Do you hear an uncomfortable beat of a distant drum?

Perhaps you "feel" it, but can't quite put your finger on it.  That's because you we never taught in your young education how wars of conquest were created.  Probably never read about what happened to the conquered people in the war. You were "taught" just how wonderful the victor is and how beneficent they are.  So you probably have an incomplete cerebral foundation to work from on why such horrible things ever happened.  That's not your fault, it's how selective propaganda works and everybody does it! These days Edward Bernays would be proud.  He just convinced women to smoke cigarettes - a piker by today's standards.  But yet a founding member of the psychological warfare pioneers who studied just what to say and how to say it convincingly to dupe the unsuspecting to achieve profitable result$.  What a guy, Cornell should be proud of the contribution their alum has made to society. 

Lets deconstruct a couple notable wars:

WW2 was in large part motivated by a drive to secure resources.  Never hear about that? Well it's true. Both Germany and Japan were trying to solve access to vital raw materials but alas, nobody wanted to negotiate a competitive position.  Read: It's mine and you can't have it at any price!  What was "it" - they were things like certain minerals, energy - mostly oil or both.  Japan eventually invaded SE Asia and the Dutch Indies to get rubber, oil and some other resources.  Germany, well the Caucasus had that irresistible oil patch and Ukraine had, and still has some of the best agricultural fields in the World.  Anything sound familiar to today's headlines?  Ever read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent?  I recommend it.  

Not just a European fixation... Chile and Bolivia had a spat over nutrient rich coastal lands and don't forget - possibly you never knew, nitrate deposits and guano harvested from the Atacama Desert.  Yep, failure to reach a compromise led to "just try it" with misery to ensue.  Such was the War of the Pacific.

Looking towards today's bubbling caldrons of unrest - The Persian Gulf War lit off when Iraq and Kuwait had a difference of opinion on the ethics of horizontal drilling - more precisely on the profits to be made thereby. You know generally, the rest of the story. How the two warring nations got to that point may never be revealed, but again, I digress, that's a whole other post.

Too numerous to mention are the European exploits of the era from the mid 1400's to the late 1800's.  All the cool kids in Europe wanted a subjugated summer home where they could talk the locals into mining gold, silver, diamonds, yummy crops and of course drilling for oil and later on stuff like mining uranium and cobalt.   The vestiges of this projection of imperial power sanitized as "colonialism" are still simmering although now defined by other words usually chosen by mother ship.

It isn't hard to foresee future dust-ups over fresh water, rare Earth minerals and of course cheap energy of any kind.  "I want it, too bad for you." is a common thought process on this planet that we seem to trot out over and over again.

Incredibly, deadly force, coercion and color revolutions seem to be the favorite methods of acquiring stuff that isn't theirs.  So tit for tat policies are popping up constantly probing for a crack in the armor to take advantage of. You have the stuff but I can refine it... etc.  Meh, that at least may open the door to fair trade and civil negotiations.  Oddly, Asia seems to have won the mineral lottery with regard to REEs, Cobalt, Lithium and even Nickel.  Lucky I suppose.  But watch out!  World history is replete with envious and underhanded interlopers who want your stuff without being nice about it.  LOL, the jails are full of 'em.  

That's just the tippy top of a mountain of "I want it, gimme or else -" bloviating statements we have read about lately - nothing new, just a sad reminder of how little we have evolved as a population.  What seems to drive it all is an insatiable need to GROW wealth to feed the crazy economic systems we have that need to churn money to produce profits AND deliver monetary growth on "investments".  Well this hive mind  cannot visualize the inevitable collision of finite resources with infinite growth. There isn't an answer to economic liking so the fact is to be ignored that promises made yesterday are eventually not possible to keep.  Virtually all wealth generation systems depend on appreciation either through interest rates, scarcity driving price or complexity (when nothing else works) complexity by the way just drives cost increases in a pretty thin veil of perceived value for money.  Thinly veiled because complexity also drives obsolescence, reduced reliability and waste - good for the balance sheet, but bad for you.  Not a good way to consume our once and done depleting resources. Rather we need high reliability, long product life and ease of repair.  But those attainable attributes all degrade the efficiency of the wealth generation machine.  So they won't happen, and don't happen, not yet anyway. Physics will see that gets corrected sooner rather than later. Physics is a harsh teacher who will not go away even for those who refuse to understand. 

We know the World is said to be far more complicated - at least that's the cover story we all read about and what the universities all profess.  Simply put, a gang of influential folks convinces themselves that their ideas are much superior to yours and your stuff is better off in their hand$.  Then if and only if (iff) the locals can be stirred up into a frenzy of anger against some objectified and properly demonized foe, we have all the necessary ingredients to put the main dish into the oven for cooking.  Thanks to the international cadre of chefs in the kitchen who you never nominated and shall remain nameless.  But just like that gift that you received with a tag that says "EBH" Everybody Helped... the feast of famine and horror can be made ready for the serving.  Iff.

Lessons learned? We know how this works, but the levers that commit the plans to action are never in your hands. You, by design, don't have agency but will be expected to own it.  You do have a voice - it wouldn't hurt to use it so we might learn at long last to get along with each other and to solve our challenges with mutual collaboration, not by good old fashioned exploitation and oppression.  

Think that could happen?  Perhaps that is an after dinner discussion for this planet.

A trip down memory lane as this old engineer sees it...

 In the interest of a short re-cap of what the idea of colonialism has brought to the world, lets take a spin through our world's historical log book.

Notable achievements for the mother ship is usually the economic exploitation provided by labor and resource pillaging. All of this is induced by physical violence which also tends to stomp out cultural identity. None of these heinous attributes seem to have much room in the history books.  The old adage "History is Written by the Victors" is true.  The conquering team doesn't like to recored the double standards associated with subjugation, dispossession, cultural erasure and good old decimation. Other words that mean the same thing are genocide, terror, violence and trauma.  Meh, different words - same oppression.

The notion that kingdom z wants what kingdom y has and they want to get it without being a friendly neighbor is as old as dirt.  Looking at the current situation in Europe we can read about The Time of Troubles (1598 to 1613-ish) Back then King James and the Muscovy Trading Company put a plan  together to take advantage of the opportunity! Yep, got to create a honey hole and of course dominate the trade routes.  Sound familiar?  What went wrong with that plan? Seems like a leader by the name of Romanov stabilized the country and oops, not so vulnerable any more.

Then came The Great Game.  Now Britain began to see Russia as threat to its "Territories".  Wether the people in those territories actually liked their lot in life is another matter - but I digress. So containment was the new call to propagandize,  Along came the Crimean War.

So the mental construction of a threat to my wealth and my happiness (from the British point of view) has lingered.  This fear has also manifest itself as "we should never let the Russians and Germans (Germany was another peer getting a little too powerful in the early 1900's) get too chummy".  To prevent a German-Russian Economic Axis old enemies became friends with both becoming allied before and after WW1.  That war would kill something like 20 million people - lives lost because of a collision of imperial ambitions, inflexible alliances and failed diplomacy - again history sort of rhymes with today don't you think? The Treaty of Rapallo signed in 1922 got things stirred up again and this time the circle of fright ensnared France as well as Britain in the post WW1 "order".  Order in who's mind you may ask?  

All of this posturing and conniving brings us up to 1939 and The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  Oopsie, the wrong countries are trying to align and now they have colonial ambitions!  Not satisfactory - only Britain and France are allowed!  Meh, it all went ka-blewie in 1941. That war (WW2) took almost 80 million lives (26 million Soviet lives by the way) in a genocidal campaign of conquest. 

Tick, tick, tick time rolls on. Cold War tensions formed around the same fault lines.  This contest for somebody else's stuff has a very long history.  Looking at the reasoning one might think, what a contradiction. the idea of security became the banner of hegemony.  Policy planners embraced paranoia because that wins contracts. LOL, My opinion of course.  Energy in post WW2 becomes a geopolitical weapon,  Oddly, keep the Russians out fueled the economic engine. Lord Ismay the First Secretary of NATO famously said "...keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down."  Hmmm, not very open to evolutionary thought or diplomatic progress.  Unfortunately these old ideas run deep. They support the economics and oligarchical influencers - who really have no interest in change. When you sit on top of the pyramid everyone else is a minion and who listens to minions?

So let's jump ahead to our current time.  If you have your head bolted on backwards, you are a philosophical Realist.  Interdependence is a weapon - economics is leverage, resources are a knife to the throat.... If you dare to think about change, you may dabble in Liberalism where war is an expensive waste our Japanese friends would call it muda, cooperation is better than conflict but hey - borders are an obsolete idea.  KABOOM, that's a collision.  The underpinning of old school thinking insures the existing oligarchy - it's their happy spot. 

Clinging to old ways suppresses innovation, is forcing deindustrialization and making the people caught in the middle pay the price. This is wrapped up in a manufactured security blanket - we love tho$e.  

Adam Smith, who we claim has it right, espoused free trade.  So just pretend global politics don't interfere with Adam Smith's theory.  Wait a second... it seems like there are rules for thee but not for me.  Let me explain. All of this free trade theory is great when Western interests have unmatched financial power, industrial might and favorable labor,  But when a competitor arises with a better resource base, labor and financial power - we don't like that!  These days a pivot to protectionism is a feeble way of suppressing free trade and trying to make tomorrow just like yesterday.  Not gonna work. Tariffs, restricting technology, blocking exports... it just isolates the head bolted on backwards people from the rest of the world and illustrates the double standards IMHO.

So where do we go from here?  Let us hope that ethical frameworks can be promoted - else a global class of ruthless elites will arise to replace those we have today.  Nothing improves.  So we need cooperation, we need true democratic processes rather than lobbied and deep state driven veneers. So old structures need to morph, but they lack trust.  That's a problem we have never been able to overcome. That's why the West has always favored fascism over communism.  Trust is hard, thuggery is easy and it's profitable too...

Maybe we can reach a collective (global) security policy.  Maybe we can do away with geopolitical partitions based on  the old ideas. Maybe we can achieve a type of renaissance.  We need transparency in our motives and actions, not deep state games. We need a democratized economy which looks like a multipolar system IMHO.  We need to think realistically too. Energy depletion will create a chokepoint with big tech. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, this will matter.  We need to look at history and appreciate centralization never works. It is fragile, usually morphs into tyrannical rule and suppresses enlightened solutions from arising.

Resilience, simplification and analogue redundant philosophies should be re-discovered and embraced.  So far we have failed to evolve, can we do it this time? 

My 2 cents.  

Trust and trustworthiness

Are simple behaviors and yet are widely recognized as important to the successful functioning of society.  This is not a revelation, but a well documented fact.  Surely they should have monetary value?  LOL...

What then of governments and privileged citizens that abrogate and destroy these attributes in order to selfishly insulate themselves from the hard work of consensus building, kindness, honesty and empathy extended to all? Hard to go colonizing with these credos.  Perhaps that is why institutions and people alike who espouse these attributes always seem to disappear.  Kind of a battle of good vs evil actually.  

The short answer in IF THEN format is: IF there is no money to be extracted or made, THEN there is no reason to care say those who derive their power and influence with currency.  Small group, greed driven and full of hubris, this is a one dimensional world view and has dangerous long term outcomes for all, the small group who by whatever luck or cunning finds themselves insulated from the rest of the population has always used manipulation and force to maintain their status and get what they want. This gang has no particular affinity to a flag, just to an ego driven lifestyle. But history reveals that this IF THEN statement never works if iterated enough times.  The Western Roman Empire, Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Han Dynasty and many many more examples exist of collapse when the legs of this stool are weakened. There are tipping points that are thought to be understood - until they are not.  Much like there are experts who get it wrong all of the time, mostly because they are mis-directors and paid dupes with credentials of some kind.  Anyhow they serve a purpose, even it that purpose is nefarious.   

1. Erosion of trust through deceit: Fool me once shame on me fool me twice - shame on you! Honestly, people know when they have been hoodwinked and although they may calculate it is better to go along than to refuse to, but there is a point out there that the latter over takes the former. 

2. Amoral behavior of various kinds: Corruption, weaponized power and statecraft that delivers outright theft and fraud... it's all been done before and it always ends in the same results. Every time. 

So when the balance of these two factors gets a bit too out of whack, other chaotic forces tend to build momentum, accumulated cultural and societal decline drives a rebalancing eventually. 

So government is the de-facto maintainer of the balance.  With all of the tools and measurements around these days it's hard to imagine lack of awareness of the interplay of factors that move the center of balance. So we must ask ourselves; who stands to gain by toppling, disrupting or re-inventing our systems?  The small circle of endless promoters of the next biggest thing seems to be the only clique that is profiting and they aren't a very transparent bunch.  They don't feel secure in public debates or in transparency either. The interesting revelation that seems to be surfacing more and more is reality and awareness of just how limited future adventures really are. This has translated into a smoke and mirrors detection sensibility that appears to be growing world wide.  

LOL, indeed. As mentioned in earlier posts,  even the largest data center with the most highly developed LLM cannot predict the future.  Looking backwards and making warnings doesn't seem to be in the algorithms.  At least not in your version.