As we close in on the end of 2025 and are writing on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, wars and rumors of wars seem to permeate our world.
The threat of China still persists. Not only because of Taiwan, but because of their overall agenda and their clear focus on replacing us as the world’s leading power.
We have a leader in Venezuela that’s way too big for his britches, and apparently is already provoking the deployment of Kinetic Urban Renewal or whatever those “special mission units” are being called now. It would help if Americans weren’t buying all the drugs he’s shipping to us.
There is a simmering cauldron in the Middle East that, mark my words, will continue to be tense despite DJT’s best efforts. The latest U.S. national strategy seems to de-emphasize the Middle East’s importance; which may change when it generates more problems we need answers to, and with power brokers like Turkey that want to run that area even to the point of making it a Caliphate.
We continue to have the Ukraine War— a war that has been hideously costly and makes no earthly sense, and that appears to be provoking the Europeans into entertaining the idea that war with Russia is or should be imminent, despite the inability of Russia to wrap up Ukraine. This too makes no earthly sense, even as they trickle weapons into Ukraine in numbers insufficient to be decisive.
Russia continues to lose scads of troops and material fighting over eastern Ukraine while not winning and being oblivious to the danger of China sensing their weakness and taking full advantage.
Iran is hell bent to provoke a final showdown with a genuine technological and nuclear regional superpower, even as their people literally run out of potable water.
Here at Deuce Central, we just shake our heads. We behold a world that seems to be going insane—if not clinically, in the ability of the leaders of its nations to clearly see their national interests and make meaningful decisions congruent with those interests. If what we see happening is possible, no act of geopolitical stupidity that we would normally consider improbable is off the table.
We are pretty sure DJT kept us out of one or more of these wars, and this is good. The involvement of the United States in a large war, or more than one in particular, might do more to move the United States further to the Left politically and socially than the re-election of the Giggling Mental Patient, Zero and Right-Said Fred, or His Royal Senescence would have done. Perhaps too far to recover.
Our Founders were aware of the dangers of both a standing army and the entanglement of the country in foreign wars. Much like any other stress influences the human body, war; and the mentality that seeks it or is under constant threat of it, introduces a unique poison into a nation’s cultural and political discourse that is hostile to liberty and the other positive qualities of a society.
The Roman Empire could measure its decline from the time it ceased to be the Roman Republic and embraced the militarism and expansive habits of the Empire, and the rule of the Caesars, despite its seeming expansion and strength. As the Romans fought others, they increasingly fought themselves as we are doing today; breaking faith with their countrymen and seeking their own at the expense of the public, and ignoring the need for a consistent rule of law to be applied to all.
The barbarian invasions have already occurred in the United States as well; millions of people who have come here for their own interests illegally have joined with perhaps even more home-grown barbarians who have little understanding of a common American identity and less still any use for it so long as their cellphones keep working and the grocery store stays stocked.
We note that in one form or another, the United States has been spending literally billions on foreign entanglements and wars since 1990. Following the Gulf War and the Iraq intrigue—which we never really got out of, we had the collapse of Yugoslavia. In that episode we took sides against and bombed the more Western power. Then, following 2001, the United States went to war for twenty more years.
As we look over that time span, the United States has certainly not gotten stronger culturally. A spirit of violent rebellion against the traditional American order seems to persist and has been growing; egged on by the institutions, media, and political leaders. It transcends the traditional left-right dogma, which is proving to be a smokescreen more than anything else. The social media age and the brokenness of society’s connections have given the population a minimal interest in personal ruggedness and scholarship, and an over-fixation on the self.
Schools are turning out students increasingly unprepared for—and even hostile to, the real world. Rules are increasingly made to be broken, and marriages and relationships are increasingly viewed as toxic stocks that will almost certainly tank and take your money and possibly freedom with them. Rather than prompting reflection and change, the mob is doubling down and demanding the normals capitulate.
The arrival of DJT was and is more of a protest against the current cultural and political state than anything else by the remaining normals. If he hadn’t existed, he would have been made. We are incredibly powerful economically, like Rome before us, but very, very poor in spirit. The glue that holds America together at this moment is not spiritual or cultural, but legal and economic.
This leaves us in a precarious position for what may come next.
Some time before I started writing the Deuces Wild column regularly, I commented on another story in which I discussed where our country could rapidly go if we had “a Great War” again in this day and age. Earlier on Deuces Wild, I argued the U.S. military is not a creature of the Right and it is dangerous for conservatives to assume it is.
As I said then, Nazi socialists invented the assault rifle and Communists perfected it. This has been further reinforced since that column was written by the behavior of retired military leaders towards President Trump as well as the penchant for leftism many of them seem to harbor.
Americans have never suffered through a true major war. Even in World War Two, the war was fought on the other side of the world mostly with no direct attacks on the homeland. A fifth-generation war such as may develop, in which there are no “front lines”, would be very different.
It is hard to describe the system shock Americans would have if their cities, infrastructure, and businesses came under direct attack from infiltrators or the likes of hypersonic, highly accurate non-nuclear missiles. The Global War on Terror, likewise, was fought “over there” from operating bases that had fast food amenities.
Ever since World War Two and for most of that war, the U.S. enjoyed air superiority, freedom of action, and freedom of engagement or disengagement from the enemy at will. It wasn’t ever a question of “what can we do next”, but “what do we want to do next?”. Despite this, every war the U.S. has fought since World War Two has resulted in either a loss or a stalemate.
Unlike in World War Two, substantial swaths of the U.S. population are disloyal to the American way of life and can be expected to be at best indifferent and at worst seditious in a concentrated attack on our country by a foreign actor. Many inhabit our national intelligentsia. After Pearl Harbor, Americans slept in line in recruitment centers to defend the country. We might see lines of people either deserting or lining up in protests against our country now.
Countries and institutions opposing the United States are already waging fifth generation warfare against us. Examine the current behavior of the Democratic Party and its fellow travelers, and their anti-ICE activity, and our most ambitious deportation plans aren’t close to what we really need to remove bad seeds from our national garden. In any hot conflict, the problems and what it would take to mitigate them would be huge. Keep reading.
China in particular has steadily undermined our security by slipping us technology that can compromise everything from our power grid to the Internet at their whim, and have probably pre-staged attack assets in our country to be used against what remains of our industrial base, supply chain, and military facilities in a future Pearl Harbor. It is unclear we can understand, much less get a handle on, this threat now.
The countermeasures that will be needed to address this are the stuff of Orwellian nightmares. If a major world war erupts with an adversary like China, potentially the entire economy could be mobilized for it. It would be made worse if China or the other launched a successful initial attack and crippled our forces, which it appears China may be planning on.
Here are just a few of the predictions I will make, in that event.
- Forget about buying civilian arms and ammunition. All of the gun steel, optics, ammo, and tactical accessories now commonly available to the public would be bought out by the government; particularly, that of the type and caliber currently issued the armed forces.
- During World War Two, we stopped producing vehicles for civilians due to military contracts. Items people took for granted were heavily rationed, including food and petroleum, oil, and lubricants. Economic controls and shortages, at least in the short term, might be seen again—as well as controls on who buys what.
- Mandatory vaccinations would be had for service members, defense industry and healthcare workers, and possibly the public in the face of enemy “biological threats” (like COVID).
- Media and the internet would be subject to oversight “for national security”, ala the Patriot Act. Ditto for “misinformation” and “foreign influences”.
- Potential internal attack threats would open the door to mass surveillance, curfews, and enhanced security measures. The dress rehearsals for this have already been field tested in China, in many cases with the assistance of Western companies. Aside from the tracking of persons and their data that has already become a literal science for other reasons, we might also see travel restrictions, oversight of interstate highways and travel, and the mainstreaming of the use of sensor fusion and wide area imaging such as Gorgon Stare. Not one aspect of life would escape scrutiny, and particularly not the electronic side.
- Taxes? They would go through the roof, and who would really argue?
- Government expansion would be back on steroids. Every government job reduced under DOGE would be back in, under the auspices of national security, economic support, or whatever. Practically every industry and institution in the country would be affected in some form, and there soon would be some government facilitator standing by to make sure everything worked for the greater good.
- Controls on financial institutions in the name of preventing funding of hostile foreign actors and money laundering would destroy any financial privacy remaining.
- Perhaps most insidiously, it would be impossible to tell those who came through this that big government was a bad thing once we “won”.
Look carefully at this list of things that would go on and tell me that this would not serve the interests of the globalists and those that would subordinate our security to a new and improved “world order” greatly—particularly if the war was especially destructive or involved the use of nuclear or biological weapons.
The act of sharpening a knife takes in putting friction on both sides of the blade in most cases; not one side. Bear this in mind as we see the change in our nation and culture at the deepest levels; regardless of who is ostensibly in charge at this moment. May we be highly vigilant in 2026!
Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.
