Calgary, April 2026
This is the fourth essay I am writing about the world we live in. In the first one from October 2021, I was describing the world economically dominated by the USA, with China providing the competition. The friends and foes were clearly defined, but there was no major war. The economies of large companies were based on globalization.
This predictable world ended abruptly on 24. 2. 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Something like that wasn’t supposed to happen. European wars belonged to the past. However, on that day, European immunity to wars collapsed. The economic cooperation between Russia and the EU was halted, and the memories of Europe in 1938 became frighteningly real. But Ukraine, which everybody expected to be quickly defeated like Poland in 1939, is still resisting, gaining admiration and support from the Western part of the world. Unfortunately, in 2025, Trump became the US president, and things changed. He wants the world to be divided into blocks governed by dominant countries. One block would belong to him, another would belong to Putin, and the third would be dominated by Xi Jinping’s China. The rest of the world would do whatever those three guys tell them to do. The war in Ukraine doesn’t fit into that vision, and Trump wants to end it as soon as possible with Ukraine's defeat. But this is exactly what Europe doesn’t want, because they fear, rightly, that if Ukraine is defeated, they might be the next, just like in 1939. Also, that vision of the world dominated by three powers is not acceptable to anybody except those three guys who would dominate the world. Therefore, there is a deepening animosity between the Trump administration and the countries of the EU and others who don’t want to be puppets of the United States. The understanding of who is a friend and who is the foe isn’t clear anymore.
In the meantime, to get what he considers to be his, Trump threatened to annex Greenland, to make Canada a part of the US, ordered to attack Venezuela to get their oil, wants to starve Cuba into submission, and on 28. 2. 2026, Trump started a war against Iran. After all, Iran, like Venezuela, has oil, but Iran is not Venezuela. Their military is successfully resisting, causing a major disruption in the oil distribution. Now American troops are heading towards Iran, in direct repetition of the Vietnam disaster. Therefore, in 2021, there were no wars; in 2022, we had one, and now, at the beginning of spring 2026, we have two wars affecting the whole global economy. To make things worse, the global economy is now burdened by various import tariffs, and globalization has become a dirty word. I don’t know if this could be called progress.
But maybe it could. There is a book called The fourth corner, written by two historians, William Strauss and Neil Howe, published in 1997. They claim that, like human life, history follows approximately 80-year cycles, broken down to four parts of 20 years each. The fourth cycle is called Crisis. It is a period of structural breakdown where existing institutional, social, and political orders are destroyed and rebuilt in response to an existential threat, often involving major war or societal upheaval. The authors are using US history as an example, but this history is becoming increasingly relevant to the whole world.
The book starts with the first cycle, which lasted 89 years. That cycle begun by the US declaring independence from Britain in July 1776 and terminated with the US Civil War ending in April 1865. After that the slavery was abolished, and the US was on its way to becoming an industrial power. The next 80-year cycle ended with the end of the WW2 in 1945, exactly 80 years after the first cycle. The US became a dominant world power, replacing the British empire from that position. And now, right on schedule, the Crisis of our 80-year cycle arrived. Existing institutional and political orders are being destroyed, causing two wars and societal upheaval. What will come after is anybody’s guess. It seems evident that the dominant position of the USA will diminish. Who will replace it? China? Or will the world become multipolar, where various governments will jockey for power? There will always be men, and perhaps some women, with huge egos who will want to be the king (or the queen) of the castle. Or will the world described in George Orwell's book 1984 become reality? Or will the governing of the world pass from people to computers? It would be interesting to know.