Recently, my colleague John Zmirak warned of the Biden regime approving reckless actions which risk an open war with Russia — and likely her allies, which now include China and Iran. And he’s right about the present danger of our proxy war with Russia in Ukraine escalating quickly, from at least half a million Ukrainian and Russian dead to unimaginable millions of Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Britons, and Americans. U.S.-made and -piloted drones attacking Russian civilians in Crimea … how is that not a provocation verging on madness?

It doesn’t help that our president, who holds the nuclear codes, is a shambling husk of a man who clearly isn’t making the key decisions for our country. Who is? We don’t even know. It’s a secret. Did I somehow miss the relevant clause in our Constitution that provides for anonymous handlers to lead us? At least with King George III, we knew who was really in charge.

But I want to step back from the brink for a moment and try to understand how we got here. Not just to the very edge of an apocalyptic conflict, but to the state of roiling chaos that prevails all across the West and pervades the Muslim world. To the gathering repression in Europe, Canada, and even the D.C. gulag of out-of-touch elites wielding all their power to gaslight, silence, and reeducate their citizens.

We all know the official story, the “Warren Commission” version of the conflict across the globe: It’s between the noble, progressive forces of individual freedom represented by Western elites … and everything else in the world, which is dark, irrational, and evil. That includes all world religions, except for the sanitized versions that airbrush out traditional morality and replace concern for the Afterlife with some “social gospel” or other.

Our Degenerate Elites

The West is ruled for the moment by enlightened advocates of sexual liberation, revolutionary technologies such as AI, and bioengineering that some hope will drag human life out for centuries. Self-assured experts and billionaire activists offer to take over the world’s food supply, seize control of energy supplies, buy up all the farmland, and inject the children of the world with bold new vaccines for the diseases they’re secretly producing in government labs. They promise us clean energy, 45 new genders, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But standing in the way of the brave new world on offer are the murky forces of darkness, repression, misinformation, and “hate.” The enemy comes in many shapes and sizes, of course — since most of the human race does not subscribe to the Davos vision of a Great Reset ruled from the top down by a tiny cabal of veal-white Ivy League graduates. Maybe it’s American Deplorable voters who object to lawless open borders and plummeting wages, or patriotic Frenchmen who wonder why a historic church burns down at leat once a month. Dutch farmers who want to keep working their ancestors’ land. Hungarians who think they should be able to choose their own national leaders.

These are the targets today of our bloodless, power-hungry elites, and they’re the readers for whom I wrote The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset. But what if I told you that this is just the second wave of repression, subversion, and violence launched by our self-appointed leaders? What if much of the chaos afflicting the West today was in fact the result of the past 30 years of delusional social engineering and reckless wars?

World War III Already Happened … to Muslims

What if World War III already happened, in fact — if a tsunami of violence and disruption struck large parts of the world, and we in the West are now just experiencing the aftershock?

My Vulnerable People Project seeks to aid the most afflicted, marginalized human beings around the world — the victims who pay the price for the reckless decisions of our leaders, whose countries have been shattered and families devastated, whom most of us usually forget about after the last American soldiers are pulled out of the region and our diplomats have scuttled onto the last helicopter out of town. We provide coal for Afghans suffering in the wake of America’s failed intervention there; we sought safe refuges for Yazidis and Iraqi Christians after America shattered that state, too.

In my travels, I see things most Americans never dream of. For instance, I pass through medieval villages in Spain, and see them full of desperate Syrian refugees begging for handouts. And I ask myself: Do these people want to be here? Why were millions of Muslims driven to leave their ancestral villages and their countries to live as strangers in an alien culture, whose own Christian heritage (from Lisbon to Warsaw) is being liquidated by elites in favor of pansexual globalism?

Playing “Risk” with Human Pieces

And the answer, sadly, is clear. Our shallow, badly educated, intellectually incurious but massively self-confident leaders have been playing a game of Risk for decades, except with human pieces on the global board. The mainstream “Right” and “Left,” from George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, didn’t really disagree on all that much in the end. We saw how cozy they all were at John McCain’s funeral, a massive bipartisan lovefest of our rulers. Remember Bush virtually smooching with Michelle Obama? Bush let us know what he thought of American Deplorables (most of his party’s voters) when he lumped in the January 6 election protestors as “children of the same foul spirit” as the 9/11 hijackers.

Our elites all agreed that the U.S. needed to secure its oil supplies. That we needed to keep any Muslim power from becoming all that strong, lest it threaten those supplies or pose a threat to Israel. The best way for us to do that? To set the various countries in the region at each other’s throats, keep them fighting among themselves. Remember how the U.S. encouraged Iraq to invade Iran, and provided Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons? That idea killed between one and two million people, and yielded nothing for either country. But it kept each one of them weak.

Our Long List of Stupid Wars

Then came the first Gulf War, when the U.S. “accidentally” failed to make clear to Iraq that we wouldn’t tolerate an invasion of Kuwait. And our Congress was flooded with lobbyists, including lying witnesses who claimed that Iraqis threw Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. That war killed some 200,000 people, mostly Iraqi civilians. Our soldiers were ordered to bulldoze and bury alive thousands of Iraqi soldiers on the infamous “highway of death.” One American traumatized by taking part in that massacre was … Timothy McVeigh. Be careful creating monsters. Sometimes they come back home to roost.

We cynically urged the Kurds to rise up against Hussein, then watched as he slaughtered them. We “contained” Iraq with crippling, savage sanctions that caused the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, mostly children, according to UNICEF. I’ll never forget then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright saying, “The price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Then came 9/11, provoked by U.S. troops patrolling Saudi Arabia in the wake of the first Gulf War, which was made possible by the slack, apathetic leadership of George W. Bush. That attack was seized on as a pretext for “remaking” the whole Muslim world, as American neoconservatives called for the U.S. to invade and occupy more than a dozen countries. In the end, we only invaded two, but ruined both of them.

In Afghanistan, we insisted we would impose Western liberalism and democracy in a region profoundly inhospitable to either concept. In Iraq, we smashed the government and ruling party, and created a hellhole of chaos that led to the genocide of 700,000 Christians and other minorities. At least we imposed gun control in Iraq, disarming the very groups that were targeted by terrorists (who strangely failed to turn in their guns; go figure!).

The Wake of Western Elites’ Destruction

When Barack Obama came to power, in part on the promise of pulling out of Iraq, his administration switched from military occupation to massive, savage drone strikes, killing thousands of Muslim civilians around the world, sowing hatred for Westerners and Christians instead of the oligarchs responsible for the policy.

In the “Arab Spring,” we wielded Western “soft power” among the populations of fragile Arab countries to encourage “democracy.” We used the Internet (developed first as a weapon by the Defense Department’s DARPA and carefully managed by the CIA, as we learned during the Hunter Biden laptop scandal) to sow discontent, to encourage dissidents, and overthrow long-existing regimes. We used NATO to bomb Libya into anarchy, creating a civil war and reigniting the trade in black slaves.

Now with Israel’s savage campaign in Gaza, we’re seeing an entire region rendered uninhabitable, with civilians paying the price for their extremist leaders. But why were the people of Gaza driven to embrace groups such as Hamas? A few decades back, most Arabs supported secular socialist parties that centered on nationalism and didn’t persecute Christians. Was it climate change that goaded religious extremism all through the Muslim world? Just bad luck? Some law of nature?

Or were the people of a huge swathe of the world, from North Africa through central Asia, the victims of an arrogant, high-handed and selfish civilizational war, waged by secularists in power against Muslims around the world and Christians here at home?

Those are questions worth pondering, aren’t they?

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.