Rediscovering Orwell

This author suggests having a predominant superpower creates a terrifying world that George Orwell didn't foresee in "1984":

Such a world should be fantastical enough for the wildest sort of dystopian fiction, for perhaps a novel titled '2014'. What, after all, are we to make of a planet with a single superpower that lacks genuine enemies of any significance and that, to all appearances, has nonetheless been fighting a permanent global war with… well, itself — and appears to be losing?

Except that Orwell really did foresee it. The differences between Orwell's Tri-partite world, and our own, is only a matter of degree.

There won't be a "2014", mostly because Orwell is still a useful guide. What makes today's situation more dangerous, however, is that it is far more-efficient for a superpower to wage war against a terrorist group than to have the Tri-Partite skirmishes Orwell posited. Efficiency is deadly.

Quoting Orwell:

"Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised."