The Prescience of Experience

By Will Keys

The older I get, the more I see the future coming—because it always arrives wearing the past’s disguise. There is a strange comfort in watching the predictable unfold. To those who have lived long enough, the patterns are visible—repeating motifs that younger men mistake for chance. History may rhyme, but for those who listen to its cadence, it speaks plainly.

When I warned that Barack Obama’s presidency would end in division and decline, the polite world scoffed. They saw hope; I saw hubris. When I wagered—literally—on Donald Trump’s first victory through an Australian betting agency and collected the winnings, it was not clairvoyance. It was prescience born of experience. I recognised the swing of the pendulum: nations weary of being lectured by their own elites.

Now that same prescience speaks again—this time of Ukraine. Strip away the propaganda, the photo-ops and the moral theatrics, and what remains is geometry: the cold logic of geography, logistics, and attrition. Assuming that Russia will soon control Kiev and all territory east of the Dnipro, the rest is already written. The West, for all its rhetoric, controls only the narrative. A nation cannot be saved by press releases. While commentators speak of “stalemate”, Russia consolidates—rail by rail, town by town—turning battlefield gains into administrative facts. Clausewitz would have recognised it instantly: destruction giving way to consolidation.

The West will call this a failure of intelligence. It is not. It is the failure of ideology—the conceit that slogans outweigh supply chains and that moral vanity can substitute for artillery. Europe has forgotten the first rule of statecraft: never fight a war you are not prepared to win. Ukraine has fought bravely, but bravery without logistics is theatre.

And here in Australia, the same intellectual contagion spreads. Our universities, once citadels of reason, now train a generation fluent in outrage but illiterate in discipline. They chant what they cannot defend. This is the Saul Alinsky inheritance—grievance dressed as virtue. It hollowed the Democratic Party in America; it will hollow us if not arrested.

Australia’s left-leaning polemic philosophies—compassion without competence, morality without merit—are steering a prosperous nation toward managed decline. Energy policy by slogan, bureaucracy by quota, foreign policy written for applause in Brussels rather than security in Darwin. If not reversed quickly, the outcome will be catastrophic: an Australia morally exhausted, economically anaemic, strategically irrelevant.

Yet even now the remedy exists. It lies in the virtues we once prized: discipline, merit, courage, and the willingness to speak plainly. The past still offers its map; we need only read it.

Each time the pattern repeats—Obama’s illusions, Trump’s correction, Ukraine’s unravelling, Australia’s drift—the same principle applies: the world punishes the comfortable and rewards the prepared. That is not prophecy; it is observation honed by a lifetime of consequence.

The past is never silent; it hums beneath every mistake, waiting for those with ears tuned by experience. I hear it still—and what it whispers is clear: our future will echo my prescience once more, unless we act while there is still time.

—Will Keys, author of Perfidious Albion and Rhodesia to Redemption