> The major wars of these five great sequences are given as the Portuguese
> cycle, with its ceaseless Italian and Indian Ocean wars of 1494-1516; the
> Dutch cycle, with the Spanish-Dutch war of 1580-1609; the first British
> cycle, with the wars of Louis XIV, 1688-1713; the second British cycle,
> with the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1792-1815; and the
> American cycle, or wars with Germany, 1914-45.
>
> Interestingly, Modelski's late '80s attempt to forecast this pattern into
> the next millennium immediately went awry (along with almost everyone
> else's) by assuming that the principal challenger to American suzerainty in
> 1973-2030 would be the Soviet Union. Presumably the slot would be filled
> now by Japan, or perhaps Unified Europe, or the Asia-Pacific Tigers.
If you'll notice the periods of conflict you describe, each typically
involves two major conflicts. The first is typically a contest to
determine the "winner" of the previous period of relative peace, or to
put to sleep an outmoded form of governance or competition, while the
second conflict is to determine the area of competition for the next
period, and the manner in which it is conducted.
Likewise, using the 1973-2030 period as the present age of conflict, we
see the first conflict being the determinance of the obsolescence of
totalitarian communism, starting with detente and the final phases of
the arms race in 1973 and culminating in 1990 with the fall of the
Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain (symbolized in the Berlin Wall), being
bankrupted to exhaustion by continuous arms buildups that are never used
to profit in gained imperial resource bases. The second conflict is to
determine what the future face of capitalist markets will be. Will they
be authoritarian nationalist/mercantilist economies, or shall
libertarianism and free markets reign?
This conflict will most likely be between the US and China as the main
players. The initial front lines in reality will be in the Asian Tiger
economies of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Indochina, and the
Phillipines/Indonesia. With the ubiquitousness of the internet,
cyberweapons systems will proliferate, with electronic combat waged
around the planet, with AI's and/or uploaded minds becoming the
equivalent of the atomic bomb that will resolve the conflict. That the
2030 timepoint coincides with our best estimates of acheivment of what
some call the "singularity" indicates that whoever gets there first will
win this conflict.
>
> Perhaps the most striking feature of this century-long process is the role
> played by massive conflict, or more exactly its successful conclusion, as a
> definitive time-marker. Whether or not the long cycle is calibrated to
> more primitive pulses (physiologic, ecological, even solar), one can set
> its clock by the celebrations that mark global armistice.
>
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}