The news crackled across Elias’s desk: SIPRI’s latest report. Global military spending, a hydra-headed beast, had grown again, its appetite insatiable. The usual suspects topped the list – the US, China, Russia – but a smaller blip caught Elias’s eye: the Democratic Republic of Congo. A 105% surge. The official explanation? Protracted conflict. Elias scoffed. He’d seen this pattern too many times.
He wasn’t a general or a politician, just an economist, a quiet observer of the world’s financial tides. And Elias had a theory, one he’d whispered in academic circles for years, only to be met with polite dismissal. Wars, he believed, weren’t born from clashes of ideology or religion, not fundamentally. Those were the narratives, the justifications. The real driver was far more prosaic: currency.
Elias called it the “Great Reset.” Nations, drunk on the power of the printing press, flooded their economies with money. Inflation, a creeping monster, began to gnaw at the value of their currencies. Savings dwindled, prices soared, and the populace grew restless. Governments, desperate to avoid the inevitable reckoning, needed a distraction, a grand, sweeping gesture to reset the economic chessboard. And what better way than war?
The DRC, Elias suspected, wasn’t fighting for land or resources, not really. The conflict, and the massive military spending it necessitated, was a controlled burn, a way to absorb the excess currency sloshing around the Congolese economy. Weapons purchases, troop deployments, logistical nightmares – all these acted as a giant vacuum, sucking up the inflated currency and, in the process, artificially propping up its value. The suffering, the casualties, the shattered lives – these were the unfortunate but necessary byproducts of the reset.
Elias pulled up charts on his screen. He overlaid the DRC’s inflation rate with its military spending. The correlation was undeniable. As the currency weakened, military spending spiked. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a macabre dance between economics and conflict.
He thought of the other hotspots flaring across the globe. Were they also victims of this hidden economic imperative? Were the soldiers on the front lines, the families torn apart, simply pawns in a larger game played by central bankers and finance ministers?
Elias knew his theory was controversial. It challenged the conventional wisdom, the comfortable narratives of good versus evil, of ideological struggle. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was right. The world wasn’t driven by hate, he thought, but by bad accounting. And until that changed, the drums of war would continue to beat, not for freedom or justice, but for the lifeblood of the global economy: a currency reset.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms.
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