Russia is now militarily allied with North Korea, China, and soon Iran. Iran is now formalizing the Axis of Resistance (Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansarallah, etc) as a mutual-defense pact. Putin has explicitly connected the two axes, saying, if I may paraphrase, ‘if the Americans arm our enemies, we'll arm their enemies.’ With Russia in Syria already, the two fronts could connect quite quickly. These are the battle lines of World War III. They're already drawn, and they've drawn blood already.

Iran, China, and Russia have conducted five joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean already, most recently in March 2024, as observed by Oman, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and South Africa. Iran, Russia, and Oman are conducting joint naval exercises now (October 2024), observed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Thailand.

Joe Biden laughed about this sort of alliance in 1997, saying,

I had one interesting conversation [with the Russians], they talked about they don't want this NATO expansion, they know it's not in their security interest, and on and on and they said, ‘if you do that, we may have to look to China.’ And I couldn't help using the colloquial expression from my state, ‘lots of luck in your senior year.’ Good luck. And if that doesn't work, try Iran [laughter].

Biden told this as a joke, but who's laughing now? Russia now massively outproduces occupied Europe. Iran massively outproduces occupying 'Israel'. China massively outproduces everyone. Industrial war is a game of industrial production and America has deindustrialized rapidly. They've outsourced much of their war production across long supply lines they cannot secure and they would depend on Chinese resources to attack China. America would be stupid to start World War III given these material conditions, but unfortunately they are.

So here we are. In the middle of World War III, if you count colored people and ignore proxies. America is fighting Russia through Ukraine and Iran through 'Israel' and is trying to fight China through Taiwan. Now America has already stripped the armories of Europe and 'Israel' and would strip its own armories if they attacked China. America doesn't have enough artillery to defend Ukraine or enough air defense missiles to defend 'Israel' and has resorted to attacks on civilians and assassinations like resource-poor 'terrorists'. For decades they held together their WWII conquests through both hard and soft power but now all they have is the ritual slaughter of the powerless.

In this way, World War II never really stopped, it just stopped affecting white people so they called it 'Cold', like their hearts. America conquered Europe, much of the Pacific, and much of the Middle East in WWII, and this WWIII is them desperately trying to hold on. But America has, in fact, been in a long retreat since Vietnam (when they became unable to field a conscript army) and then Afghanistan (when they became unable to field an army at all). They have now lost naval supremacy to Yemen and air supremacy to both Russia and Iran. In many ways, World War III is finished before it started, America is furiously throwing proxies in front of itself, but its own army is too scared to even show up.