The older I get the more I think that while I’m not a communist. I may be a Marxist (Karl as opposed to Groucho, though I did like Groucho’s chutzpah). Marxism is the body of social, economic and political theory that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed in the mid-1800s. It rests on a few core ideas. Marx’s “historical materialism” holds that the way a society produces its goods and services shapes everything else: its politics, law, religion and culture. Who owns the land, factories and tools (the “means of production”) determines who holds power. In every era a ruling class has owned the means of production and an exploited class has worked them: masters and slaves, lords and serfs, and under capitalism the bourgeoisie (owners) and the proletariat (wage workers). Marx argued that workers produce more value than they’re paid in wages. The owners keep the difference, which he called “surplus value,” as profit. He believed competition would push capitalism into recurring crises, concentrate wealth in fewer hands, and leave workers increasingly alienated from their work and its product. It’s hard to disagree that all that is happening now. Marx predicted that workers would become conscious of their shared interests, overthrow capitalism, and set up a transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The key texts are The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867 onward). Marxism later split into many branches. Lenin and Trotsky adapted it into a doctrine of revolution led by a vanguard party. I think I may be more a Trotskyite than a Marxist. Trotskyism rests on a few main ideas centered around Internationalism. Because socialism had to be global, Trotskyists put world revolution ahead of the interests of any single socialist state. Supporters see Trotskyism as a principled, democratic, internationalist Marxism that the Stalinist distortion buried. It was Leon Trotsky who said “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” I find myself thinking a lot these days about we and revolution and the press is certainly coming to that same place based on the number of articles on WWIII and the coming revolutions.
As for WWIII, a world war would have two defining characteristics. The first would be that the world’s most powerful nations would have to be in direct conflict — as they were in the first and second world wars. The second is that the conflict would have to span continents. So far, neither threshold has been crossed. However, the possibility has always been there. Russian hybrid warfare against the European backers of Ukraine, including sabotage, arson and assassinations, greatly increases the risk of accidental escalation. As Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, put it last year: “We are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either.” But could the Russia-Ukraine war turn into a truly global conflict? In the eyes of some of the participants, it already has. When North Korean troops arrived on the frontline to support the Russians in their fight against Ukraine, Zelenskyy called the development “the first step to a world war”. The war between the US and Iran has also overlapped with the Ukrainian conflict. The Iranians are widely believed to have received assistance in targeting US bases in the Middle East from Russia. Ukraine, meanwhile, has offered its expertise in counter-drone warfare to the Gulf states.
The fear that a global conflict may be brewing extends well beyond Europe and even the Middle East. Xi Jinping consistently warns of the dangers of the US and China falling into a “Thucydides Trap”. The Chinese leader is picking up on a theory advanced by Graham Allison, a Harvard academic, that throughout history the dominant global power has tended to end up at war with the rising power. The Thucydides Trap is the idea that war becomes likely when a rising power threatens to displace an established one. it draws on Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War: Athens’ growth and the fear it caused in Sparta made war inevitable. The exceptions to this Trap include Britain’s handoff of global leadership to the U.S. in the early 20th century and the U.S./Soviet Cold War. The main stave concern is with U.S./China relations, and that war is only not inevitable if we employ deliberate, sustained statecraft. Both Chinese and American leaders have used the term Thucydides Trap to describe the state of affairs between them. But is that thinking current based on the changing nature of warfare?
Drones change the character of war more than its nature per se. Clausewitz’s says that war’s nature (politics by violent means, fear, chance, friction) stays constant, while its character (tools, tactics, costs) shifts. Ukraine shows the shift. Cheap drones have made the battlefield transparent, so massing troops or armor without being seen is very hard. A $500 FPV drone can destroy a multimillion-dollar tank, and the economics now favor mass and attrition over a few expensive platforms. That gives smaller or poorer actors real striking power and tends to favor defense. Sounds like a big change in who’s in control in war that doesn’t favor the big bully (think Russia in Ukraine and U.S. in Iran). But drones probably don’t defuse the Thucydides Trap, and in some ways they could make it worse. Swarms of cheap drones and missiles make an amphibious invasion of Taiwan much harder, which is the logic behind the Pentagon’s “hellscape” concept. If the attacker can’t expect a quick win, the temptation to strike goes down. But escalation risk rises too. Drones lower the political cost of using force because no pilots die and incidents are deniable. That means more shootdowns, more gray-zone clashes, and more chances for an accident to spiral. China dominates drone manufacturing and supply chains, so drones may sharpen the very power-shift anxiety that drives the Trap. Autonomy compresses decision time. AI-enabled swarms that act faster than humans can deliberate weaken the crisis management that kept the Cold War from turning hot. The Trap is about perceptions, fear, and politics, not hardware. Nuclear weapons, a far bigger technological shock, didn’t end U.S./Soviet rivalry; they pushed it into proxy wars and arms control. Drones are more likely to change how a U.S./China conflict would be fought, and how costly it looks beforehand, than whether the underlying rivalry turns violent. Avoiding the Trap still depends on diplomacy, guardrails, and communication channels between the two powers.
The recent Starlink/Starshield issues in Ukraine should trouble us all. If drones are the future of warfare then Starlink/Starshield issues of vital national and international interest. Sovereignty over war and foreign policy should not be in private hands and it makes no sense that Musk’s (or for that matter Hegseth’s alone without Congressional authority) personal decisions about sharing Starlink/Starshield terminals with the Ukrainian military or the range with which they can operationally function make a real difference to the course of that war. Musk’s explanation for restricting coverage, that he wanted to keep the conflict from widening, drew criticism because it suggested he took it upon himself to determine the terms of escalation. SpaceX (the owner of Starlink/Starshield) depends heavily on government contracts, and the U.S. government depends heavily on SpaceX for launch capability, so some argue the line between public and private is already blurry. Supporters compare it to telegraph and postal infrastructure and argue it would be cleaner to nationalize the company or run it as a public corporation like the Postal Service. That thinking never sits well with people that feel government can’t do anything well (as opposed to the notion that private enterprise can never do anything with integrity). it immediately devolves into a debate about [private property rights. But Starlink/Starshield is a global issue, not just a U.S. issue. At the UN, Iran called its operations there illegal and Russia suggested it may breach the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. There are growing competitors such as Amazon’s Kuiper and Europe’s IRIS, so they make break Starlink/Starshield’s monopoly and leave no single provider as indispensable, but not at the moment.
So the real question is less “nationalize or not” and more how much single-vendor dependence a government should accept for critical infrastructure, and which tools fix that with the least collateral damage. There are many reasons to harken back to and consider about the thinking of Marx and Trotsky in these increasingly fraught times…both about war and about who should own the critical means of production. In human evolution there is the missing link and now in the evolution of global domination there is perhaps both the Thucydides’ Trap and the the missing of Starlink/Starshield for drone warfare that all combine into the Missing Thucydides Link.