In The Fall of the West Nicholas Hagger examined the evidence for the origin of Covid and whether it has been used as a bio-weapon between West and East. He saw the US, worried by China's Belt-and-Road Initiative in 140 countries, as collaborating with the Western Syndicate's New World Order based on the Great Reset advocated by Schwab's World Economic Forum and the UN's Agenda 2030. He saw an authoritarian New World Order that could accommodate Russia and China as being established before a democratic World State. In The Golden Phoenix (which completes a quartet that includes The Syndicate, The Secret History of the West and The Fall of the West and is also a sequel to Peace for our Time), Hagger carries the story forward from Ukraine's being a corridor between the Black Sea and Europe for Russian natural gas to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In 2019 Hagger was invited to Russia to give a lecture in Moscow on a supranational World State to an audience which included men in military uniform, and he received several awards, including the Russian Ecological Foundation's Golden Phoenix lapel badge. He was asked to write two letters to Putin and was in contact with Putin's advisers. The phoenix rises from ashes, and Hagger considers whether the West is rising from the ashes of its withdrawal from Afghanistan to advance its technocratic New World Order by supplying arms to Ukraine and blocking Russian gas; or whether a Russian authoritarian New World Order is rising from the ashes of the defunct Soviet Union to dominate southern Ukraine, and eventually some former Soviet territories, in alliance with China's Belt-and-Road New World Order in 140 countries; or whether the supranational democratic global New World Order he outlined in World State and World Constitution is rising from the ashes of the Second World War like a golden phoenix. The Russian Foreign Minister has said that NATO is in effect in a war with Russia, and that there is a real danger of a Third World War, and Hagger assesses the likely outcome of the current conflict.