Lots to reply to, so bypassing some of the “sub-discussions” and replying to
@Skallagrim selectively, since he either makes points that I either agree with or consider to be answered in sufficient detail already:
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You'll note that I reference Classical High Culture quite often. Speaking of "Rome" is short-hand. We're talking about a High Culture that includes the Hellenic polities, and grew to encircle the Mediterranean. Rome was not part of Greece, and "a sea away". Qin was a frontier marcher state separated from the Chinese heartland by mountains. Carthage, the equivalent of this for the Canaanite High Culture, was also "a sea away" from Phoenicia.
The scale, now, is greater. Certainly. Just as the Classical world-system was greater in scale than the Egyptian world-system, which was after all far older. When we reference the exaples I have mentioned here, there is nothing to indicate that scale "changes the rules". Same things keep happening. Just... larger.
Indeed,
much greater.
Now, personally, I’d say that in the case of the West, the scale has ballooned so much, that we should expect the “swings” and overall intensity of our own cycle to be more ferocious and destructive than that of previous High Cultures.
I mentioned it to you and
@CastilloVerde in private once, but to reiterate and expand upon it: One analogy you posited that really stuck with me was thinking of the macro-historical model as a mathematical formula. You plug in certain inputs and get certain outputs, with the underlying relationship between how the variables get plugged in and manipulated remaining consistent, no matter the exact results. So, say we start with a (really simplistic and made-up) formula of 5x, and our x is 5, our output is 25. But if we crank x up to 10 and plug it into 5x again, we’ll get 50.
Fair enough, but what if we get an unusually large input, like 100? Well, same underlying process applies, but as soon as we plug it into 5x, we get a rather (and indeed, an atypically) large output.
Here’s the thing: We’re the 100!
So, the Romans, the Qin, the Assyrians, and the other High Cultures you mentioned? Their inputs were in the single (or at most, low double) digits, being pre-industrial societies for whom daily life moved much slower and for whom the status of Universal Empire could be satiated by claiming domain over their own backyards — which, impressive as they were for the time, weren’t truly universal or consequential on a global scale, beyond the legacies they created that “successor cultures” picked up on long after their lifetime. (e.g.: The West inheriting much from Rome, which was then spread to the “Non-West” by proxy of Western domination.)
By contrast, the West — with its global reach, its universalist ideals, and its more “economically minded” brand of ideological cultism — is the first High Culture to have triple-digit inputs, as the thousands of years between the extant High Cultures and this budding one have given the world a long time to progress leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in Caesar’s, Qin Shi Huangdi’s, or Ashurnisirpal II’s time.
I’m not saying we’ve outgrown human nature or transcended the rules of the current Scarcity Paradigm — far from it. What I
am saying is that the scale on which things happen now is such, that from a macro-historical perspective, the details are sufficiently different to make the West stand out for precisely that reason. At the very least, I expect we’ll see some new spins on the same fundamental tendencies and archetypes that stick out, rather than “rehashing” of old ones dropped into a Modern context.
Regarding outright warfare: I've already argued that the situation we're in lends itself to a conflict more akin to a "civilisation-wide civil war", and that such a conflict is less likely to invite the use of weapons of mass destruction on a large scale. It defeats the purpose of the participants. They don't want to destroy, they all want to rule.
As I said: Caesar didn't want to burn Rome, and a future counterpart in a similar position would (for the exact same reasons) not wish to nuke Washington or New York.
Per the above, I’m not so sure we should treat previous “Caesars” as the be-all, end-all of what all “Caesar” figures — past, present, and future — could be like.
To repeat my previous comparison, it’d have been wrong for the “proto-macrohistorians” of Republican Rome to cast Julius Caesar as a toga-bearing, Latin-speaking expy of Qin Shi Huangdi, and I expect the same will also prove true for us. Same for learned Chinese observers to predict that Qin would’ve been just another Ashurnisirpal II in all but name and era, as — like Caesar himself — these various incarnations introduced new, culture-specific takes on the transitional tyrant who caps off the “Age of Cultists” and helps midwife the “Universal Empire”.
Seen in that light, I believe the Western High Culture will bring yet another variant of “Caesar” to the table that we haven’t seen before, one who — going by the kinds of extremes we Modernists have proven ourselves capable of, from Capitalism lifting billions out of poverty in the best of times, to industrialized extermination of millions of “undesirables” in the very worst — could very well rise to power against a backdrop of turmoil and carnage that makes the Warring States Period look like juvenile horseplay.
Moreover, while I hate to invoke Godwin’s Law again, there have been instances of the worst possible candidate — no matter how improbable or easily dismissed they were at first — coming to power and taking the world by storm. Case in point: Hitler having a borderline ASB profile of luck, charisma, irrational gambling, and genocidal insanity that no one saw coming until it actually happened, fighting a multi-front war and expending huge swaths of Germany’s resources on exterminating undesirables when it made little strategic sense to do so and all that. Indeed, even among the Major Leagues of 20th Century Despots, Hitler was still exceptionally bad, so our “Caesar” figure being to his predecessors what Hitler was to his rival dictators or the regimes (e.g., the Ottomans and Armenian Genocide) who inspired him? Honestly, I wouldn’t rule that out.
Even ignoring that and dialing down my own take on Neo-Caesar to the level of a Qin Shi Huangdi or Ashurnisirpal II expy… well, what about Neo-Antony who seizes power in Neo-Caesar’s stead? I may be the most anti-expy guy here, but I’d be remiss not to point out how Antony briefly took power in Rome after Caesar’s assassination and gave Octavian a hard time before the latter eventually won. What’s worse is that we may not even have to wait that long for Neo-Antony to ascend, if more contemporary examples of the especially cutthroat protégé surpassing the already-ruthless mentor early on — namely, Hitler supplanting Anton Drexler as the Nazi Messiah or Stalin succeeding VI Lenin as Head of the USSR — offer glimpses of what a “different” take on a transitional tyrant could look like. Maybe I should convert my fictional Neo-Caesar into more of a Neo-Antony who ascends after the latter’s “early demise”, now that I think about it…
It's possible. @Zyobot often raises the same scenario of a "world war III" being the potential equivalent of Caesar's Civil War.
Personally, I have doubts, because the underlying pressures (conflict within society come to dominate) do lend themselves to precisely the civil war kind of outcome. And civil wars are fought differently than international wars. The goals aren't the same. You don't want to reduce to a cinder that which you intend to own.
Caesar, after all, didn't march on Rome to burn it down. And however radical some of her ideas may have been, Hatshepsut razed no cities or temples. Even such brutal tyrants as Ashurnasirpal II or Qin Shi Huangdi never sought to burn the world to the ground. They sought to re-make it, yes. But not to destroy it.
That’s where I stood initially, yes.
More recently, I’m cooking up an outline in which our “Mithridatic Wars” (i.e., the War in Turkey you've proposed) mushrooms into World War III as the desperate Globalists — having become more panicked, desperate, and unhinged with each passing generation leading up to the 2070s or 2080s — finally resort to total war against the “Non-West” as a last-resort means of clinging to power, razing their Eastern rivals, and forcibly depopulating the Earth like their forebears have been planning for decades. Frankly, if Klaus Schwab and the other globalist oligarchs who take certain themes of the Georgia Guidestones way too seriously are that conspiratorial and power-drunk already, then I see no reason for the last of their successors to be any better.
Naturally, this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back as World War III between the West and East (and their proxies, of course) bleeds the former dry, segueing into a “War Across the West” much like how the Great War catalyzed revolution in Russia — making Neo-Caesar something of an arch-reactionary Lenin to the Globalists’ Nicholas II. And perhaps, Neo-Antony a supremely monstrous Stalin that takes his mentor’s purging and scourging to whole new levels shortly after seizing power. Not quite what happened in Rome, China, or Assyria, perhaps, but given how the details have time and again swerved in some crazy directions… well, I’m quite sure the worst possible man for the job will once again come to power and unleash Year Zero across the Western World.
But at the heart of it all, I think the fundamental difference between your expectations and mine is that I think your version of Neo-Caesar — and in fact, most of the key figures you see arising and the decisions they make — is a tad
too rational in his aims and methods. That is, I don’t think your prognosis necessarily factors in human stupidity enough, because regardless of whether it makes economic or strategic sense to act in ways that are “politically wise” (if still exceptionally brutal and destructive), there’ll no doubt be a slew of gamblers, fanatics, and total loons who go well beyond “mere” ruthlessness and straight into batshit-crazy territory that wield
way more power than they should. I already mentioned the possibility of Neo-Caesar taking after Hitler (in the sense of being a mad Gary Stu of Evil), but let’s also not forget the warlords and “petty dictators” in the margins who’d probably fire off nukes as soon as the nuclear powers (namely Russia, though perhaps also France, the UK, and definitely the US) descend into civilization-wide civil war. Never mind the various lieutenants the top dogs surround themselves with, ranging from the loony Himmler and fanatical Goebbels in the case of Hitler, to horribly sadistic NKVD chiefs like Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov in the case of Stalin — and on, and on, and on.
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Anyway, that's all I've got for now. There were a few other points I wanted to elaborate on (such as Neo-Augustus founding a pan-Western mercantile league instead of an outright Principate), but I'm tired and have probably written enough for one night.
Even now, I'm not fully accustomed to composing extended replies or essay-length rebuttals, so forgive me if there's a bit of a lull between now and my next 1,000-or-more-word response down the line.
