Unpleasant random thoughts

Every now and then, I think about the geopolitical situations that face us, and I draw some conclusions that aren't necessarily commonplace

1. World War I never ended, but if you think it did end, then you can label the current conflicts in the world as World War III. 

2. If the Union had let the Confederacy secede, the Confederacy would have failed a few years afterwards and we'd be free of the stupid North vs. South conflict in the U.S. (i.e., "the South shall rise again" and all of its surrounding iconography) that fuels so much of the rancor in today's political scene. 

3. Jobs shipped overseas from the United States have less to do with trade imbalances that can be remedied by tariffs and more to do with the blind pursuit of profit over any social good. 

I guess each one of these could use a little explanation about why I come to these conclusions:

World Wars

If we look back to the Hundred Years War in Europe. It wasn't a single war, but rather a series of three conflicts, each one followed by an unsatisfying truce that let the underlying conflict simmer and re-emerge before the final conflicts. 

The conflict of World War I was not resolved in the Treaty of Versailles, and the peacekeeping expected of the League of Nations did nothing to block the gate. Instead, Hitler used what he considered a humiliating defeat in that war to fuel what we'll call today a "revenge tour." The simmering conflicts that undergirded World War II stemmed at least in part from the drawing of artificial nation-state and "mandate" boundaries by the victorious powers, who continued to have colonial empires after collapsing the empires of their opponents. 

Then, it's not hard to see how conflicts in Africa and the Middle East that followed the end of World War II and the institution of the United Nations kept flaring up through the 1950s and (in Africa, particularly) in the 1960s. Certainly, the fall of Assad in Syria and the conflict between Israel and Hamas are direct descendants of the lines drawn in the sand at the end of World War I and the horror of World War II. 

What else was the so-called Cold War but a conflict arising out of the tension between World War II allies - the West and the Soviet Union - after they rid themselves of their common enemy?

And once the Soviet Union fell and the various Soviet Socialist Republics sought to be unleashed by Moscow, the so-called "New World Order" did nothing to stifle conflict over many of the same boundaries and grievances, leading to a number of breakups - like those "Soviet satellites" Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

In Vladimir Putin, we have another leader fueled by what he sees as a humiliating defeat, not in war so much (although the Russian war in Afghanistan was certainly not a win for Moscow) but in the very collapse of the nation he served as an officer in the KGB. Now, he's on his revenge tour, and when you look at it, it's because nothing that was in question in 1914 has been successfully resolved. 

So, I believe that in the future, historians will either mark the invasion of Ukraine as the start of World War III or they'll come up with a term for the whole 100-some-odd years since World War I's inception   like the Hundred Years War, noting that it had at least three phases. 

The Civil War

While I like to think that the "arc of history bends toward justice," I look at the economic system the South had - based on the backs of enslaved people - as doomed to fail. The issue with this assessment, of course, is that there could have untold generations of suffering before that economic collapse, so from a moral standpoint, the Union, spurred by radical Republicans, had to fight that war. 

The issue, once again, is that because the Confederacy wasn't left to fail on its own, the anger over surrender in a vicious war has simmered ever since and that resentment has poisoned our national politics ever since. It is possible, in this imaginary scenario, that as the Confederacy collapsed, some of those states would have come hat in hand to Washington and beg to be readmitted. We'll never know, but like I do about World War I, I think the U.S. Civil War never really ended and it's playing out in our current politics. 

The Great Hollowing

I want to preface this next part by saying firmly that I have no love for Communism or any other state seizure of industry. I believe that people and society move forward on ambition. They want to enjoy (in other words, profit from) the fruits of their labor. 

That's why I don't dismiss the profit motive or the desire to become a millionaire or a billionaire, but unlike an Ayn Rand, I don't believe this human life (to a degree, we are no longer living in Nature like the other animals, but outside it - not above it - but sort of boxed off in our own created habitat) is one where each person is a sovereign with no obligation to the rest. 

I believe things are more complex than that. There is a conflict between the freedom of the individual and the cohesion and good of the group. Sometimes, we must do what is best for ourselves, even if it's not in the best interest of the group, and other times our needs and the needs of the group align. That's why religion and laws arise. Only dictators get everything they want (if only for a little while before the rebellion). 

All that being said, the unfettered quest for profit is what drove jobs overseas in what we'll call the "Great Hollowing" of the U.S. industrial base in the past five decades. Think about it. Big corporations make big money in markets like China, despite having to do so under a Communist government. And if they can make products there cheaper than they can make them here and then sell them to us, then they will ship the work of making those products there.  

Paying U.S. workers costs more than paying workers in many other lands and that's why jobs were shipped elsewhere in the first place. 

I come from a blue-collar background. My father and mother both worked to keep us in lower middle-class neighborhoods. My dad worked in car washes, chemical plants, structural steel manufacturers and ultimately in construction. My mom didn't work outside the home when my siblings and I were young, but she worked part-time and then full-time as we grew older, first in a hat factory and then in a dress factory. The good union work she had was eventually shipped to non-union shops in the South before ultimately being shipped overseas. 

I don't blame people for being pissed off that jobs went overseas, but the reason is not because other nations are taking advantage of us. It's because our own companies are. 

Copyright © 2025, Salvatore Caputo