“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Some say the quote belongs to Albert Einstein, others say it belongs to President Harry Truman. Every war begins with math: how much do the rich and powerful have minus how much they want, and what assets they have to pay for it. If they can get someone else to pay the cost, they would be crazy not to go for it, right?
Kings stopped leading their armies into battle during the Middle Ages. They sent young men to fight in their place. When societies produce more men than they can employ or feed, they look for outlets–new markets, new enemies, new myths of greatness. It’s always the same–old men trick young men into risking their lives to make themselves richer.
What Do the Numbers Say?
A 2025 Harvard Youth poll showed that only 15% of Americans under age thirty believe the US is heading in the right direction, and only 19% trust the federal government to do the right thing. In Scott Galloway’s new book, Notes on Being a Man, he cites statistics showing today’s American seventy-year-olds are 72% wealthier than they were forty years ago. People under forty are 24% less wealthy than forty years ago. Neither generation understands why the younger people are struggling.
The older people grew up in an era when the other global manufacturing superpowers were recovering from the devastation of WWII. We suffered during the war, but not as much as the rest of the world. We were living in a post-war “Fat-Dumb-and-Happyville,” enjoying a monopolist’s profits. My generation thought that’s the way it had always been and always will be.
Most of us didn’t realize we were creating systems that transferred wealth from young people to the old. School was cheap for us, and we expected everyone to be well educated. But we’ve limited the supply of educational institutions and artificially raised the costs of higher education (have you seen the cost of college textbooks???). We made getting student loans easy and expected, and we encouraged young people to take on studies with little chance of landing high-paying jobs. A few hit it big, but most ended up in jobs that don’t require the degree they hold.
And we saddled them with student debt they’ll be paying for the rest of their lives. Young people hear about Grandma and Grandpa buying their house for cash, selling it for a huge profit at retirement, and blowing the money on a resort retirement village in Arizona, with golfing, facelifts, and all the best people in their neighborhood. Our advanced medical system keeps them alive until they run out of money.
Young men have the highest unemployment and underemployment rates. Girls’ brains mature faster, and without the historic binders holding them back, young women are achieving more sooner, and they’re leaving young men in the dust. Sure, men still earn more on average than women do, but if we had to drop in and out of the workforce like mothers do to have children and care for them, I would bet anybody that the wage difference would evaporate.
So here we are. We manufactured a surplus of young men more likely to be downwardly than upwardly mobile, men who know they have little chance of enjoying a better life than their parents and grandparents. Youth unemployment among men remains stubbornly high, and the odds of upward mobility have fallen.
In my day, society expected young people to go to college and/or move out of the family home, never to return, after we reached eighteen. We got a good job, married, started a family, and bought a house by twenty-five. Since that time, opportunities for young men have decreased, but society’s expectations for them haven’t.
Millions of young males, educated and indebted just enough to expect opportunity but unable to find it, sit in their boyhood bedrooms or parents’ basements and wonder who stole their future. Their future looks bleak, but the old men see an opportunity to exploit them. They always have, and they always will.
Where Is There a Whole Lot of Poorly Protected Wealth?
Let’s take a look at South America’s largest country, Brazil. They have a population of 212 million people and 3.29 million square miles of land. On average, they have around ten acres of land per citizen. The United States, with 340 million people and 3.81 million square miles, offers seven – and half of that is desert, mountain, or tundra. When we adjust for unusable terrain, Americans have about one-third as much productive land per person as Brazilians.**
Central and South America is a continent rich in soil, minerals, and energy, sparsely populated by comparison. They’re far from being considered military superpowers, but most Americans don’t know that. They also don’t know – yet – that there are about twice as many Central and South Americans as there are in the US population.
They see that they’re not very far away, and they see them infiltrating our poorly-protected borders regularly. Heck, they’re here already. In other words, Latin America is in the perfect position for a land invasion.
On the northern side of the Gulf, we are a crowded, anxious nation whose ideology prizes growth and consumption. When abundance and appetite share a border, history writes the same story. How did the original East Coast colonies lay claim to all the land to the west?
The rich old guys, too old by law to join the US military, by the way, kill two birds with one stone – they send their surplus impressionable young men (aka, their competition) to steal the wealth of their neighboring countries. What do the soldiers get? A paycheck. Maybe death.
We called the expansion to the Pacific Manifest Destiny. The people who already lived there didn’t call it that. Hitler called his attempted expansion Lebensraum. I call it not paying the full price for your economic gain.
The Gulf of America
The second quarter of this century revived talk of annexation and expansion – sometimes as jokes, sometimes as policy daydreams. Most Americans already view Canada as “United States North.” Few would protest if Greenland someday became an energy outpost. We’re good friends, and Canada is poised to benefit from climate change.
The narrative hardens when we look south. Immigration enforcement and campaign rhetoric focus almost exclusively on Latinos, creating a sense of permanent cultural siege. Language differences make it more challenging to understand each other, and easier to lie.
As immigration enforcement grows more aggressive, it’s easy to see how a hemisphere could divide itself into rival camps of fear and resentment.
Provocation as Policy
Hitler started World War II by staging a fake attack on Germany by Poland. History’s oldest tactic is to provoke a weaker neighbor and call their reaction aggression. Little kids know how to play that game. Mom! He hit me!
Surely, you have heard about the United States’ extrajudicial execution of Venezuelans and Central Americans in boats off their coasts. Supposedly, they were carrying drugs or immigrants, and the water conveniently washed away all evidence. We have no idea what those boats were up to. I hope we don’t see the number of these military actions becoming comparable to Russia’s epidemic of defenestration, aka, people mysteriously falling out of windows.
Each “incident” rallies domestic anger on both sides of the “Gulf” of America and creates the illusion of an external threat. It’s ironic how changing the name of that body of water that nobody wanted to change lends itself to potential media coverage of what is looking ever more likely to come.
But First…
… we need an army. Specifically, we’ll need one that can fight on three fronts simultaneously. Being in the military doesn’t have the prestige it used to. ROTC enrollment has declined since the end of the Vietnam War and draft, and the elite members of each class have avoided it. You don’t see ROTC students at the cool kids’ table.
It’s hard to know whether the current situation with the surplus young men in our country is just a happy coincidence for the current administration, or whether they manufactured it. Many don’t think of the present administration as smart enough to pull off a multi-year strategy of this magnitude. It just might be. It’s hard to forget advice from Roy Cohn and Vladimir Putin.
High unemployment makes military service attractive again: raise pay, promise free college, and sell the uniform as a symbol of fitness and belonging. Even the televised scolding of generals to “look sharp and get in shape” serves a recruiting function – they remind disillusioned young men that the military restores pride. When patriotism, self-improvement, and Grandpa’s approval merge, the runway leads straight to the battlefield.
The Reverse Harem Economy
At the same time, gender economics have flipped. Women can feed, house, and protect themselves, and many quietly ask what a full-time man contributes. Online culture answers with sarcasm: men as accessories, sperm donors, spider killers, or boytoys. A few charismatic males monopolize attention.
Economic pressures relegate Average Joe to the basement or their boyhood bedroom, and free porn is the only thing that keeps their frustration temporarily in check. Without it, their minds stew in resentment. Some adjust, some retreat, others search for a different stage on which to matter. Under the right circumstances, the military has always provided a socially acceptable alternative.
Safety Valves for a Crowded Species
Societies that broaden what masculinity means lower their risk of violence. If affection between men weren’t stigmatized, some pressure would dissipate. If men could enter “feminine” fields – education, beauty, design – without ridicule, half the economy would open overnight. Expanding what men are allowed to be might be the most practical peace policy of all.
West Hollywood as a Counterexample – and a Caution
West Hollywood offers a vivid counterpoint to these pressures. Since the city’s founding in 1984, our population has consistently included about 10 percent more men than women, yet it has avoided the instability that demographic imbalance usually predicts. It did so by expanding the range of what masculinity can look like.
Affection between men is normalized here. Men participate openly in fields traditionally labeled “feminine” – education, beauty, design, caregiving – without stigma or penalty. Creative labor, hospitality work, personal services, and nightlife thrive because men contribute their full range of talents.
As a result, West Hollywood’s economy is robust, its civic life engaged, and its social fabric resilient. The city proves that when a community widens the definition of manhood, it doesn’t weaken; it stabilizes.
That success also makes West Hollywood a cultural outlier. A city that demonstrates how well a broadened masculinity works can feel threatening to narratives built on scarcity, grievance, and rigid gender roles.
My worry is not that West Hollywood is militarily vulnerable – of course it isn’t – but that certain politicians who rely on resentment to mobilize power may target our values rhetorically, politically, or legislatively. When a community shows what a healthier future could look like, someone will eventually try to turn it into a cautionary tale instead of a model.
West Hollywood doesn’t contradict the arithmetic behind conflict; it reveals the solution. The question is whether the nation will learn from its example – or resent it.
When the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to President Obama before he had done anything more than get elected, I interpreted that as an award for us as a nation. The committee gives the awards to shine a light on examples of humans to emulate. Electing Obama acknowledged we had overcome the original sin of our founders. We have a ways to go, but we’re on the right path.
If I could, I would nominate West Hollywood for a Peace Prize for demonstrating that allowing men to be what they want to be, to truly actualize ourselves, free from the historic constraints of masculinity, is a path to take for sustainable peace.
The Road to Tres
The preconditions are visible: demographic imbalance, geographic temptation, economic frustration, and a generation trained on video war games. The Western Hemisphere has never fought a world-scale internal war. But it has never before combined so much youth, technology, and grievance in one place.
If history keeps its averages, the next great conflict may not begin in Europe or Asia. It could start somewhere between the deserts of the north and the rainforests of the south – an arithmetic lesson mislabeled as destiny.
-Scott Williams
West Hollywood
Notes:
*Tres = three in Spanish
**Brazil
3.29 million square miles
1 mile = 640 acres
2.1 trillion acres
212 million population
= about 10 acres per person
No desert, mountains, or frozen tundra
United States
3.81 million square miles
x 640 acres/mile
2.44 trillion acres
381 million population
= about 7 acres per person
But, half of it is Alaska, high mountains, desert
