Sitting in a stellar position of the White House is a key figure in everyday decision making for America and it is not Donald J. Trump. It is a little-understood and currently never interviewed alt-right radical named Steve Bannon. At least alt-right is the last label we associate him with as the leader of the white-nationalistic Breitbart network before he became Trump’s campaign manager. After Trump’s election, he implanted his tentacles into politics, policy, and security in Trump’s White House.

In practice, we might call him “Trump’s Brain,” reminiscent of the Moore and Slater book, Bush’s Brain, describing the role of Karl Rove in the George W. Bush elections as president. But Bannon’s role is much farther-reaching than Rove’s ever was. Thus, with the consequences of his influence, we wonder in what direction the brainy and selectively-read Bannon will lead Trump.

The direction could be quite alarming.

Steve Bannon believes a global war is pre-ordained, one bigger than WWII. He has already picked the combatants. One is the United States, under the Judeo-Christian banner, and the other will be billions under the banner of Islam.

Believing we are in the formative stage of an existential war, Bannon identifies everything as part of that conflict. Like a secular priest, he feels he must gird his loins and set the stage for the apocalypse that will purge the Earth for the new political order, whatever the cost to Americans. And what is that order?

Borrowing ideas from authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning, Bannon’s political philosophy boils down to three things that a Western country, and America in particular, needs to be successful: Capitalism, nationalism, and “Judeo-Christian values.” These are all deeply related, and integral to the struggle. Thus the purge will rid our side of all of the uninitiated, unwelcome occupants of this holy experiment. Any swarthy enemies beholden to outside values must be repelled in preparation for this global war.

We must prepare for a new world order. That requires untangling yourself from foreign alliances like NATO and perhaps aligning yourself with more authoritarian, even expeditiously Machiavellian regimes like Russia, which exploits other countries but does not engage in defending any of them. You tear up treaties like NAFTA and not employ new treaties. In this combatant and discordant process, chaos is bound to reign, people will get hurt while enemies are identified and repelled. That is the sacrifice Americans (not the elite) will undergo.

The Fourth Turning follows the first three which include the Civil War (some 100 years after the American Revolution), The Great Depression, and World War II. In 2011 speaking engagements, he told the conservative nonprofit, Liberty Restoration Foundation and the Republican women’s group, Project GoPink that major crises will “happen in about 80 or 100-year cycles. And somewhere over the next 10 or 20 years, we’re going to come out of this crisis.”

More recently, on a 2016 radio message, he warned that expansionist Islam and expansionist China are on the march and the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat. “We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next 5 to 10 years, aren’t we?” he asked Reagan biographer Lee Edwards. At Breitbart, he often spoke in combatant – ostensibly civil war — terms of how he ran Breitbart before he quit as chair to run Trump’s campaign, “It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war.”

With such a world-shaking picture dominating his thinking, It is understandable that Steve Bannon would organize a reckless and chaotic effort to ban entry of Muslims into the United States, and to do it with little consideration for any reckless disruption of everyday life, not to speak of a total disregard for human decency. The man is on a “Turning” mission, disconnected from the mundane, hitched on the star of Donald Trump, whose mission is only self-absorption.

In such a wild crusade, there is no room for any practical considerations like economic impact and cost to life and well being for citizens and non-citizens alike. The Fourth Turning principle rests on a conviction of ethno-nationalism. Such a precept is embedded in many of the executive orders, by all appearances, fashioned under Steve Bannon’s direction.

The central theme of ethno-nationalists is that our nation is defined by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, and a common ethnic ancestry. It also includes ideas of a culture shared between members of the group, and with their ancestors. It discourages people from becoming members of a nation by cultural assimilation, explaining the total deportation route of Trump’s current executive order.

Bannon’s fixation on war legitimizes somewhat of a war footing, many policies operating in a secrecy that tries to dull the impact of those who resist his policies, while leaving his targets unaware. It is part of Bannon’s serious belief in crisis. If a sense of a “Crisis” period as a signature for the Fourth Turning is not felt, Bannon undoubtedly believes that leaders like him should find the threat, even create one, to mobilize collective action.

His belief seems to be that by the end of the 2020s, the Fourth Turning crisis will draw to a close and perhaps by the early 2030s we will enter a new First Turning, with a cultural revitalization sweeping money and power from the old to the young. It will be a new “High,” always coming after a crisis era, a First Turning where institutions are strong and individualism is weak.

The alarming part of “Turning, according to Bannon’s belief is that he now has the power to control what he sees as the Fourth Turning. It constitutes a crisis period, perhaps even creating a war setting for a “Crisis” where there is none. We already have evidence of this in alienating allies (NATO) and enemies alike, his first ban on Muslims failing, but inspiring jihadists. Thus he is setting up that war footing in a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom and renewal of an imagined new First Turning.

He has a very unsettling start in that direction.