By Emanuel Pastreich
Fear No Evil
March 7, 2026
Like the First World War, this war will bring down all the imperial powers. At the same time, it will also be unlike any previous war because it will be a combination of a conventional war and an omniwar.
As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it,
"This is the age of monsters. The old order is dead, but the new order is struggling to be born."
The assassination of Iran's religious leader Ali Khamenei was similar to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on June 28, 1914. The brutal war unleashed by that first assassination, could not be stopped by anyone, and thus it brought about the collapse of the Russian Empire, German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ottoman Empire. It dealt a fatal wound to the British Empire and the French Empire as well. The war also made socialism a global movement with unprecedented influence.
We cannot predict what will happen this time, but we can guess that we will see the collapse of the Gulf state monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, and the transformation of Iran into a very different state. We will also see the weakening, and perhaps the collapse of, Israel. The decay of the United States will also speed up, resulting, perhaps, in a descent into warlordism at home and abroad.
Perhaps the Epstein files will inspire an anti-Trump political force that will take on all of Washington. Such a movement would cut like a hot knife through butter in the corrupt and bankrupt political culture of America. However, the deep corruption in the system will mean that even a revolution may lack the institutional authority to actually establish a new system.
The future of the United States, or the United States centered international community, may have a fate like that of China after the fall of the Han Dynasty漢朝. The corrupt Emperor Ling 霊帝of the Han Dynasty and his supporters were so parasitic that it was easy for the millenarian group known as the Yellow Turbans 黄巾under the leadership of the charismatic religious leader Zhang Jue 張角to sweep the Han Dynasty aside in 184 AD. But Zhang Jue and his followers were not able to fully displace the Han Dynasty. They could only destroy civilian rule and damage the legitimacy of the government. No alternative emerged out of that chaos. Instead, there rose up warlords who claimed that they would restore the Han Dynasty, most importantly Liu Bei 劉備, Sun Quan 孫権, and Cao Cao 曹操. Nevertheless, for all of their strategic genius, none of them could restore the economic and political system that existed under the Han. Even though Cao Cao was militarily successful, he still could not pull the empire together. China remained a geopolitical Humpty Dumpty until the establishment of the Tang Dynasty in 618, almost five hundred years later.
Perhaps we will see a century of powerful warlords battling it out to restore the United States. That might start with a battle between the Indo-Pacific Command Central Command, or perhaps the fight will start elsewhere. China is already boasting that it upholds rules on trade and global governance that Trump had abandoned. One can see that as an attempt to hold up the flag of the global consensus of the Clinton era.
And then there is the war of the rich versus ordinary people around the world using IT, nano-tech, digital currency, surveillance and control, psychological control. The part of that system is going to continue its rampage and it does not care what happens to Israel, the United States, and Iran. Multinational IT corporations rampaging the Earth like Oracle and Palantir, or private equity like BlackRock and Blackstone, are prepared to jump from Israel to India, or even to China, at any moment, if Israel, or the United States, starts to sink. That battle is not going to end any time soon because those powerful IT, intelligence, finance monsters have their claws in Iran and Turkey too. That part of the story is completely ignored in the simple narrative told by most truth tellers.
This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020. He writes on Fear No Evil.