World War IV?

Will the great recession lead to World War IV?
by Michael Lind

Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of "The American Way of Strategy."

".. As the oversold promise of free-market globalization fades, countries large and small may turn increasingly toward state capitalism. At home, this would mean permanent state support of troubled industries like banking and the automobile industries, which all of the major industrial countries have bailed out. In trade, this would mean a retreat from global trade areas toward regional blocs and bilateral deals. Examples include agreements between energy-hungry governments like those of China and Japan and the state-owned oil or natural gas companies of Saudi Arabia and Russia. In a world of diplomatic rivalries among great powers to win contracts with state-owned corporations, the distinctions between geoeconomics and geopolitics would erode, with potentially dangerous consequences. Direct war between great powers seems unlikely, but if the Cold War was World War III, then a cold World War IV resembling Orwell’s shifting coalitions of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania in 1984 is all too easy to imagine.

These trends are clear but the transatlantic establishment refuses to confront them. Instead, elites on both sides of the Atlantic hope that the great recession will turn out to have been merely a particularly nasty business cycle downturn. They pray that soon we can return to something like the illusory prosperity of the late 1990s and 2000s without having to engage in any radical rethinking or reform. Our political and opinion leaders think they are leading us back home. They haven’t noticed, or refuse to admit, that what used to be home is now a large, smoking crater. "

Pretty interesting article.. Read the full article here