The Return Of The Nineteenth Century

Everything changes, but nothing ever changes in quite the same way. The current world order, put in place by the events of the 20th century, is coming to its entirely predictable end. The world will go forward, but as always, it will go forward by going backward, back to what it knows. It will not return to the 20th century, but to the 19th, at least geopolitically, but with all the science and technology of the 21st. The world of thirty to fifty years from now will look different, feel different, and be different from the world of today. It will be more tribal; people like the Kurds will no longer be subsumed into a larger and hostile culture. Nation states will again be the organizing principle, with the leading nation states setting the rules, loose as they may be, for the rest of the world, settling disputes and quashing the inevitable wars between the lesser states and tribes. It will be the 19th century, but with a permanent American moon base. And yes, utopia will still be a long way off.

Dystopia will not occur, and zombies will not rise
The Russians won’t elect a Tsar, and much to their surprise
The people of the future will not think there’s been much change
For everything’s familiar and there’s nothing that seems strange
And that’s because time stretches out the changes one by one
In incremental baby steps and has since time’s begun
In peoples’ minds the USA has always been the lead
From days of Rome and before that, to Persian and the Mede
And gathered ‘round the big time States the little States grow fat
Colonial? Of course not, we would never call them that
The Punjab will see tourists, and through passes will be led
From time to time the tourists will be armed, in coats of red
No, not much will be changed, it’s how the world has always been
There will always be a Colonel, always be a Gunga Din

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