Geopolitics

We are already living through both World War 3 and a 1929-style economic depression, but unlike their historical precedents, these crises are unfolding in slow motion over 15+ years instead of the 1-2 year timeframes of the past. The 2008 financial crisis marked the beginning of our extended depression period, creating prolonged effects like asset bubbles, monetary distortions, and social breakdown through the opioid crisis and COVID-19, rather than the immediate economic devastation of 1929. Similarly, current global conflicts from Gaza and Ukraine represent the early stages of World War 3, but in a distributed form involving multiple flashpoints, hybrid warfare, cyber attacks, and proxy conflicts rather than direct military confrontation between major powers.

Antiques dealer, machine psychologist. http://www.musicinphasespace.com

This isn’t exactly “WWIII” or “Depression 2.0,” but a 21st-century paradigm of drawn-out, multi-dimensional crisis with similar civilizational costs. The system is too complex, decentralized, and pathologically adapted to endless disruption. The “slow burn” is now stability—a catastrophic equilibrium where collapse is spread out and incremental, not sudden or acute.

Solutions are duct take at best: Bailouts save banks but inflate asset bubbles. Sanctions hurt Russia but spike global food/energy prices. Crises self-propagate—there’s no reset button, only trade-offs that prolong the timeline.

Conflicts persist because all sides profit: arms sales, resource control, political distraction. Societies can’t agree on what is happening, let alone coordinate responses. ZIRP props up insolvent corporations and states with cheap money, avoiding 1929-style crashes but creating “walking dead” economies: low growth, debt bubbles, and rising inequality.

It’s a Thucydides trap. I don’t think it can be won in this version of “the west”

The Information Sphere is the new battlefield. It takes time to flip minds, about a generation of constant alternative reality coverage.

The critical difference is nuclear deterrence, which forces conflicts into prolonged, lower-intensity forms and prevents the rapid escalation that characterized previous world wars. When examining cumulative casualties, we may already be approaching historical precedent numbers: COVID-19 has killed over 7 million globally, the opioid crisis claims over 100,000 annually in the US alone, Gaza casualties are estimated at 200,000, and Ukraine has seen over half million military casualties plus thousands of civilian deaths. This extended timeline creates a “boiling frog” effect where populations don’t recognize they’re living through a depression or world war because changes occur gradually, but the total death toll and social disruption may equal or exceed historical precedents. The nuclear age has fundamentally has  created this new paradigm of prolonged, distributed catastrophe rather than acute, concentrated disaster

Beauty matters - Wannabe Polymath. Interested in art, music, history, philosophy and faith.

Thank you for your detailed answer. 
I have heard of Kondratiev cycles, but I have never studied them in detail. 
As I understand it, changes in Kondratiev's cycles are triggered by innovations (technology, social changes) and in the "Fourth Turning" theory by generational change. 
Am I right?

I’m not a fan of Fourth Turning theory. It’s a poker-table vision of history: dramatic, clean, and mythic. If I had to choose I’d lean more toward Kondratiev cycles with nukes. The K-wave hasn’t vanished—it’s just been indefinitely delayed and distorted. Nuclear deterrence, financialized capitalism, and digital fragmentation don’t resolve crisis—they prolong it, mutate it, and monetize it. Renewal doesn’t come—not yet. And it won’t arrive through some grand, cleansing crisis. If it comes at all, it will come from a change in global polarity

What are your thoughts on the "forth turning" theory?

If it was a chess game, it would be a damn long and tiring one.