More than a decade ago I wrote my first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Part of my motivation was to establish my bona fides at forecasting social, political and military trends. I didn’t like the direction America was heading, and I wanted to warn as many readers as possible about some of the dangers I saw coming. At the end of 2015, I hope that my past success at prognostication will encourage people to pay heed to this essay.

As we roll into the New Year, we are witnessing the prelude to the culmination of a titanic struggle between three great actors. Three great social forces are now set in motion for a 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.

Two of these great social forces are currently allied in a de facto coalition against the third. They have forged an unwritten agreement to jointly murder the weakest of the three forces while it is in their combined power to do so. One of these two social forces would be content to share totalitarian control over large swaths of the globe with the other remaining social force. One of these social forces will never be satisfied until it achieves complete domination of the entire planet. So what are these three great social forces? They are Islam, international socialism, and nationalism. Allow me to explain the salient aspects of each, and how they relate to the coming 2016 cataclysm.

1. ISLAM

Islam is similar to a self-replicating supercomputer virus. It is a hydra-headed monster, designed by its creators to be an unstoppable formula for global conquest. It’s almost impossible to eradicate, because it has no central brain or control center. Islam is like a starfish: when you cut off a limb, another grows to replace it. The names of the Muslim leaders, and the names of their Islamic groups, are transitory and ultimately unimportant. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are succeeded by Al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, but they will all pass from the scene and be replaced by others. While Muslim leaders and regimes have come and gone, Islam itself has remained steadfastly at war with the non-Muslim world for 1,400 years.

Islam does not recognize secular national boundaries. To devout Muslims, there are only two significant realms of the world. First is the Dar al-Islam—the House of Islam, which is the land of the believers. The other is the Dar al-Harb—the House of War, which must be made Islamic by any means, including violent jihad. The expansion of Islam is sometimes held in check for long periods, but more often Islam is on the march, acquiring new territory. Once conquered by Islam, territory is rarely taken back, Spain being a notable exception.

The Muslim world produces almost no books or new inventions. Short of finding oil under their feet, most Islamic nations are backward and impoverished. So wherein lies the power source for Islam’s nearly constant expansion over the past fourteen centuries? The motor and the battery of Islam are the Koran and the Hadith, or sayings of Mohammed. A messianic Mahdi, Caliph or Ayatollah with sufficient charisma can accelerate Islam’s pace of conquest, but individual men are not the driving force.

Secular “Muslim in name only” strongmen from Saddam Hussein to Muamar Qadafi can hold Islamism in check for a period with brutal methods, but strongmen are often assassinated or otherwise removed from power, and in any event, they cannot live forever. Once the secular strongmen are gone, fanatical mullahs are able to stir their zealous Muslim followers into sufficient ardor to reinstall a radical Islamist regime under Sharia Law, according to the Koran.

This pattern of secular strongmen being followed by fanatical Islamist leaders has recurred many times over the past millennia and longer. Do not be fooled by modernists like King Abdullah of Jordan. To the true believer of Islam, any king or strongman is never more than a rifle shot or grenade toss away from being kinetically deposed, and replaced by another Islamist fanatic.

The persistent virulence of Mohammed’s 7th Century plan for global domination means that it is always ready to erupt in a fresh outbreak. Islam is like a brushfire or ringworm infection: it is dead and barren within the ring, but flares up where it parasitically feeds off the healthy non-Islamic societies around it. What produces this uniquely fanatical motivation, from within nations and peoples that otherwise seem devoid of energy and new ideas?

The motivation lies within the words of the Koran and Hadith. Most simply distilled, in the earthly realm, these Islamic texts offer immoral men sanction for thrill-killing, looting, raping, and capturing infidel slaves, and when these jihadists are killed, they are promised a perpetual orgy with seventy-two nubile virgin slave girls in Mohammed’s sick, evil and perverted Muslim paradise. Unlike the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Koran and Hadith appeal not to man’s better angels, but to the darkest aspects of human nature. (Tellingly, Moses and Jesus are said to have climbed to mountaintops to communicate with their God, while Mohammed received his messages from Allah deep inside a bat cave.)

A meaningful or permanent reformation of Islam is impossible, because a new generation of fanatics, wielding the unexpurgated Koran and Hadith as their weapons, will always declare the reformists to be apostates and murder them. In Islam, the fanatics who are holding the unalterable Koran in one hand and a sword in the other always stand ready to seize complete power and exterminate their enemies.

This latent danger breeds fear and causes nearly all non-Muslims to be carefully circumspect in their dealings with Muslims, lest they lose their heads at a later date. This intentionally fostered fear of Islam is used as a cudgel against those who would otherwise resist its domination. The immutable Koran is the constant fountainhead of bloody Islamic conquest. Radical Islam is the pure Islam, the Koranic Islam, the real Islam.

Anyone who does not understand this bitter reality is dangerously ignorant of the past 1,400 years of human history.

2. INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM

The second great actor or social force is international socialism. It can also be aptly described under the rubrics of leftism, statism, cultural Marxism and communism. These all inhabit the international socialist spectrum. I trace these cultural Marxists at least back to the Jacobins of the 18th Century, a clique of secular humanists who were early globalists aligned with Freemasonry.

The Jacobins moved from Germany to France with a coherent and fully developed plan to engineer a social explosion as a means to take power. The Jacobin destabilization plan became the template for many more bloody “people’s revolutions” to come. Following the French Revolution, we are familiar with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. We are less familiar with the early 20th Century British Fabian socialists, or the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, or the German “Frankfurt School” of international socialists, who transplanted their vision to the United States via Columbia University.

Unlike Vladimir Lenin and the Communists, they understood that international socialism’s goals could not be fully accomplished until the strong edifice of Western Civilization was hollowed out and sabotaged from within. In the end, the clandestine international socialist forces which burrowed deep within the Western womb achieved results which were far more permanent than the militarily-imposed revolutionary “war Communism” of Lenin and Mao.

Over the course of the past century, while Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, the Fabian socialists have been increasingly successful at poisoning the roots of national, cultural and ethnic identity, leaving the inheritors of Western Civilization disorganized and demoralized, with no central belief system to rally behind. Why has this deliberate demoralization and dumbing-down process occurred? The international socialists have believed at least since the French Revolution that it was their duty to impose a top-down feudal order upon the ordinary “dumb masses,” a new world order managed by self-proclaimed experts chosen from among the correctly-educated elites, both for the benefit of the ignoramuses, and as a way to line their own pockets and continue to live an elite lifestyle of wealth and power.

It may seem paradoxical that major corporate and banking interests are deeply invested in the international socialist new world order, but when you untangle the threads it actually makes perfect sense. Today’s international banks and mega-corporations are powerful global actors in their own right, and they are now written into each new international trade agreement. In fact, corporate lawyers author most of the pages of the multi-thousand-page trade pacts, which are now coming down like rain. Trade pacts which were never voted on by American or European citizens, pacts which are taking on the force of international treaty law, superseding even the United States Constitution.

From the Rothschilds of Europe to the Warburgs of both continents, to the Morgans and Rockefellers of America and back to the Hungarian immigrant George Soros, for several centuries, millionaire (and more lately billionaire) bankers have written their own laws and cut their own political deals. Today, they literally create billions of new dollars and Euros per day out of thin air, and pass it over to their cronies. In the United States, the creation a century ago of the Federal Reserve—a privately run central bank of, by and for the interests of a cabal of private banking interests—is a glaring case in point.

In the USA, the heads of global mega-corporations and investment firms donate massively to both the Democrats and the Republicans alike, ensuring favorable treatment in an era of corporately directed crony capitalism. The picture is much the same in other countries. These post-nationalist crony-capitalists recognize no sovereign borders and believe that patriotism is a laughable anachronism.

For example, in America, open-border traitors bribe politicians to pass laws to allow them to import unlimited numbers of H-1 visa foreign workers to directly replace Americans at their very desks and work places, and these traitors do not lose one wink of sleep over it. The traitor class of the international business set calls this “agility,” moving fungible proles, peasants and paupers world-wide to where they can be set to work most cheaply and profitably. Ordinary American middle-class workers and their families are just collateral damage in this process. The reality is not much different in Europe.

These super wealthy open-border corporate and banking elites, who paradoxically steer the forces driving international socialism, are able to bribe their way to success after success in myriad ways. Their wealth and political connections ensure that cooperative young players with future star quality are steered to the right universities, foundations, councils, government agencies and media positions. For example, when you see a talking head on television, and his listed expert credential is that he is a member of the entirely private Council on Foreign Relations who has written articles for their house publication Foreign Affairs, you will know that he is destined for high positions, and doors will magically open in front of him.

Over on the Fourth Estate, the global mass media has been almost entirely subverted, scripted and stage-managed for decades by these über-wealthy elites through a thousand channels greased with kickbacks, no-show jobs, and secret payoffs that are disguised as special stock offerings and private land deals. Media figures morph seamlessly into senior political advisors and corporate board members, adding millions to their portfolios with each well-timed transition. Even many retired generals and admirals eagerly wallow in this swamp of sell-out and sleaze. It should not be a surprise to anyone that so many politicians leave Washington or Brussels as millionaires. Just as it should not be a surprise that long-time CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” was for his entire adult life secretly a leading member of the World Federalist Association, a fact he proudly revealed only after his retirement from in front of the camera.