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The House of Representatives passed a bill earlier this month that will require all men aged 18-26 to be automatically registered for conscription into the military. The bill was spearheaded by Representative Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania whose parents came to the United States as Jewish refugees from Lviv, Ukraine in the aftermath of the Second World War. The bill doesn’t officially change government policy, as all male American citizens aged 18-26 were required to register for the draft even before this new bill was passed, and by itself may be unremarkable or merely symbolic, but the circumstances surrounding it may suggest that the US is planning to escalate the situation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and/or Taiwan.

When I was young, the draft was thought to be something of an antiquity. It was something in the past, something that had happened a long time ago, something that was never going to be repeated. After all, we were living at the end of history. Thoughts of grade school bring back memories of a recently-graduated, blonde liberal-arts teacher whose class I was in as a youngling. It was her first teaching job, and we were a classroom full of rowdy white children, bouncing off the walls. She explained to us, while proudly sporting her V-Day t-shirt, that all wars had ended. It was progress, you see. First humanity had brought an end to wars. Next on the list was violence against women. Everyone believed it. Everyone but me. Even as a young child, it seemed impossible to me to fundamentally reinvent human nature and erase conflict from the world. I tried to correct her, but the other kids shut me down first.

“You can’t argue with the teacher. You really think you know everything!”

It may be too soon to say it, but I really do believe the “end of history” era in America will be thought of as a nostalgic oasis — a time when people actually believed that human conflict had been resolved permanently through global trade and liberalism, and a time of stark contrast to current-day America. Of course, 9/11 changed all of that. Before 9/11, American power seemed infinite and God-like. After, America seemed very mortal, indeed. As my classmates and I stared at the television as it displayed vivid images of passenger planes crashing into the great American landmark of the Twin Towers, that same teacher told us that it would be our generation who would go to war over it. Originally optimistic, she now seemed upset. “This won’t end peacefully,” she told us. An era was over.

There was a cloud that hung over us like fog, yet the sky was clear. The Sun was at its peak. I drew some controversy with my skepticism toward white liberals. People who I believe had become accustomed to a certain standard of living in the early 1990s as a result of globalization now see neoliberal causes as a way to maintain this standard — despite inflation, total wealth inequality, and poor wage growth, as well as policies such as mass immigration. But I’ll say this: I would define most people who define themselves as liberal as moderates with liberal or conservative leanings. I would compare such people favorably to my liberal-arts teacher. Actual white liberals seem akin to regime hardliners to me. But I’ll leave that there.

As the War on Terror dragged on, interest in it waned. It became the “forever war.” This effect has carried on even now, as people today rarely pay attention to world events even given the dramatic events unfolding oversees. Even as Russia sends potentially nuclear-armed submarines to port in Cuba. And yet a short trip to a franchise gym located anywhere in America tells a different story: What war? It all feels like a familiar movie with completely different actors. Things are similar, yet everything is different. America is yet again on the road to war, but this time nobody cares. Instead of righteous indignation, instead of a yearning to collectively assert that America should exist, no one seems to care. Instead of religiously following wall-to-wall media coverage, Americans largely pretend that it doesn’t exist and hope that it will soon pass them by. Spiritually, America doesn’t feel to be “at war” at all.

This is not to mention the practical problems with the draft. At that same diverse gym, you’ll find tons of blacks who stick together, talking loudly, ignoring the others. Tons of Hispanics who stick together, heads down and focused. And tons of whites who likewise stick together, talking only to themselves, living in their own world. It’s as if there is an invisible wall between them. The different ethnic groups stick to conversations mostly among themselves while avoiding as much contact as possible, keeping their eyes down as they relocate. The experience will give you the very strong sensation that these people don’t like being stuck in the same room together and that they all feel a little uncomfortable. It left me with the impression that the American concept of “professionalism,” something that I always believed to be a little unnatural, was maybe the only thing seriously keeping America afloat.

It’s hard to imagine this diverse group working together to achieve much of anything, let alone waging war. Sure, you can draft them, give them guns, and send them to fight. But they have no real loyalty to each other. They also have no belief in what they’re fighting for, and no sense of common destiny. They’re as likely to bully and tango with other out-groupers as they are to fight the Russians, the Chinese, the Arabs, or whoever. When push came to shove, I can’t say I’d expect them to fight all that hard, and I’d anticipate a large number of surrenders and retreats. That’s not even mentioning the massive production problems that America would have and which would plague the regime for the duration of the war, given that it has shipped the bulk of its production capabilities to China — an adversary and rival. The only real chance America would have is therefore to play dirty.

Thus, America has the power to draft you, but can you really call it a national military if the US involuntarily forces large numbers of distinct, diverse peoples onto boats and trains, locking them in together, and then hands them all a weapon when they exit, ordering them to charge some fixed enemy defenses? It would be a scene similar to the movie Enemy at the Gates:

Globalist #1: The one with the rifle shoots!

Globalist #2: [handing out rifles] One out of two gets a rifle.

Globalist #1: The one without, follows him! When the one with the rifle gets killed, the one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots!

Guarding the rear would of course be fellows such as Brittney Griner and the blonde girl with two moms from the US Army recruiting advertisement, armed with machine guns and ordered to shoot any retreating subversives and counter-revolutionaries. How else could you practically deal with the retreating mass of humanity that is bound to emerge? Moreover, who could blame them? Ours is not the historical homeland of Mexicans. Blacks have no racial interest in the outcome of such a war. And whites are told every day that they have no place anymore, let alone a country to call their own. To win, the regime would have to instill total fear in its draftees. It will have to be a literal slave army, fighting for international liberalism and guided by human rights, waged by the same people our regime is currently replacing via mass immigration and “humanitarian efforts.”

A draft may seem like a far-fetched idea at present, but a lot may become possible when the regime begins to get desperate — and when they suggest “bringing back the draft,” we should not assume they are bluffing. Current events likewise suggest that the regime is serious. One such event is a suspect announcement earlier this month that the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) is being officially labeled a terrorist organization by the US State Department. Sweden is awash in terrorism directed at the indigenous Swedes, none of it at the behest of Swedish nationalists. I don’t know any of the NRM’s members personally, but from what I can tell, it’s largely a protest organization with big dreams. Is the regime just lashing out, or is this part of a larger, strategic move to quell Right-wing dissent before a larger war breaks out? Could America lean on its vassal states to fight for it? Possibly, but that’s not usually how vassal politics works — and so far, I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that the European Union’s member states are willing to fight this next world war without American involvement, especially given that any war involving Russia today will also likely involve China and Iran.

The other thing that caught my attention was the surprising result of Mexico’s recent presidential election, in which Claudia Sheinbaum was victorious. The American press has been way too friendly toward her given that she has been described as a “Leftist populist” in the era of the Gaza flood. I’m guessing she’s a fairly typical Washington, DC-style neoliberal — someone who will unquestioningly take orders from America. Someone who might shut the border down in an instant using the Mexican army — or perhaps cartel-linked militiamen — in case, say, a giant war breaks out and a flood of draft-dodgers heads south. She would unironically build a wall and have America pay for it.

Of course, this is all speculation at the moment, but there does appear to be a kind of logic to recent events — and it seems entirely possible that the American government might not be willing to simply go gently into the good night.