George Orwell’s Three-Power World—and Ours

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four does not present a world of many nations. It presents a world of three empires—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—locked in permanent, shifting conflict. The alliances are deliberately fluid. One day Oceania is allied with Eastasia against Eurasia; the next day it is the reverse. The public is required to instantly forget yesterday’s enemy and embrace today’s. The deeper purpose of this system is not military victory but mental control. If the Party can change who the enemy is, it can change what reality itself means.

What Orwell was describing was not a fantasy of chaos but a theory of stability: a three-power system in which no one wins, no one loses, and conflict never ends.

We now live in something very close to that world.

The United States dominates the Western Hemisphere and the Atlantic order. China dominates East Asia and increasingly the Pacific and much of the global manufacturing system. Russia dominates a northern arc—from Eastern Europe through Central Asia—using energy, war, and coercion to compensate for its weaker economy. None of these powers is strong enough to rule the world, but each is strong enough to enforce a regional sphere.

And just like in Orwell, alliances are not moral commitments; they are tools.

Europe is “America’s ally” while being economically bound to China. India works with Washington while buying Russian oil. Turkey is in NATO while coordinating with Moscow. Saudi Arabia shifts between the dollar and the yuan. Nothing is permanent. Everything is transactional. The public is told these are contradictions. In reality, they are the system working exactly as designed.

This is where Trump fits in.

Trump does not think in terms of rules-based order or international law. He thinks in terms of turf. Venezuela is in America’s hemisphere, so Washington gets to decide what happens there. Ukraine sits in Russia’s historical sphere, so Putin’s actions are something to be bargained over rather than confronted absolutely. Taiwan sits in China’s orbit, so deterrence is maintained rhetorically while real red lines quietly soften. None of this requires Trump to admire Putin or Xi. It only requires him to accept that great powers get their neighborhoods.

Africa, in this worldview, is what Orwell called a “disputed zone”—a place where all three powers operate, extract, and interfere, precisely because no one controls it. China builds ports and mines. Russia sends mercenaries and weapons. The U.S. applies aid, sanctions, and pressure. The people who live there are not the point. The denial of territory to rivals is.

Orwell’s insight was that a three-power world does not bring peace. It brings endless, low-level conflict and constant narrative manipulation. Today’s ally can be tomorrow’s threat. Yesterday’s outrage can be erased by tomorrow’s deal.

The real war, then and now, is not over land. It is over memory—who gets to say what has always been true.

Orwell is the Prophet of Trump's Brave New World

I am among those who believed the Aldous Huxley predicted the future in his Brave New World. It was not Big Brother who crushed us individually and as a people.  We would simply sell out for drugs and entertainment.  

Which is true. And electing a game show host President underlined that truth with a Sharpie.  

And yet, world politics really is devolving into the spheres of influence Orwell predicted.  Huxley saw our individual fall into oblivion. Orwell saw the new world order.

Animal Farm: George Orwell's Story of the Soviet Union and Revolution

The original title, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story

On July 3, I was talking to a friend who mistrusts politics of every kind. After thinking about what he said, I realized the George Orwell’s book Animal Farm agreed with him. I re-read Orwell’s tale, alternately laughing and cringing at this dark view of human nature. 

The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. Like many other tales in this genre, before Disney, this fairy tale ends sadly.

Animal Farm can be read as a very good re-telling of the history of the Soviet Union from the death of Lenin until the end of World War II.  For years after the death of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky fought for control. Trotsky was a revolutionary idealist. Stalin was ruthless. Stalin won.  And over time, Stalin erased the memory of Trotsky and other heroes of the Revolution.

Orwell’s tale also describes the fate of nearly all revolutions except the American Revolution.  I will be writing later about Hannah Arendt’s book On Revolutions. She explains why America did not descend into the fate of France, Russia, and nearly every revolution of the last two centuries. 

In the revolt on the Manor Farm, the animals throw the farmer off his land and run the farm themselves.  The pigs are the cleverest creatures and take over management of the farm.  At first they set up a socialist utopia, but strife begins, especially between the two pigs vying for leadership: Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky). Eventually Napoleon trains attack dogs and exiles Snowball.  He continues to consolidate pig power, until finally the pigs make friends with their human neighbors and oppress the rest of the animals as badly as the humans. 

After overthrowing the Tsar, the common people of Russia ended up with worse oppression in the form of the Soviet Union. By the end of Animal Farm the animals other than pigs were worse off than they were under the farmer. 

My friend’s view of politics is vindicated in Orwell.  Checks and balances are all that stands between any nation and its own Animal Farm. Orwell said his goal in writing was to promote Democratic Socialism. He wanted to ensure no ruler could consolidate absolute power, left or right. 

So I can read Orwell as a call to go and fight for democracy. My friend can read Orwell as a parable of why political involvement will lead nowhere good. 

We both agreed in our conversation, that the history of the Church taking power was simply bad.  Every government run in God’s ends with people saying they are doing God’s will when they crush others.

In Animal Farm the pigs set up a government based on Seven Commandments of how animals should behave. Over time the pigs violate, rewrite and finally erase all of the commandments and replace it with a new one: 

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

--> Every theocracy, every tyranny, every authoritarian government could use this motto.

1984: Big Brother Never Showed Up

I am re-reading "1984" for the Cold War class I am taking.  George Orwell's tale is so completely Evil Empire and so completely wrong.  In a bleak, battered London, Winston Smith toils rewriting history at his day job and trying to remember and write down the truth at night.

As a storyteller Orwell is brilliant and chilling.

As a prophet, he is a failure.  The world he imagined is nothing like what actually happened.  Orwell imagined a future with central control of information and nearly all history wiped out.  In this gray, impoverished world everyone is starving.

Closer to the future is Ray Bradbury's 1953 book "Fahrenheit 451."  You and I and everyone who read that book 30 years ago remember it as the book about burning books.  In this terrifying world in which Firemen start fires instead of putting them out.

But when I re-read the book several years ago, the thing that stood out was the video walls and the ear bugs.  The main character's wife had a room with three walls of video and wanted her husband to get promoted in the fire department so they could afford four walls of video.  With four walls, the video became interactive and she could be on game shows.  And everyone got music through bugs they fitted in their ears.  Bigger TVs, TVs that cover walls, music direct to your ears--that sounds like the near present and near future.

The guy who got the future right is Aldous Huxley in his 1931 book "Brave, New World."  Huxley imagines the future in which no one has to burn books because no one reads them.  In the Brave New World people are so glutted with entertainment and information that they are easy to manipulate.

Any prospect of the horrors of 1984 becoming reality died with the Soviet Union.  Communist China is becoming capitalist in a way that will eventually end the communist domination of the government.

But people who no longer read, who are obsessed with music and video, who are lazy and stupid--that world is here.  Prophetic Gold Medal to Huxley, Silver to Bradbury, no medal for Orwell.