In
the United States, the number of mass shootings continues to climb. In
Lebanon, Iraq, Hong Kong, and Chile, demonstrators fill the streets for weeks
or months on end. In France, that cradle of disorder, the yellow vests
have gone quiet for now, but probably not for long. What is going on? And
what, if anything, does it have to do with Fourth Generation war?
To address the latter question, we need to remember that
Fourth Generation war is rooted in a crisis of legitimacy of the state. As people shift
their primary loyalty away from the state to a wide variety of other things,
the state loses its monopoly on war and on social organization. And as
those monopolies vanish, disorder spreads.
What we are seeing
in spreading disorder is not Fourth Generation war itself. But it is a
failure of the state. As Martin van Creveld argues in The Rise and Decline of the State, the state
arose for only one purpose: to establish and maintain order and safety of
persons and property. States that cannot do that lose their legitimacy.
Here is where we see an answer to our first question,
what is going on?
In more and more places, states are failing to maintain order but remain as
vehicles of the New Class, the Establishment. The Establishment runs the
state, not to provide security of persons and property for all, but for its own
benefit. It uses its control of the state to give itself careers, money (lots
of it), power, prestige, etc. It then employs these to exempt itself from
the consequences of state failure, i.e., it lives in gated communities, its
kids go to private schools and its jobs don’t get shipped overseas.
One of the
interesting characteristics of the new world disorder is that it is coming
primarily from the middle class. The yellow vests are a striking example. But the young
people filling the streets of Baghdad and Hong Kong are also often of middle
class background. They are college students or recent college graduates.
They are taking to the streets because around the world, the middle class is
under ever growing pressure. College degrees no longer bring good jobs.
Pensions and paychecks no longer last to the end of the month. Maintaining even
a vestige of a middle class standard of living requires going even deeper into
debt. The state arose to provide security, but it now yields growing
insecurity for the middle class.
So far, the disorder
appears to be directed against the Establishment that runs the state, not the
state itself. That is why it is not Fourth Generation war. If it proves
possible to boot the Establishment out and replace it with governors who serve
the middle class instead of themselves, the state is likely to remain.
However, if the Establishment is able to hold on to power despite its failure
in governance, then at some point people are likely to start giving up on the
state itself. At that point we will be looking at 4GW, and lots of it.
One of the few
benefits of the circus that is the impeachment of President Trump is that it
has compelled the Washington Establishment, America’s Deep State, to manifest
itself. The “witnesses” against the President (none of whom seem to have
actually witnessed anything) are in highly paid, high prestige jobs. They have
had distinguished careers, from the “right schools” on up. They are all
deeply committed to the Globalist world order. And they loathe the President
because he is not one of them.
Should the
Establishment succeed in driving President Trump from office, one way or
another, the message to the people who voted for him will be simple: you don’t
count and you never will. At that point, many of those voters will begin
to question the system itself, if they are not doing so already. And that
system is the state.
In the end, states cannot remain both
legitimate and a private hunting preserve of the New Class. As Martin van
Creveld said to me years ago in my Capitol Hill office, everyone can see it
except the people in the capital cities.
Interested
in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’
new future history, Victoria.