An intentionally speculative, tin-foil-hat thought experiment. Some events discussed are real. The grand conspiracy connecting them is not presented as fact.
Maybe World War III has already started.
No, I don’t mean tanks pouring through Poland tomorrow morning or somebody launching a mushroom cloud over the horizon. That’s how World War III happens in movies.
I’m wondering whether historians in 2050 will look backward and say it actually began around 2016—and the rest of us simply missed the memo.
So grab your aluminum foil. Heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap, preferably. We’re going down the rabbit hole.
In 2016, the international tectonic plates were already moving. Russia was asserting itself. China was becoming increasingly powerful. Iran and Saudi Arabia were openly hostile. Turkey was pursuing its own regional ambitions. America was politically tearing itself apart.
Nothing to see here.
Then came COVID.
Now before somebody fires up the keyboard, I’m not claiming COVID was deliberately created as some giant obedience experiment. That’s where our fictional conspiracy gets more interesting.
What if nobody needed to create it?
What if powerful people simply watched?
COVID became perhaps the largest accidental experiment in human behavior in modern history. Governments discovered what frightened populations would tolerate during an emergency. Businesses closed. Schools closed. Churches closed. Borders closed. People worked from bedrooms while governments held press conferences explaining what everyone could and couldn’t do.
Whether individual policies were justified is a separate argument. Our imaginary villains weren’t interested in epidemiology.
They were taking notes.
They learned something remarkably important:
Fear moves populations faster than politics.
Then artificial intelligence showed up.
That’s where our imaginary conspiracy board meeting gets uncomfortable.
For most of human history, powerful institutions needed enormous numbers of humans. Humans farmed the food, built the machines, analyzed the intelligence, processed paperwork, drove the trucks and fought the wars.
Now we’re building machines capable of doing increasing amounts of intellectual work.
At some point, our fictional Bond villain leans across the conference table and asks:
“Exactly how many humans do we need?”
Relax. It’s satire.
Mostly.
Meanwhile, another strange ingredient gets dumped into our conspiracy stew: religious apocalypticism.
There are Christian Zionists who believe Israel plays a central role in biblical prophecy. There are Jewish Third-Temple activists who advocate rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Most Christians and Jews aren’t sitting around plotting Armageddon, obviously.
But history doesn’t require billions of extremists.
Sometimes a surprisingly small number of wealthy, connected true believers can cause an impressive amount of trouble.
So imagine an assortment of religious activists, oligarchs, defense interests, technology billionaires, intelligence agencies and politicians—all wanting completely different things but occasionally pushing history in roughly the same direction.
That’s actually scarier than one secret cabal.
Nobody is driving the bus.
They’re fighting over the steering wheel.
Meanwhile, look at the emerging international chessboard.
On one side: China, Russia and Iran, increasingly aligned by strategic interests even though they aren’t some monolithic NATO-style alliance.
Across the board: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, discovering that Iran provides a wonderful incentive for cooperation.
Then there is Israel, sitting smack in the middle of one of history’s most combustible neighborhoods.
And underneath everything?
Oil. Liquid Gold…
Iran doesn’t necessarily have to defeat Saudi Arabia militarily. It merely needs to make producing and transporting oil increasingly dangerous.
“If we can’t sell ours, perhaps nobody sells theirs.”
Threaten pipelines. Threaten tankers. Threaten the Strait of Hormuz. Threaten the Red Sea.
Suddenly every American filling his pickup truck becomes an unwilling participant in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
And then there is America.
Our political system is so polarized that Americans can watch exactly the same event and somehow witness two completely different realities.
November 2026 approaches. Control of Congress is contested. President Trump faces another two years in office regardless, but congressional control could dramatically alter what Washington can accomplish.
Perfect conditions for stability.
I’m kidding.
So now assemble our conspiracy corkboard.
2016: Trump wins…geopolitical realignment accelerates.
2020: humanity receives an accidental crash course in emergency government and mass social behavior.
2022 onward: wars and alliances rearrange the international order.
AI arrives and begins changing the economic relationship between humans and machines.
Religious apocalyptic movements continue watching Jerusalem.
Iran and Saudi Arabia circle one another.
China watches.
Russia pushes.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
Turkey remembers it used to run an empire.
And America conducts another election.
Maybe World War III won’t begin with a flash.
Maybe it began 10-years ago as hundreds of seemingly unrelated events that nobody thought to connect.
That is, of course, how conspiracy theories work.
Take enough dots, buy enough red yarn, and eventually your basement wall looks like a CIA briefing room.
But here’s the uncomfortable part.
History really does work that way sometimes.
The people living through enormous historical transitions rarely receive a notification saying:
Congratulations! You have entered a new historical era. Click here to accept the terms and conditions.
They simply go to work.
They raise their children.
They complain about gasoline.
They argue about politics.
They watch football.
And somewhere beyond their horizon, the clouds keep getting darker.
So maybe this isn’t World War III.
Maybe China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Israel and the United States will somehow navigate this mess without stumbling into something catastrophic.
I certainly hope so.
But keep the aluminum foil handy.
Because if historians eventually decide World War III began in 2016, I’m going to be annoyed that nobody at least sent us a calendar invitation.
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