Murrinations

Since WW2, the American carriers have given the USN dominance over the world’s oceans. Indeed, the power of these ships is etched on the Chinese thought process after two such carrier groups combined and sailed through the Taiwan Strait in the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis and forced the Chinese to back down. Consequently, negating American carrier power has been a principal goal of the PLAN since that 1996.

Naval challenges have been a major focus of two arms races that led to the global conflicts of WW1 and WW2. So, they should be taken very seriously. In the first arms race, the Royal Navy defeated the challenge from the Imperial German Navy in WW1 by a combination of enormous expenditure and a wave of naval invocations. Those groundbreaking innovations started with the launch of HMS Dreadnought and included steam turbines, all big guns centralised gunnery, submarines and aircraft carriers in their nascent form.

For those who do not believe that history has a nasty habit of repeating itself, welcome to the 5th Industrialised arms race that has now officially started. The pedigree of this well-trodden, competitive process in the industrial age started with the 2nd Reich in the decade that leads to WW1 in 1914 and was followed by the rise of the 3rd Reich in the 1930s which led to WW2 in Europe. Coincidently, Japan flowed through to war in the Pacific from 1937 onwards.

Whilst the world has been focused on Trump's election and presidency, the last (following the Brexit vote and the election of Trump) of my three predictions for 2016 has come true; that President Xi would consolidate power to become as powerful as Mao.

North Korea has always been opportunistic with respect to playing the gaps in American foreign policy focus. For example, it chose to make its nuclear breakout when America was focusing on the second invasion of Iraq, ironically with the pretext of preventing the spreading of weapons of mass destruction. Recognising that America would not be able to respond, it was the moment when North Korea made its move.

One of the key principals expounded in Breaking the Code of History (BTCH) was that the majority of geopolitical conflicts are driven by resource competition. This prime driver can easily be considered as a unique human, negative quality.

On April 23rd, 2017 France will go to the polls and vote for a new president. Using the principals of Breaking the Code of History (BTCH), can we predict an outcome?

To draw an answer, we should consider three key drivers:

The EU

I have to confess that yesterday for the first time since his arrival on the presidential trail, Trump said something that really surprised me. After his naristicly driven argument with the press about the size of the crowd in attendance at his inauguration ceremony, any sane person would have been worried about Trump's truth. Balanced against such a negative, is the more recent signal that the hypocrisy so present in most Western politicians, may not be one of the characteristics of Trump's complex charater.

Ronseal is a British wood stain, paint and preservative manufacturer that originated the common, idiomatic slogan "Does exactly what it says on the tin".

Those who enjoy science fiction will already be familiar with the many films that feature Sentient Machines, some of which are benign manifestations and others much darker. The three films that best epitomise Sentient Machines that become set against their creators, mankind, are all series: "Battle Star Galactica", "The Matrix" and "The Terminator". None paint a rosy picture. Recently, some of the brightest scientific minds on the planet have warned that we are on a collision course for a war of survival against our own creations.