The last war doesn't necessarily have to be some great, grand nuclear conflict or massive conflict between superpower nations, it could be something a lot more intimate, what's that poem quote, "this is the way world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper"
As a matter of fact what I picture is what happened in the "Arab spring" ten years ago happening everywhere in the world, every society splintering into factions fighting it our for whatever ideology they want to fight for, something akin to the short story "All the Last Wars at Once"
You're right that government bureaucrats only care about saving their own skin at the end of the day, but average people can be gripped by passions that can explode into shocking acts of violence.
It all depends on whether more people turn away from anger and hate and turns towards love and empathy than those that don't if we're going to avoid some large scale outbreak of violence, I don't know about you though but it seems like the world really lacking in empathy when so many people grab a gun and kill strangers so often.
But I really do hope that cooler heads will prevail and in the long run we'll be ok and I really do think that can happen.
The arab spring was 100% orchestrated by outside agents, anyone telling you the opposite is ignorant or a shill, or both. The factors that led to this situation made little difference, the situation in most of the countries involved was far worse in the 80s and 90s than in the 00s. For example iran had been devastated by the war in iraq, entire generations lost due to ass-retarded islamic preachers larping as strategists, yet there was no revolt. In egypt you had far more extremist activity in those years, back in the 81 president sadat got shot, the muslim brotherhood was much bigger back then but then it actually lost public support after a series of terrorist bombings in the 90s and 00s wrecked the country's tourism industry which fucked over the population which depends on that source of income. In syria things were not bad at all, the oil boom of the 00s was a boon to them, same with libya and iran. The economic hardships in these countries had been far worse in previous years, same with repression specially in syria and iran during the 80s. Point is there was no reasonable trigger for the arab spring, it was a concerted effort by spooks and big data to game the population into toppling those regimes. Sure there were other parties like expats who wanted democracy or revenge against those regimes, but without the support of those benefactors I mentioned they wouldnt been able to pull this off
If the arab spring shows anything is that letting other countries own the means of communication and by extension the data of your citizens its a massive risk since now they can game your population against not just your interests (that is, the regime's) but even again their own interests by manipulating them into supporting shit thats going to fuck them over in the end, but it will be a massive win for the foreign interests pushing for this
Like it or not trump was right about tiktok because for all the bitching libtards did about russiagate the fact is no yanks use VK, but millions use tiktok, so what trump saw was the potential for the chinese to pull an arab spring on his country, which after looking at the 2020 riots maybe they did
Plus, China in all its wisdom and history has a story of "winning without fighting". If a conflict arises in the horizon, the chinks will rather bribe, hookwind or fool anyone they can before there is no other option. In all their history, it has followed that formula of avoiding conflict until you can't run away from it anymore. Because in the modern sense, war is an enormous waste of resources and manpower and if we all know one thing, is that China doesn't like to waste things that can be in the pocket of the CCP.
The objective of the party is to accumulate wealth and hold on to power, no more no less. It has no interest on the wellbeing or progress of the chinese population, in fact it actively curtails it to avoid insurrections from happening like in tiannamen. Economic expansionism plays into that strategy, but going into total war against a superpower does not. Democracies under total war tend to become stronger and more focused. Dictatorships become weak because the dear leader has to fight the total war outside and an internal war to keep the peasants from revolting and other apparatchiks from using the situation to topple his ass. Consider how many assassination attempts hitler had, how stalin killed a bunch of his generals (which fucked him at the end when the germans invaded) and feared even his own doctors
The last thing someone like xi wants is to deal with that, he knows that if he went to war with the yanks odds are his own party is going to stab him in the back just for all the money and profits a war would cost them. The only thing keeping the ccp together is a mixture of fear and bribes, but the bribes are a much bigger factor. Many ccp fuckheads feared xi's anti-corruption campaign but at the end it turned out to be a fiasco and many say china is now even more corrupt than before. Dictators are terrible at stamping out corruption because they depend on corruption and bribes to keep their underlings from toppling them. The moment a dictator goes clean the underlings who see their bribes evaporate will topple him and put a new dictator that keeps the money flowing into their offshore bank accounts.
