Hegemonic States
War can be understood as an informational state, a mechanism that oscillates from imbalance to balance like any other natural mechanism.
Intelligence does not need data. History is the most elegant form of Intelligence which allows harnessing the past to understand the future. The mechanism manipulates myopic societal memory to dynamically function and create balance from imbalance. Nature works because it has a way of working secretly.
Information jumps from one state to another. War is a piece of information and hence has a probability. You can put war into a state and forget about it, but increasing inequality, decreasing economic power, and generational trends bring it back again.
And because the multiplicity of time is happening despite everything i.e. larger and smaller cycles are interacting and oscillating together, the human inability to see them is why we are the frog in the well. Comprehension of a system beyond our day-to-day mundane causality would transform us into enlightened intelligent beings. Without intelligence, we are agents suffering unpredictable disorder, a story created by chaos, a part of the simulation at the mercy of the structure of time.
I wanted to go back in time and understand the reference to my World War III window. Where did I come up with the 2024-2030 window back in 2008. Anticipation is a study of history, which remains a factual extrapolation of structures of the time. Looking into the future probabilistically is as simple as the ticking of a clock, it is just that long term does not excite the society, which is roiled in instant gratification. This is why investing is not for the masses, it is for the few who understand that generational wealth, needs patience, slowness, and the ability to grasp that crisis is a combination of danger and opportunity.
Intelligence is a mechanism that can extract order from disorder. Nature is intelligent, a perpetual motion machine, which replicates, learns, adapts with magical ease, leveraging on effect to give birth to a cause, a science fiction for the masses.
Coming back to the 2020's forecast of a World War cycle. More than a few thinkers have articulated the mechanism of war as a system of hegemonic states, which is always on the move, expressing itself and changing world order.
"We conclude that there is a significantly high probability that warfare among core states could occur in the 2020s."
Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 1995, The Next World War, World-System, Cycles, and Trends
"The current situation of unipolarity in the core of the world-economy will in future decades give way to a situation of multipolar military and economic competition....collapse of the relatively simple bipolar cold war order markedly increases the probability that major crisis and war will erupt in Europe in the coming decades."
Meirsheimer 1990
"Relative stability is typically imposed by a single-core power which has achieved hegemony - whereas periods of intensified military conflict occur as leading powers enter into a decline and core rivals begin to compete to be the successor hegemon."
Wallerstein 1993
"...while states always desire to go to war, they can only afford to do so only when economic growth is providing them with sufficient resources."
Goldstein 1988
"It is widely accepted that the current K wave, which entered a downturn around 1967/73, is probably now in the process of beginning a new upturn which will reach its apex around 2025. It is also widely accepted that by this period the U.S. hegemony, already unraveling, will have definitely eroded. This convergence of plateauing economic cycle with a period of political multicentricity within the core, should if history truly repeats itself, result in the outbreak of full-scale warfare between the declining hegemon and the ascending core powers...The multipolar world of economic power will equilibrate to a world of a multipolar world of military power."
Goldfrank 1987
"World-systems like complex systems are nested and hierarchical and move between states of centralization and decentralization. The distribution of economic and military power oscillates from one in which there is a more or less equal distribution among a set of core states to the one in which a single core state has a significantly greater concentration of economic and political/ military power. Hegemonic stability theory supports the proposition that warfare among core states is less frequent and less severe when there is a strong hegemon that acts as a power balancer and guarantees the stability of the structure of world power. When there is no hegemon - when power is multipolar in the core - warfare among core states is much more likely because there is no powerful hegemon to keep the peace."
Krasner 1976
"Although a strong military and economic power could serve as a stabilizing force on the European continent, it could also serve to antagonize a declining Russia if this country is excluded from meaningful participation in regional political and economic activities...If Russia can be considered an unpredictable element in the coming decades, China is even more of a wildcard."
Chase-Dunn and Podobnik, 1995
"...highest greatest danger of great power war sometime around the decade of the 2020s"
Joshua S. Goldstein, 1988, The Past and the Future, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age
War which may seem illogical is a systematic long-term mathematical play between hegemonic states. A strong economic power keeps the peace between the states but as economic power erodes, the mechanism destabilizes leading to the fight for power, war(s). One may believe we are in a sane world, where the power of dialogue helps. We will soon find out. But the exuberance of the decade-long bull market, debt, the weakness of the sovereign state, and commodity secular uptick does not ameliorate the current situation. How society deals with the War Clock will soon be clear. In any case, what should be obvious is that if information is not observed as a mechanism, we will continue to find ourselves incapable to make sense of why we have reached, where we have reached, and what should be done to build an intelligent future that looks different than the past.