Why we can't win World War III

It's a story as old as mass infantry vs mounted archers

The Houthis in Yemen claimed on Sunday that they successfully fired a hypersonic missile at central Israel. Authorities in Jerusalem disputed the claim, saying that a ‘projectile’ was intercepted before entering Israeli airspace.

Either way, the Houthis continue to fire off larger and larger weapons. They harass Western shipping travelling through the Red Sea with little opposition. The American response to these attacks has been to bomb Yemen; something they’ve been doing for a long time to little effect.

Turns out, it’s pretty hard to bomb a people back into the Stone Age who never left the Stone Age in the first place.

The Houthis are, of course, just one set of combatants pouring missiles into Israel. Hamas fires smaller rockets, which the Israeli Iron Dome, David’s Sling and US-provided THAAD can intercept quite easily. Hezbollah in the north fires more serious weapons, which often get through. Most deadly of all so far, of course, was the October 1 ballistic missile attack from Iran, which did considerable damage to military targets.

While pro-Israeli outlets argue that Israel has been victorious in its fights against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, it’s difficult to see how this is the case. The demolition of northern Gaza has made Israel, and increasingly its Western allies, international pariahs. We do have to share a planet with the Muslims and the Global South whether we like it or not, and killing tens of thousands of Palestinians has done permanent damage to Western standing in the world.

Zionists won’t like it to be framed that way, but it’s true. And what has Israel gained? 360 square kilometres? That’s one-twentieth the size of the Dubbo Regional Council area. It hardly seems worth it.

Israel has been pursuing a war strategy very similar to how the Western powers conduct warfare. Seeking to dominate the battlespace with superior technology and firepower, the Israelis find themselves getting picked off and worn down by enemies on every side.

Like a besieged Crusader state in the 13th century, Israel is finding it difficult to project force and hold terrain, while simultaneously its casualties are mounting and morale is collapsing. At this point, only the West entering the conflict on their behalf or the launch of a nuclear Samson Option on the region will prevent Israel from being overwhelmed.

The situation is the same for the US proxy war in Ukraine. The Russians have been using cauldron tactics against the Ukrainians in the Donbass since 2022, chewing up their manpower and grinding down their reserves. While Russian territorial gains have been negligible until this point, it is the Ukrainians who are being bled dry. We can expect the Russians to launch a powerful offensive at some point soon to finish off the Ukrainian forces, and then Ukraine will be Russia’s for the taking.

The Russians and the Arabs are conducting warfare the way those civilisations have always conducted warfare. Ukraine and Israel, being supplied and directed out of the United States, are following the Western European method of warfare: big hits using advanced technology to capture and hold territory.

This method of warfare is known as the ‘Western Way of War’ by scholars in the field of military history. The concept was popularised by Classics Professor Victor Davis Hanson.

We Westerners like decisive battles to create a permanent peace. The history of Western warfare is heavy infantry or heavy cavalry crushing a foe to achieve a political settlement. This pattern traces from the Greek hoplite to the Roman legionary to the medieval knight to early modern mass infantry to tank warfare to heavy bombers and aircraft carriers.

We like to hit hard, settle the fight and then establish a political order based on the outcome.

That’s not how other civilisations fight. The history of Middle Eastern and steppe warfare, for example, is the history of mounted archers using their mobility and speed to wear down an opponent until they flee or are massacred.

This brings us back to the missiles. One of the central contentions of Hanson’s argument in his book is that geography determined the difference in styles of warfare, and except for one or two exceptions like Alexander the Great and the Spanish Caliphate, Western armies can’t conquer in Asia, and Asian armies can’t conquer in Europe.

This understanding of civilisational differences in warfare helps us to understand how the Middle Eastern and Eurasian powers are engaging with the West. No pitched battle to ‘sort it out’; instead, a drawn-out campaign of attrition using rockets and missiles.

In this type of East vs West conflict, the aggressor will be the one to lose. Whichever side is seeking to impose its will upon the sphere of the other will be the side that fails.

That’s us, or rather, it’s the West. It is the United States that is aggressing to defend the economic and political order established after World War II. Therefore, it will be the West that will prove unable to project power and impose its will upon the great powers of West and North Asia.

The Russians and the Persians will wear the Western powers down for as long as they need to, and then once they sense exhaustion, they’ll strike.

This scenario is based upon the assumption that the conflict remains conventional, of course, and Western economic weakness and military overextension is why I think the Americans or their proxies will resort to nukes at some point in the not-too-distant future.

America and its proxies are already running low on supplies of interceptor missiles and long-range ballistics like the ATACMs. The Eurasian powers are producing even more than they are using, and have been stockpiling for this for decades.

Meanwhile, the other great civilisational pole is waiting in the wings. Unless some radical change occurs in the global conflict situation, the winner of the West vs Eurasian military contest is looking like it will be China.

All with stolen US technology.

The neocons in charge of US, and therefore Western, foreign policy are fanatics. They don’t live in the real world that the rest of us inhabit. They’ve got an ideological agenda, and the interests of Western peoples play no role in that globalist vision.

They’re going to lose, and unfortunately for everybody else on Earth, so will we.

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The left have totally cancelled me. They impounded my PhD thesis and have made it impossible for me to work in my profession. Please consider buying my 2017 book Civilizationism to support my work.