The world’s top trend forecaster, Gerald Celente, who has been publishing the Trends Journal since 1991, says his Spring 2010 report is one of the most important Trends he’s ever published:

“Of all the Trends Journals® I have published since 1991, this issue stands apart. Were I to rank it, I would say it is among the most important. The United States is on a path that, if not diverted, will lead the world into the first “Great War” of the 21st century.

This is not fear-mongering, “pessimism porn,” or hyperbole. Though the historical and external circumstances are so different that similarities are not easily discerned, the policies currently being pursued by the “great powers” are very much the same as those followed by other doomed Empires past.

Mired in debt and sinking deeper, America’s reckless domestic spending and engagement in expensive, drawn-out, unwinnable wars is characteristic of other empires in their waning days. In the past, the last-ditch attempt to preserve power was to wage more war.”

Mr. Celente describes the various hot spots and flashpoints around the globe, mostly focused on the middle east, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and of course, Iran.

As Celente points out, it has not been out of the question for governments, including the US government, to take our nation to war based on fabrications such as the Gulf of Tonkin, which ignited the Vietnam war and cost the lives of 58,000 American soldiers and left hundreds of thousands wounded. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was another pretext to war, pushed heavily by the Bush administration, with the mission quickly changing to “making the world a better place” once it was learned that no WMD existed.

The world would certainly be a much better place if a lot of dictators and regimes were overthrown, but you don’t see our military in Africa (or any real UN support), where millions are being ethnically cleansed. The reason, suggests Celente, is that, as President Eisenhower warned, war is a big business that enriches the few at the expense of the many. Celente backs up his claim with the words of Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine ever to serve at the time of his death in 1940, who said:

“It [war] is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

There is much more going on when wars are waged than just bringing freedom and democracy to the countries which we invade, and it comes at the expense of the lives of our fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons.

Self interest, with no regard for the lives of others, drives those like the bankers funding the wars, the corporate interests profiting from the natural resources that are conquered, and the politicians who use war as a way to scare the population into keeping themselves in power.

It’s not just Gerald Celente who believes that governments have no scruples when it comes to war and empire building, but economic adviser Marc Faber, as well. Both of these men have accurately forecast trends over the last three decades, and both warn of impending wars as politicians at home attempt to deflect blame for the economic distress being caused by their policies. This financial bust, according to Faber, will not end well:

“I think eventually there will be a big bust and then the whole credit expansion will come to an end.

Before that happens, governments will continue printing money which in time will lead to a very high inflation rate, and the economy will not respond to  stimulus. The average family will be hurt by that, and then in order to distract the attention of the people, the governments will go to war.

People ask me against whom? Well, they will invent an enemy.”

When Americans are protesting en masse in the streets because of lost jobs, lowered wages, foreclosed homes, higher taxes, broke pension funds, a worthless dollar and restrictions on their freedom, they will be blaming the politicians who got us into this mess. Mass protests of this nature can lead to riots, which can very quickly lead to violence in the streets.

Out of fear and self preservation, politicians will respond the only way they know how: blame someone else. In this case, it will be not be finger pointing at each other, but rather, they will collectively point their fingers at other nations, and those nations’ leaders will subsequently point their finger at us.

There are many scenarios that can play out in the future, including hyperinflationary meltdown of our currency, a slide into a severe deflationary depression, or a peak oil driven economic collapse, but the long-term trend, the end result of any of these dire scenarios, is one that has been proven time and again throughout history: war.