We weren’t even gone a week yet so much feels different.
Some shifts were personal, like how I misplaced my Field Notes (UPDATE: Found!), or how my four-year reading streak in the Bible app was broken, or how I lost my first Wordle on Wednesday morning. Then there’s how I filled my gas tank on Monday at downright European prices, or went to buy some grapefruit and could see peoples’ mouths.
Then there’s that war in Europe.
I know other artists feel this discombobulation, too. When the whole world’s brimming with hot takes, I feel like turtling up. Does the world really need another half-assed geopolitical hypothesis from a middle-aged dad?
Except geopolitics is one of my favorite topics! So maybe you’ve heard some of this before, but I’m gonna share my observations on where we’re headed anyway. Buckle up, friends. This is gonna get dark.
Comparisons to World War II might seem simplistic or overwrought, but what’s unfolding in Ukraine is not sudden. NATO expanded east over the last couple of decades mostly because former Warsaw Pact nations were concerned about Vladimir Putin’s aggression, and those anxieties have proved painfully valid. Under Putin’s regime, Russia has been at constant war. They invaded Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine + entered wars in Syria and Central African Republic + poisoned and/or imprisoned dissenters like Alexei Navalny + conducted a massive psy-ops campaign to alter US elections, sow division in NATO, and raise American sympathy toward Putin + developed hypersonic missiles to evade our nuclear defense system. While we should keep hoping for peace, or for deescalated tensions, it’s also time to open our eyes. Much of our diplomatic and intelligence corps—the people on the front lines of international relations—believe we’re already in the midst of the next great global struggle. Fiona Hill said as much in a recent Politico interview:
Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.
Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.
All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.
In light of this seeming inevitabilty, I feel considerable relief at all the right-leaning Americans who’ve stopped short of backing Putin. Yes, the Trumps and Tuckers of the world still insist he’s super cool and smart and social justice crusades are deadlier than despots armed with hypersonic nukes, but most conservative-minded folks I know aren’t buying this pitch. That is deeply heartening! Maybe we won’t spin off into a second American Civil War after all! 😅
When I was a young man obsessively reading about military strategy, one of my favorite subjects was the Winter War, wherein the USSR invaded Finland in 1939 only to have their ass kicked by skiing Finns. Nearly six Russian soldiers died for every defender killed. After Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov declared on state radio that bombing runs were actually humanitarian aid missions, the Finns began sardonically referring to their improvised anti-tank weapons as “Molotov cocktails,” and the name stuck. The Soviets still prevailed eventually because they could afford those levels of human attrition, but they only ended up with a swath of the Karelian Isthmus. All that’s to say—without diminishing the lives lost and displaced—there’s a silver lining to watching the vaunted Russian Army storm into a smaller county, then promptly turn into Keystone Kops. By US intelligence estimates, more Russian soldiers died in the last month than all the US service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Four Russian Generals are already dead! That’s absurd. Putin may have empirical aspirations, but he can’t put nerve agent on all his enemy’s door knobs. One of the upsides to despotism is it sows the seeds of its own downfall.
Storylines are as crucial to war as arms. Grievance is weaponized, icons are crafted, ethnic and national egos are stoked. In this regard, Putin’s propaganda machine seems especially pathetic. Graffitied Zs pale in comparison to swastikas or hammers & sickles. No one even knows what they mean! And if the pitch is that Russia is guarding the world’s 300 million Slavs against nefarious Western hordes, then invading Slavic countries and killing Slavic citizens by the thousands seems like too confusing a plot-line to follow.
One concept on my mind lately is the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. There’s too much detail to address here, but the gist of the theory is American civilization (and possibly all civilizations) are on a 80-100 year loop, wherein cultural pendulums swing through a series of four “turnings.” According to that theory, we’re in the midst of the Fourth Turning—the final phase of the cycle—where war and drastic social changes occur rapidly and the world becomes a tinderbox. The last time the US was in a Fourth Turning was World War II, the time before that was the Civil War, and the time before that was the American Revolution. Eventually, we’ll move into a renewed age. Not for a while, though. My point here is that we should hope and pray for peace, but its time to prepare for cataclysm.
Sure, we just wrapped up a two-year pandemic, and that seems like a lot for those of us used to worrying mostly about school shooters, but it’s important to note how circumstances can always get worse. And often do! Disease, war, famine…there’s a reason these catastrophes are linked together as apocalyptic horsemen. At some point we might consider responding with fortitude and resiliency rather than crying “What next!?!” for easy likes on Facebook. In fact, we should seriously reconsider everything we post on social media.
One of the scariest pendulum swings in the Strauss-Howe cycle is that war during the Fourth Turning becomes total. Guidelines are thrown away and militaries open all options to achieve their aims. Think General Sherman’s march on Atlanta, or Nazi concentration camps, or the bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima. This is morbid, but I expect at least one nuclear weapon to detonate in anger during my lifetime, and probably within the next five years. Or maybe even deadlier bio or chemical weapons to emerge. These are outcomes we should be praying against.
To those of us raised during the Cold War, there’s a strange comfort to Russia being the bad guys. It’s just simpler to fear Ivan Drago than Islamic extremists holed up in the Hindu Kush. Still, my favorite years as an American were the ‘90s, after the Iron Curtain fell. Muscovites were downing Big Macs and donning Levi’s, concern over nuclear annihilation faded, and 9/11 was still in the planning stages. Granted, I was 11-21 years old during that time, so my lens is tainted by youth, but I hope we witness another such peaceful era in my lifetime, and I hope the US and Russia are someday friends again.
Man, how much more credibility would the United States have if we hadn’t invaded Iraq? Sure, Uday and Qusay Hussein are gone, and there was some charm in seeing Saddam pulled out of that hidey-hole. But was all that worth blowing up our foreign policy high ground? No. If some strangely hypothetical situation arises where we have to put George W. Bush on trial for war crimes in order for Putin to face the same, we should take that trade, even if I’d be kind of mad at The Hague for even making the offer in the first place, especially since W. has proven to be a cheery and likable ex-President.
Remember how, for months, the US said there was evidence Russia was going to attempt a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Russian diplomats kept denying that, and acting all mad, accusing the West of trying to manifest an invasion? But then the troop build-up continued and then they actually invaded? Well, we can complain about gas prices and inflation and Ol’ Mumbly Joe Brandon all we want, but those public callouts were some masterful statesmanship. If you expected the US to handle this crisis so deftly and for NATO to coalesce, you were more optimistic than I.
I don’t know what loving our enemy looks like in times like these. What I know is I’m praying like David’s Psalms for Putin’s downfall, and that my heart also aches for the all those Russian dissidents immediately jailed for unfurling signs, or conscripts duped, then chucked into the meatgrinder. While we’re praying for Ukrainian lives to be saved, for the defending army to be victorious, for Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ongoing courage, let’s also pray for the Russians crushed under the pasty palm of their own potentate.
As propaganda escalates and worldviews simplify, we also need discernment. Citizenship in God’s Kingdom doesn’t demand neutrality. We’re placed specifically to serve our neighbors and local institutions, to guard those in death’s path. If this unfolds into the Great Battle of our lifetime, then I pray we keep ordering and trusting our allegiance under Christ. In the face of the deadliest weapons humanity has ever known, I fall back on trusting the True King.
Good Shepherd, hold us through these dark days. Soften our hearts against hardening hate. Shield us from terror and violence. Holy Spirit, leads us through to peace on the other side. Amen.
“In the face of the deadliest weapons humanity has ever known, I fall back on trust in the True King.“ Amen to that. Thanks for your perspective and speaking it through your biblical worldview, Jordan. Solid stuff. Really appreciate you sharing it.
Very strong and insightful, Jordan. Thank you for taking the time to work through this clearly.