World Socialist Web: The Economist - The Next War

The Economist: Humanity teeters on the brink of world war

When will the Western electorate wake up the what's going on? KV

James Cogan

The Economist magazine, the influential London weekly described by Karl Marx over 150 years ago as the “European organ” of the “aristocracy of finance,” has devoted its latest issue to discussing “The Next War” and “The Growing Threat of Great Power Conflict.” Its lead editorial opens with a chilling warning:

In the past 25 years war has claimed too many lives. Yet even as civil and religious strife have raged in Syria, central Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, a devastating clash between the world’s great powers has remained almost unimaginable.

No longer … powerful, long-term shifts in geopolitics and the proliferation of new technologies are eroding the extraordinary military dominance that America and its allies have enjoyed. Conflict on a scale and intensity not seen since the second world war is once again plausible. The world is not prepared.

The Economist envisages a dystopian, violent future, with the American military deploying to intimidate or destroy purported challenges to its dominance everywhere.

In an unintended echo of George Orwell’s “Newspeak,” the Economist concludes that “a strong America”—armed to the teeth and permanently threatening its rivals with obliteration—is the “best guarantor of world peace.”

The most chilling aspect of the report, however, is that it is pessimistic about its own prognosis for US imperialism succeeding in intimidating its rivals into submission. The very development of an ever more aggressive military stance toward China and Russia raises, not lessens, the likelihood of war.

“The greatest danger,” it states, “lies in miscalculation through a failure to understand an adversary’s intentions, leading to an unplanned escalation that runs out of control.”

World Socialist Web: The Economist - The Next War