04.09.12

Reflections on the Third World War

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:28 am by Administrator

After spending the last six months immersed in the world of The Third World War – and with the recent release of A Land War in Asia - I have a few thoughts that I’ve developed over that period of time.

The world system, as explored heavily in The Blast of War and expanded upon further in A Land War in Asia is a mess.  We have a number of interlinked challenges:

1) China’s economic rise rests upon an insecure foundation:

China has severe demographic problems.  First, there’s the obvious problem that the Chinese have a severe gender imbalance in its rising population as a result of the widespread practice of sex-selective abortions.  This means that China has many more young men than it does young women, a proposition that always leads to political instability.

Second, China’s population is rapidly aging.  Mark Steyn, as I am fond of quoting, likes to remind us that at current rates China will “grow old before it grows rich.”

Third, these factors mean that the existence of the present Chinese regime is dependent upon continued rapid economic growth.  If the People’s Republic of China cannot generate the wealth to satisfy large cohorts of young men on one side and a growing population of geriatrics on the other then it will not be able to ensure the survival of the current government.

The government of the People’s Republic of China, having long ago abandoned any pretense of being founded upon any more solid ideological foundation than its ability to provide prosperity in exchange for freedom, is absolutely dependent upon continued economic expansion.  When economic growth slows, stops, or reverses – as it must at some point – it will be a very dangerous moment for the world as the Chinese leaders must make a choice between attempting to sustain their own position through external aggression, internal repression, or some mix of the two.

In The Blast of War and A Land War in Asia it is China’s challenges that ultimately plunge the world into war.  Faced with the choice between diving into the abyss of internal anarchy or hazarding the risks of war, China’s leaders choose the latter.  I think that’s a reasonable calculation to expect that they would make under such conditions.

2) America’s greatest vulnerabilities are political:

Much as China’s greatest problems are demographic-economic-political, so are the vulnerabilities of the United States.  Put simply, the American political system is broken.  Not only in the endless deadlock between the parties in Washington, but in a deeper sense that the American people themselves are now very deeply divided by culture.  The political chasm between Republican and Democrat, between Red and Blue, is increasingly divorced from ideology and instead resembles the partisan divisions between the Blues and Greens of the Eastern Roman Empire.

In terms of the Third World War, this has several deep implications.  First, that the divisions within America weaken the United States in the eyes of the world and make it more likely that a potentially-aggressive power such as the People’s Republic of China will risk war with the United States under the assumption that America’s political leadership and the American people will be unable to sustain the level of unity necessary to fight a major conflict.

Even if, as in the Third World War, the nation were to have a President with the skill and the will to guide the nation into such a conflict, that means that the underlying divisions within the nation would create chasms that any foreign enemy would seek to exploit.  Hence, in The Blast of War, the nation is kept from taking early action to avoid war by its own domestic distractions and in A Land War in Asia, the Chinese seek to exploit American disunity for military advantage.

The United States of today resembles less the end-stage of the Roman Empire than it does the late Roman Republic.  The nation possess tremendous reserves of power that, for purely political reasons, it cannot fully access.

Is America’s spending addiction a problem?  Absolutely.  However, it’s something that could be addressed by a sufficiently resolute leader.  Alone among the world’s nations, the United States possesses the technological capability to revolutionize warfare – which I have argued, both within the scope of my novels and elsewhere, is the best way to defeat the Chinese.

If the United States returns to its founding principles, than a limited-but-strong Federal Government in the Hamiltonian mode could ensure that this is a second American Century.  If, on the other hand, the American Republic remains mired in bickering of the sort that is necessitated by the welfare state, then not only the United States but, indeed, the world itself is doomed.

3) Europe is irrelevant.

For some reason, when I look at Europe today, I recall the words of Stephen Vincent Benet in a very different context, “it is over, but they will not let it be over.”

As General MacArthur very wisely saw when he addressed the Congress some sixty-one years ago, the axis of the world has shifted to the Pacific and it will not be turning back anytime soon, if ever.  Europe is incapable of seriously projecting power and the long project of European unification has turned the continent into an insular backwater.  If China has a demographic problem, Europe has a demographic disaster.  More than one European nation has fallen into a death spiral due to its tiny birth rates.  If we accept that old bromide that the children are our future than the sad reality is that most of Europe has no real future.  Instead, its a place where tiny bands of youngsters are going to expend their lives in the impossible task of attempting to care for an ever-increasing number of dependents.  With one notable exception, I doubt if we will ever see Europe play a major role in global affairs in any of our lifetimes.  Instead, perhaps, instead Europe will suffer the fate of the colonies that is surrendered and become a battlefield for other, stronger nations.

The sole exception I envision is Great Britain.  This is, both for me and in practice, more a matter of sentiment than anything else.  As the only European nation to have turned its colonies into something of real value, it seems possible that Britain will be able to survive the collapse of Europe by the residual goodwill that she holds among her former dominions, her position as a gateway to the rest of Europe, and the fact that she is the home of the global language.  My hope – as laid out in the books – is that, once the European Union is dispensed with, a new union based upon shared heritage and language may be forged among the English-speaking peoples that would allow Britain to recover some of its former glory.

4) The Middle East can mess up your day:

One can make the case that the last ten years of war in the Middle East have distracted the United States from what may very well be an inevitable showdown with China.  That is not my opinion, but I believe that it is one for which strong arguments can be marshaled.

However, as much as some days it is tempting to wish that entire region of the world out of our minds – a wish shared by almost every empire throughout history – the reality is that, while prolonged engagement there seems to only bring misery, to disengage from activity there seems to be to only invite the arrival of what Donald Rumsfeld called “unknown unknowns” – those sudden and utterly unexpected events that can really mess up your day.

I believe – and this will be explored further in book three – A Thousand Points of Light – and perhaps in a non-fiction companion work, that the best way to avoid a Third World War – and to win it quickly should it come – is for the United States to get the sort of political leadership that will allow it to bridge its domestic divisions and to access some of its latent power.  This, of course, is a subject that merits its own essay and then some (I’m toying with writing a book on this subject alone), but what I will say is this: if we are to avoid disaster then we must be prepared to overcome our own prejudices and accept some historic truths about humanity.  We need to accept the need to make military preparations in order to avoid war and, further, to internalize the basic truth that the destiny of man is forged by force.  Further, we need to study and understand how a century of social engineering on a massive scale have created the social and demographic trends, both at home and abroad, that are driving us towards disaster.  Though, as I’ve said, that’s going to be a subject for another day.

 

04.04.12

On Publishing a Second Book

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:48 am by Administrator

I’m not really one to pause and reflect.  For myself, when I complete a task, the follow-up question is always: what’s next?  Still, with A Land War in Asia now available on Amazon.com (indeed, someone managed to buy a copy before I could even buy one for myself) and with The Blast of War still selling well (and, as a way of promoting A Land War in Asia, temporarily free on Amazon.com), it’s worth taking a moment to speak on the process.

The first thing – the first question I always get – is whether I’m happy with the book.  The short answer is that I don’t think I’ll ever be fully pleased with anything that I write.  The longer answer is more complex.  Here’s what I’ll say for both The Blast of War and A Land War in Asia: they’re not quite like anything else on the market today and, in my opinion, they’re better than any of the alternatives that I’ve read.  Admittedly, I’m writing for a very narrow audience – I’m pretty sure that I own every “future history” book ever written and, combined, they take up about half of one shelf on my six double-stacked book cases.  The truth be told, when the trilogy is finished – hopefully in the summer – with the release of A Thousand Points of Light I’ll have created a work that, when the combined paper edition is printed, will end up being a thousand-page Clancy-sized doorstop and I’ll have done it in a little less than a year while juggling many other things.    I think that it’s a daring story – broader than pretty much anything I’ve ever read.  If someone would pay me to to do it, it would probably take twenty years – by which time the projected events of the books would be in the distant past – to tell this story with the sort of detail that I’d like.

I don’t have the patience, I think, to follow someone like Robert Caro (who has spent thirty years writing his biography of Lyndon Johnson) or Shelby Foote (who spent about twenty creating his history of the Civil War).  In general, when I go into a store and it appears that I’ll be waiting more than two minutes in the line, I’ll leave and shop somewhere else.  The odds that I could maintain my focus while embarking upon a decade-long project is essentially zero.

Now, as to the second question – how’s business?  Business is, in a word, fascinating.  The Blast of War has moved a respectable number of copies for what it is and how it’s been marketed.  One conclusion that I’ve come to from my experience with The Blast of War is that traditional marketing for e-books is pretty much futile.  I’ve spent a little money on ads and the like and noticed pretty much no difference in sales figures.  Instead, with an initial spike in sales when it was launched and another when I placed an article on the book in the American Thinker, it’s seen a slow-but-steady increase in its numbers.  I think that it’s best to hold back exact sales figures, but I’ll say that the numbers haven’t been close to high enough to make a career of it, but they’re high enough to make me think through some tax planning stuff.

What’s next?  Well, there’s the aforementioned A Thousand Points of Light to cap off this series.  Having, really, gotten as much out of this format as I think I can, I’m looking to do something a little different next time around.  However, alas, I’ve also realized that I don’t really do anything “small”.  I have at least three fleshed-out concepts in my head:

The Martian Empire:

This would be military/political science fiction and, actually, might even be considered something of a distant sequel to my “Third World War” series.  Where The Third World War was largely written in reaction to and out of frustration with military/political fiction where World War Three is narrowly avoided and the nukes don’t go off, the concept of the Martian Empire series is largely a reaction to the strange and pervasive idea that seems to be found in most science fiction that human unification of some sort is a prerequisite to major space travel.  Yes, there are a few Baen books where different human “star nations” go to war with eachother but, in general, these (I’m thinking of the Honorverse and Starfire novels in particular here) tend to be far removed from the contemporary world.  Also, I want to take a more realistic look at the long-term effects of technology and extended lifespans as well as some basic evolutionary questions.

The Martian Empire is probably something at least a little familiar to any good science fiction fan – it’s basically a single nation where the cultures and institutions of the English-speaking peoples have merged into a single political entity (the flag of Mars, as I imagine it, combines the Stars and Stripes with the Union Jack).  Mars, however, is in conflict with much of Earth because Martians are descendants of colonists who have been genetically enhanced in various ways and who were, to begin with, exceptional people themselves.  Martians believe themselves to be better than Terrans because, in an objective sense, the average Martian is smarter and stronger than the average Terran.

An opening book of this series, as I imagine it, sort of riffs on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iraq War, and sort of the First World War.  I imagine a scenario where some Earth nation agrees to let an alien force station warships in Earth orbit, forcing Mars to invade the Earth to prevent alien forces from being positioned in a spot where they could threaten Mars, leaving Martians forces to attempt to occupy and reorganize the Earth.

King of Sparta:

The title is a pun.  I don’t normally like puns, but I’m kind of enamored with this one.  In fact, I might write this book simply because I like the title so much.  This is about a twenty-something Army Captain who unexpectedly inherits his father’s fortune and decides to use it to “start the motor of the world.”

In other words, in a way that is entirely not meant to resemble any famous guy with a similar name, this is about a young billionaire forming a private army and trying to change the world for the better.  Incidentally, he’s “King of Sparta” because his last name is King and he’s from a town named Sparta.  I thought that was obvious but, often, I find that that isn’t the case.

I’m not sure where he’ll be using his private army.  Originally I had planned to have the story be about my long-cherished dream of launching a coup in Equatorial Guinea, though increasingly I imagine it being set in my native British Columbia, if only because I have a concept for an opening title called “An Old Man in a Hurry.”  In case you haven’t already noticed, I really like titles.  That leads to my third concept.

The Memoirs of a Confederate Samurai:

This is really a case where it would all be on the cover: a Japanese guy, a disgraced Samurai, finds his way to antebellum Los Angeles, where he falls in with a group of soldiers in the local US Army garrison.  When the Civil War breaks out, he decides that he is morally obligated to join the, and travels with them across Arizona and New Mexico to Texas, where he joins the Confederate Army.

I don’t have the whole story down – and I’d have to do a damned lot of research to have it done right – but I want to set it in the Western Theatre, which isn’t featured in Civil War fiction as much as it ought to be.  I imagine him first being a personal friend of – and being directly advanced by – Albert Sidney Johnston.  Then, after Shiloh, I imagine him winning the respect of and riding with Nathan Bedford Forrest until the end of the war.

This would be the hardest to write.  And I’d really want to get this one right because, as I see it, it would have the potential to be a genuine bestseller.  I’d just want to make sure that we really got the cover right.