WWIII: Winning the Peace
People keep asking me. “When will the war end?” My answer is, “Do you mean the entire World War or a piece of it?” “What do you mean?” “Which war do you mean?” Here are a few options:
Ukraine
Israel
The Underwater War
The War in Space
The War in the High North and the Arctic
The War in the Pacific
The DNA War
The Mercenary/Gang Wars
Local Civil Wars
The reality is that these are all profoundly intertwined, and the superpowers are behind all of them to some extent or another, wittingly or unwittingly.
We all know about Ukraine and Israel because they adhere to the old editor’s adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” If humans are dead, injured, or displaced, there’s a human interest story. These wars are kinetic, which matters in an Instagram world. There is something to take a picture of.
The War in Space and the War Underwater do not adhere to this rule because there are no dead humans. There are no eyewitnesses. There are hardly any photo ops. In addition, there is a huge problem in explaining why any of this matters. When the superpowers destroy their own satellites, as Russia sometimes does, it only creates a story when the astronauts on the International Space Station might have to be evacuated to avoid being hit by the razor blades of shrapnel traveling at 18,000 mph which the event created. Few understand that these debris fields are all about denying opponents the ability to access those orbits, thus constraining the capacity to wage war on the ground. Few understand that wars on the ground now entirely depend on satellite eyes in space. When someone cut the fastest internet cable in the world on January 6th 2020 up in the Arctic, the British Chief of the Defence Forces, Sir Tony Radikin, immediately suggested it was an act of war. As a Naval Commander, he understood that this cable allows NATO to monitor Russian submarines. But, he soon went quiet because no one wanted to acknowledge that the US and Russia might be directly in conflict. It was easy to drop it because hardly anybody understood that the targeted cable is what allows almost all high-altitude satellites to connect to Earth. Had there not been redundancy, there would have been no more missile guidance and, frankly, no more Uber Eats because GPS depends on these links.
Part of the problem is that the public thinks WIFI is just in the air and electricity comes out of a socket. The only time underwater warfare stories surface is when energy infrastructure is damaged, which means heating bills will go up. So, we hear about Nordstream II and the Balticonnector damage, but everyone is afraid to acknowledge that superpowers, their special ops, or their mercenaries for hire, are behind it. The recent damage to the Balticonnector between Finland and Estonia involved both internet cables and pipelines. The press and the participants are clearly trying to avoid allegations of sabotage and veer towards the explanation that a Chinese naval vessel, The New Polar Bear, simply did it by accident. The missing anchor kind of gives the game away. It is now under investigation. It matters whether these events are described as cuts or breaks. A break is fine. Breaks happen. A cut is war. We’ve seen cuts in The Atlantic, Taiwan, and elsewhere and attempted cuts off of Ireland, West Africa, and further afield.
Remote places around the world are becoming contested and morphing into geopolitical hot spots. As inflation drives up food and energy prices, the places that provide these resources are increasingly valuable. This helps explain why the Arctic is an increasing focus of attention. It has almost unlimited protein and energy, in addition to being the place where most strategic satellite infrastructure connects to Earth. The American Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, just opened a “diplomatic station” in Tromsø so that the US has a “diplomatic footprint above the Arctic Circle.”