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A wonderful piece, and thanks for pinging me to it. Yes, it is largely a recap of what we've discussed many times on FR, and in many ways WWI was a gigantic historical watershed, the other bookend to the Thirty Years' War that was the last event of its sort in European history and constituted the shift from wars of religion to wars of dynasties, a period that lasted almost exactly 300 years and ended in 1918, to usher in, well, what? I suggest it is now a war, not of nationalities as so many in academia dismissively suggest, but a war of ideologies. This is, in its way, a return to wars of religion, and that, coupled with an renascent Islam, may be very bad news for people who just want to be left alone to enjoy the incredible wealth that the world has accrued, however unevenly distributed.

As I have noted elsewhere, no fewer than five dynasties fell in or about 1918: the Hohenzollern in Prussia, the Wittlesbach in Bavaria, the Romanov in Russia, the Ottomans in Turkey, and the Habsburgs in Astro-Hungary. Those between them were, with the now absent Bourbons and the Stuarts and the Spanish Habsburgs and others nearly too numerous to mention, the principal movers in all of the blood and pain suffered between 1618 and 1918. What is left is the apparatchiks, the nomenklatura, and that peculiar manifestation of statist ruling classes that is called, in the United States, Deep State and in Europe, the Government. The fall of the dynasties has left us with would-be rulers no less ambitious, power-obsessed, and murderous than the old ones. But this time - perhaps as a consequence of technology - this time it isn't going to be on any 300-year cycle. We're at the 100-year point now, and it may, regrettably, be time to tighten the seat belts for another rough ride.