Who could have predicted the outbreak of COVID-19 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? The answer is David Murrin of Global Forecaster. He predicted the former in his groundbreaking book “Breaking the Code of History” published way back in 2010.
The world urgently needs to listen to David again, because now he is forecasting that China will go to war in 2024, in the Chinese Year of the Dragon. Few outside China are even remotely prepared for this.
There are three main reasons why David believes China will go to war this year. The first is the decline of America. The second is the rise of China. The third is David’s detailed analysis that shows war is both cyclical and inevitable, though the majority of us fail to understand its primary drivers. Let’s examine briefly these three arguments.
The Decline of America
America has been omnipotent since the end of WW2. However, based on David’s Predictive Model of Empire Cycles, America is now in the 5th and final stage of decline. America today is weaker than Great Britain in 1914 and even 1939. This weakness is demonstrable in the political fracture of the nation and the massive rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio, now at levels last seen in 1945. These huge levels of leverage imply that the real unleveraged growth rate of the economy is barely 0.1 - 0.2%.
Two decades of money printing, pushing most stock market indices to record levels, have blinded the public, the government, and the military to the threats America faces. The long period of relative peace since WW2 has led Western populations to believe this is a permanent state, rather than a phase of the same cycles that their ancestors experienced. Worst of all, this denial by the West is perceived by the axis of autocracy as weakness, thus encouraging escalation. To add fuel to the fire, there is the specific issue of President Biden. His weakness, as evidenced by his rout from Afghanistan and his failure to support Ukraine to victory, invites attack. The longer Biden is in office, the greater the gains to be had by China in fighting America. Hence the imperative for China to start the war as early as possible in 2024.
The Rise of China
China, by contrast, is in the second stage of its expansion. However, it has been constrained by American power until recently. President Xi understands that he either challenges hegemony or accepts the status quo. In that sense, 2024 is a now-or-never moment.
The CCP’s plan to covertly seduce the West to invest in and build the world’s greatest industrial base in China has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. With unfettered access to natural resources coming overland from Russia, China can easily outbuild the world, and continue to do so in the event of WW3. Since 2020, Xi has shifted China from a manufacturing, export-driven economy to an internally driven economy, with a growing demand to build ships and weapons. This has been accompanied by stockpiling supplies of energy and commodities, in what David calls “Xi’s Four Year Plan”. It emulates the Nazis’ four-year plan in 1936, the consequences of which Chamberlain never understood: that Hitler must either go to war in 1940 or go bust, as will Xi if he does not go to war this year.
Simultaneously China’s intelligence services have been running rings around the West for decades, stealing military and civilian IP on an industrial scale, penetrating the West’s top universities, and compromising senior politicians and families. Meanwhile, China’s counterintelligence efforts have blinded the CIA, allowing China the element of total surprise, similar to that achieved by Hamas on the 7th of October. Not only is China’s PLAN (People’s Liberation Army Navy) ready for war, but it also now has technological superiority in key spheres of battle. This comes in the form of the mass deployment of DF-21 and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles and more recently DF-17 hypersonic glide weapons. This PLAN window of superiority may only last 12-18 months, further strengthening the case for China to attack sooner rather than later. Today China has already amassed missiles on the recently fortified islands off its coast, both to deny an enemy access to China and to control the water and airspace out to the second island chain. China has thousands of missiles ready for launch at very short notice, which would quickly overwhelm any US and Japanese forces operating inside the second island chain.
The unfolding world war is one of a titanic nature, continuing the pattern that dates back to the Napoleonic wars, between the organisational constructs of greater individual responsibility and growth (aka democracy), and that of constrained human existence in a hierarchical structure (aka autocracy) led by a cohort of dictators. The greatest of them all is President Xi. He is a predator, coded to think in a way that few understand. He sees the world very differently. Like most predators, he is cautious and calculating, seeking to remove the risks of destroying his prey. With him, strong deterrence works, if only the West possessed such a thing! Conversely, the extreme denial and weakness displayed in the West will only encourage Xi’s aggression, as it did Putin over Ukraine.
The cyclicality and inevitability of war
The entropic 112-year hegemonic war cycle dates back beyond the Napoleonic wars and was the trigger for WW1 in 1914. This entropic pulse has already driven the wars in Ukraine and Israel and is set to intensify into its 2027-2030 peak. The cycle places us today at the start of a decade-long WW3 with China and its allies, which back in 2009, David predicted would start in 2022.
Every signal David sees today suggests that the cycle is running as predicted and that these current wars will erupt into WW3. When they do, the PLAN will conduct a Pacific war that has the same geographical constraints as that fought by Japan in WW2. The intermediate objective will be to extend power out to the third island chain, thus evicting America from the region and allowing China to consolidate these gains into one economic sphere. Five years later they will emerge with a giant navy to dominate the oceans and to pick off democratic nations continent by continent.
American weakness, China’s rise, and the cycles of history lead David to the conclusion that China will go to war in 2024. He was right about Covid. He was right about Ukraine. Heaven help us all if he is right about China too.
For further information on how Global Forecaster can help you navigate an exceptionally challenging geopolitical and market environment, David can be contacted via his website http://www.davidmurrin.co.uk.
© David Murrin 2025. All images courtesy of Getty Images. |