World War III Has Already Started. Everyone is Losing.

There's a 100-year-old solution.

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Everyone keeps trying to predict WWIII.

They don’t get it.

World War III has been going on for a while. It has no definitive starting point or declaration. The very concept of war has changed. It no longer requires acts of Congress or conventional justifications.

We fight with different weapons now.

During the first global war, a social activist named Jane Addams did the unthinkable. She talked to America’s enemies. She traveled Europe, interviewing everyone she could. She learned that the war wasn’t about ideology. Eventually, everyone told her what they were really fighting over:

Resources.

When she returned, Jane Addams started suggesting in speeches and essays that we should stop fighting wars that only result in death, destruction, and depletion. Maybe we should stop all the high talk about values and freedom and just do a better job of allocating resources. Doing that would prevent wars.

Once hailed for her social work and global political activism, Addams was immediately blacklisted from virtually every organization she’d helped build. The media buried Addams in personal attacks, accusing her of being unpatriotic. Eventually, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

She died four years later.

No politician wants to admit it, but Jane Addams was right. Every single war has always been about the same things:

It’s about water.
It’s about food.
It’s about energy.
It’s about land.
It’s about influence.

Right now, Israel wants to attack oil infrastructure in Iran. It’s no accident that Iran has reached record oil production and sales this year despite western sanctions. Their top customers include China and Russia.

Why the attacks on Gaza?

Five years ago, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published a report on "the unrealized potential of Palestinian oil and gas reserves.” You can read it here. The report estimates these reserves could generate "hundreds of billions of dollars" for whoever develops them. It also criticizes Israel for preventing Palestinians from developing those resources as a way to alleviate their massive poverty. It just so happens that the U.S. is now proposing an international coalition of western governments to preside over Gaza once Israel pushes its 2 million inhabitants into Egypt. There's similar plans underway for the West Bank.

Since the war started, Israel has awarded a dozen gas exploration licenses to six different oil companies, including BP. They're going to explore exactly where those Palestinian oil reserves are located, off the coast.

Netanyahu’s cabinet has made it clear they want to transform Gaza into a kind of futuristic trade hub, similar to Dubai.

These plans come straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook, and it hits right in the middle of a global energy crisis exacerbated by war. When it comes to geopolitics, there's no such thing as a coincidence.

It's not just about oil and gas, either.

As Richard Medhurst explains, there's a wide range of economic and logistical incentives for the U.S. and Israel to depopulate Gaza, including the construction of a canal alternative to the Suez, allowing them to dominate maritime trade and giving them key military advantages. The preferred canal route runs through Gaza. They've been planning this project for decades, and now they have a moral cover story. All of this looks like a repeat of the Iraq invasion, with western countries antagonizing a rogue actor until they do something that seems to warrant an extreme response. A year later, that response has led to countless innocent deaths and a wider assault on Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

Likewise, the war in Ukraine has more to do with natural gas than democracy, human rights, or even Russian aggression.

The U.S. and Russia have been fighting for dominance of Ukraine for at least ten years. Ukraine sits on Europe's second-largest natural gas reserve. Russia has also exported natural gas to the EU through pipelines across Ukraine. Months after Russia's invasion, a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Germany.

Now Germany is signing 20-year deals to import liquefied natural gas from the U.S. On a side note, liquefied natural gas is "way worse than coal." Even though Biden has announced pauses to those deals, they impact future arrangements in a move to appease climate activists, and he has quietly assured Europe that the LNG deliveries will keep coming, uninterrupted.

Beneath the campaign rhetoric, western officials have grown open to the possibility of peace talks, considered outlandish a year ago. So has public opinion in Ukraine. Their military is now in the business of securing bargaining chips, and not trying to repel Russia. Despite hundreds of billions in funding, they remain outgunned three to one, and they’re struggling to replenish their ranks in the face of relentless Russian advances and attacks on their crucial infrastructure.

From a recent piece in The Financial Times:

Once buoyed by hopes of liberating their lands, even soldiers at the front now voice a desire for negotiations with Russia to end the war. Yuriy, another commander on the eastern front who gave only his first name, says he fears the prospect of a “forever war.” Ukraine is heading into what may be its darkest moment... It is losing on the battlefield in the east of the country, with Russian forces advancing relentlessly — albeit at immense cost in men and equipment.

Nobody will win the war in Ukraine, except corporations.

Both sides will claim victory.

The U.S. has also been antagonizing China over Taiwan, sending increasing amounts of military aid and provoking Chinese leaders with diplomatic envoys. Once again, if you want to know why, follow the resources.

Taiwan happens to be the world’s premier producer of semiconductor chips, something some of us pointed out as early as 2022, only to be dismissed as fearmongers. Optimists said the U.S. had no need for Taiwan’s semiconductor factories because we were building our own.

Two years later, those factories have run into delays despite a gigantic influx of $400 billion into the tech sector. They won’t start producing chips until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest. The biggest reason? The U.S. is facing a skilled labor shortage. Meanwhile, we remain reliant on Taiwan, and that’s our fault.

According to a report by the Hudson Institute:

A battle for semiconductor manufacturing is happening across the Pacific. For years, Beijing has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into its domestic industry in an effort to cut foreign-made products out of China’s market. Meanwhile, Washington and its partners have been working to make sure that the means and know-how to make the most advanced versions of these microchips don’t find their way into China.

If the U.S. were no longer able to access Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, it would have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy.

A related report indicates that losing access to Taiwan’s semiconductors would trigger a $1.6 trillion crisis, bigger than the 2008 financial meltdown or the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Economists consider that a conservative estimate, since “a disruption to the industries that rely on a continuous flow of semiconductors” would mean “large swaths of the economy can suffer from a domino effect of delays, loss of sales, and factory shutdowns.”

So, the U.S. isn’t defending Taiwan’s democracy.

They’re guarding chip factories.

Imagine what Jane Addams would say about the wars going on today. She wouldn’t hesitate to say they’re about oil, gas, and computer chips. She would point out how much these wars have hurt the people our leaders pretend to be helping, especially when our own government is underfunding our own public health and disaster response agencies while spending more than $200 billion just in the last two years to allegedly protect democracy.

You don’t have to be a psychic to see that people are upset and angry, and they have every right to be. Time and again, both parties manage to find bipartisan solutions to fund wars, military equipment, and police compounds. As I recently wrote, tens of billions of dollars originally allocated to schools for clean air wound up buying drones and armored vehicles for police instead.

It happened with Biden’s blessing.

It’s demoralizing to watch one party hold our needs hostage while the other only manages to find common ground to fund violence. It’s even more demoralizing to watch this happen with so much public support.

They don’t get it.

We’re in World War III.

The U.S. is engaged in information wars, proxy wars, economic wars, cyber wars, and looming direct conflicts between major superpowers. We’re fighting over the last remaining resources on a dying planet during a mass extinction, in a desperate attempt to power a number of misguided quests, on top of an unsustainable endless growth economy that treats life as expendable. Our leaders are all willing participants in these wars. They all have their own versions of human rights and freedom, despite their own scarred histories.

As war increasingly preoccupies the minds of politicians, they’ll devote less and less attention to disasters as those disasters grow in scope, scale, and frequency. We watched all of that happen this week.

There’s only one solution, and Jane Addams was exiled for saying it out loud. We have to start cooperating. These wars are waged in the name of democracy and human rights, but they’re really about resources.

Nobody will win these wars.

Nobody.