its debts. These assets don’t just include mountains of parts and tractors, but also mountains of machine tools, all of which flood the market at below-cost levels in order to scrape up any available pennies to pay off the debts. This cheap stuff satisfies a lot of silent demand for tractor parts, tractors, and machine tools (people buy what they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford), but it also soaks up normal market demand because of the sales bonanza. This, in turn, depresses sales for manufacturers of machine tools, tractor parts, and tractors, throwing at least some of those other manufacturers into a debt crisis, inducing some of them to close, and so on. The result is falling prices, failing companies, rising unemployment, and, eventually, a major crash (either in that economic sector, or in the economy as a hole). This is known as a “deflationary spiral,” and it can happen in any market, from tractors to mortgages to cell phones. If the “falling demand” is for something that nobody needs anymore, this isn’t a problem. But if it touches an essential-to-life market, it can make countries fail.

9. I warn you, this rabbit hole gets very dark indeed, but it is happening right now, and the notion is spreading to other nations. Thanks to

Triggernometry

and

Konstantin Kisin

for having the gonads to publish this:

10. Such as is currently happening in Hungary

11. The Scandanavian countries have been aiming at this problem with programs like this, among others.

12. South Korea is currently doing a much more radical suite of incentives than anyone has tried before. It will be worth watching—though, in the case of Korea, any new generation thusly robustified will be too little, too late, to save them from some of the nastier parts of the demographic implosion. If it works, though, it might give them some solid post-collapse phoenix momentum.

13. The US seems to be currently pursuing this policy with China, and perhaps to a lesser extent with the member states of the EU.

14. Consider Russia’s sudden bellicosity, or China’s Belt and Road and South China Sea initiatives in this light.

15. Here’s a rundown by a former CIA operative

16. Or did you think Trump’s massively disruptive, utterly unhinged behavior on the international stage was all due to him being an entertainer, narcissist, and glory hound at heart?