Speaker 1: We just got this in literally two minutes ago. Fox
News can confirm that Iran's supreme leader, the Iatola Kaminee,
is dead following Israeli strikes against his compound and location.
Earlier today, in late February twenty twenty six, US and
Israeli forces carried out coordinated strikes on the Islamic Republic
of Iran's military infrastructure.
Speaker 2: There has been a predictably strong verbal response coming from
Moscow so far, with Vladimir Putin over the weekend condemning
the killing as a cynical murder.
Speaker 1: Okay, stop the tape, just breathe for a second. Yeah,
that audio, that breaking news report we just play. It
isn't real, It hasn't happened. Yeah, anyway, right, But I
want to ask you a question right now, directly to
you listening to this. What if the history books of
the future say that World War IIE didn't start with
a single grand declaration.
Speaker 2: Right, like a big dramatic speech.
Speaker 1: Exactly what if they say it started with a series
of dominoes that we've already been watching fall for the
last two decades.
Speaker 2: It is it's a chilling thought experiment, I mean, but
is precisely the kind of pattern recognition we need to
be engaging in right now, because we are so conditioned
by history books to look for a Pearl Harbor moment
or you know, an assassination Serijevo, the Big Bang, Yes,
and because of that, we might be completely blind to
a global conflict that is slowly boiling all around us.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. We are so incredibly glad you're
here with us today. Our mission for this exploration is
to unpack a profoundly provocative piece of source material is
from the YouTube channel watch Mojo.
Speaker 2: Uh, Watch Mojo Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: The video is titled has World War three already started?
Eight major events so far? Now? Look, I know what
you might be thinking. Watch Mojo is mostly known for,
you know, top ten movie lists or pop culture rankings,
but this specific chronological journey they've mapped out through the
systemic shocks of the twenty first century. It is incredibly dense.
It builds up to that fictional, terrifying scenario in twenty
twenty six that we just played for you, and it
really forces us to look at the geopolitical architecture of
our time.
Speaker 2: It really does. And before we go any further. I
think we need to lay down a very firm foundation
for how we are going to approach that. Absolutely, because
the timeline we are about to explore it touches on
highly sensitive, incredibly tragic, and deeply politically charged global events.
There is immense human suffering embedded in this timeline.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we want to be crystal clear with you. We
are absolutely not taking sides here now. We are not
endorsing any political viewpoints, we are not validating any specific
government's actions, and we're definitely not here to tell you
who is right and who is wrong in these massive
geopolitical conflicts. Our goal is purely analytical.
Speaker 2: We are essentially acting as your guides. We're impartially mapping
out the facts, the timelines, and the overroaching ideas exactly
as they are presented in this watch Moojoe analysis.
Speaker 1: Just putting the pieces on the board exactly.
Speaker 2: We want to see how these puzzle pieces fit together
to form the narrative that the source is presenting. We
are looking at the architecture of the argument itself, testing
its structural integrity to see if this theory actually holds water.
Speaker 1: Because, let's face it, keeping up with the global news
cycle right now can feel like staring into a chaotic blur. Oh,
it's exhausting, it's totally overwhelming. You get a push notification
on your phone, you read a headline about a drone
strike or I don't know a new pair eff and
before you can even process the implications of that, the
next crisis is already happening.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So this discussion is designed to zoom out. We want
to cut through that daily noise and look at the massive,
sweeping patterns. We are looking at the threads that connect
seemingly isolated events across decades.
Speaker 2: And to do that effectively, to really understand where this
analysis suggests we are heading, which is that projected climax
in tendy twenty six, we have to rewind all the
way back. We have to go back to the turn
of the twenty first century, because if we're looking for
the earliest fracture in the post Cold War world order,
we have to start with these psychological and strategic shattering
of the illusion of absolute peace.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this, because if you think back to
the nineteen nineties, there was this prevailing geopolitical mood. Francis
Fukuyama famously called it the end of history in history
right right. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the liberal democratic
order had supposedly triumphed, and the general consensus was that
major paradigm shifting conflicts were basically a thing of a pass.
Speaker 2: It was supposed to be this era of unipolar American
dominance and increasing unstoppable economic.
Speaker 1: Integration, which is exactly why the events of September eleventh,
two thousand and one were such a profound rupture. The
analysis pinpoints this as the foundational shock event number one.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just a horrific terrorist attack, as awful
as it was, It was the moment that end of
history narrative violently unraveled. Yeah, when al Qaeda destroyed the
World Trade Center towers and struck the Pentagon, killing nearly
three thousand people, it fundamentally altered the DNA of the
global security apparatus.
Speaker 1: The source notes that the president at the time quickly
announced the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, which launched military
strikes against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But
we really need to look at the structural shifts that occurred,
the underlying mechanics, right, the detail that always gives me
pause when reviewing this era. Is how NATO responded. Following
nine to eleven, NATO invoked Article five for the very
first time in its entire history, and.
Speaker 2: We really need to unpack the mechanics of that because
it is a pivotal moment in international relations. Article five
is the absolute cornerstone of the NATO Alliance.
Speaker 1: The All for one, one for all claus exactly.
Speaker 2: The text states that an armed attack against one member
in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack
against them all. But the geopolitical framework here is crucial.
This treaty was signed in nineteen forty nine, right.
Speaker 1: It was designed with the Soviet Union in mind. Yes,
it was written for a scenario where massive columns of
Russian tanks come rolling through the Fulda Gap into West Germany.
It was not designed for state actors using commercial airliners
as kinetic weapons.
Speaker 2: Yet the Alliance adapted in real time. The definition of
an art attack evolved over the span of just a
few days. It's akin to well, it's like updating the
operating system of a massive legacy hardware network to deal
with the completely novel virus while the machine is running.
Speaker 1: That's a great way to push.
Speaker 2: So NATO members decided that a terrorist attack orchestrated by
a non state entity from thousands of miles away triggered
a collective defense mechanism originally met for state on state
conventional warfare.
Speaker 1: And that adaptation is the thread we need to pull
because it put the United States and its allies on
a sustained, multi generational war footing. As the source points out,
this wasn't a traditional multipower world war like we saw
in the nineteen tens or nineteen forties, but it completely
transformed the way the world operated. The war on terror
expanded across continents. We saw the creation of the Department
of Homeland Security, We saw the Patriot Act, and domestic
surveillance laws broadened significantly.
Speaker 2: We also saw the dawn of new deniable forms of
power projection. The massive drone campaigns that began in this
era fundamentally changed how kinetic force was applied globally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Pushmutney warfare.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and intelligence sharing networks between allied nations became deeply
inextricably intertwined. Even the global financial system was weaponized for
the first time on a massive scale to track terrorist financing.
Speaker 1: The analysis highlights a specific policy shift here, the declaration
that the US would make no distinction between the terrorists
who committed the acts and those who harbour them.
Speaker 2: That was huge.
Speaker 1: It essentially turned the entire globe, any nation with a
porous border or a weak central government into a potential
theater of operations. But the source goes further. It argues
that the subsequent invasion of Iraq in two thousand and
three is where the seeds of our current geopolitical nightmare
were really sown.
Speaker 2: That is a critical point of extrapolation in the video,
because the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime dismantled the existing
balance of power in the Middle East. Hussain, for all
his brutal dictatorial crimes, he acted as a primary strategic
bulwark against Iranian expansion, kept.
Speaker 1: Them in check.
Speaker 2: Strategically speaking, Yes, So when that regime collapsed, it created
a massive power vacuum in Baghdad.
Speaker 1: And nature abhors a vacuum exactly. The argument laid out
here is that Iran stepped right into that void. The
collapse of the Iraqi state structure allowed Iran's regional influence
to grow exponentially establishing what some analysts call the Shia
pressant right, stretching.
Speaker 2: From Tehran through Baghdad, into Damascus and down into Lebanon.
Speaker 1: It planted the seeds for the sprawling, complex proxy conflicts
that are defining the Middle East right now. The destabilization
unleashed after two thousand and one laid the groundwork for later,
much larger confrontations. The post Cold War illusion of absolute
peace was dead, replaced by a chaotic, multi front long war.
Speaker 2: I think what's most striking about this foundational fracture is
how it distracted the soul superpower. Well. While the US
and its allies were pouring trillions of dollars in immense
strategic bandwidth into counterinsurgency operations in the mounds of Afghanistan
and the streets of Falluja, the rest of the world
was quietly shifting.
Speaker 1: They took their eye off the broader board.
Speaker 2: Precisely, which brings us to a completely different kind of
systemic shock. Because if the events of two thousand and
one fractured the geopolitical and military security of the Old Order,
the events of two thousand and eight fractured its economic foundation.
Speaker 1: Event number two. We are talking about September fifteenth, two
thousand and eight, the day Lehman Brothers, America's fourth largest
investment bank, filed for bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: A monumental day.
Speaker 1: We all know the broad Strokes stock exchange is plummeted.
Governments had to launch massive, unprecedented bailouts, and it triggered
the deepest global recession since the nineteen thirties. But I
want to elevate this beyond a simple recap of the
housing market crash.
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that we have to look at
the geopolitical consequences of this economic devastation. This is where
the balance of global really starts to shift, perceptibly, almost psychologically.
For decades, the Washington Consensus, which is the Western model
of deregulated, liberalized financial markets that was sold to the
world as the ultimate full proof engine of prosperity.
Speaker 1: And suddenly that engine spectacularly exploded. Yes, Western financial institutions,
which were the literal bedrock of the global economic order,
were exposed as incredibly fragile, massively overleveraged, and deeply flawed.
The moral authority of the Western economic model took a
catastrophic hit.
Speaker 2: Now contrast to chaos in New York and London with
what the analysis notes about China during this exact same period.
This contrast is vital.
Speaker 1: It's night and day, it really is.
Speaker 2: While the West was frantically bailing out banks and dealing
with skyrocketing unemployment, China launched a massive state directed stimulus rebound.
Speaker 1: The scale of that stimulus was staggering. We're talking about
roughly four trillion yuon injected directly into their economy. The
source specifically that China was building schools, subways, power plants,
and hospitals.
Speaker 2: They were just building everywhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were creating jobs for millions of laborers who
had been laid off when their export factories closed due
to the plunge in Western consumer demand.
Speaker 2: The visual and psychological contrast there cannot be overstated. On
one side of the globe, you have the complex, seemingly
abstract financial architecture of the West collapsing like a house
of cards, resulting in foreclosures and severe austerity.
Speaker 1: And on the other side, you.
Speaker 2: Have China pouring concrete at an unprecedented rate, building high
speed rail networks across the country, and reinforcing the perception
of its rising almost unstoppable.
Speaker 1: Power it was almost a changing of the guard optically speaking.
And you know, we always talk about these macroeconomic shifts,
but there is a human element captured in the source
material that really grounds this.
Speaker 2: The quote from the employee.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they highlight a quote from a Lehman employee on
the actual day of the bankruptcy. The person says, I
was very, very happy in Lehman. So, yeah, I like
this company, and I'm just disappointed for everybody. I'm just sad.
Speaker 2: It perfectly encapsulates the bewilderment of that moment. The rug
was completely pulled out from under ordinary people. Millions lost
their homes, their life savings, and their sense of security.
And that bewilderment didn't just fade away when the stock.
Speaker 1: Market recovered, No it didn't.
Speaker 2: It metastasized into profound political consequences. The analysis connects this
economic shock directly to the rise of populist and nationalist
movements that began gaining massive momentum across Europe and North
America in the decade that followed.
Speaker 1: Because when the social contract feels broken, trust in the
liberal economic consensus completely breaks down.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it weakens alliance cohesion from the inside out. When
working class populations in Western democracies feel that the globalized
system only enriches a financial elite who suffers zero consequences
for their failures, they turn inward.
Speaker 1: They demand borders befortified.
Speaker 2: They demand trade deals be ripped up and international commitments
be scaled back.
Speaker 1: I hear that argument, and the timeline certainly lines up,
But I want to introduce a point of friction here
for you and the listener to consider. Is it entirely
fair to pin the rise of global populism and institutional
distrust solely on the two thousand and eight financial crisis.
Speaker 2: That's a fair.
Speaker 1: Question because right around this exact same time we saw
the explosive growth of web two point zero, social media
platforms and algorithmic echo chambers. Wasn't the weaponization of information equally,
if not more, responsible for fracturing that domestic consensus.
Speaker 2: That is a highly valid pushback, and the truth is
the two phenomena are deeply intertwined. Social media algorithm certainly
provided the accelerant, but the two thousand and eight crisis
provided the dry tender.
Speaker 1: I like that analogy.
Speaker 2: You need a baseline of deep seated economic anxiety and
a genuine loss of faith and institutions for those algorithmic
echo chambers to exploit. The financial crisis proved to many
that the quote unquote experts were wrong, making the public
highly susceptible to alternate narratives distributed via these new technological platforms.
Speaker 1: So it's the synthesis of the two economic ruin meeting
algorithmic radicalization. And the overarching point the source makes here
is profound. It says major wars often emerge from periods
of economic upheaval that unsettle established power hierarchies. When you
look back at history, the crash of two thousand and
eight might be remembered as the exact moment America's unipolar
dominance stopped looking permanent exactly.
Speaker 2: These first two systemic shocks, the terror of nine to
eleven and the financial ruin of the two thousand and eight,
represent the end of the old order. They weaken the
institutional confidence and the strategic focus of the West.
Speaker 1: And in geopolitics, there is a hard rule, which is
when a dominant power appears weakened, distracted, or divided domestically,
other powers will inevitably test the boundaries, which brings us
to the next phase of this analytical timeline, event number three,
the era where the rules of the game weren't just bent,
they were actively aggressively rewritten on the ground. And to
see how that plays out, we have to look at
the map of Eastern Europe in the year twenty.
Speaker 2: Fourteen, the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? How did this happen
so fast?
Speaker 2: This is a textbook masterful example of exploiting a distracted
global community. The context provided by the source is crucial here.
Following the euromit in protests in Kiev, which OUs to
Ukraine's pro Russian president Viktor Yanikovich, the region was thrown
into absolute political chaos.
Speaker 1: And in the midst of that chaos, in late February
twenty fourteen, unidentified armed personnel began seizing key infrastructure sites.
We're talking airports, military bases, government buildings across the Crimean peninsula.
Speaker 2: These were the infamous Little Green Men, highly trained troops
clearly utilizing Russian equipment and tactics, but operating entirely without
official military insignia, no flags on their shoulders, none. It
was a brilliant, albeit cynical strategic move that gave Moscow
a wild degree of plausible deniability in those crucial early days.
Speaker 1: I want you, the listener, to really think about the
audacity of that scenario. Imagine waking up and finding a
major piece of your sovereign country suddenly seized and occupied
by a neighboring power, but through a shadowy, undeclared operation
where the invading troops literally won't even admit what flag
they fly.
Speaker 2: It paralyzed the international community's response mechanism.
Speaker 1: Because it exploited the gray zone.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if columns of tanks roll across a border, the
response is clear, But when masked men slowly take over
checkpoints while a massive disinformation campaign muddies the waters online,
Western leaders were left debating what was actually happening until
the reality on the ground had already been cemented.
Speaker 1: Within weeks, Russia formally annexed the peninsula. They held a
highly disputed referendum. The source notes that Vladimir Putin vehemently
defended the move, claiming it was a necessary action to
protect Russian speakers and correct historical injustices from the Soviet era.
The official numbers claimed a staggering eighty two percent voter
turnout with more than ninety six percent voting in favor
of reunification with Russia.
Speaker 2: Those numbers are practically a caricature of a rigged election,
and Western governments universally condemned the annexation as a blatant
illegal violation of international law. Sweeping economic sanations were imposed that.
Speaker 1: The physical map had already changed. Yes, the sanctions didn't
reverse the annexation. And I think we need to delve
into why the Western response was relatively muted compared to
what we saw later in twenty twenty two, because this
is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Wasn't it largely
because Europe and specifically Germany had become deeply inextricably dependent
on Russian energy exports.
Speaker 2: You've hit on a vital structural weakness there. For decades,
the prevailing European strategy, often referred to as wandle dirtch
handle or changed through trade, assumed that tying Russia into
the European energy grid would pacify.
Speaker 1: Moscow, the idea being you don't bite the hand that
buys your gas.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the belief was that Putin would never risk the
massive revenue from the nord Stream pipeline. But twenty fourteen
proved that for certain leaders, historical grievance and territorial ambition
will trump economic rationality every time. Europe was simply too
reliant on Russian gas to risk a full scale economic
war in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: And that hesitancy taught a dangerous lesson. But beyond the
geopolitical maneuvering, the source emphasizes that twenty fourteen introduced a
terrifying new concept into mainstream military discourse. Hybrid warfare.
Speaker 2: Yes also sometimes referred to as the Jerassimov doctrine, named
after the Russian Chief of the General Staff. It is
the realization that in the twenty first century, the battlespace
isn't just.
Speaker 1: Physical if everywhere.
Speaker 2: Hybrid warfare is a synchronized, deeply integrated blend of kinetic
action those deniable little green men, along with massive weaponized
information operations, economic pressure, and devastating cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure.
Speaker 1: It's warfare designed to remain just below the threshold that
would trigger a conventional military responseato's Article five, which we
discussed earlier, But the reality is it was the first forcible,
unprovoked redrawing of European borders by a major power since
the end of World War II. That is a massive
psychological and legal threshold to cross.
Speaker 2: The analysis points out that NATO did respond by beginning
to rotate troops into Eastern European member states like Poland
and the Baltics. This was under what became known as
enhanced forward presence. It was essentially a tripwire force designed
to deter further aggression.
Speaker 1: But the core argument the source makes is that while
actual combat casualties were relatively limited during the twenty fourteen
CRIMEA operation itself, the long term systemic damage was absolutely done.
Speaker 2: It was permanent.
Speaker 1: The annexation deeply, perhaps permanently, destabilized the post Cold War
regional balance. Many strategic analysts now view twenty fourteen not
as an isolated, opportunistic incident, but as the literal opening
chapter of a prolonged, escalating European conflict.
Speaker 2: It was a test of the international systems immune response,
and the system was found lacking. It set the stage,
normalized the tactics, and embolden the actors for the far larger,
more devastating invasion that would come eight years later.
Speaker 1: It is the slow boil theory playing out in real time.
But while physical borders were being violently redrawn in the
mud of Eastern Europe, the economic and technological foundations of
the world were cracking in the Pacific, Yes, which brings
us to the next critical pivot point in this timeline,
event number four, the period from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty,
which the analysis broadly categorizes as the US China strategic break.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, to truly
grasp the magnitude of this shift, we need to apply
a broader historical framework. Political scientists often refer to the
Thucidies trap.
Speaker 1: The Thucidity strap. Break that down for us.
Speaker 2: It's a theory based on the ancient Greek historian's observation
of the Peloponnesian War. It basically states that when a
rapidly rising power threatens to displace and establish ruling power,
the resulting structural stress may violent conflict highly likely, if
not totally inevitable.
Speaker 1: Like two massive trains on the exact same track heading
straight for each other.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. For decades, the US and China had
operated under a deeply intertwined cooperative framework. It was the
ultimate symbiotic relationship. America got cheap consumer goods and low inflation,
and China got massive foreign investment, technology transfers, and an
export driven economic miracle that lifted hundreds of millions out
of poverty.
Speaker 1: But that symbiotic relationship masked deep growing structural imbalances. The
source highlights that beginning in twenty eighteen, the United States
fundamentally shifted its posture. The Trump administration imposed sweeping, unprecedented
tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese imports, and.
Speaker 2: They cited decades of alleged intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers,
and highly unfair trade practices.
Speaker 1: The sheer scale of the economic imbalance cited and the
source material is wild. They point out that at the
time had had an eight hundred billion dollar global trade deficit,
right and if roughly five hundred billion dollars of that
was specifically with China and meant Beijing accounted for more
than half of America's entire trade deficit with the rest of.
Speaker 2: The world combined, it was wildly lapsided.
Speaker 1: Beijing naturally didn't back down. They retaliated with their own
targeted tariffs, specifically aiming at American agricultural exports to maximize
domestic political pain.
Speaker 2: But if we look closely at this timeline, the conflict
rapidly evolved. It moved far beyond just a dispute over
the price of steel, aluminum, or soybeans. It morphed into
an existential battle for twenty first century technological supremacy.
Speaker 1: The true battleground wasn't just shipping containers. It was microchips,
artificial intelligence, and global telecommunications infrastructure.
Speaker 2: The source zeros in on the crackdown against Chinese technology giants,
most notably Huawei.
Speaker 1: Huawei.
Speaker 2: Huawei wasn't just a phone company making cheap handsets. They
were the global leader in rolling out five G network infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And the US Justice Department filed a massive thirteen cou
indictment against Huawei, its chief financial officer, Mengwanzu, and two
affiliated firms. The charges were severe bank and wire fraud,
theft of trade secrets, and conspiracy to violate sanctions against Iran.
Speaker 2: The campaign against Wahwei was a watershed moment. Washington realized
that if a strategic rival controlled the five G infrastructure,
the Internet of things that'll connect everything from autonomous vehicles
to power grids to military logistics. It represented an unacceptable,
fatal national security vulnerability, so they acted. The US began
aggressively pressuring its allies globally to literally rip Huawei equipment
out of the national networks.
Speaker 1: Think about the strategic break like a deeply messy, hostile
divorce between two people who have shared a bank account,
a business, and a house for forty years. The deeply
integrated framework of the early two thousands was visibly painfully
eroding without a single physical shot being.
Speaker 2: Fired, and the rhetoric from leadership matched the severity of
the policy shifts. The analysis points to a crucial speech
in twenty nineteen by then Vice President Mike Pence where
he effectively declared that the multi decade era of engagement
had failed.
Speaker 1: That's a strong statement.
Speaker 2: It was an official acknowledgment that trying to integrate China
into the liberal world order in hopes that they would
eventually democratize was a flawed, failed theory.
Speaker 1: And that ideological shift reverberated through the entire military apparatus.
The US Department of Defense released strategy documents formerly pivoting
away from the counter terrorism focus that had dominated their
planning since two thousand and one.
Speaker 2: Right the Long War was over.
Speaker 1: The new organizing principle for the US military was officially
great power competition. The War on Terror was out, preparing
for a near peer high tech conflict was in.
Speaker 2: We saw this strategic competition manifest physically in the South
China Sea. The source notes the intense militarization of the region.
China engaged in an unprecedented island building campaign.
Speaker 1: Dredging sand onto coral reefs to create artificial.
Speaker 2: Islands exactly and outfitting them with military grade runways, rare installations,
and anti ship missile batteries, effectively trying to annex one
of the most vital maritime trade corridors on the planet.
Under their nine dashline claim.
Speaker 1: It's a slow, methodical attempt to push the US Navy
out of the First Island chain, and the rivalry has
continued to harden under successive US administrations. It was no
longer a partisan issue. Getting tough on China became the
rare bipartisan consensus in Washington.
Speaker 2: It led to incredibly strict export controls on advanced semiconductors,
cutting China off from the cutting edge chips required to
train AI models.
Speaker 1: It was a profound systemic unwinding. The globalized world was
rapidly intentionally dividing into competing technological, economic, and security blocks.
Speaker 2: The lines were being drawn, and.
Speaker 1: Just as the tension between these newly forming blocks was
reaching a fever pitch, an entirely unprecedented, non kinetic shock
hit the entire global system simultaneously. Yes, at number five,
here's where it gets really interesting, because this is where
the timeline gets profoundly personal for every single person listening,
because we all live through this next fracture. We are
talking about the year twenty twenty and the pandemic shock.
Speaker 2: In early twenty twenty, as the sarskov two virus spread
rapidly outward from Muhan, the World Health Organization formally declared
COVID nineteen a global pandemic. The source recaps the immediate
paralyzing societal effects that we all remember so clearly.
Speaker 1: National borders slam shut, global.
Speaker 2: Aviation virtually halted, overnight, financial markets went into free fall,
and sprawling highly optimized supply chains fractured simultaneously around the
entire globe.
Speaker 1: The sheer human cost noted in the material is staggering.
The CDC eventually reported well over one hundred million cases
of the virus in America alone, leading to upwards of
a million deaths. The source uses a localized example, noting
that nearly forty five thousand people lost their lives in
the state of Ohio.
Speaker 2: A loan it was awful.
Speaker 1: It was a rolling, localized tragedy that was occurring on
a massive, on ff fathomable global scale, while.
Speaker 2: The health crisis was devastating on a human level. The
analytical angle we need to focus on is the geopolitical
weaponization of the pandemic. How did this biological event accelerate
the march toward a fractured world right Because as the
crisis deepened, the diplomatic rhetoric turned incredibly toxic. Accusations escalated
rapidly between Washington and Beijing over transparency, the origins of
the virus, and the initial suppression of critical public health data.
Speaker 1: The analysis highlights that Sino US relations reached an absolute nator,
perhaps the lowest point since nineteen seventy nine, when the
US formally normalized relations with the People's Republic of China.
It was during these chaotic early months of twenty twenty
that the phrase strategic decoupling evolved from an academic theory
into an urgent, panicked national security mandate.
Speaker 2: Because the pandemic exposed a terrifying vulnerability. For decades, the
global economy had run on just in time logistics. It
prioritized maximum efficiency and lowest cost above all else.
Speaker 1: Get the parts exactly when you need them, don't pay
for warehouse storage precisely.
Speaker 2: But when the borders closed, governments suddenly realized that their
just in time supply chains were incredibly fragile.
Speaker 1: I remembered the sheer panic when Western nations realized that
they were entirely dependent on a geopolitical rival for the
most basic survival tools. The active pharmaceutical ingredients for antibiotics,
the raw materials for heart medications, basic personal protective equipment
like N ninety five masks. All of it was overwhelmingly
manufactured in China.
Speaker 2: It was a brutal wake up call regarding the reality
of globalization. We had spent decades building this hyper efficient
global supply chain Jenga tower, and the pandemic pulled out
the foundational blocks.
Speaker 1: The whole thing wobbled.
Speaker 2: Governments realized that relying on a strategic rival for critical
medical supplies, vital minerals or legacy technology was an unacceptable
security risk. The paradigm shifted globally from just in time
efficiency to just in case resilience.
Speaker 1: And as the scientific community miraculously developed vaccines, we saw
that decoupling happen in real time through what became known
as vaccine diplomacy. The source points out how the global
distribution of vaccines immediately became a tool for geopolitical leverage.
Speaker 2: Is a soft power arms race. China and Russia aggressively
ship their domestically produced doses abroad, particularly targeting the global South.
They were aiming to create favor, secure natural resources and
expand their diplomatic.
Speaker 1: Influence, while the West was looking inward right.
Speaker 2: Western states, dealing with massive domestic outbreaks and political pressure,
primarily hoarded early supplies to prioritize their own domestic vaccination campaigns.
Speaker 1: It created a deep lingering resentment in developing nations, a
feeling that the West would abandon them in a true crisis.
That resentment is a wedge that rival powers are still
actively exploiting today, which brings us.
Speaker 2: To the crux of the argument regarding twenty twenty defense
ministries and intelligence agencies worldwide. Quietly adjusted their threat assessments.
The pandemic forced a massive ces stemic reassessment of dependencies
the math change. The source makes a profound claim here.
While COVID nineteen obviously wasn't a shooting war, it fundamentally
destabilized the complex economic architecture that had underpinned relative great
power piece since the end of the Cold War.
Speaker 1: The analysis states that historically significant global conflicts often follow
a massive systemic shock that weakens established institutions, drains national treasuries,
and amplifies underlying rivalries. In that strategic sense, twenty twenty
wasn't just a devastating public health crisis. It was a
structural fracture.
Speaker 2: It was the exact moment the world collectively realized it
could no longer rely on the interconnected systems it had
spent thirty years building.
Speaker 1: And historical precedent shows us that when global systems fracture,
when economic interconnectedness is viewed as a liability rather than
a strength, and when international institutions appear impotent, the unthinkable
suddenly becomes a viable policy option. Yes, which leads us
directly to the event that shattered the illusion of your
peace entirely violently ending the post Cold War era.
Speaker 2: Event number six twenty twenty two, Russia launches a full
scale invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 1: The timeline dates this precise rupture to the dawn of
February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, following a chilling, deeply
revisionist televised address by President Vladimir Putin where he essentially
denied the historical legitimacy of the Ukrainian state and announced
a quote unquote special military operation. Russian armored columns crossed
the border from multiple.
Speaker 2: Axes, including a massive thrust southward from Belarus aimed directly
at the capitol.
Speaker 1: Missiles began raining down on Kiev, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and other
major population centers. The scale of the assault was breathtaking.
Speaker 2: And this raised an important question, how did the West's
strategic assumptions fail so spectacularly? For decades, the prevailing wisdom
in European capitals was that large scale, mechanized territorial conquest
on the European continent was a dark relic of the
twentieth century.
Speaker 1: The belief was that economic inter dependence, the fact that
Russian oligarchs kept their money in London and German factories
ran on Russian gas would make a war of this
scale economically suicidal and therefore impossible.
Speaker 2: It was the ultimate failure of imagination.
Speaker 1: But the reality of Russian paratroopers descending on the Hostemil
airport outside Kiev proved those assumptions violently wrong.
Speaker 2: However, the analysis highlights that Putin's assumptions failed equally spectacularly.
The expectation in Moscow would a rapid decapitation strike, that
the Ukrainian government would flee, the military would fold, and
a puppet regime would be installed within seventy two hours.
Speaker 1: Instead, they encountered the incredible, galvanizing resilience of the Ukrainian people,
anchored by President Voladimir Zelensky. When reportedly offered an evacuation
flight out of the besieged capital by American intelligence, Zelensky
delivered what will undoubtedly be one of the most iconic
quotes of the twenty first century, the fight is here.
I need ammunition, not a ride.
Speaker 2: That single moment of defiance fundamentally altered the trajectory of
the twenty first century. The source includes a clip of
Zelensky's starkly stating that Putin had begun a war not
just against Ukraine, but against the entire democratic world, seeking
to destroy everything they had built.
Speaker 1: He framed it perfectly. It wasn't a regional border dispute.
It was an existential clash of systems.
Speaker 2: And because Ukraine didn't fall in three days, it gave
the West the time and the moral imperative to organize
a sweeping, unprecedented response. And this response heavily utilized the
exact economic weapons that had been quietly developed and tested
during the trade wars and decoupling of the previous years.
Speaker 1: The financial warfare was immediate and devastating. The analysis details
how Western allies launched coordinated sanctions that effectively froze hundreds
of billions of dollars of Russian central bank assets held overseas.
Speaker 2: We really need to pause and explain the magnitude of
the next step they took, because the source mentions that
key Russian banks were removed from SWIFT.
Speaker 1: Right for the listener who might not be an international banker,
what exactly is the SWIFT system and why is being
cut off from it? Considered the nuclear option of financial warfare.
Speaker 2: It's an essential concept to grasp. SWIFT stands for the
society for worldwide interbank financial telecommunication. It isn't a bank itself.
Think of it as the central nervous system or the
secure messaging network that thousands of global financial institutions used
to rapidly and securely transmit information and instructions to clear
international transactions.
Speaker 1: So if a German company wants to buy oil from
a Russian energy firm, the banks use SWIFT to communicate
and settle the massive transfer of funds.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Without access to Swift, international trade becomes incredibly slow, expensive,
and analog. It's like trying to run a modern multinational
corporation via fax machine while everyone else is using broadband Internet.
Speaker 1: It's crippling.
Speaker 2: Cutting Russia out of Swift was intended to immediately paralyze
their ability to fund their war machine through energy exports.
Speaker 1: But I want to throw another point of friction into
this analysis. The weaponization of Swift and the freezing of
sovereign central bank assets was meant to crush the Russian
economy instantly. But it didn't completely work, did it. In fact,
didn't this massive financial strike actually accelerate the very block
formation the watch Mojo video is warning about.
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant observation, and it highlights the law
of unintended consequences. When the US and Europe demonstrated that
they could and would weaponize the foundational plumbing of the
global financial system, it sent a shockwave through the non
Western world.
Speaker 1: Nations like China, India and the Broader Bricks coalitions suddenly
realized that if they crossed Washington, their sovereign wealth could
be erased overnight.
Speaker 2: So it turbocharged efforts toward ded allarization. It forced Russia
to rapidly pivot its entire economy eastward, selling massive quantities
of heavily discounted crude oil to India and China bypassing
Western financial systems entirely. The sanctions didn't end the war.
They simply accelerated the division of the global economy into
two parallel heating.
Speaker 1: Systems, and militarily the invasion force a similar hardening of lions.
The NATO Alliance, which had been suffering from deep internal
divisions and was famously described by the French president as
experiencing brain death just a few years prior, suddenly found
a renewed, urgent existential purpose.
Speaker 2: The Alliance rapidly reinforced its eastern flank, and perhaps most significantly,
historically neutral countries like Finland and Sweden, nations that had
maintained neutrality through the entirety of the Cold War, moved
rapidly and decisively to join NATO, effectively turning the Baltic
Sea into a NATO Lake.
Speaker 1: But beyond the geopolitical tectonic shifts, what is truly horrifying
about the Ukraine conflict is the nature of the warfare itself.
The analysis accurately points out the surreal, terrifying justa position
on the battlefield.
Speaker 2: The war revived the brutal, grueling meat grinder trench warfare
reminiscent of World War One mud artillery barrages and static front.
Speaker 1: Lines, but layered directly on top of those WWI style
trenches is a terrifying twenty first century reality. Swarms of
first person view FPV, kamikazi, drones, AI assisted targeting systems,
commercial satellite internet like startlink directing artillery fire, and overt
thinly veiled threats of tactical nuclear weapon use from the Kremlin.
Speaker 2: It is the absolute worst horrors of the twentieth century,
violently crashing into the bleeding edge technology of the twenty.
Speaker 1: First, and crucially, as Russia's initial blitzkrieg failed and their
stockpiles of precision munitions dwindled, they were forced to rely
on their newly formed strategic partnerships. The war in Ukraine
physically linked the emerging block.
Speaker 2: Russia began importing thousands of Shaheed loitering munitions from Aaron
and millions of artillery shells and ballistic missiles from North
Korea to sustain their war effort.
Speaker 1: In Europe, it shattered any remaining illusion of safety. The
source forcefully argues that the invasion wasn't an isolated regional
dispute over a specific piece of territory. It was a
major nuclear armed power violently rejecting the established rules based
global order by a network of autocratic partners.
Speaker 2: But the systemic stress didn't stop in Europe. No, the
friction was heating up globally, pulling our focus back to
the Middle East, leading us to the next massive systemic
shock event number seven.
Speaker 1: Twenty twenty three, the Israel Hamas War expands.
Speaker 2: On the morning of October seventh, twenty twenty three, the
geopolitical landscape fractured again. Hamas launched a massive, highly coordinated
and brutally violent assault from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel.
Speaker 1: The source outlines the horrific toll of that day, roughly
twelve hundred people killed, the vast majority of them civilians,
and hundreds taken hostage back into the tunnel networks of Jasa.
The analysis specifically references the deeply disturbing verified footage from
the Nova Music festival, taken right at sunrise.
Speaker 2: It shows thousands of young people dancing in the desert,
completely unaware of the paraglider's descending and the absolute horror
that was about to unfold just miles from the border.
Speaker 1: The psychological trauma of October seventh for Israel was profound
off and compared to their own nine to eleven. In response,
Israel mobilized hundreds of thousands of reservists and launched a massive,
sustained air and ground campaign aimed at completely dismantling Hamas's
military and governing capabilities in Gaza.
Speaker 2: But the focus of the Watch Mojo analysis isn't solely
on the immense human tragedy unfolding within Gaza itself. It
focuses intensely on the rapid, terrifying contagion effect of this
conflict right, it looks at how a localized, deeply entrenched
conflict instantly threatened to engulf the entire region and draw
in the major global powers.
Speaker 1: Because the interconnectedness of modern geopolitics means nothing happens in
a vacuum, the contagion was almost immediate. Within days, Hezbolah,
the heavily armed Iranian backed militant group in Lebanon, began
a sustained campaign of rocket fire and anti tank missile
attacks across Israel's northern border.
Speaker 2: Forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli civilians
and opening of all little second Front.
Speaker 1: At the exact same time, a shadowy network of Iranian
backed militias in a ro Rock and Syria, often operating
under the umbrella of the Islamic Resistance, began launching near
daily drone and rocket attacks against US military bases and
personnel stationed in the region.
Speaker 2: It was a clear coordinated effort to pressure Washington, but
perhaps the most globally disruptive expansion of the conflict came
from Yemen.
Speaker 1: The Houthis Yes, the Huthi.
Speaker 2: Movement, another keynote in Iran's axis of resistance, began launching
sophisticated anti ship ballistic missiles and suicide drones at commercial
cargo vessels transitting the Red Sea and the Babel Mandeb Strait.
Speaker 1: We need to underline the geopolitical significance of that specific
body of water. The Babel Mandeb Straight is one of
the most critical maritime choke points on Earth. Roughly twelve
percent to fifteen percent of all global trade and a
massive portion of the world's energy supplies flows through the
Red Sea to the Suez Canal.
Speaker 2: By targeting commercial shipping, the Houthis weren't just attacking Israel
or the US. They were effectively holding the arteries of
the global economy hostage.
Speaker 1: Majorshiping conglomerates were forced to reroute their massive containerships around
the southern tip of Africa. The Cape of Good.
Speaker 2: Hope, which adds weeks to transit times, burns millions of
dollars in extra fuel, drives up insurance premiums astronomically, and
ultimately acts as a massive inflationary tax on the entire
global economy.
Speaker 1: It perfectly illustrates the sources thesis a regional ethno nationalist
conflict in the levant Immediately disrupted global supply chains and
energy flows worldwide.
Speaker 2: To manage this massive multifront escalation and prevent a region
wide conflagration, the United States had to deploy immense military assets.
The analysis details the rapid deployment of multiple carrier strike groups,
including the crown Jewel of the US Navy, the massive
USS Gerald R Ford to the eastern Mediterranean.
Speaker 1: The source includes a quote describing this massive deployment as
a big show of presence, show of support, and frankly,
show of strength. It was textbook to terns. The US
was projecting overwhelming, undeniable kinetic power to send a very
clear message to Hesbela and more importantly, to their patrons
in Tehran.
Speaker 2: Do not escalate this further, or you will face the
full weight of the United States military.
Speaker 1: But we have to look at the strategic cost of
that deterrence. The analysis makes a vital, chilling observation. While
the massive US deploimate prevented an immediate regional war, it
demonstrated a dangerous reality multiple global power centers were now
operating simultaneously in the exact same constrained theater.
Speaker 2: It highlighted the concept of imperial overstretch. The US Navy
was suddenly tasked with attempting to suppress hoothy missile fire
in the Red Sea, deterring Hesbola in the Mediterranean, supporting
Ukraine and Europe, while simultaneously trying to maintain a credible
deterrent posture against an increasingly assertive China in the Indo Pacific.
Speaker 1: All of these actors were actively testing red lines. They
were probing for weaknesses, observing the burn rate of Western munitions,
and testing the limits of American strategic bandwidth. In real time.
The Middle East had become a powder keg with multiple
lit fuses demonstrating just how fragile the global balance.
Speaker 2: Have become, which brings us to the absolute climax of
this analytical journey, the final domino in the Watch Mojo
videos timeline event number eight.
Speaker 1: Now, it is absolutely vital to remember that this specific
event has not happened. It is a projection, a meticulously
crafted fictional scenario set in the near future, specifically late
February twenty twenty six. This is the simulated news broadcast
we played for you at the very beginning of the show.
Speaker 2: Today. The analysis projects a scenario where the slow boiling
Proxy Wars finally boil over. It imagines a situation where
intelligence indicates Iran is mere weeks away from weapons grade
nuclear breakout.
Speaker 1: Capability, a nightmare scenario.
Speaker 2: Yes. In response, US and Israeli forces carry out massive,
highly coordinated overt strikes directly on the sovereign territory of
the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Speaker 1: The hypothetical targets include deeply buried facilities linked to missile
production and the nuclear enrichment sites at Natam's and four Doh.
But the most shocking escalatory element of this twenty twenty
sixth scenario is the targeted assassination of Iran's head of state,
the Supreme Leader, Ayatola Kammone.
Speaker 2: The source brilliantly scripts out the political framing of this
hypothetical event because it mirrors exactly how these nations communicate today.
It imagines Israeli officials standing before the UN describing the
massive preemptive operation as a tragic but absolute necessity to
prevent a hostile terror sponsoring regime from acquiring the ultimate
weapon of mass destruction.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, the material imagines American leadership framing the strike as
the ultimate restoration of deterns. The source even crafts a
highly realistic hypothetical social media post from the US President.
It envisions the President calling Kammone one of the most
evil people in modern history, framing his death as long
overdue justice for the people of Iran, for Americans killed
by proxy IEDs over the decades, and for victims worldwide
terrorized by Kamone and his gang of blood thirsty thugs.
Speaker 2: But is the global reaction in this twenty twenty six
scenario that tips the scales from regional war to world war.
In this projection, Iran obviously condemns the strike as an
unprovoked act of extreme aggression. They immediately signal massive coordinated retaliation,
utilizing their entire axis of resistance.
Speaker 1: The immediate real world economic fallout would be apocalyptic. The
analysis imagines the Strait of Horror moves effectively closing due
to Iranian mining and missile threats. Global oil prices immediately
spike past two hundred dollars barrel, threatening to plunge the
entire global economy into a devastating depression.
Speaker 2: US military assets across the Persian Gulf shift into a
wartime posture, preparing for incoming ballistic missile barrages.
Speaker 1: And this is where the interlocking alliances turn the conflict global.
The other major year political powers do not stay on
the sidelines. Russia and China, deeply tied to Iran economically
and strategically, step in with sharp, aggressive diplomatic and military warnings.
Speaker 2: The video in envisions Vladimir Putin stepping up to a
podium and fiercely condemning the assassination of Common Eye as
a cynical murder, a blatant violation of international law. The
Russian Foreign Ministry issued statements accusing the US and Israel
of recklessly plunging the entire Middle East into an abyss
of uncontrolled, catastrophic escalation.
Speaker 1: The analysis carefully synthesizes why this specific, albeit fictional moment
represents the ultimate point of no return. It states, unlike
prior proxy confrontations in Syria or Iraq, this was overt
state on state escalation. This is the vital distinction that
changes the paradigm.
Speaker 2: Let's unpack that distinction. For the last two decades, the
major global powers have essentially fought each other in the shadows.
They fight through proxies.
Speaker 1: Funding this rebel group in Syria, arming that militia in
Yemen sending intelligence to Ukraine exactly.
Speaker 2: It allows for a vital layer of plausible deniability that
prevents direct nuclear exchange.
Speaker 1: But a direct, coordinated, massive kinetic strike by the US
and Israel directly onto the sovereign internationally recognized territory of Iran,
culminating in the intentional killing of its head of state,
completely strips away all deniability. The gray zone evaporates. It
forces everyone to pick aside and commit their forces.
Speaker 2: The narrator of the source material delivers a line analyzing
this scenario that really made me stop and reflect on
the fragility of our era.
Speaker 1: What was it?
Speaker 2: If future historians mark the moment when separate regional flashpoints
began to converge. February twenty twenty six may stand out
is the point where long simmering rivalries fused into direct
confrontation between aligned blocks.
Speaker 1: It's the moment the ven diagram of global conflicts becomes
a single, terrifying circle. The analysis imagines a world where
the US President must address the nation from the Oval Office,
warning the public that American lives will likely be lost,
that the economy will suffer, and that the nation must
prepare for a protracted, prolonged fight across multiple theaters.
Speaker 2: The localized crises. We have spent this hour discussing the
psychological trauma of two thousand and one, the economic and
institutional erosion of two thousand and eight, the rewriting of
borders in Crimea in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: The technological decoupling and trade wars of the late twenty tens,
the shattering of the global supply chain during the twenty
twenty pandemic.
Speaker 2: The brutal return of industrial warfare in Ukraine in twenty
twenty two, and the explosive proxy wars triggered in twenty
twenty three. They all fuse together, They combine into a singular,
uncontainable global conflict.
Speaker 1: The blocks are formed, the lines are drawn, and the
shooting begins.
Speaker 2: It is a sobering, terrifying synthesis of twenty five years
of global friction.
Speaker 1: Wow. We have covered an immense, staggering amount of historical
and analytical ground during this discussion. Let's try to zoom
back out one final time and summarize the threads we've
pulled together.
Speaker 2: We started our journey examining the localized horrific terror of
two thousand and one which shattered the end of history
illusion and put the West on a permanent war footing
inadvertently empowering regional rivals in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: We then watched the unquestioned economic authority of the West
crack during the two thousand and eight financial crisis, a
moment that simultaneously accelerated China's rise and sowed the seas
of deep internal populist division within Western democracies.
Speaker 2: We observed how a distracted global community allowed the rules
of sovereignty and borders to be violently rewritten in the
mud of Crimea in twenty fourteen, normalizing the insidious tactics
of hybrid warfare.
Speaker 1: We tracked the profound realization in Washington that engagement had failed,
leading to the aggressive severing of economic and technological ties
between the US and China, sparking the new era of
great power competition.
Speaker 2: We explored the profound, terrifying systemic shock of the twenty
twenty pandemic, a biological event that proved just how fragile
or hyper efficient globalization truly was, shifting national priorities from
efficiency to absolute security and decoupling.
Speaker 1: Which paved the way for the shattered illusion of European
peace in twenty twenty two with the brutal, grinding invasion
of Ukraine, an event that weaponized the global financial system
and solidified the formation of a new opposing block of
autocratic nations.
Speaker 2: All of which was further inflamed by the explosive, highly
interconnected proxy wars triggered by the Israel Hamas conflict in
twenty twenty three, proving that localized violence can instantly threaten
the vital arteries of global trade.
Speaker 1: All of these systemic shocks, these falling dominoes, building relentlessly
toward that terrifying projected potential of a direct overt block
versus block confrontation in twenty twenty six. The core underlying
theme of this analytical source material is crystal clear, and
it demands our attention. GUS history might look back and
realize that World War III wasn't an event that just
suddenly happened on a random Tuesday because an archduke was shot.
It was a temperature that slowly, imperceptibly boiled over two
decades until the pot finally cracked.
Speaker 2: The framework challenges are fundamental understanding of what a global
war actually looks like. In the twenty first century. It
suggests that economic decoupling, the weaponization of supply chains, debilitating
cyber warfare, and far flung proxy battles are not modern
alternatives to a world war. They are simply the early,
non nuclear phases of one.
Speaker 1: I want to leave you with a final provocative thought
to mull over as you go about your day for
the last thirty years, the prevailing wisdom of global leadership.
The bedrop of the post Cold War consensus was that
deep interconnectedness and globalization were the ultimate shields against World
War three. The theory was simple. If our economies, our
supply chains, and our financial systems were deeply tied together,
it would simply be too expensive, too ruinous to ever
fight each other. But based on the sprawling timeline we've
unpacked today, what happens when nations decide that relying on
their arrivals for microchips, medicine, and energy isn't a shield,
but rather their greatest, most fatal weakness. Exactly if severing ties,
hoarding resources, and decoupling is the new global defense strategy,
does that isolation make a massive conflict less likely? Or
does it make it infinitely more inevitable?
Speaker 2: That is, undeniably the defining strategic quid of our time.
Speaker 1: So what do you think after looking at the architecture
of the last twenty five years? Are we already gearing
up for a major global conflict? Have the early stages
of World War three already even fought in the boardrooms,
the server farms, and the proxy battlefields. Or is this
intense tension just the chaotic, bumpy, but manageable new normal
of a rapidly changing multipolar world. Where do you stand
on this timeline? Leave a comment down below with your thoughts.
We read every single one and we love seeing how
you analyze these incredibly complex topics. Until next time, stay
purious and keep pulling at the threads.