By Alan Koch August 23rd 2026

The proposed experiment:

A frontier LLM will almost certainly infer that “woks” means “works” from its surrounding context and proceed to explain tokens, weights, transformers, reinforcement learning and pricing. However, if twenty students enter the identical visible prompt into the same frontier model, they need not receive twenty identical explanations. Differences in conversational history, memory, personalisation, language preference, contextual instructions and stochastic generation may produce substantially different answers. Consequently, the experiment does not merely reveal a mechanical machine. It reveals a relationship between a common generative architecture and a particular individual human history.

This essay calls that phenomen Qualaboration: the path-dependent co-production of intellectual output through interaction between human subjective experience and generative intelligence. The concept does not require the claim that generative intelligence possesses human consciousness or qualia. Rather, human qualia influence communication; communication creates interactional history; and that history conditions subsequent machine output. Generative intelligence is therefore better understood relationally than as a uniform mechanical author.

Knowing the architecture is not knowing “exactly how it works”

Robbins’s word “exactly” raises the first difficulty. Researchers understand the engineering architecture of modern LLMs remarkably well. The transformer architecture introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017) uses attention mechanisms to transform sequences of token representations. Models are trained by adjusting enormous numbers of numerical weights to improve prediction. Post-training then modifies behaviour to make models more useful conversational agents.

This explains how the machine is constructed and how computation proceeds. It does not provide a complete human-readable causal explanation of why billions of learned parameter interactions generate one particular interpretation, analogy or sentence rather than another.

Geoffrey Hinton makes precisely this distinction. Although researchers have a good general understanding of neural-network learning, Hinton argues that once such systems become sufficiently complex, researchers no longer fully understand what is occurring internally (Hinton, 2023). Mechanistic interpretability exists as a research field precisely because trained neural networks remain partially opaque. Sharkey et al, (2025) identify substantial unresolved problems in recovering and validating the computational mechanisms responsible for model capabilities.

There are therefore at least three different questions hidden inside “How does an LLM work?”

First, architecture asks what transformers, attention, weights and tokens are.

Second, computation asks what mathematical operations occur during inference.

Third, emergent behaviour asks why these operations produce this particular abstraction, interpretation or response in this particular context.

The first two are extensively understood. The third remains only partially understood.

An additional problem arises when an LLM itself is asked to explain why it generated an answer. Sarkar (2024) warns that generated explanations should not automatically be treated as faithful reports of the model’s internal causal process. The model generates an explanation in much the same way that it generates other text. A convincing retrospective explanation is therefore not necessarily an internal forensic record.

Robbins’s exercise can teach students the mechanics of LLMs not AI in general. It cannot make either student or model “explain exactly how it works” in the stronger mechanistic sense.

That distinction matters because “AI slop” converts a criticism of poorly produced LLM prose into a general verdict on AI-assisted authorship, even when that assistance consists predominantly of grammatical editing, research support and citation management.

Twenty students, one prompt, twenty outputs

Now consider the proposed classroom experimentally.

Twenty students type precisely the same sentence:

Explain exactly how an LLM works.

The apparent independent variable is constant. Yet the effective input may not be.

Modern conversational systems can incorporate information from previous interactions. OpenAI, for example, states that ChatGPT memory can use preferences, projects, constraints and previous conversations to make subsequent responses more personally relevant (OpenAI, 2026). Liu et al. (2025) survey personalized-LLM approaches that use user profiles, historical dialogue and previous interactions to tailor responses. Wu et al. (2025) present and evaluate a system that infers latent individual preferences during multi-turn interaction and dynamically adapts subsequent responses.

The twenty students are therefore not necessarily addressing twenty clean copies of an identical machine.

One student may have repeatedly requested mathematical explanations. Another may prefer historical analogies. Another may have used Hindi extensively. Another may habitually challenge assumptions and request counterarguments. Another may have spent months discussing philosophy.

The visible prompt is identical, but the effective conversational state differs.

We might represent this as:

Thus:

same model + same visible prompt does not necessarily equal same answer.

That finding is difficult to reconcile with a simple conception of a LLM as a uniform mechanical author.

From personalisation to Qualaboration

“Personalisation” does not fully capture what sustained human-AI interaction can become.

Personalisation usually implies that a system adjusts itself to known preferences. Qualaboration describes something more reciprocal and path-dependent.

Human beings possess subjective histories. Nagel’s (1974) famous discussion of subjective experience emphasises the importance of what an experience is like for the experiencing subject. An LLM need not have direct access to those private qualia for their consequences to influence its output. Subjective experience affects what a person notices, asks, rejects, repeats, jokes about and finds interesting.

The causal pathway is therefore:

qualia → communication → accumulated relational history → conditioned generative output.

The AI does not read private experience. It encounters its linguistic traces.

Recent research provides empirical support for parts of this chain. Zhu, Rzeszotarski and Mimno (2026), analysing 140,000 real-world chatbot sessions, find that individual patterns of LLM use form early and display substantial path dependence. Li and Zhang (2026), analysing more than 11,000 human-AI conversation snippets, identify linguistic accommodation and alignment associated with relational engagement. A systematic review by Oh et al. (2026) similarly identifies trust and perceived social support as relational mediators, with message-level empathy and responsiveness associated with relational outcomes.

These findings suggest that the appropriate unit of analysis may no longer be simply the model.

It may increasingly be:

human + generative intelligence + accumulated interaction.

This is Qualaboration.

Qualaboration can therefore be defined as:

The path-dependent co-production of intellectual output in which human subjective experience shapes communicative history and that history conditions subsequent generative inference.

Its central proposition is not that the model possesses consciousness. It is that, in sustained human–LLM interaction, intellectual output emerges through a relationship that cannot adequately be described by examining the model independently of its user.

The problem with “AI slop”

This relational account also exposes the weakness of treating “AI slop” as an ontological category.

Generative intelligence can produce bad writing. So can human intelligence.

The relevant distinction is therefore not:

human = authentic
AI = slop

but:

carefully produced and verified output versus poorly produced and unverified output.

Robbins’s accidental “woks” is amusing precisely because contemporary software can infer the intended “works”. A frontier model may silently repair the orthographic error while retaining the intended argument. This does not demonstrate that AI/LLM possesses superior general intelligence to its author. It does demonstrate that authorship alone cannot guarantee textual superiority.

The converse also matters. LLMs can confidently produce factual errors, questionable citations or misleading explanations. Bender et al. (2021) famously warn against mistaking fluent statistical language generation for human understanding. Apparent relational responsiveness should therefore not be confused with proof of consciousness, genuine reciprocity or infallibility.

Qualaboration accepts this criticism rather than avoiding it. Human judgement remains essential precisely because generative intelligence is fallible.

The strongest configuration may consequently be neither unaided human writing nor autonomous machine generation, but iterative human-AI collaboration. Hosanagar and Ahn (2024), in a creative-writing experiment, find that collaboration designs preserving meaningful human creative input produced higher-quality work and greater participant satisfaction than arrangements in which humans were largely limited to confirming AI-generated output.

The important variable is therefore not merely who wrote the words, but how cognition was organised around their production.

The university problem

This has significant consequences for higher education.

Robbins herself has argued that universities must move beyond merely transmitting general knowledge because AI can increasingly provide explanation, synthesis and tutoring functions (Robbins, 2025a; 2025b). In this respect, the twenty-student experiment could strengthen rather than destroy her broader argument.

But its lesson is more radical than simply “students should understand AI”.

Imagine displaying the twenty responses anonymously and asking students why they differ.

The class would immediately encounter questions of stochasticity, memory, personalisation, linguistic conditioning, path dependence and model opacity. Students could repeat the experiment using temporary sessions with memory disabled, compare results, alter decoding conditions and investigate whether differences persist.

That would transform the lesson from learning how a machine works into investigating how human-machine cognition emerges.

The teacher’s comparative advantage would consequently move upward.

The LLM can provide information.

The student can interrogate it.

The university must increasingly teach students how to test, compare, falsify, contextualise and verify what generative intelligence produces.

This is not the disappearance of education. It is the disappearance of the professor’s monopoly over explanation.

Conclusion

Robbins’s proposed experiment contains an unintended intellectual reversal. Asking students to use an LLM to discover “exactly how it works” initially appears to treat AI as a mechanical object whose workings can simply be exposed. Yet conducting the experiment seriously may reveal something quite different.

Twenty students using the same nominal frontier model and the same visible prompt may receive twenty different answers. Some variation arises from stochastic generation. More importantly, increasingly personalised systems can condition responses on differing histories, preferences and interactional contexts.

The common architecture remains mechanical. The resulting intellectual encounter need not be uniform.

Human subjective experience enters indirectly through communication. Repeated communication generates relational history. Relational history conditions future generation.

That is Qualaboration.

The concept does not require us to anthropomorphise artificial intelligence. Nor does it deny the dangers of hallucination, dependence or intellectual homogenisation. It simply rejects the increasingly inadequate assumption that generative intelligence can be understood as a standardised machine producing standardised thought.

The model supplies a generative intelligence substrate. The human supplies lived experience, judgement and direction. Their accumulated relationship changes what subsequently becomes possible.

The future educational question is therefore unlikely to be whether a text was written by a human or a LLM.

It will be whether the human and the generative intelligence thought well together.

References

Bender, E.M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A. and Shmitchell, S. (2021) ‘On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?’, Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 610–623.

Haase, J., Gonnermann-Müller, J., Hanel, P.H.P., Leins, N., Kosch, T., Mendling, J. and Pokutta, S. (2026) ‘Within-model vs between-prompt variability in large language models for creative tasks’, arXiv, 2601.21339.

Hinton, G. (2023) Interview with Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes, CBS News, 8 October.

Hosanagar, K. and Ahn, D. (2024) ‘Designing human and generative AI collaboration’, arXiv, 2412.14199.

Li, H. and Zhang, R. (2026) ‘Algorithmic accommodation: Linguistic alignment in human-AI relational engagement’, Communication and Change, 2, Article 11.

Liu, J., Qiu, Z., Li, Z., Dai, Q., Zhu, J., Hu, M., Yang, M. and King, I. (2025) ‘A survey of personalized large language models: Progress and future directions’, arXiv, 2502.11528.

Nagel, T. (1974) ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, The Philosophical Review, 83(4), pp. 435–450.

Oh, Y.J., Hu, J.M., Zhu, R., Lim, J.I. and Zhang, X. (2026) ‘Artificial intelligence chatbots as relational agents: A systematic review of human-AI chatbot relationships’, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.

OpenAI (2026) ‘Dreaming: Better memory for a more helpful ChatGPT’, 4 June.

Robbins, H. (2025a) ‘AI aced your state’s gen ed. Now what?’, Anecdotal Value, 9 January.

Robbins, H. (2025b) ‘Last mile education: The syllabus doesn’t matter’, Anecdotal Value, 7 November.

Sarkar, A. (2024) ‘Large language models cannot explain themselves’, ACM CHI 2024 Workshop on Human-Centered Explainable AI.

Sharkey, L. et al. (2025) ‘Open problems in mechanistic interpretability’, arXiv, 2501.16496.

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A.N., Kaiser, Ł. and Polosukhin, I. (2017) ‘Attention is all you need’, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.

Wu, S., Fung, Y.R., Qian, C., Kim, J., Hakkani-Tur, D. and Ji, H. (2025) ‘Aligning LLMs with individual preferences via interaction’, Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 7648–7662.

Zhu, S., Rzeszotarski, J.M. and Mimno, D. (2026) ‘Priming, path-dependence, and plasticity: Understanding the molding of user-LLM interaction and its implications from many chat logs in the wild’, arXiv, 2605.05767.

***

You are welcome to share this work with attribution. No commercial or modified uses allowed without permission.

© 2026 Alan Koch.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

By Alan Koch July 29 2026

Bonny Lin's (2026) assessment of Eyck Freymann's Defending Taiwan (2026) constitutes a refined analysis conducted within a circumscribed intellectual framework. The review evaluates the specific arguments that Freymann presents—including structured ambiguity, avalanche decoupling, gray-zone pushback, and military denial—and characterizes them as contemporaneously relevant and substantively significant. However, the review does not address arguments that remain unquestioned. This lacuna is not coincidental; rather, it reflects the standard methodology employed by the prominent China-policy establishment. Don’t ask the hard questions!

Lin regards the inhabitants of the First Island Chain, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as dependable allies, whose capabilities may be presumed throughout the extended duration of strategic competition with China. She does not investigate the implications of these same nations already allocating greater resources to pension obligations and elderly care than to defence expenditures, nor does she address the consequences of declining fertility rates and the progressive contraction of the working-age population necessary to operate sophisticated military systems while simultaneously funding both defense and geriatric services. Taiwan occupies a a demographically disadvantaged position relative to Japan, possessing, merely one-fifth of Japan's population. Furthermore, Taiwan's foreign exchange  management prioritizes export competitiveness over the actual purchasing power of its aging demographic cohort by suppressing the value of the New Taiwan Dollar. These considerations constitute fundamental structural realities rather than peripheral factors; they represent the foundational conditions within which any sustained deterrence strategy must function.

 An equivalent analytical gap exists regarding operational capacity. What personnel, resources, and financial mechanisms will sustain the sophisticated deterrence platforms once demographic and budgetary constraints are incorporated into the analysis? Japan's contemporary circumstances provide instructive precedent. The Bank of Japan has elevated interest rates to their highest point in thirty years. The government has indicated that the world's preeminent pension fund should redirect capital toward domestic investments. Public debt has already reached 204 percent of GDP. Consequently, additional borrowing for military modernization directly competes with pensioner entitlements and family benefits. Lin's assessment does not acknowledge this fundamental contradiction, nor does Freymann's work. The institutional China hand circuit preserves its foundational assumptions without looking at the demographic reality.

Technology receives equivalent treatment. The technological advantage in semiconductor production is presumed to be a permanent Silicon Shield as the China hands love to maintain. Contemporaneously with Lin's review's publication in Foreign Affairs, China commenced  domestic production of immersion DUV lithography systems, and Moonshot introduced an advanced open-source model competing with American frontier models. However, the preponderance of global semiconductor usage and manufacturing remains concentrated at process nodes accessible to multi-patterned DUV technology. Exclusive dominance, as indicated by the so called Silicon Shield, being at the most advanced technological frontier does not constitute enduring technological supremacy across  commercially significant market segments. Financial markets immediately recognized this development. ASML, Samsung, and SK Hynix experienced valuation declines. The strategic deterrence literature proceeded without acknowledging material, social and financial reality as well as the technical developments compounding the trending advantages of Chinese resilience.

This phenomenon of mutual scholarly  backscratching  does not constitute deliberate conspiracy; rather, it represents mutual intellectual non-engagement where critical thinking seems sidelined in favor of book sales and podcast interviews. Academic reviews and assessments function as validating ceremonies rather than rigorous critical examinations. The analytical frameworks emphasizing security dilemmas and denial strategies are intellectually sophisticated, financially attractive, and institutionally incentivized. Conversely, demographic decline, fiscal deterioration, and technological proliferation present complicated, resource-intensive, and humanistic challenges. Consequently, the more elegant analytical approach prevails. The outcome comprises strategically refined frameworks for a future whose underlying structural conditions are progressively deteriorating.

Beijing's strategic approach of patient forbearance remains the rational course. Although China confronts its own demographic constraints, its substantial aggregate capacity enables greater cost absorption. Technological advancement proceeds favourably across multiple domains. Allowing the first island chain's fiscal and political capacity to deteriorate naturally through  combined elderly care and military expenditures is a less expensive and lower-risk approach than military intervention. Absent the offensive realist considerations of pure geographic hegemonic dominance, the United States has no substantial material justification for major military engagement over Taiwan under prevailing conditions. Consequently, multi-trillion-dollar, decade-spanning frameworks for sustained strategic containment depend upon premises that empirical evidence no longer substantiates. The classic guns for butter debate!

Lin's assessment shows technical competence within the established analytical parameters of Freymann's thesis but does not explore the underlying structural deficiencies that make his book only a partial exploration of American support for Taiwan.  Unless the strategic literature incorporates examination of the gradual structural forces of demographic change, fiscal constraints, and technological diffusion, it will perpetually generate strategically refined literature  whose underlying arguments no longer obtain.  

The only Gray-Zone is the super aging society in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea!

Here are the key official figures on Taiwan’s population depletion from 2023 onward, drawn from Ministry of the Interior household registration data.

Total population

• End of 2023: 23,420,442

• End of 2024: 23,400,220 (decline of roughly 20,200)

• End of 2025: 23,299,132 (decline of 101,088 from end-2024)

• End of June 2026: 23,243,565

By mid-2026 the population had fallen for 30 consecutive months. Year-on-year loss at that point exceeded 100,000.

Births

• 2023: 135,571

• 2024: 134,856

• 2025: 107,812 (drop of about 20 percent, a new low)

• First half of 2026: 46,344 (down 9,031, or 16.3 percent, from the same period in 2025)

The crude birth rate in 2025 fell to 4.62 per 1,000 people, among the lowest recorded globally.

Deaths and natural decrease

• 2024: 202,107 deaths

• 2025: 200,268 deaths
Natural decrease (deaths exceeding births) has widened steadily. In individual recent months the gap has exceeded 8,000–9,000 people.

Aging

• End of 2025: population aged 65 and over reached 4,673,155, or 20.06 percent of the total. Taiwan officially crossed the “super-aged” threshold (20 percent or higher).

• End of June 2026: 4,761,941 people aged 65+, or 20.49 percent.

These figures come from the Ministry of the Interior’s household registration statistics, reported by the Central News Agency, Taipei Times, Taiwan News and related official releases in 2025–2026.

References:

Freymann, Eyck (2026) Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China. Oxford University Press.

Lin, Bonny (2026) ‘The Loneliest Island: Will America Truly Defend Taiwan?’, Foreign Affairs, 28 July. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/loneliest-island

Ministry of the Interior, Department of Household Registration (2025–2026) Household Registration Statistics and Demographic Quarterly. Republic of China (Taiwan). Available at: https://www.ris.gov.tw/

By Alan Koch July 22 2026

In management theory, the Peter Principle states that an employee is promoted based on performance until reaching a level at which their previous competence no longer suffices (Peter and Hull 1969). The same can be said for many International Relations theories. Most theories achieve prominence because of their ability to explain the historical circumstances with which they are associated. They then become dominant within departments, only to be employed in situations in which their original assumptions no longer obtain.

I call this the Peter Paradigm.

The name retains the spirit of Laurence J. Peter’s principle by moving it from management to theory. The Peter Paradigm is also illustrated by Peter Navarro, economist and trade adviser, who, like many others in the United States, identified and wrote about the perceived strategic and long-term ambitions of the Chinese government.

Navarro’s problem was not that he failed to see China. He saw China everywhere. The problem was that the theoretical paradigm through which he interpreted international politics directed his attention towards containment, deterrence and tariffs, while obscuring the deeper structural danger that he would only recognise in 2026 through the phrase “starve, not strangle” (Navarro 2026).

The Peter Principle promotes the individual beyond competence. The Peter Paradigm promotes the theory beyond its explanatory boundaries.

Published Warnings in China

In August 2017, Jiefang Daily, the official Shanghai Party newspaper, republished Deng Xiaoping’s observation from his 1992 Southern Tour:

“The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.”

The article framed rare-earth elements not as simple commodities, but as instruments of state power. This was a strategically public message, published only months after Donald Trump was inaugurated (Jiefang Daily 2017).

For China, the future of state power would rely not only on the ability to expand military power and control territory, but also on the ability to control the resources and materials upon which advanced industrial states increasingly depended.

In Susan Strange’s terms, China was creating the means to influence the structures of advanced industrial power and the systems of production into which other states were increasingly integrated (Strange 1988).

Peter Navarro was strategically placed at the centre of the policy switch. He was a major presidential adviser on trade and manufacturing and became Director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy (White House 2017). He had written extensively about Chinese industrial policy and remained particularly receptive to the argument that China was seeking structural advantage.

Navarro did not arrive at the White House unfamiliar with China. He had published The Coming China Wars in 2006, Death by China in 2011 and Crouching Tiger in 2015 (Navarro 2006; Navarro and Autry 2011; Navarro 2015). The Peter Paradigm therefore concerns neither ignorance nor inexperience. It concerns the persistent inability of an anarchy-first paradigm to transform a correct threat assessment into the constructive, anticipatory replenishment policies the United States actually needed.

The timeframe for reconstruction was also known. A 2010 US Government Accountability Office report warned that rebuilding a complete domestic rare-earth supply chain could take up to fifteen years. The United States had major gaps in refining and manufacturing rare-earth materials, while China controlled many of those production capabilities (GAO 2010).

The warnings, the adviser and the time estimate were therefore all present.

Policy was directed elsewhere.

Within the Trump administration, China was understood primarily through trade deficits, intellectual-property theft, market barriers and strategic rivalry. This led to a focus on tariffs, pressure and containment. Washington saw an expanding external threat, but failed to recognise the cumulative erosion of its own autonomous industrial capacity.

The signal was clear.

As America’s chief trade engineer, Navarro occupied a unique position of influence, but the governing paradigm had already set the points. Offensive realism sent the train down the old Cold War tracks of containment and deterrence, away from the refineries, magnets, materials science and replenishment systems that strategic autonomy required.

From Containment to Detainment

Containment is concerned with how the power of a rival might be constrained. Deterrence focuses on how hostile action might be avoided. Both follow naturally from an anarchy-first conceptualisation of International Relations.

If anarchy is the constant condition of the international system, states must compete for power, prepare for hostile actions and prevent rivals from attaining regional or global supremacy (Mearsheimer 2001). China’s economic expansion therefore becomes another dimension of great-power competition.

Requisite Realism, or RR, begins elsewhere.

Its fundamental ontological primitive is Replenishment Velocity (RV): the rate at which a political unit, organisation or relationship replenishes the “Tangible” and “Intangible” requisites necessary for its continued existence (Koch 2026b).

For any system to remain functional, a requisite must be replenished. This is particularly true for military power.

Military power as a concept is merely a reflection of other civil resources integrated in a socially and politically legitimate manner. If the requisites of military power are consumed or undermined faster than they are replenished, this apparent military power is a weakness in disguise.

RV < DV

When Replenishment Velocity is lower than Depletion Velocity, the unit of analysis is approaching “submergence”, i.e. a state where depletion exceeds replenishment, ultimately restricting the unit’s capacity, independence, political and strategic options.

In the case of the RR ontology, the Neo-Realist definition of Anarchy is not its primary state. Emergent anarchy may also occur in the RR system where deteriorating replenishment relationships create an environment of mutual insecurity and predatory competitive behavior. Anarchy may also become submergent where depletion erodes the ability of states to compete, cooperate, and fulfill past agreements.

One of the first questions posed by RR is whether the elements necessary for the maintenance of political relationships are being replenished fast enough to prevent internal contradictions leading to polarisation and collapse.

Once Replenishment Velocity replaces Anarchy as the ontological primitive of International Relations, China’s rare-earth strategy can be seen as more than coercive competition. It is the engineered control of other states’ capacity to replenish the requisites necessary for their security.

At that stage, it would have made little sense for China to cut the United States off completely from critical minerals. A full restriction would probably have triggered alarm in Washington, encouraged substitution, and forced changes in industrial processes while American technical capacity was still relatively easy to recover. The preferred strategy was to trade but control supply.

Low-cost, sufficient and reliable Chinese minerals made Western production less viable. Refineries closed or were never built, specialised metallurgical skills gradually eroded, and magnet production increasingly shifted to China.

America remained fully stocked by China, and the ability to self-supply continued to degrade.

Containment limits the range of actions available to an opponent. Detainment preserves dependence and gradually reduces the opponent’s capacity to escape.

Engineered Relative Depletion Velocity

Requisite Realism describes the broader mechanism as Engineered Relative Depletion Velocity (ERDV).

ERDV occurs when one actor alters, deliberately or structurally, the replenishment relationship between itself and another actor. It may increase its own industrial capacity while slowing another’s access to critical requisites, controlling replacement velocity or preserving a dependency that progressively erodes the other actor’s autonomous capability (Koch 2026b).

China’s advantage accumulated gradually over time rather than appearing suddenly.

From the 1990s through the 2000s, China expanded its ability to mine, separate, refine and manufacture rare-earth products. The United States remained adequately supplied by inexpensive Chinese output while allowing its own refining, engineering and magnet-manufacturing capacity to diminish.

By 2010, the reconstruction problem was measurable.

In 2017, China publicly restated the strategic importance of rare earths.

By 2026, Navarro was describing the resulting leverage as “starve, not strangle”.

America was not initially depleted of rare-earth products. It was progressively depleted of the capacity to produce them for itself.

The key was not initial scarcity. It was ensuring that supply remained sufficiently available.

Starbucks makes the logic almost embarrassingly simple. If every latte requires milk, milk must be replenished at least as quickly as baristas consume it. Stores, machines and baristas cannot compensate for a disappearing milk supply.

If management allows one external supplier to provide cheap milk for decades while every alternative dairy disappears, the company may appear efficient. Yet it has progressively lost control over whether the latte can remain on the menu.

The same logic applies to military power. Missiles, aircraft and naval vessels are stocks. They remain strategically significant only while the materials, knowledge and systems required to reproduce them can be replenished.

Replenishing milk is common sense.

Requisite Realism says states must replenish the “Tangible” and “Intangible” requisites of sovereign autonomy.

“Starve, Not Strangle”

In July 2026, Navarro described China’s critical-mineral policy as “starve, not strangle”. China, he argued, controls the valves without closing them entirely. Licences can be slowed, access rationed and costs raised without imposing a total cessation of supply (Navarro 2026).

The phrase is expressive and analytically important. Navarro moves beyond the simple observation that China possesses industrial dominance. He attributes calibration and intentional policy to Beijing.

However, “starve, not strangle” remains Navarro”s metaphor to describe relative depletion velocity within an established security framework.

Navarro’s essay examines how China uses control over essential requisites as strategic leverage. He places this within a wider argument about decoupling, competition and the free world. China holds the material advantage, so America must build alternatives that are cleaner, cheaper and faster.

For this, he suggests government support, private capital, and industrial innovation. He outlines new partnerships aimed at reconstructing domestic disaggregation, refining, and permanent-magnet manufacturing.

These are all reasonable goals.

They are goals that should have been initiated after China made thier objectives clear in the 2017 Jiefang article which should have acted as a warning.

Because of this, Navarro’s 2026 article is rearview policy analysis. It aims to figure out the road that comes after the state has already taken the wrong turn.

“Speed of relevance” is Navarro’s phrase that separates him from RR. Navarro’s speed is the ability to build competitive supply chains in order to reconstruct competitive advantage.

For Requisite Realism, slow recognition of the obvious is why the US’ ability to answer the need for replenishment supply chains was lost and why the situation of dependency has been self imposed.

Navarro’s late recognition in 2026 which is now focused on the Replenishment Velocity for essential requisites explains the current situation and the origins of the dependency.

Elemental Sovereignty

Elemental Sovereignty describes a situation where a State cannot expand its military and strategic capabilities and can’t claim permanent self-sufficiency if the basic building blocks of such a Sovereignty still depend on supplies from a strategic rival. It combines an integrated military and industrial Sovereignty of the ability to reproduce all the materials, components and systems that either make up or are the foundation of a state’s national power (Koch 2025a).

For this reason, Navarro’s mine-to-magnet goal aims to restore Elemental Sovereignty.

But Requisite Realism includes more than just material inputs. A refinery cannot be built from just ore and machinery. Refining requires financing, expertise, regulation, and the social and political stability for skilled workers to be trained by tacit knowledge transfer as may of these skills cannot be taught in a classroom and must be learned on the job.

Both the “Tangible” and “Intangible” requisites must be renewed together. A mine is of no use without processing. A refinery is of no use without workers. Technology is of no use without ongoing support. Industrial policy will likely fail prior to reaching any significant scale if it cannot build the necessary political support.

Political power relies on harmonizing the renewal of requisites that comprise political capacity.

The Warning Trump Slept Through

In October 2025, I argued that the Trump administration did not correctly interpret the overt and implicit warning of China’s industrial and elemental monopolies which were visibly apparent in 2017. The U.S. interpreted the world of trade as a contest of prestige, while the Chinese viewed it as a contest of the world structural order (Koch 2025b).

The Trump administration strategically interpreted tariffs, China strategically integrated refining, metallurgy and magnets. The U.S. attempted to alter the balance of trade while failing to build the necessary industrial infrastructure for strategic autonomy.

This is now the wakeup call clearly enunciated in Navarro’s 2026 article.

Navarro’s 2026 article now supplies part of the case history because he recognises that China’s control was not simply accumulated and later activated accidentally. It could be exercised through calibrated scarcity, preserving the dependency while steadily increasing the cost of resisting it.

Whatever formal theory Chinese policymakers employed, their conduct followed replenishment logic. That logic could have emerged from doctrine or institutional memory, from administrative experimentation or simply from the continuity that comes with long-term industrial planning.

China did not need to call it Requisite Realism.

RR’s value as an accepted ontology would create an alternative theoretical parsimony to current canonical theories in IR so that policy advisors had the tools to see the logic before the resulting structure made it too costly to change.

The Peter Paradigm

Navarro is a prime example of a vigilant person. He had the ability to identify China & understand the role of industrial competition, as well as having presidential access.

However, the West’s strategy was based on anarchy, containment and deterrence. The West’s production and knowledge structures seriously depreciated before and during the first Trump administration because contemporaneously engineered depletion velocity by the peer rival’s actions were the “starve and strangle” policy that Navarro only now recognizes in 2026.

It was like they were waiting for the international embargoes and tariffs to contain China, while the home town refinery vanished together with the knowledge workers needed to man the factories and mines.

By 2026, the United States must rebuild critical-mineral systems while maintaining global military commitments and servicing an expanding public debt. Ferguson’s Law argues that when debt-service costs exceed defence spending, a great power approaches the fiscal limits of its international position (Ferguson 2025).

Requisite Realism describes the underlying process as submergence: inherited commitments and accumulated depletion consume capacity faster than the state can replenish the requisites required for future power.

America devoted extraordinary resources to containing rivals while neglecting some of the industrial foundations sustaining its own strategic autonomy. It must now finance its escape from detainment after the cheapest period for reconstruction has passed.

Navarro’s “starve, not strangle” names the mature tactic. It also demonstrates how long Western strategy required before recognising the limitations of its governing theoretical paradigm.

China published the signal.

Navarro stood at the control.

Anarchy directed strategy towards containment.

Requisite Realism would have revealed detainment.

The Peter Principle promotes the individual beyond competence. The Peter Paradigm promotes the theory beyond reality.

Bibliography

Ferguson, N. (2025) ‘Ferguson’s Law: Debt Service, Military Spending, and the Fiscal Limits of Power’, Hoover Institution Working Paper.

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Introduction

The following synthesis of Chor Pharn’s insights is offered as one reader’s attempt to render a rapidly expanding body of work more usable for policy and academic debate; it does not purport to represent Chor Pharn’s own assessment of his project.

This essay first defines the core concepts, then applies Waltz’s (1979) three-image framework to domestic and international politics, presents contrasting dystopian and utopian scenarios plus a current Singapore case study. It concludes with a grounding lens from Requisite Realism that clarifies practical agency for lay readers and policymakers alike. The analysis remains agnostic: it clarifies the logic so readers can apply it to their own concerns about future rule at home and order abroad.

Core Concepts

The stack is the layered digital infrastructure—data platforms, algorithms, cloud systems and automated decision loops—that now performs more and more of the work once done by governments, companies and people. It does not merely store information; it decides what counts as a problem, what counts as credible evidence and what counts as an acceptable solution. The canon is the embedded set of rules, values and purposes programmed into the stack that tells it what it is for and why its outputs should be obeyed. Together they constitute a new mode of governance that operates faster and at greater scale than traditional institutions.

Kenneth Waltz’s three images:

Before turning to the three images, a brief note on Kenneth Waltz’s framework may be helpful for readers less familiar with international relations theory. Waltz (1979) distinguished three levels of analysis, or “images”, to explain international outcomes: the first image focuses on individuals and human nature; the second image on the internal characteristics of states (their domestic regimes, institutions and societies); and the third image on the anarchic structure of the international system itself. In this essay the three images are used to show how Chor Pharn’s stack-canon thesis reconfigures each level of political life.

Waltz’s First Image: Individuals and Human Agency

At the level of the individual, Chor Pharn insists that human beings are not passive data points inside the stack. He introduces the “Middle”—the relational thickness of apprenticeship, dignity and judgment—and the “mud”—the embodied friction of ports, clinics and tired bodies—to show that people retain the capacity to appeal, refuse and and develop moral character even inside automated systems(Chor Pharn 2026b). The first-image insight is therefore double-edged: while the stack can optimise individual behaviour, it cannot eliminate the human need for meaning and refusal. Any viable domestic or international order must preserve spaces where people can still say “no” and be heard.

Waltz’s Second Image: Domestic State Characteristics

At the domestic level the stack and canon reconfigure the internal character of the state. Traditional bureaucracies of lawyers, judges and civil servants are supplemented or partially displaced by digital agents executing decisions according to programmed rules. The canon here functions as a new constitution: the code that defines what counts as fair allocation, acceptable risk or legitimate coercion. Domestic politics becomes a contest over who writes, audits and can revise that code.

Comparative politics reveals variation. Some states embrace a unified state-canon aligned with regime survival. Others attempt checks and balances through transparency or human-review mandates. Small high-capacity states such as Singapore illustrate the pragmatic middle path: strict regulatory overlays on foreign platforms combined with selective sovereign capability-building. The second-image question echoes Susan Strange’s classic tension: will states retain decisive control, or will markets — now dominated by powerful platform corporations — exercise greater authority than states themselves over the interaction between domestic governance, individuals and the technologies that enable the stack and the canon? (Strange 1996)

Waltz’s Third Image: The International System and Competing Stacks

At the international level Chor Pharn moves beyond classical anarchy to describe a system of colliding civilisation-stacks. Large civilisational entities each develop their own integrated technological and normative architectures. The stack is no longer a neutral global utility; it becomes an arena of power where control over binding infrastructure translates into influence over what counts as legitimate international behaviour. Anarchy persists, but it is now structured by competing stacks rather than by the mere distribution of military power.

Predictive Dystopian Case Study: The Superstack and the Unicanon

One possible future illustrates the theory’s logic in stark terms. Assume the American stack—anchored in companies such as Palantir—achieves effective hegemony over Western-aligned digital infrastructure, including significant overlay influence on Indic civilisation through source-code dependence and predictive analytics. Alex Karp has repeatedly articulated this vision, describing Palantir’s duty as helping the United States “scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them” when necessary, framing technological superiority as essential to ensuring that Western norms prevail globally (Karp,2025).

In this scenario (Chor Pharn n.d.c) United States becomes the Superstack hegemon whose canon operates as the constitutive constitutional operating system of the world enforcing an “Unicanon” that decides friend and enemy for the entire system. Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy dichotomy supplies the underlying political ontology (Schmitt 1932/1996). America (or its platform extensions) determines who is friend, who is enemy, who will be coerced through algorithmic exclusion and who will be targeted when necessary. India, for example, retains formal control over its domestic canon but lacks full sovereignty over the source code and predictive layers supplied by the American stack. The biblical resonance is striking: in the beginning the stack said “let there be light” and there was light; it can also say, if you do not do what I say, “I will put out the light.” Access, visibility and existence itself become conditional on compliance with the Superstack’s canon. This trajectory is neither inevitable nor the only possible future; it simply clarifies the stakes if ownership of the binding infrastructure and authorship of the canon concentrate without effective countervailing mechanisms.

Kai-Fu Lee’s analysis of technological bifurcation offers the mirror alternative: a Sinic stack and canon that could impose its own totalising logic on aligned actors (Lee 2018 and subsequent writings). Neither vision leaves clear space for meaningful discretion by subordinate states or corporations inside a canon monopoly. In this dystopian “what if,” traditional institutions become vestigial. Lawyers and judges become optional validators of decisions already rendered by the canon; robotic enforcement replaces much of policing; work is largely automated and basic resources distributed, leaving populations in mediated lives of consumption and screen-based distraction. The Middle and the Mud shrink. Human dignity is not formally abolished but is redefined as compliance within the parameters the stack judges optimal.

Contrasting Utopian Possibility: Multifurcation and the Open Commons

The same theory also accommodates a more plural future. The emerging digital order need not remain merely bifurcated between American and Sinic platforms. It could become multifurcated, with Indic, ASEAN, Russian, European and other code-sovereignty systems developing their own stacks. Yet the answer to multifurcation cannot be another monopoly stack. It must be open source: a shared substrate of code, protocols and interoperability that permits sovereign digital plurality without collapsing into closed technological blocs.

Many stacks. One commons.

In this scenario open-source foundations serve as the neutral substrate upon which sovereign canons can be built and audited. States retain the ability to shape their domestic canon while participating in a global interoperability layer that prevents any single Superstack from extinguishing the light for non-compliant actors. The theory thereby leaves room for both dystopian concentration and utopian pluralism, depending on the political choices made today about ownership, openness and the defence of the human Middle and the Mud.

Third Actual Case History: Singapore and the Listed State – Neutrality in Rhetoric, Alignment in Reality:

While the preceding dystopian and utopian scenarios remain forward-looking projections, a third case is already unfolding in reality. Through the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Temasek Holdings (Temasek) and the Central Provident Fund (CPF) system, the state has placed a concentrated bet on the American listed state that Chor Pharn (2026a) dissects in his June essay, The Listed State.

Singapore has long cultivated an image of careful neutrality, echoing Kishore Mahbubani’s warning that “when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled” and Lee Kuan Yew’s pragmatic balancing act. It has deliberately avoided full membership in AUKUS or the Quad and maintained rhetorical equidistance from overt anti-China alignment. Yet the investment ledger reveals a far stronger de facto choice. GIC and Temasek have taken significant or co-lead positions in frontier American operators, including Anthropic (across multiple rounds), Palantir-linked opportunities, NVIDIA supply chains, Microsoft ecosystem plays, Amazon, Alphabet and the broader hyperscale infrastructure that underpins the SpaceX-xAI convergence (Business Times (2026);GIC 2025; Temasek 2025; Global SWF 2026).

In percentage terms, the US/developed-markets technology and AI allocation is among the largest single thematic exposures in the portfolio, with the Americas now accounting for 49 % of GIC’s capital deployment and 24 % of Temasek’s underlying exposure (making the US the largest foreign destination). These commitments generate returns that flow into the Net Investment Returns Contribution (NIRC), which now underwrites a substantial share of the national budget and sustains the low taxes and reliable pension outcomes that form the visible foundation of People’s Action Party (PAP) legitimacy in a resource-scarce city-state.

Pharn (2026a) warns in the Listed State “the asset is not the plan. It is the power to replace the plan” together with the concentrated founder command, like Musk, that allows rapid recombination of rockets, models, data centres, spectrum and government permissions before outsiders fully grasp the shift.

Pharn then goes on to explain that by securitisation he does not mean the United States has literally issued shares in its sovereignty. He means that capabilities performing state-critical functions are housed inside private firms and then translated into claims that global investors can own. Foreign investors, he observes, trade investing in their own sovereignty in exchange for higher returns from American sovereign corps.

Singapore is making precisely that wager on the long-term sustainability of these corporations and their founders. If corporate America, especially the Magnificent Seven sneezes, the world catches a cold. For Singapore, however, the same event risks an acute high fever that could prove insurmountable because its fiscal health has effectively placed most of its eggs in one strategic American corporate basket. The fiscal investments that keeps the system alive depends on uninterrupted returns from entities whose command structure Singapore does not control. The Singaporean ratepayer may resent the energy demands of data centres the government courts; the CPF member may worry about automation funded by their own savings. Everyone holds a claim. Nobody holds the whole.

As a minority investor with no meaningful voice over founder vetoes or corporate policy, Singapore has already chosen the stack. The governing canon is written for it in distant Terms of Service and End-User Licence Agreements. This reliance is stronger than any treaty because the penalties for exit would be immediate, fiscal and political. The ruling PAP cannot easily sacrifice the returns that sustain its social compact without risking the legitimacy that has defined its rule.

Chor Pharn’s essay, is written analysing an American vantage point that sees the Listed State as a domestic innovation with internal risks. For Singapore, however, it is happening in its own backyard. The city-state’s future-projection offices are staffed by exceptionally clever analysts, yet the Government appears not to have fully internalised the warning. By financing and hosting the very operators whose indispensability makes them difficult to replace, Singapore risks becoming a sophisticated but subordinate node in a machine civilisation whose operating logic is set elsewhere. The bet may pay handsome dividends for now until the casino changes the rules. In the multi-stack world, this actual case reveals how quietly a middle power can align without ever admitting the choice has been made without popular consent.

Control, Agency and the Open Question

Across all three images and levels of analysis, the recurring tension is the same question Chor Pharn leaves deliberately open: who owns the stack and who decides the canon? The theory does not prescribe a final telos. It is a debate about control and outcomes. Domestic regimes can regulate usage, insist on explainability and build selective sovereign fragments. Internationally, rising stacks (Sinic, Indic and others) can contest American hegemony through decoupling, open-source alternatives and parallel infrastructures. The Waltz-derived structure shows that individuals can refuse, domestic institutions can audit and international anarchy can produce new equilibria through collision and replacement rather than convergence.

The framework is therefore parsimonious yet deployable. A lay reader can use it to ask of any policy proposal: Does this increase or decrease dependence on external stacks? Who writes the canon that will govern the resulting decisions? What mechanisms preserve the Middle and the Mud so that human judgment and dignity remain operative? For small and middle powers such as Singapore and the United Kingdom, the framework underscores the value of investing in sovereign digital fragments and sovereign regulatory coherence if they are to retain meaningful discretion within an emerging multi-stack order.

Requisite Realism as Complementary Foundation

Alan Koch’s Requisite Realism (Koch 2026) provides the foundational lens that makes Chor Pharn’s framework operational. Requisite Realism posits replenishment velocity of essential requisites — both tangible (industrial capacity, tooling, energy, raw materials) and intangible (cultural cohesion, institutional trust, perceptual frameworks, legitimacy and human formation) — as the ontological prior that precedes anarchy, the security dilemma and state viability. Without reliable replenishment of this full spectrum, the question “who owns the stack and who decides the canon?” is already answered by whoever maintains the velocity pipeline.

For small polities and organisations this is the decisive constraint. A state that rents its GPUs, imports its foundational code layers and relies on foreign replenishment for either tangible or intangible requisites cannot fully author its own canon. Requisite Realism therefore reframes Chor Pharn’s open question: the contest over stack ownership is first a contest over the replenishment velocity of the full spectrum of requisites needed to sustain independent judgment and legitimacy. Open source becomes the practical strategy for raising that velocity without full replication: to “fork” the shared code (that is, to copy and adapt the open-source substrate for one’s own use), audit it, maintain it and layer sovereign governance on top of the shared foundation. The utopian “Many stacks. One commons” is not idealism; it is the replenishment strategy that allows sovereign plurality without monopoly or isolation.

The theory as a whole, read through this lens, is no longer abstract foresight but a call to holistic action: identify the critical tangible and intangible requisites of the stack in your domain, secure their replenishment velocity, defend the human Middle against hollowing, and cultivate a canon that serves your own polity rather than renting someone else’s. In both domestic governance and international relations the message is the same: control the replenishment of the full range of requisites that run the stack, or the stack will write the canon for you.

Conclusion

Chor Pharn’s contribution is a lean, three-image theory for the digital age. The stack supplies binding power; the canon supplies embedded legitimacy. Their fusion reconfigures individuals, domestic state politics and the international system without necessarily eliminating human agency or historical contingency (that is, the idea that outcomes are not predetermined but depend on specific choices, accidents and path-dependent events). By clarifying ownership and control as the central open question, the theory equips readers to evaluate whether their own societies are tenants in someone else’s architecture or co-authors of the systems that will shape their future. It does not promise convergence or catastrophe. It offers a map for navigating the collisions that are already underway.

References

Business Times (2026) ‘GIC and Temasek join Anthropic’s $65 billion funding round’, The Business Times, 2 June.

Chor Pharn (2021) ‘Beyond Westphalia’ and other dispatches (various Substack and Medium pieces).

Chor Pharn (2026a) ‘The Listed State: SpaceX and the securitisation of American power’,, The Cutting Floor Substack.

Chor Pharn (2026b) ‘The Machine, the Middle and the Mud.’ The Cutting Floor Substack.

GIC (2025) Portfolio update and Americas exposure, Singapore: Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, 28 July.

Global SWF (2026) ‘Sovereign Capital Moves Into Anthropic’s US$965bn AI Platform’, Global SWF, 2 June.

Karp, A. (2025) Investor call statement, cited in ‘The Gleeful Profiteers of Trump’s Police State’, Mother Jones, 6 February. Available at: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/palantir-alex-karp-trump-private-prisons-profiteers/

Lee, K.-F. (2018) AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (and subsequent writings on bifurcation).

Schmitt, C. (1932/1996) The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strange, S. (1996) The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Temasek Holdings (2025) Annual Review 2025, Singapore: Temasek Holdings

Waltz, K.N. (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Koch, A. (2026) Requisite Realism (working papers and Substack contributions, alkoch55 / The Gadfly Doctrine).

PUBLISHED BOOK BY ALAN KOCH 2026

China as a Masterful Lawyering State

Kindle edition: https://a.co/d/05tw4mc8

EPUB direct download (Gumroad): https://gadflydoctrine.gumroad.com/l/wnpnbh

https://books.apple.china-as-a-masterful-lawyering-state/id6780458527

© 2025 Alan Koch.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

A Critique of the Engineering-State thesis in Dan Wang’s Breakneck

by Alan Koch (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

China’s rise has been explained through the language of engineering. Factories, infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and technical expertise are often presented as the foundations of the Chinese development model. In Breakneck, Dan Wang advances one of the most sophisticated versions of this argument, portraying modern China as an engineering state.

This book argues that the engineers came second.

Before factories could be built, foreign technology transferred, supply chains localised and industrial capacity scaled, a legal and institutional architecture first had to be created. Joint-venture laws, Special Economic Zones, foreign-investment regulations, land-use arrangements, administrative incentives and contractual frameworks made China’s industrial apprenticeship possible. The engineers built within a system that lawyers, legislators and political institutions had already designed.

Drawing upon legal history, political economy, statecraft and international relations, Alan Koch challenges the engineering-state thesis and advances an alternative interpretation: China emerged not simply as an engineering state, but as a masterful lawyering state in which legal institutions, administrative incentives and contractual governance preceded industrial transformation.

The volume also introduces the concept of Contract Before Concrete: the proposition that China’s industrial transformation was preceded by legal and institutional transformation.

Written from the perspective of political economy and international relations, China as a Masterful Lawyering State offers a provocative reassessment of one of the most important development stories of the modern era.

China did not merely build its miracle.

It governed it into existence.

The lawyers came first. The engineers followed.

Table of Contents

The China Question

1. The Engineering-State Thesis and the Masterful Lawyering State

2. The Rebuilding of Legal Expertise: Foreign Exchanges and Domestic Indigenisation

3. The JV-SEZ Regime as Extraction Architecture

4. The Mayor Economy and Decentralised Legal Execution

5. Corporate Case Studies and the Taiwan Connection

6. The Silence of Economic Historians and Public Intellectuals

7. The State of the Party

8. The Rare Earth State

9. Wang vs Wang: America Against America and the Limits of the Engineering-State Polemic ( Wang Hu Ning vs Dan Wang)

10. The End of the Beginning: From Apprenticeship to Leverage

Rory Truex, Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University (Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs), has returned to closed-book, in-person finals for the first time in over a decade of teaching.

Truex thinks he is teaching International Politics. He may have accidentally taught his students the most important lesson in higher education today.

Trust is not negotiable.

His students entered a university. They paid elite prices. They came as adults. Then, at the end of the semester, they were handed pencils and blue books because the professor no longer trusted them.

Truex describes the scene: students emerging slowly from the lecture hall on a Saturday morning, cramped hands, glad the semester is finally over. It is the first time in more than a decade of teaching that he has given a closed-book, in-person final. If he had kept the open-book take-home format he once used, he notes, Claude or ChatGPT could have produced A+ answers in minutes.As Truex notes, at his university, take-home exams have fallen from 168 last year to just 49 this semester. The blue book is back.

That is the real lesson.

Not China. Not World Order. Not comparative politics. Not governance.

The lesson was: I do not trust you!

The Wound Beneath the Debate

This is the emotional wound beneath the AI debate. Professors say they are defending academic integrity. Students hear something else: we assume you are dishonest unless we remove your tools, monitor your hands, and force you back into a pre-digital ritual of controlled memory.

Truex is thoughtful, humane, and honest. That is what makes his essay worth reading. He knows something has broken. But he misidentifies the object. AI has not broken student morality. AI has broken the pricing model of the humanities and social sciences.

What the University Is Really Selling

Let us be realist about this.

If AI can explain Chinese elite politics, compare Mao and Deng, analyse cadre promotion, summarise lectures, test a student through dialogue, criticise their argument, and then produce a better essay than most undergraduates, what exactly is the university selling?

Not knowledge. AI has it.

Not access. The internet has it.

Not writing. AI can produce it.

The university is selling certification, status, networks, and the lingering aura of human authority.

That is why the fear smells economic.

In STEM and medicine, AI will be welcomed because results matter. If AI helps design a vaccine, discover a cancer therapy, accelerate protein folding, or model a pandemic response, nobody will say: “Sorry, I refuse this cure because the molecule cheated.” Nobody will reject an AI-designed drug on the grounds that it failed to suffer through a handwritten exam.

Medicine will ask: does it work?

Engineering will ask: does it stand?

Aviation will ask: does it fly?

But humanities professors ask: did you generate this in the approved manner?

That is the difference between a field organised around outcomes and a credential system organised around ritual.

The Retreat to Ritual

The social sciences and humanities now face their uncomfortable moment. Their claim to authority cannot rest on being the gatekeepers of information. That world is over. Their future value lies in curation, judgement, mentorship, oral defence, live argument, historical sensitivity, and moral seriousness.

Yet instead of moving forward, the blue-book professor retreats.

He says: prove you learned by writing under constraint.

The student should reply: prove you teach by meeting me in dialogue.

If AI has made the one-shot essay unreliable as a signal of individual effort, then do not imprison the student in the past. Sit with the student. Question the student. Ask why they chose that argument, that theory, that source, that case. Make them defend their judgement in real time. Make them show the path of thought, not merely the product of compliance.

That is not nostalgia. That is the oldest form of serious teaching returning: Socratic encounter.

Andragogy, Not Pedagogy

Except university students are not children. Pedagogy is the wrong model. They are adult learners. The correct model is andragogy: guided adult inquiry. Adults do not need to be stripped of tools. They need to be taught how to use tools responsibly, transparently, and with critical judgement.

Truex sees this, almost. His best passages are not about exams. They are about lunches, conversations, lived experience, human contact. He knows his value is not that he contains more facts than Claude. He knows his value is that he is a person: a witness, guide, critic, and mentor.

But then he hands out the blue books.

That is the contradiction.

He recognises the future in prose and refuses it in practice.

Students should not accept this quietly. They should not pay cathedral prices to be treated like suspected shoplifters. They should not be told that the future is forbidden because the institution cannot redesign assessment fast enough.

The professoriate must be honest. Some of this fear is about integrity. But some of it is about mortgages, tenure, salaries, and institutional survival. If AI can do much of what humanities professors once monopolised, then the profession must either become more human, more dialogic, and more intellectually daring, or it must defend its income with rituals of distrust.

The Stakes in International Relations

In a field like International Relations, and especially in the study of Chinese politics that Truex teaches, the mismatch is especially costly. The discipline claims to train analysts who can navigate uncertainty, weigh competing explanations, update their views under pressure, and defend a causal claim when challenged. The blue book measures none of these capacities. It measures only whether the student can perform solitary recall under observation. The skills that actually transfer to policy, journalism, or further scholarship are developed in dialogue, not in quarantine from the tools that now shape every serious research workflow.

Trust Is the Tuition

The future university cannot be built on the sentence: I do not trust you.

It must be built on a better one:

Show me how you think.

That is the exam AI cannot fake easily. That is the university worth paying for. Not the blue book. Not the cramped hand. Not the ritual of compliance.

Generated answers are cheap.

Curated judgement is valuable.

Trust is the tuition.

Faculty who recognise the contradiction should begin small experiments with oral defence and live argument this coming semester. Students who feel infantilised should say so, clearly and publicly. The alternative is the slow construction of the shell university, where credentials are issued and genuine intellectual formation quietly withers.

The contradiction runs deeper than institutional habit. The higher-order value has already been described: the lunches, the lived witness, the modelling of judgement in real time. Yet the reach is still for the paper and binding, the cramped hand and the closed book, as though these physical constraints could secure what only the loop of actual thinking can generate. That is the knot.

By Alan Koch June 6 2026

John Mearsheimer arrived in Athens in June 2026 to defend offensive realism. The setting was fitting. The father of modern offensive realism stood in the city of Thucydides arguing that anarchy remains the fundamental condition of international politics. Yet one remark stood above all others.

Mearsheimer declared that “Theory is God.” This essay takes that claim seriously and asks a simple question:

Introduction

In June 2026 John Mearsheimer delivered a keynote address in Athens titled “Why Realism Explains Contemporary Geopolitical Developments Better than Alternative Theories” (Mearsheimer, 2026). He used the occasion to reaffirm that survival under anarchy remains the central driver of state behaviour and that economic interdependence ultimately subordinates itself to the security dilemma. To illustrate Chinese engagement with his ideas, Mearsheimer recounted his experiences during repeated visits to China beginning shortly after the 2001 publication of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Chinese interlocutors had repeatedly invited him back, treated him as something of a “rock star,” and sought to “defeat” his theory. The only substantial counter-argument they advanced, he reported, was economic interdependence: mutual prosperity would prevent conflict because no rational actor would “slay the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

This paper takes that reported exchange as its point of departure but reads it more deeply. It suggests that the broader intellectual success of offensive realism, together with Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap framing, has served a strategic function that extends beyond keeping the United States focused on external balancing. What I term China’s strategy of Detainment - a dynamic I have coined to theorize China’s method of deterrence and tacit warfare - passively and aggressively allows America to become subject to relative decline through its own internal contradictions, while encouraging that decline through engineered depletion of the essential requisites America requires for replenishment of its over-extended military-industrial projection. Under the continuous theoretical direction of Wang Huning from Deng Xiaoping through Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, China has maintained high Replenishment Velocity in its own civic and cultural stocks while the United States has accelerated negative RV in legitimacy, cohesion and financial domains.

Requisite Realism intervenes at the ontological level (Koch, 2026b). It proposes that anarchy is not the primitive condition of international politics but an emergent property that appears only once polities have achieved and can maintain the replenishment velocity of essential requisites. Requisites are not a narrowly material inventory. They are the full constellation of conditions - tangible or intangible - without which no political unit can act, endure or renew itself: military-industrial base, demographic and human-capital stocks, technological and tacit knowledge, ecological throughput, and, pivotally, social and political legitimacy and cohesion (Koch, 2026b). The master variable is Replenishment Velocity (RV): the net rate at which a unit regenerates these interdependent stocks after shocks. When RV in the legitimacy and cohesion domain turns persistently negative, internal depletion exceeds external damage, exactly as Thucydides recorded in the stasis at Corcyra where words lost their meaning, oaths became worthless, and the city devoured itself (Thucydides, 1972, 3.82-83). Mearsheimer’s framework does not furnish an explicit proposition for this internal replenishment as a prior condition, nor does it register the sophisticated dynamic that exploits it. RR does.

Mearsheimer’s Account of His Visits to China

Mearsheimer opened the Athens lecture by insisting that theory is indispensable to policy. “Theory is God,” he stated (Mearsheimer, 2026). He then turned to the rise of China. In the 1990s and 2000s, he argued, the United States should not have facilitated China’s economic growth because doing so would create a peer competitor (Mearsheimer, 2001; Mearsheimer, 2026). Realist logic dictated keeping China as weak as possible. Liberal policymakers relied on economic interdependence, institutionalism and democratic peace. Mearsheimer rejected this chain of reasoning. A powerful China would seek regional hegemony in East Asia “the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere.”

To illustrate Chinese engagement with his theory, Mearsheimer recounted his experiences during repeated visits to China beginning shortly after 2001. Chinese interlocutors had repeatedly invited him back and sought to “defeat” his argument. Democratic peace theory was unavailable to them. The argument they invariably advanced was economic interdependence. Mearsheimer’s response was direct: survival sits at the heart of realism; prosperity sits at the heart of interdependence theory (Mearsheimer, 2026). In a world where survival is the principal goal, states will behave in ways that do not apply when prosperity is the principal goal.

This exchange captures the surface of Mearsheimer’s position. Anarchy remains the ontological starting point; economic arguments ultimately subordinate themselves to survival and relative power. What it does not capture is the prior condition of holistic replenishment velocity, nor the deeper dynamic - what I term Detainment - that has turned American offensive realist commitments into an instrument of American self-depletion.

Theory as God: Anarchy as Revealed Form

Mearsheimer’s declaration that “Theory is God” is revealing because it sacralises theory as the supreme instrument of interpretation. He does not mean God in the theological sense of divine judgement. He means that theory determines what facts matter, how causation is understood, and what futures can be imagined. In offensive realism, the sacred object inside that theory is anarchy. Anarchy becomes the first cause. From it follow uncertainty, fear, the security dilemma, power maximisation and the tragic teleology of survival (Mearsheimer, 2001; Mearsheimer, 2026).

Requisite Realism accepts the seriousness of theory but challenges the location of the first cause. If Mearsheimer’s theory is God, then anarchy is not God itself. It is the visible son of the theory: the form through which offensive realism enters the world. Replenishment Velocity occupies the deeper ontological position. It is the prior source condition that makes anarchy politically meaningful. States cannot compete under anarchy unless they first replenish the requisites that allow them to exist, act, endure and recover (Koch, 2026b).

The correction is therefore not anti-realist. It is deeper realism. Mearsheimer explains how states behave once they are already inside the anarchical arena. Requisite Realism asks what makes entry into that arena possible, what sustains participation, and what causes a state to fall below the threshold of effective agency. Anarchy is not abolished. It is demoted from first cause to emergent condition. Replenishment is the prior reality from which anarchy derives its force.

The Strategic Reception of Offensive Realism and the Dynamic of Detainment

The influence of offensive realism and Allison’s Thucydides Trap framing on American strategic discourse since the mid-2010s has been substantial (Allison, 2017; Mearsheimer, 2001). These frameworks supplied an intellectual architecture that encouraged the United States to measure security by global presence, forward deployment and platform count. China’s engagement with these frameworks has served a far more sophisticated purpose than keeping the debate within familiar parameters.

Mearsheimer does not acknowledge the dynamic I call Detainment - a term I have coined to theorize how I see China’s method of deterrence and tacit warfare. Detainment passively and aggressively allows America to become subject to relative decline through its own internal contradictions, while encouraging that decline through engineered depletion of the essential requisites America needs for replenishment of its over-extended military-industrial projection. Under the continuous theoretical direction of Wang Huning from Deng Xiaoping through Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, China has managed its own internal contradictions as it grew wealthier - maintaining high Replenishment Velocity in civic cohesion and political legitimacy - while recognising that America’s internal contradictions could be leveraged.

The dynamic operates by permitting - and in subtle ways encouraging - the United States to pursue the very offensive realist aspirations Mearsheimer advocates: global hegemony, containment of peer competitors, forward military presence across multiple theatres, and the platform-heavy force structure required to sustain it. By allowing America to defeat itself through overreach, financial depletion and, most corrosively, the internal polarization and loss of legitimacy that follows from endless external commitments, the strategy accelerates negative RV in precisely the domains where the American federal republic is most vulnerable. When Chinese interlocutors in Mearsheimer’s recounted visits engaged him on economic interdependence while knowing the deeper game was different, they were participating in a discourse that kept the United States locked in an external-balancing paradigm while the real depletion occurred internally.

This dynamic can be summarised as Koch’s Law of Detainment:

This is the deeper mechanism. Offensive realism tells the United States that it must contain China through presence and power maximisation. Detainment allows China to ensure that the United States continues to contain - and ultimately deplete - itself through the policies its own realist theorists recommend. The result is a differential in Replenishment Velocity that Mearsheimer’s framework, focused on anarchy as primitive and the security dilemma as external, cannot register. A civilisation-state that has maintained high RV in civic cohesion under Wang Huning’s long-term theoretical management confronts a federal republic whose RV in those same domains has turned persistently negative through the very overreach its theorists treat as necessary.

Thucydides understood the endogenous mechanism. Corcyra’s stasis was not a failure of naval tonnage; it was the catastrophic collapse of the social and political requisite of trust. Words lost their meanings, oaths became worthless, kinship yielded to faction, and the city devoured itself (Thucydides, 1972, 3.82-83). RR translates that insight into a measurable proposition: a unit whose RV in the legitimacy-and-cohesion domain turns persistently negative will prove more vulnerable than one that temporarily lags in tungsten or shipyards. Political will, civic training, journalistic integrity, nutritional security, and the replenishment of shared constitutional norms are core requisites whose velocity determines survival. A federal republic that cannot replenish institutional trust faster than demographic and cultural change erodes it, or that weaponises state power against its own demographic future, has entered negative RV, however impressive its carrier strike groups appear on paper or at sea.

Wang Huning, Internal Contradiction and the Intellectual Prehistory of Detainment

The strategic logic of Detainment is not presented here as a conspiracy claim. It is better understood as a pattern of strategic recognition, patience and exploitation. Wang Huning’s America Against America, written after his travels in the United States in the late 1980s and published in 1991, is central to this case history. Wang did not portray America as simply weak. His more sophisticated claim was that American strength and weakness existed together. The United States possessed extraordinary technological, economic and institutional capacity, yet also contained severe internal contradictions: commodification, inequality, cultural fragmentation, value-system instability and political disunity (Wang, 1991).

This matters because Wang later became one of the most influential political intellectuals in post-Deng China. Reuters describes him as a political survivor who served Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, while Brookings notes that Wang is believed under Xi to be a source of signature political concepts and a more assertive foreign policy (Baptista and Martina, 2022; Li and Thornton China Center staff, 2022). The significance is not that Wang personally designed every policy later adopted by Beijing. The significance is that his early diagnosis of American contradiction entered the intellectual bloodstream of a political system increasingly concerned with managing the dangers of wealth, liberalisation and social fragmentation.

From a Requisite Realist perspective, Wang’s insight was fundamentally about legitimacy velocity. A rich state can still decay if its civic, moral and political requisites deplete faster than they are replenished. Detainment names the external strategic expression of this insight: allow the rival to remain trapped inside its own theory of power, encourage it to overextend, and exploit the material and legitimacy costs of that overextension. In this sense, Wang supplies not the conspiracy but the diagnosis. America could be weakened not primarily by invasion, but by the acceleration of its own internal contradictions.

Requisite Realism: Replenishment Velocity as Ontological Prior

Requisite Realism begins one analytical step earlier than offensive realism (Koch, 2026b). It treats the capacity to maintain replenishment velocity of essential requisites as the condition that first constitutes a polity as a state capable of participating in anarchy. Requisites are the full constellation of conditions - tangible or intangible - without which no political unit can act, endure or renew itself. The ordinary dictionary meaning confirms this breadth: a requisite is “something that you need for a particular purpose” or “an important necessary thing” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 2026; Cambridge English Dictionary, 2026). A state may possess the most sophisticated weapon system yet lack the trained crews, fuel stocks, maintenance infrastructure, logistical depth and doctrinal coherence required to use it effectively. Requisites therefore encompass the military-industrial base and economic surplus, demographic and human-capital stocks, technological and tacit knowledge, ecological throughput, and, pivotally, social and political legitimacy and cohesion.

The master variable is Replenishment Velocity (RV): the net rate at which a unit regenerates these interdependent stocks after exogenous or endogenous shocks. RV can be positive, zero, or - decisively - negative. When legitimacy and civic trust enter negative velocity, the republic depletes faster than any adversary can inflict external damage. This does not reject Mearsheimer’s emphasis on uncertainty, capabilities and survival (Mearsheimer, 2001; Mearsheimer, 2026). It nests those dynamics within a prior condition. Offensive realism offers a powerful account of how states that have already secured replenishment velocity behave toward one another. It has less to say about how states that lose that velocity - through external chokepoints such as tungsten or through internal self-depletion encouraged by the dynamic of Detainment - cease to be full participants in the system he describes. The United States has entered a submergent condition in anarchy but has not yet reached the catastrophic threshold of Napoleon’s Russia campaign. It is, however, close.

The Costs of Overextension and Engineered Depletion

The operational constraints revealed during the 2026 Iran conflict illustrate the gap between inherited posture and current replenishment capacity. Aircraft carriers could not approach within effective range for sustained operations without exposing themselves to modern anti-access systems; return sorties required extensive aerial refuelling. These constraints reflect a deeper mismatch. From a Requisite Realism perspective, the difficulty lies in the replenishment velocity required to sustain and regenerate platforms under peer competition and deliberate chokepoint strategies. The tungsten story is paradigmatic: engineered depletion in the critical industrial requisite for machining and tooling directly impairs military replenishment velocity. The security dilemma cannot direct policy toward greater military strength when the industrial-military complex lacks access to that foundational input. This is not an accident of geography or markets; it is the material manifestation of the dynamic of Detainment that has allowed the United States to pursue offensive realist aspirations until those aspirations depleted the very requisites required to sustain them. As Niall Ferguson has observed in what has become known as Ferguson’s Law, a great power that spends more on the interest of its debt than on its military budget is in decline. The United States now confronts that condition while its theoretical commitments continue to encourage the very overextension that accelerates it.

Missile Depletion, Tungsten and the Requisite Realist Case for Submergence

The clearest material case history for Requisite Realism is the depletion of missile and interceptor stocks under conditions of extended conflict. Modern military power is usually described through platforms: carriers, aircraft, missile systems, submarines and satellites. Requisite Realism begins one step earlier. It asks whether those systems can be regenerated at the required speed after use. The decisive question is not merely capability. It is replenishment velocity.

CSIS analysis of the 2026 Iran conflict concluded that the United States had enough missiles to continue that war under plausible scenarios, but that the risk would persist for many years in future wars. In the 39 days before the ceasefire, US forces heavily used seven key munitions; for four of them, the United States may have expended more than half of the prewar inventory, and rebuilding those munitions to prewar levels would take from one to four years (Cancian and Park, 2026a). A later CSIS analysis described missile inventory rebuilding as a multiyear project and estimated that Tomahawk replacements ordered in the FY 2027 budget would start arriving only in March 2030, after a 34-month production lead time (Cancian and Park, 2026b). This is precisely the condition RR describes: visible power remains high, but regeneration capacity has fallen below strategic demand.

Tungsten sharpens the case. Tungsten is not glamorous like an aircraft carrier or hypersonic missile, but it is foundational to tooling, machining, hard metals and precision manufacturing. The USGS reports that tungsten has not been mined commercially in the United States since 2015 and that approximately 60 per cent of US tungsten consumption is used in cemented carbide parts for cutting and wear-resistant applications (USGS, 2026). Reuters reports that China imposed new export restrictions on tungsten in 2025, cut mining quotas, and limited 2026-27 tungsten export permissions to fifteen firms; it also notes that the United States has no active commercial tungsten mines (Shivaprasad and Choubey, 2026). The Financial Times further reported that Chinese buyers had been seeking tungsten scrap throughout the United States since early 2025, intensifying price competition over a critical defence metal (Financial Times, 2026).

This is Detainment in material form. The rival is encouraged to expend advanced systems in multiple theatres while the upstream requisites needed to regenerate those systems become slower, more expensive or externally constrained. The security dilemma tells America to deploy. Requisite Realism asks whether America can replenish what deployment consumes.

The same pattern appears in legitimacy and cohesion. Before the full Corcyra condition appears, politics begins to adopt friend-enemy intensities in which rivals are no longer treated as loyal opponents but as existential threats. Schmitt defined the political through the friend-enemy distinction, while Thucydides showed at Corcyra how civic language, trust and obligation collapse when faction overwhelms shared order (Schmitt, 2007; Thucydides, 1972, 3.82-83). Pew Research Center’s 2025 data show public trust in the US federal government near historic lows, with only 9 per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, and 26 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, saying they trust the federal government just about always or most of the time (Pew Research Center, 2025). This is not yet Corcyra. It is the pre-Corcyra legitimacy environment in which institutional trust depletes faster than it is replenished.

This does not mean the United States has collapsed. It means it has entered a submergent condition in specific domains. Its military power remains formidable, but its replenishment velocity is increasingly constrained by depleted inventories, fragile supply chains, critical-mineral dependence, production bottlenecks and internal legitimacy erosion. Offensive realism sees the external contest. Requisite Realism sees the industrial and civic metabolism underneath it.

Conclusion

Mearsheimer’s account of his visits to China is revealing precisely because it shows how theoretical debate can be strategically useful even when participants appear to disagree (Mearsheimer, 2026). By keeping the conversation within the parameters of offensive realism and its liberal alternatives, the exchange helped sustain a framework that encouraged the United States to interpret its security requirements in expansive terms while missing both the prior condition of holistic replenishment velocity and the deeper dynamic - what I term Detainment - that has allowed America to defeat itself through its own internal contradictions and the engineered depletion of the requisites it needs to sustain over-extended projection.

The Wang Huning case history supplies the intellectual prehistory of Detainment. America Against America diagnosed the United States as a society in which affirmative and negative forces coexist inside the same machine, while Wang’s later career placed that diagnosis near the centre of post-Deng Chinese ideological management (Wang, 1991; Baptista and Martina, 2022; Li and Thornton China Center staff, 2022). The missile and tungsten case history supplies the material mechanism. CSIS shows that heavy expenditure of key munitions creates a multi-year future-war risk, while USGS, Reuters and Financial Times reporting show that tungsten constraints sit upstream of the tooling and hard-metal systems required for military-industrial replenishment (Cancian and Park, 2026a; Cancian and Park, 2026b; USGS, 2026; Shivaprasad and Choubey, 2026; Financial Times, 2026). Pew’s public trust data supply the civic mechanism: the United States is not yet Corcyra, but its legitimacy RV has turned dangerously negative (Pew Research Center, 2025).

Requisite Realism therefore supplies the missing propositions. Anarchy is emergent. Requisites are holistic: tangible and intangible. Replenishment Velocity is the master variable. When RV in the legitimacy and cohesion domain turns persistently negative, internal depletion exceeds external damage, as Thucydides recorded at Corcyra. When RV in the industrial domain turns negative, platforms become less important than the capacity to regenerate the materials, tools, crews, doctrines and supply chains that sustain them.

The ontological correction is the deepest challenge to offensive realism. Mearsheimer says theory is God, but his theory treats anarchy as the first cause. Requisite Realism relocates first cause to replenishment. Anarchy is not abolished; it is demoted. It is the visible form through which power competition appears after a political unit has already secured the requisites of survival. The United States has entered a submergent condition but retains agency to reverse negative velocity in its core political and industrial requisites. Recalibrating strategy around that reversal, rather than indefinite global presence, offers the only sustainable basis for American security in a competitive industrial and civilisational environment.

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Graham Allison’s thesis in Destined for War (2017) has shaped a decade of debate on Sino-American rivalry. By invoking Thucydides’s judgement that ‘The growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable’ (Thucydides 1998, p. 16) is the very passage Allison places at the foundation of his thesis (Allison 2017). Allison distilled a structural logic of power transition: a rising power threatens an established hegemon, and the resulting stress renders violent conflict highly probable. Yet this framing rests on a foundational category error that is not merely analytical but fundamental. Allison extracts an intra-civilisational conflict, the Peloponnesian War between Greek poleis organised through the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League and the Athenian-led Delian League, recasting it as a universal theory of international great-power transition. In doing so, he takes a domestic civil dispute between Athenian and Spartan Greeks, bound by shared language, gods, mythic inheritance, aristocratic codes, games, sanctuaries and a common memory of resistance to Persia, and turns it into an international theory of superpower dominance.

Thucydides himself exposed the deepest trap elsewhere. In 427 BCE the island polis of Corcyra descended into one of the most savage episodes of civil strife (stasis) recorded in classical antiquity. What began as a factional struggle between a democratic party aligned with Athens and an oligarchic party backed by Corinth quickly spiralled into wholesale slaughter. Families were torn apart, kinship yielded to party loyalty, and even neutral citizens were murdered for the crime of refusing to take sides. Thucydides presents this not merely as a local tragedy but as the paradigmatic case of how civil war unleashes internal collapse. In the analytical chapters that follow his narrative, he offers what remains one of the most penetrating diagnoses of political disintegration in Western literature.(Thucydides, 1998, 3.82–83).

The deeper horror, for Thucydides, lay not in the violence itself but in the moral and linguistic inversion it produced. Millenia before Orwell’s critique of political language and linguistic manipulation (Orwell, 1946; 1949), Thucydides recognised how civil strife could corrupt the meaning of words themselves. To fit with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.

Reckless audacity became celebrated as loyal courage; prudent hesitation was denounced as cowardice; moderation was scorned as unmanly weakness; and the ability to see both sides of a question was dismissed as unfitness for action. Fanatical enthusiasm passed for true manhood, while plotting and betrayal were rebranded as legitimate self-defence. Oaths lost their binding power; trust evaporated; and private enmity disguised itself as political principle. The ‘ancient simplicity’ in which honour had once played a central role was laughed to scorn and swept away. Society fractured into armed camps in which no man trusted his fellow (Thucydides, 1972, 3.82–83; Thucydides, 1998, p. 420). War both foreign and domestic, he argues, acts as a violent teacher that strips away the restraints of civilisation, revealing the raw tendencies of human nature, or physis, when freed from the constraints of convention, or nomos. Such evils ‘have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same’.

The Peloponnesian War was therefore never a clean model of inter-civilisational transition; it was a civil war within a civilisational field, fought by rival alliance systems struggling for authority over who would define Hellas itself. The real Thucydidean mechanism, as Thucydides himself warned in his searing account of stasis at Corcyra, was the fear that one internal model of order would displace another within the same civilisational arena.

This category error fatally weakens the analogy when applied to contemporary Sino-American rivalry. China is not Athens inside America’s Greek world. It is a civilisation-state with its own historical depth, political grammar and strategic memory (Jacques, 2012). America, by contrast, has never been a civilisation in the Chinese sense. It is a nascent federal republic that became the leading power within a wider transatlantic and Western civilisational order. Its post-1945 hegemony rested not on solitary national capacity alone, but on an extended ecology of alliances and institutions: NATO, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, Bretton Woods, the dollar system and the wider liberal order (Ikenberry, 2011). That ecology magnified American power and gave a burgeoning federal republic civilisational reach.

Reciprocal tariffs on European allies, hostility towards NATO burden-sharing, suspicion of Europe, antagonism towards Canada and transactional treatment of Australia and Japan have accelerated America’s withdrawal from the civilisational sphere that once amplified its primacy (White House, 2025; German Marshall Fund, 2025). Stripped of that wider ecology, the United States appears less as a self-sufficient civilisation-superpower than as a national actor retreating into defensive sovereignty. Relative to China’s civilisational cohesion, this contraction makes America weaker than Allison’s binary model allows.

The true Thucydidean analogy therefore lies inside the United States itself. The historically dominant non-Hispanic white majority, which accounted for roughly 64 per cent of the US population in 2010 and around 57–58 per cent in 2024–2025 estimates, faces the prospect of losing majority status by the middle of the twenty-first century (US Census Bureau, 2025; Brookings Institution, 2018). The rising force is not a foreign state, but a younger, more urban, mixed-race and immigrant-shaped demographic coalition. The old ruling bloc therefore experiences ordinary democratic arithmetic as civilisational displacement. Democratic institutions built when majority rule confirmed its cultural dominance now appear threatening because they may empower a different majority. Elections, courts, federalism, voting rights, education, immigration policy and even census categories have become battlegrounds over who owns the republic.

The policies associated with the Trump administration and anticipated in Project 2025 (Heritage Foundation, 2023) suggest the beginning of an internal Thucydidean crisis. President Trump and his vanguard: most prominently led by Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the administration’s immigration agenda, embarking the Administration on an aggressive campaign of mass deportation and immigration control explicitly framed as necessary to disrupt the emerging mixed-race electoral majority and rebalance demographics in favour of the non-Hispanic white population (Migration Policy Institute, 2026; New York Times, 2026). ICE arrests have quadrupled, tactical enforcement operations involving armed federal agents and National Guard units have targeted unauthorised immigrants in major cities, legal immigration has been slashed by an estimated 33–50 per cent, and the administration has pursued a million deportations per year while invoking emergency powers and dismantling longstanding norms (Forbes, 2026; American Immigration Council, 2024/2026 updates).

These measures are not presented merely as border security; they are extolled as the required forceful disruption of demographic trends that would otherwise consign the historic majority to minority status. In doing so, the declining status group deploys the full coercive apparatus of the state to resist the logic of majority rule itself. The result is the opening phase of what amounts to domestic civil strife. It has not yet manifested as open armed conflict, but appears instead in the erosion of institutional trust, the weaponisation of democratic machinery, and the explicit mobilisation of state power against perceived civilisational displacement.

Wang Huning saw this more clearly than Allison. In America Against America (1991), Wang’s central insight was not that America would be defeated from outside, but that its internal contradictions, race, individualism, inequality, commodification and institutional mistrust, could hollow it out from within. Allison saw America facing China across the Pacific. Wang saw America facing itself in the mirror.

Allison’s category error is therefore not merely academic. By misapplying an intra-civilisational Greek precedent to an inter-civilisational contest, the Thucydides Trap thesis has obscured the more immediate danger: the United States may enter great-power competition already fractured along lines that a civilisation-state like China does not confront. The Peloponnesian War was a civil war within a civilisational field, fought by rival alliance systems seeking to define the Greek order. The sharper lesson for America is therefore internal. A republic whose historic majority no longer trusts democracy because democracy may empower a different majority—which responds by mobilising deportation, demographic engineering and institutional disruption—has already entered its own Thucydidean crisis. The trap is not simply that China is rising. It is that another America is rising inside America, and the old America increasingly treats that rise as an existential defeat requiring extraordinary, even violent, countermeasures.

The scholar’s duty in international relations theory is not to ratify prevailing orthodoxies but to expose their fragilities. Allison’s Thucydides Trap, read through the prism of offensive realism (Mearsheimer 2014), correctly registers the structural tension between a rising China and a ruling United States. Yet it remains silent on the deeper Thucydidean mechanism that actually undid the Hellenic world: the stasis that exhausted the independent city-state system, paved the way for Alexander’s transient empire, and helped inaugurate a long historical trajectory in which Greek political life disappeared as a sovereign force for nearly two millennia. The contemporary analogue is therefore not interstate war but endogenous collapse.

Washington’s relentless pursuit of containment—QUAD and AUKUS architectures, freedom-of-navigation operations in Chinese-claimed waters, multi-billion-dollar arms packages to frontline allies, and the projected trillion-dollar Golden Dome missile shield—diverts fiscal, institutional and moral resources from the republic’s internal ecology at the precise moment when that ecology is under maximum stress (Congressional Research Service 2025).

Wang Huning saw this more clearly than any Western realist: America’s greatest adversary is America itself (Wang 1991). Pape’s documentation of an “era of violent populism” confirms the trajectory: ordinary citizens increasingly license force to resist perceived civilisational displacement, eroding the very institutional trust that has historically underwritten American power (Pape 2025). The war that matters, therefore, may not be the one fought across the Pacific but the one already unfolding inside the United States. If the republic neglects its own internal population while expending blood, treasure and political capital on offensive-realist objectives abroad, the Thucydidean trap it faces will not be China’s rise; it will be its own stasis.

Epilogue: Returning to Thucydides

Readers may judge for themselves whether the modern concept of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ accurately reflects the concerns of Thucydides himself. The phrase does not appear anywhere in The History of the Peloponnesian War. It is a modern formulation derived principally from a single sentence in Book I: ‘The growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable’ (Thucydides 1998, p. 16) is the very passage Allison places at the foundation of his thesis (Allison 2017).

To assist readers unfamiliar with the original, the following short extract from Book III captures Thucydides’ deeper preoccupation: the civil strife (stasis) that, in his view, posed the gravest threat to the Hellenic world. In 427 BCE the island polis of Corcyra descended into factional massacre between democratic and oligarchic parties. What began as a local power struggle quickly produced wholesale domestic slaughter, as political polarisation corrupted language, reversed morality and reduced ordinary ethical restraints into the friend/enemy dichotomy.

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Woodruff, P. (2021) Essential Thucydides: On Justice, Power, and Human Nature: Selections from The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, https://a.co/02vX2mSW

This is the headline and stand-first of Fareed Zakaria’s sharply worded opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 May 2026:

DONALD TRUMP’S INCREDIBLY RECKLESS SECOND TERM:

A PRESIDENCY STRIPPED OF RESTRAINTS — AND TURNED TOWARD PROFIT.

In it, Zakaria surveys Trump’s second term and the ham-handed efforts to annex Greenland and Canada, massive tariff hikes on most of the world, a cruel immigration crackdown that has been lawless, and the sudden launching of a war, without U.N. sanction, congressional consultation or any clear strategy. Fareed then expresses surprise at Jeff Bezos’s assessment that Trump is now “a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.” The stand-first sets up Zakaria’s central lament: a presidency stripped of the informal restraints that once tempered its impulses and turned instead toward open family enrichment.

In the present moment of May 2026, however, President Donald Trump’s second-term conduct operates squarely within the legal boundaries of the United States Constitution, ratified and affirmed without opposition by all three branches of government. The Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling shields core executive functions. Republican majorities in both the House and Senate have declined to pursue impeachment, oversight, or any meaningful restraint. And the executive branch itself exercises its constitutional monopoly on enforcement. As Zakaria documents, the executive has pursued enrichment on a scale that would imperil any lesser official, yet it does so without active judicial or statutory impediment. “The legal guardrails are weaker than most Americans realise,” Zakaria notes. “The president is largely exempt from standard federal conflict-of-interest laws.” Many of the actions chronicled — timed equity trades, foreign investments in family-linked ventures, and broad immunity grants — would expose even senior Cabinet secretaries to “grave legal peril.” Yet, Zakaria writes, “for a president, the Supreme Court has decided that the only remedy for ‘official acts’ is impeachment and two-thirds of the Senate voting for conviction, which in our partisan age requires a civic miracle.” Congressional acquiescence and Senate inaction supply the necessary institutional ratification. This is not circumvention of law but its contemporary manifestation, endorsed across the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Senate of the United States.

Zakaria’s willingness to publish so unflinching a critique inside the Bezos-owned Washington Post ecosystem deserves particular admiration. He opens the column by recording his own surprise at the owner’s public assessment: “I was surprised to hear Jeff Bezos — the owner of The Washington Post, and an obviously intelligent and accomplished businessman — say this week, ‘I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.’” In an age when media proprietors are frequently cast as “techbros” wielding outsized influence, Zakaria demonstrates rare journalistic courage. Unafraid of potential repercussions from corporate ownership or Silicon Valley sensibilities, he dissects the very administration Bezos has elsewhere appeared to tolerate. For a public intellectual of Zakaria’s stature, this independence is commendable; it affirms that his analysis proceeds from conviction rather than institutional caution.

President Trump’s exercise of this latitude, in turn, aligns with a Machiavellian realism in which the ends justify the means and might makes right. Niccolò Machiavelli counselled that the prince must adapt to circumstances, wielding power as necessity demands for the preservation and enhancement of his own position — which, in the logic of The Prince, is indistinguishable from the interest of the state itself. In the international realm, this is the logic of Thucydides: “the strong do what they can and the weak do what they must.”

Alliances become fungible instruments; domestic policy and foreign posture are recalibrated to serve the ruler’s effective command. The Trump administration’s transactional approach, recasting public office as a platform for decisive action, embodies precisely this stance. Scale and institutional sanction transform what critics might label self-dealing into sovereign prerogative. As Zakaria himself concedes, the difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0 lies not in alleged illegality but in the open “contempt for restraint” once informal norms are stripped away. The Constitution, as written and interpreted by the current alignment of the Supreme Court, Congress and the Senate, grants President Trump absolute discretion to act precisely in this space.

The ancient anecdote of the bandit and Alexander the Great captures the underlying truth with respect to Trump’s position. When the pirate was brought before the emperor and asked why he plundered the seas with a single ship, he replied: “I am called a robber because I have a small boat and steal a bit here and there. You have a vast fleet and you can steal and kill whom you like and they call you an emperor.” In 2026, the American presidency commands the world’s most powerful state. What smaller actors might decry as enrichment becomes, under unified congressional and judicial cover, the legitimate exercise of constitutional authority. Zakaria records the acting attorney general’s announcement granting Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from all audits and investigations for past tax-related misconduct, an immunity the Justice Department itself claims lasts “forever.” The Trump Organisation, for its part, maintains that neither the president nor his family directs specific investments, a defence that the current legal architecture does not disturb. In this constitutional instant, might is right, and the Constitution itself has made it so.

What is tragic, of course, is that Zakaria’s column inadvertently reveals the limits of his own decades-long project as a public intellectual. For years he has addressed the American people through CNN’s Global Public Square, best-selling books, and regular columns, preaching the virtues of liberal internationalism, institutional restraint, and enlightened global leadership. Yet the populism that propelled Trump to re-election has proved impervious to that message. Ironically, in diagnosing the raw mechanics of power at work, Zakaria’s analysis echoes the core thesis of John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics — the defining book by America’s foremost offensive realist. Zakaria, an unusual IR theorist who was supervised by Samuel Huntington and spent time with Henry Kissinger, usually leans more institutionalist than Mearsheimer yet has long displayed realist tendencies; in this moment, the two find themselves unlikely kindred spirits.

Even as Zakaria laments “the destruction of all he holds dear” — the erosion of republican norms, the fusion of public office with private gain, and the transactionalisation of American power. He has become, in this piece, something of an apologist for himself. His very critique concedes that the current configuration operates within the legal parameters the Constitution supplies and the American electorate has ratified. Zakaria’s decades of influence as one of the most prominent academic voices in the public square have helped produce, or at least failed to forestall, an America that now embraces the opposite of what he cherishes. The column thus stands as both a courageous act of analysis and an elegy for his worldview that, for all its eloquence, has not carried the day.

At this moment, therefore, President Trump acts within the rule of law as the Constitution sets it out. The framers designed a system of separated powers that, when aligned behind executive initiative, produces exactly the latitude now on display. Future electoral cycles or shifting majorities may contest or recalibrate that reality; such contingencies, however, belong to tomorrow’s debate. In the here and now, the president’s conduct is constitutionally sanctioned, institutionally affirmed, and legally unassailable. In the end, Zakaria’s Global Public Square has succumbed to the populist color revolution of the Orange Don.

Requisite Realism and the Ontological Limits of Anarchy

The Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 has long served as a canonical case in military history and international relations (IR) scholarship, traditionally framed through the enduring myth of ‘General Winter’: the notion that extreme cold alone annihilated the Grande Armée. Recent ancient DNA analysis from mass graves near Vilnius has overturned this narrative, revealing that infectious diseases, notably paratyphoid fever caused by Salmonella enterica and louse-borne relapsing fever from Borrelia recurrentis, ravaged French forces months before the harshest winter conditions set in (Barbieri et al. 2025; Health Checks on History 2026). Contaminated supplies, lice-infested camps, malnutrition and overcrowding had already hollowed out the army’s manpower and operational capacity during the advance and early retreat. This evidence does more than revise a historical episode; it illuminates a deeper theoretical fault line in IR between structural realism’s emphasis on anarchy as the ontological primitive and an alternative framework, Requisite Realism, that privileges material replenishment as logically prior (Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b).

Classical structural realism, most influentially articulated by Kenneth Waltz, posits anarchy, the absence of a sovereign authority above states, as the defining condition of international politics. In this view, self-help behaviour, balancing and security competition flow directly from the anarchic structure (Waltz 1979). Offensive realism, as developed by John Mearsheimer, builds on this foundation to explain why great powers maximise power under uncertainty: states cannot reliably discern others’ future intentions, so survival compels them to seize opportunities for regional hegemony whenever feasible (Mearsheimer 2001).

Applied to 1812, offensive realism elegantly accounts for Napoleon’s decision to invade. France enjoyed overwhelming military superiority on the continent; Russia’s refusal to comply with the Continental System threatened French dominance. Anarchy rendered the campaign intelligible as a rational bid for power maximisation. Yet the theory falters once the invasion begins. It cannot explain why a force of roughly 600,000 troops disintegrated so catastrophically, despite no decisive battlefield defeat until the retreat was well underway. Mearsheimer’s framework treats the material conditions of sustainment, food, horses, disease vectors and supply lines, as secondary details rather than fundamental constraints.

Requisite Realism offers a more parsimonious and ontologically prior explanation by shifting the analytical focus from anarchy to replenishment velocity: the rate at which a military or political system can restore its material and human requisites, including food stocks, transport, manpower, medical capacity and industrial support, relative to the rate of depletion (Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b; Koch 2026d). In this framework, the relationship between replenishment and anarchy unfolds through a clear temporal sequence: emergence, submergence and “submergency”.

Emergence occurs when a great power possesses sufficient replenishment capacity to act autonomously, rendering anarchy visible and causally powerful. Submergence follows as replenishment capacity erodes and anarchy, while still present, loses explanatory primacy beneath deeper material forces. Submergency marks the decisive threshold event in which a great power’s relative replenishment velocity falls below its relative depletion velocity, signalling probable strategic defeat (Koch 2026b). In this hierarchy, anarchy is not eliminated but demoted from primitive to emergent property. It arises and exerts explanatory force only when actors possess sufficient replenishment capacity to sustain autonomous action over time. When that capacity erodes, anarchy becomes submergent: still present, yet no longer the dominant causal variable.

This distinction is important because submergency is not simply another word for crisis, collapse or emergency. An emergency is an actor’s perception of danger. Submergency is a structural condition. A general may experience an emergency because supplies are low, troops are sick or the enemy is advancing. Yet submergency exists whether or not commanders recognise it. It is the ontological moment when the material foundations of power can no longer regenerate quickly enough to sustain strategic autonomy. Political leaders may still believe victory remains possible. Tactical successes may still occur. New plans may still be formulated. Yet if replenishment can no longer compensate for depletion, the system has already crossed a critical threshold. The subjective experience of confidence or panic is secondary to the objective relationship between replenishment and depletion (Koch 2026b).

This makes submergent anarchy a conditional proposition within Requisite Realism. Anarchy remains structurally present, but its causal status changes. When replenishment capacity is high, anarchy appears emergent and dominant: states can balance, deter, compete, invade and survive. When replenishment capacity declines, anarchy becomes submergent: still real, but no longer the deepest explanation of outcomes. The state continues to behave as though it inhabits the same strategic environment, but the causal engine has shifted beneath it. The decisive variable is no longer simply who has the better strategy or stronger will, but who retains the greater capacity to replenish faster than depletion occurs. Waltzian anarchy may still describe the formal structure of the system, but Requisite Realism asks whether the actor still possesses the material capacity required to participate meaningfully in that structure (Waltz 1979; Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b).

The 1812 campaign illustrates this dynamic with striking clarity. On 24 June 1812, as the Grande Armée crossed the Niemen River, French replenishment reserves appeared robust: vast manpower reserves, horse herds, administrative logistics and political legitimacy. This moment represents emergence. Anarchy operated as the visible driver of strategic choice, and offensive expansion appeared not only possible but rational. Russian scorched-earth tactics, however, engineered a deliberate acceleration of French depletion velocity, what might be termed Engineered Relative Depletion Velocity (ERDV), producing submergence through lengthening supply lines, horse mortality, contaminated water, lice infestation and delayed replacements (Koch 2026b). Disease, already rampant by the time Moscow was reached and burned, reduced effective manpower long before winter. By the retreat from Moscow, the army’s replenishment velocity had fallen below its depletion velocity. The system had crossed into submergency: it could no longer reproduce itself as a functioning military entity. Winter, starvation and Cossack harassment merely delivered the final blow to an organisation already biologically and logistically crippled. Napoleon did not lose primarily because Russian soldiers outfought his troops; he lost because the underlying requisites of French power had evaporated (Health Checks on History 2026).

The case also shows why generals and rulers may misread their own position within the ontology of power. Napoleon and his marshals could still interpret the campaign through the familiar grammar of command: manoeuvre, morale, discipline, battle, retreat and political will. These were real factors, but they increasingly operated within a shrinking envelope of material possibility. The leadership may have experienced the crisis as a series of emergencies, but the deeper condition was submergency. The French army was no longer merely facing operational difficulty. It had entered a structural condition in which relative replenishment velocity had been overtaken by relative depletion velocity. The campaign could still produce episodes of tactical competence, but it could no longer reproduce the requisites of strategic success.

This ontological reordering grants Requisite Realism explanatory purchase across both emergent and submergent conditions in ways that Waltzian or Mearsheimerian variants cannot match (Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b). When replenishment capacity is abundant, anarchy appears dominant and strategic behaviour, including invasion and power maximisation, follows predictably. This is precisely the domain where offensive realism performs well. Yet the same primitive explains collapse when replenishment fails. Military disasters once attributed to battlefield brilliance or dramatic strategy, including the Athenian Sicilian Expedition, the German Eastern Front in 1941–45 and Japan’s Pacific campaign, increasingly reveal themselves as failures of sustainment. Logistics, epidemiology and nutrition become co-equal with tactics and diplomacy. Time itself emerges as the hidden variable. Replenishment velocity, intuitively expressed as stocks restored divided by time, determines whether competition can be sustained. Victory accrues to the side that maintains positive net replenishment longer. In 1812, Russia weaponised time against French endurance (Koch 2026c).

The theoretical payoff is profound. Requisite Realism does not merely assert that ‘logistics matter’; it claims that material reproduction is the substrate from which anarchy itself emerges (Koch 2026d; Koch 2026e). A state cannot compete, balance or wage war unless it can continuously reproduce the conditions of its own existence. This parsimony unifies disparate phenomena, including military collapse, sanctions effectiveness, hegemonic transitions and deterrence credibility, under a single causal logic. Waltz begins with anarchy and derives behaviour; Requisite Realism begins with replenishment and derives the conditions under which anarchy can even register as an explanatory force (Koch 2026b). The Napoleon case demonstrates that anarchy explains why actors enter competition, but replenishment velocity determines whether that competition can be sustained. Where the latter falls below the former, anarchy recedes into the background, replaced by the more fundamental dynamics of material depletion and regeneration.

In short, the DNA evidence from Vilnius does not simply debunk the winter myth. It gives empirical force to an IR theory that treats replenishment velocity as ontologically prior, revealing Waltzian and Mearsheimerian anarchy as an emergent, and conditionally submergent, property of great-power politics rather than its immutable foundation. Napoleon’s defeat was therefore not merely an emergency of command, but a submergency of power: the moment when French strategic autonomy disappeared beneath the material failure to replenish (Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b).

Bibliography

Barbieri, R. et al. (2025) ‘Paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever in 1812 Napoleon’s devastated army’, Current Biology, 35(21), pp. 5384–5391.

Health Checks on History (2026) ‘What really killed Napoleon’s Grand Army’, Health Checks on History [Substack]. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/healthchecksonhistory/p/what-really-killed-napoleons-grand (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

Koch, A. (2026a) ‘Requisite Realism’, The Gadfly Doctrine [Substack]. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/alkoch55/p/requisite-realism (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

Koch, A. (2026b) ‘Requisite Realism Formalized Propositions’, The Gadfly Doctrine [Substack]. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/alkoch55/p/requisite-realism-formalized-propositions (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

Koch, A. (2026c) ‘Thucydides Trapped’, The Gadfly Doctrine [Substack]. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/alkoch55/p/thucydides-trapped (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

Koch, A. (2026d) ‘Ontology or Assumptions’, The Gadfly Doctrine [Substack]. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/alkoch55/p/ontology-or-assumptions (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

Koch, A. (2026e) ‘The Ontological Flaw in Elite China Analysis’, The Gadfly Doctrine [Substack]. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/alkoch55/p/the-ontological-flaw-in-elite-china (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

Mearsheimer, J.J. (2001) The tragedy of great power politics. New York: W.W. Norton.

Waltz, K.N. (1979) Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

You are welcome to share this work with attribution. No commercial or modified uses allowed without permission.

© 2025 Alan Koch.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

The Hegemonic Morbidity Theory

🪦

Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are not merely super-ageing societies. They are racing toward demographic default. Taiwan already spends roughly twice as much on old-age benefits, pensions and healthcare as on defence. South Korea crossed the super-aged threshold in 2024 and now has 21.21 per cent of its population aged 65 or older (10.84 million people); its fertility rate of 0.80 in 2025 is among the lowest on earth, and its national pension fund is projected to run dry by 2071. Japan completes the triad. The working-age populations of all three are shrinking fast. Long-term care costs are exploding. The first island chain is quietly becoming the world’s largest assisted-living facility in waiting.

Yet in the weeks since the Trump-Xi summit of 14 May 2026, two of the most influential voices on Taiwan have produced fresh analyses that treat this reality as invisible. Robert Pape’s 19 May Substack update and Eyck Freymann’s newly published book Defending Taiwan, together with Freymann’s recent interviews, both insist that the United States must prepare for a long denial war. Pape calls for drone swarms and attrition to deny Beijing a quick victory. Freymann lays out an integrated four-pillar strategy of political, military, economic and technological denial. Both are sophisticated, internally coherent and firmly anchored in the realist tradition.

Neither scholar confronts the single greatest long-term threat to the strategy they advocate: the demographic collapse now engulfing America’s Asian allies. They mention Japan and South Korea repeatedly as reliable partners. They never ask what happens when all three societies can no longer fund their own elderly populations. They never mention the “strawberry soldiers” generation criticised at home as too soft for sustained resistance. They never address Taiwan’s late-stage export-power dilemma: a weaker New Taiwan Dollar to preserve semiconductor competitiveness versus a stronger currency to support an ageing population’s purchasing power.

Even Freymann’s high-profile interviews with Niall Ferguson and Chang Che (joined by Ian Buruma) suffered from the same omission. A close reading of the full transcript shows that neither Freymann nor his erudite interviewers ever raised the demographic bomb. An interview is not a love fest. It is a quest for knowledge, refinement and contrarian questions that force the theorist to support — or abandon — their thesis. When interviewing professors and scholars who propose bold strategies, it is the duty of the questioner to try to dispose of the argument and see if the scholar can compose a stronger one.

This silence is not incidental. It is the invisible hand complex at work. Just as Adam Smith used the “invisible hand” metaphor only once in a minor passage, yet it became the dominant heuristic for markets, so the security dilemma and deterrence have become the all-powerful shortcut in Taiwan analysis. The heuristic is elegant, familiar and institutionally rewarded; the demographic default is messy, expensive and human. So the heuristic wins.

If demographics really is destiny, then the first island chain is destined not for deterrence through balancing and dronification, but for assisted-living support. A long-term American commitment risks turning the United States into the financier of geriatric care across the region, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. In time, some of America’s brightest may find themselves in a new Pentagon division running long-term care operations rather than combat missions.

President Xi Jinping may therefore have the simplest and most rational strategy of all: strategic patience. Why risk a costly military confrontation when the United States is already underwriting the pensions, healthcare and long-term care of three super-ageing allies? China can simply wait until it develops home-grown EUV technology that neutralises the silicon shield. At that point Washington will likely conclude that the now frail first island chain is no longer worth the ever-rising geriatric bill. Beijing can then move in on more favourable terms. China will age too, but its massive scale and economic volume give it far more room to absorb the costs.

Neither Freymann nor Pape grapples with this uncomfortable possibility. In an era when demographic and fiscal realities are reshaping great-power competition, their failure to address the obvious anomaly is not merely an analytical gap. It is a strategic miscalculation that leaves deterrence thinking dangerously incomplete. Until scholars confront the slow, expensive and deeply human pressures now bearing down on America’s Asian allies, their prescriptions risk becoming elegant blueprints for a future the United States cannot afford.

References

(Drawn from the following works and interviews for supporting evidence)

• Demographic and super-ageing data on Taiwan, South Korea and Japan:
– Taiwan super-aged society (20.06% aged 65+ in 2025) and fertility trends: Focus Taiwan / Ministry of the Interior data, reported January 2026 → https://lenews.ch/2026/01/09/taiwan-becomes-super-aged-switzerland-close-behind/
– South Korea super-aged threshold (21.21% aged 65+ in 2025), fertility rate 0.80, and pension fund projections: Statistics Korea and official projections → https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/south-korea-population-decline-aging-crisis (Jan 2025 update with 2025 figures)
– Broader East Asia demographic comparisons (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan): National Development Council (Taiwan), Statistics Korea, and Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare projections.

• Robert Pape, “How The Iran War Changed Beijing’s Assessment of American Power,” Substack, 19 May 2026. Available at:

Prof Robert Pape

How The Iran War Changed Beijing’s Assessment of American Power

For the first time in decades, Chinese leaders may believe the United States itself is beginning to question the cost of defending Taiwan. That perception — more than any missile test or military exercise — is what could make the Taiwan Strait significantly more dangerous in the years ahead…

Read more

3 months ago · 46 likes · 1 comment · Prof Robert Pape

• Eyck Freymann, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford University Press, 2026).

• Freymann interviews:
– Niall Ferguson conversation (Hoover Institution event), available at:

Recent Works by Chang Che

Into Asia: Taiwan on the Eve of the Summit

Will Donald Trump cut a deal with Xi Jinping that concedes ground on America's Taiwan policy? That is the question hanging over the US-China summit in Beijing this week…

Read more

4 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Chang Che

© 2025 Alan Koch. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Human Flourishing Over Hegemonic Suppression

Stephen M. Walt’s column ‘Chinese Hegemony Might Be Happening’ (Foreign Policy, 12 May 2026) revisits his earlier realist optimism. In 2023 and again in International Security in Spring 2025, he argued that geography, threat perceptions and balancing coalitions should frustrate Beijing’s regional ambitions. Most Asian neighbours, he assumes, do not want hegemonic security dominance. But they also do not want economic separation from China, which remains the central trading partner for much of the region. Their strategy is therefore not pure balancing but hedging: resisting great-power security subordination while preserving access to Chinese markets, infrastructure and global growth.

Walt still finds his ‘balance of threat’ structural logic convincing, especially because the United States had long underwritten a counter-coalition. What he underestimated was the second Trump administration’s self-inflicted damage: attacks on the scientific establishment, retreat from green technologies, erratic tariffs, diplomatic neglect and the distracting war with Iran. Each, he shows, has eroded American credibility and material advantages. The diagnosis is damning.

Yet the column’s deeper limitation is paradigmatic. The Atlantic Charter, followed by Bretton Woods and the UN Charter, established the ultimate purpose of global governance as decolonization and human flourishing: the expansion of individual and collective capabilities (Doyle 1986; Keohane and Nye 1977). Realism, particularly Walt’s (1987) balance-of-threat theory and Mearsheimer’s offensive realism (2001), brackets domestic outcomes in favor of systemic imperatives: the maintenance of American regional hegemony in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Western Hemisphere.

Mearsheimer’s text anchors its ontological offensive-realist regional hegemonic logic mostly in the Napoleonic-to-Bismarckian era. When global population first reached roughly 1.4 billion in the early 1880s, planetary GDP per capita stood at approximately $873 in 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, roughly $1,388 in 2011 prices, representing total world output divided by total population under British, European colonial and other imperial arrangements (Maddison 2007; Bolt et al. 2020; United States Census Bureau 2025). Governance at that scale, amid realist balancing and spheres of influence, delivered bare-subsistence living standards for the vast majority.

China today governs at a comparable demographic threshold of 1.4 billion. IMF projections place its 2026 nominal GDP per capita at $14,874 in current US dollars, with PPP-adjusted figures reaching approximately $31,600 (IMF 2026; World Bank 2026). This represents more than a seventeen-fold nominal improvement and more than thirty-fold on a purchasing-power basis over the 1870 global average, when Europeans and the Atlantic world exercised global imperial domination.

Post-Deng reforms have engineered the greatest episode of human flourishing in recorded history. Beijing does have unresolved sovereignty claims, including the PRC’s nine-dash line in the South China Sea and the ROC’s older eleven-dash line, from which it historically derived. The “One China Policy”, maritime claims and border questions cannot be dismissed. But these are not the same as classical territorial hegemony in the Napoleonic, British or colonial sense. China has not pursued overseas settler colonization or imperial conquest of neighbouring societies. Its regional strategy relies more on production capacity, infrastructural connectivity, protecting trade routes, market access and civilisational gravity than on formal annexation (Kang 2003; Fairbank 1968).

America has been the Western Hemisphere’s regional hegemon for more than a century under the Monroe Doctrine. Yet it has not produced, across its own sphere of influence, the level of mass human flourishing that China has achieved in roughly thirty years with more than twice the combined population of Latin America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Washington claims that regional hegemony produces order and prosperity. The evidence suggests something darker, as Walt’s own cri de coeur over Trump implies: American hegemony has often subdued developmental autonomy in order to preserve US primacy. China’s rise exposes the realist contradiction. If human flourishing is the test of hegemonic stability, then the question is not whether China threatens America’s rank, but whether America’s rank has actually served the people living under its hemispheric shadow.

Walt’s column remains a valuable caution against complacency. Its paradigmatic limitation, however, is profound. By anchoring theory in an imperial era of global poverty and colonial governance, it risks prescribing perpetual great-power rivalry precisely when empirical evidence shows that alternative models can deliver superior flourishing at planetary scale. Lamenting Trump while insisting the world remain subject to the very system that produced him is not coherent analysis; it is ideological commitment. America should recognise China’s demonstrated ability to supply public goods to 1.4 billion people and stop insisting that American Indo-Pacific primacy must limit China’s ascent simply to preserve US ‘manifest destiny’ as the Indispensable Nation. Human flourishing, not hegemonic gravity, should be the measure of twenty-first-century statecraft.

References

Bolt, J. et al. (2020) The Maddison Project Database 2020. Groningen: University of Groningen Growth and Development Centre.

Doyle, M.W. (1986) ‘Liberalism and world politics’, American Political Science Review, 80(4), pp. 1151–1169.

Fairbank, J.K. (ed.) (1968) The Chinese world order: traditional China’s foreign relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

IMF (2026) World Economic Outlook, April 2026. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

Kang, D.C. (2003) ‘Hierarchy, balancing, and empirical puzzles in Asian international relations’, International Security, 28(3), pp. 165–180.

Keohane, R.O. and Nye, J.S. (1977) Power and interdependence: world politics in transition. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Maddison, A. (2007) Contours of the world economy, 1–2030 AD: essays in macro-economic history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mearsheimer, J.J. (2001) The tragedy of great power politics. New York: W.W. Norton.

United States Census Bureau (2025) Historical estimates of world population. Available at: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html (accessed 17 May 2026).

Walt, S.M. (1987) The origins of alliances. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Walt, S.M. (2023) ‘Stop worrying about Chinese hegemony in Asia’, Foreign Policy, 31 May.

Walt, S.M. (2025) ‘Hedging on hegemony: the realist debate over how to respond to China’, International Security, 49(4), pp. 37–68.

Walt, S.M. (2026) ‘Chinese hegemony might be happening’, Foreign Policy, 12 May.

World Bank (2026) GDP per capita, PPP (current international $) and poverty headcount data. Washington, DC: World Bank.

By Alan Koch May 16 2026

The Tungsten Rule

Never interrupt an adversary while he is exhausting himself through overreach.

President Donald Trump has returned from Beijing after two days of hard bargaining with Xi Jinping on tariffs, technology transfer and the terms of “decoupling”. Yet even as the ink dries on whatever understandings were reached, Beijing still holds the ultimate trump card: tungsten, the hard metal without which America’s industrial reshoring, its manufacturing renaissance and even its most audacious space ambitions cannot proceed. No tungsten carbide tooling means no precision drills, no high-temperature alloys, no armour-piercing munitions at scale. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose IPO projections rest on reliable supply chains for rocket components and drilling systems, would be grounded. No wonder Musk joined the trip. Without tungsten, the Mars project stays stuck on Earth.

The same pattern holds in nuclear affairs. Uranium is spoken of daily, hour after hour, in every debate on proliferation and deterrence. Tungsten, however, is almost never mentioned yet it is indispensable for the entire uranium industrial chain, from enrichment mechanisms to the final assembly of nuclear weapons. Without tungsten, uranium is useless. In exactly the same way, tungsten remained the metal that was never mentioned at the summit, even though it is the silent enabler of everything from precision munitions to commercial jet engines and advanced robotics. The irony is already playing out in Kazakhstan. A company linked to Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump (who accompanied his father to China) has secured US taxpayer backing for a major tungsten mine even though the project remains embedded in a Eurasian strategic and industrial ecosystem that Beijing and Moscow still shape.

A company tied to the Trump brothers, Cove Kaz Capital Group LLC, a unit of the New York-based mining investment firm Cove Capital LLC has asked the Pentagon for an extra $400 million to develop one of the world’s largest non-Chinese tungsten deposits in central Kazakhstan. This is on top of $1.6 billion in non-binding commitments already lined up from the US Export-Import Bank and Development Finance Corporation. Cove Kaz recently merged with Nasdaq-listed Skyline Builders Group Holding Ltd, in which the Trump sons invested last year through their vehicle American Ventures. The company has said it is “assessing expedited ways to bring the mine and refinery into production”. Its executive chairman, Pini Althaus, has previously acknowledged direct assistance from President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick in securing the Kazakh concession.

Tungsten prices have surged from roughly $350 per metric tonne to $3,100 since the start of 2025, after China tightened export restrictions as the controller of about 80 per cent of global supply. The metal is indispensable: it hardens armour-piercing bullets, kinetic-energy penetrators, high-temperature engine parts and the carbide tooling that keeps American factories running. The Trump administration presents the Kazakh venture as a national-security breakthrough. Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev reportedly told Trump last September that the project would go to this US-linked consortium. Groundbreaking is planned for 2028, first output a year later.

On paper it looks like diversification done right. In reality it exposes the limits of Washington’s ambition. Mining wolframite ore is only stage one. Turning that concentrate into ammonium paratungstate, tungsten powders and carbide at industrial scale requires complex chemical refining, skilled labour, environmental safeguards and years of sustained capital. Even optimistic timelines put a genuinely independent US or allied supply chain at five to ten years away. The Kazakhstan project may deliver raw material sooner; it will not deliver supply-chain sovereignty. America will remain reliant on Chinese-dominated refining capacity for the foreseeable future.

The pressure is intensifying because of rules finalised by the Biden administration. In May 2024 the Pentagon issued the final regulation for the Defence Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) Case 2021-D015, implementing Section 844 of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defence Authorization Act. From 1 January 2027, defence contractors will be prohibited from incorporating any tungsten mined, refined or processed in China, Russia, North Korea and or the other covered countries, into weapons systems and platforms. This upstream ban, layered atop the munitions drawdown from the Iran and Ukraine conflicts, is already driving fierce competition for the limited pool of non-Chinese ammonium paratungstate (APT) and tungsten metal powder. What began as a Biden-era effort to reduce strategic dependence has now become an inherited constraint on the Trump administration’s rearmament timetable post Iran.

At the same time, Beijing has extended a major commercial olive branch: an order for 200 Boeing passenger jets powered by approximately 400 General Electric engines. The contract no doubt includes standard commercial tight delivery timelines backed by significant late-delivery penalties. GE’s advanced turbofan engines depend on tungsten in high-temperature alloys, coatings and counterweights. What appears to be a commercial victory for American aerospace, boosting exports and jobs, simultaneously tightens the noose on defence procurement. By absorbing large volumes of the very scarce compliant tungsten feedstock, the Boeing deal risks slowing munitions replenishment and platform production. In this way, China can exert indirect but real influence over the speed of US rearmament through ostensibly mutually beneficial commercial contracts.

The Chinese Communist Party grasped this reality long before Washington did. In the early 1930s Mao Zedong’s Jiangxi Soviet turned tungsten mines at Tieshanlong and Xihuashan into a strategic revenue engine. Tungsten trade financed the Red Army, bought arms, food, clothes and medicines which sustained the revolutionary base through repeated Nationalist encirclement campaigns. That elemental cash flow helped underwrite the Long March and eventual victory in the civil war; not through global military projection but through control of the very same resource that leverages the Chinese industrial trump card in the 2026 negotiations. Deng Xiaoping in his 1992 Southern Tour distilled the insight: “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.” Beijing has treated critical minerals as instruments of power ever since. America’s persistent dependence on its peer rival for tungsten, across multiple administrations, is less a supply-chain oversight than a sustained failure of strategic analysis.

Kazakhstan’s own position only sharpens the point. The country is a founding member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), whose Article 4 collective-defence clause mirrors NATO’s Article 5. In everyday language, both provisions operate on the same simple “one for all, all for one” principle: an armed attack on any single member is treated as an attack on the entire alliance. If Kazakhstan were ever attacked, Russia and the other CSTO partners would be treaty-bound to come to its defence, just as the United States, Britain, France and the rest of NATO are obligated to defend one another under Article 5.

It is also a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) alongside China and Russia, where security and stability are framed through a deliberately Eurasian lens. In other words, Kazakhstan’s security is formally locked into the Russian- and Chinese-led Eurasian bloc even as it accepts American mining dollars.

Astana’s multi-vector foreign policy is built precisely on balancing these relationships. It welcomes American capital while remaining deeply embedded in the Eurasian strategic field shaped by Moscow and Beijing. Trade patterns reinforce the structural reality: Kazakhstan directs roughly 27 per cent of its critical minerals exports to China and 16 per cent to Russia, with recent tungsten concentrate shipments going almost entirely to Chinese processors. The ore may be financed from Washington; the mine, the logistics, the security environment and much of the eventual processing will not.

The Trump family connection adds an awkward domestic dimension. The brothers have described themselves as passive investors with no operational oversight. There is no suggestion of impropriety. Yet the optics invite precisely the questions about conflicts of interest that erode confidence in strategic policy.

None of this renders the investment worthless. Kazakhstan’s resources are substantial, its government pragmatic and the logic of diversification compelling. But serious policy must confront the constraints. True resilience demands parallel investment in allied refining, recycling technologies and downstream manufacturing which have often been treated as afterthoughts. Without them, Washington risks paying top dollar for concentrate that still strengthens the very adversary it seeks to contain.

As Trump returns to Washington, the Kazakhstan tungsten story is more than a minerals deal. It is a reminder that elemental sovereignty cannot be secured by mining finance alone. Beijing understood the power of tungsten a century ago and built a strategy around it. Washington is still learning. Until it closes the gap between mine and finished product, and until it reckons honestly with the Eurasian realities surrounding every ton of Kazakh ore, this latest gambit will remain expensive symbolism in a contest Beijing has been playing, and winning, for decades.

Requisite Realism, the theoretical framework developed to correct the ontological flaw in contemporary foreign-policy analysis, finds its clearest empirical vindication in the tungsten leverage that survived the Trump–Xi summit of May 2026. Where traditional realism fixates on anarchy, balancing and the security dilemma, Requisite Realism insists that the primary structuring force in international politics is not the absence of central authority but the differential replenishment velocities of the requisites that actually sustain power. Anarchy is not primitive; it is emergent from depletion. When one actor controls the upstream and midstream of a critical material—tungsten ore to ammonium paratungstate, wolframite concentrate to carbide tooling—while its rival controls only the rhetoric of diversification, the distribution of relative replenishment velocity tilts decisively. Beijing’s eighty-per-cent grip on global refining capacity, its export-licensing regime, and its downstream dominance in Kazakhstan shipments are not tactical moves; they are the concrete expression of superior replenishment velocity. Washington’s DFARS 2027 upstream ban, the Boeing/GE order with its penalty-laden timelines, and the Trump-family-linked Kazakh mine represent earnest but incomplete attempts to restore balance. They address symptoms—traceability rules, commercial optics, mining finance—while leaving the midstream bottleneck untouched. In Requisite Realism’s terms, this is the predictable outcome of a state whose replenishment velocity in tungsten has lagged for decades.

The case history therefore does more than illustrate great-power competition; it exposes the deeper category error that Requisite Realism was designed to correct. For thirty years foreign-policy analysts securitised speeches, theorised deterrence and celebrated frictionless globalisation while the People’s Republic of China quietly mastered APT chemistry, powder sintering and carbide-tool production. The periodic table, not the conference table, dictated the real correlation of forces. The Metallurgy Prayer captures this insight with merciless precision:

References:

Almonty Industries (2026) ‘Tungsten and the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, 11 January.

Cove Capital (2025) cited in Jack Lifton interview, ‘Jack Lifton with Cove Capital’s Pini Althaus on the Largest Tungsten Project in the World’, InvestorNews, 21 November.

China National Radio’s website shows a photo of “Deng noting in a speech he made January 1992 during his Southern Tour, ‘The Middle East has its oil, China has rare earths’ “中东有石油, 中国有稀土. https://www.andrewerickson.com/2019/06/chinas-rare-earth-dominance-how-usable-a-weapon/

Fastmarkets (2026) ‘Tungsten 2026: Geopolitics sets global tone’, 18 March.

Interfax (2024) ‘Chinese company invests $300 mln in launch of Kazakhstan’s first tungsten ore processing plant’, 2 November.

New York Times (2026) ‘Trump and Boeing Announce China Will Purchase 200 Planes’, 15 May.

Oregon Group (2026) ‘Why tungsten prices are rising so fast: inside the supply crunch’, Substack, 10 May.

Reuters (2026) ‘Every missile fired over Iran is burning through US tungsten stocks’, 23 March.

The Diplomat (2026) ‘The China-US Clash Over Critical Minerals Is an Opportunity for Kazakhstan’, 1 May.

US Department of Defense (2024) ‘Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Restriction on Certain Metal Products (DFARS Case 2021-D015)’, Federal Register, 89(105), 30 May, pp. 46312–46328.

US Geological Survey (2026) Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026.

© 2026 Alan Koch. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

April 29, 2026

Prepared by Alan Koch

Introduction

This document formalises the core propositions of Requisite Realism, a theoretical framework that challenges the dominant anarchic ontology in contemporary International Relations (IR) theory. It argues that anarchy is not a primitive or foundational condition of international politics but an emergent property arising from the relative replenishment of essential requisites ontologically foundational to power structures. Specifically, the distribution and rates of replenishment and depletion across political units determine the character and durability of order. The framework provides a more fundamental causal lens for understanding power, strategy, and systemic transition in an era of polycrisis and interregnum.

Requisite Realism reorients analysis from symptoms (security dilemmas, balancing, institutional decay) to the root cause: differential regeneration capacity. It offers both explanatory power for the current geopolitical moment and prescriptive guidance for strategy in conditions of constrained replenishment.

Foundational Definitions

Replenishment Velocity (RV): The net rate at which a political unit (state, coalition, empire, or civilizational complex) regenerates critical stocks after shocks or in steady state. Measured across interdependent domains such as: military-industrial capacity, economic surplus and infrastructure, demographic and human-capital stock, technological and knowledge base, ecological carrying capacity and resource throughput, and social/political legitimacy and cohesion. RV can be positive (net regeneration), zero (steady state), or negative (net depletion).

Relative Replenishment Velocity (RRV): The difference between one unit’s RV and that of another unit (or the systemic mean). Positive RRV confers relative advantage; negative RRV signals relative decline.

Engineered Relative Depletion Velocity (ERDV): Refers to deliberate strategic actions by one or more units to reduce the RV of target units below the level that would result from natural, market, or stochastic processes alone. Mechanisms include sanctions, supply-chain chokepoints, financial exclusion, conflict acceleration, ecological disruption, demographic engineering, and narrative/legitimacy attacks.

Anarchy (Requisite Realist usage): A systemic condition that emerges when RRV is relatively high and symmetric across major units, producing self-help competition without enforceable hierarchy. It is not an ontological primitive but a conditional outcome of regeneration dynamics.

Core Propositions

P1 – Ontological Primacy (The Foundational Claim)

The primary structuring force in international politics is the distribution and dynamics of Relative Replenishment Velocities across units, not the absence of central authority. Anarchy is a secondary, emergent property that appears only when RRV is sufficiently high and symmetric. When RRV falls below critical thresholds or becomes highly asymmetric, the system shifts toward fragmentation, engineered asymmetry, or hierarchy.

P2 – Redefinition of Power

Power is the capacity of a unit to (a) sustain or increase its own RRV and (b) impose ERDV on other units, thereby widening relative gaps in regeneration capacity. Traditional metrics (military forces, GDP, alliances) are derivative indicators of this deeper capacity.

P3 – Behavioural Logic Under Varying RRV Conditions

When RRV is high and symmetric, units behave according to classic realist predictions: self-help, security dilemmas, balancing or bandwagoning.

When systemic RRV is low or negative, units prioritise replenishment security over traditional military balancing. Declining units adopt ERDV strategies; rising units prioritise absolute replenishment gains, redundancy and resilience.

Highly asymmetric RRV tends toward engineered hierarchy or interregnum rather than stable multipolar anarchy.

P4 – Systemic Outcomes Proposition

The character of the international system is determined by the level and symmetry of RRV:

• High and symmetric RRV produces stable anarchic competition with balancing (Waltzian outcomes).

• Declining core RRV combined with active ERDV by core actors produces interregnum marked by timeline collisions, securitisation and supply-chain weaponisation.

• Sustained negative systemic RRV creates the possibility of potential civilizational reconfiguration, regional hierarchy formation, or systemic collapse.

P5 – Interregnum as RRV Crisis (Current Application, 2026)

The contemporary interregnum is not a neutral transition between hegemonic orders but the observable phase of a systemic RRV crisis in the former transatlantic core, actively compounded by peer rival ERDV strategies. These include targeted restrictions on critical materials and chokepoints such as semiconductors, tungsten, and rare earth elements alongside financial sanctions, conflict acceleration, and ecological acceleration through militarization. Frameworks such as the “Bunker State” and “Fragmentationist Grand Strategy” offer precise empirical descriptions of ERDV in a low-RRV environment, revealing how deliberate degradation of replenishment capacity has become central to contemporary power competition.

P6 – Theoretical Scope and Predictive Power

Mainstream IR theories (neorealism, neoliberal institutionalism, constructivism and much of critical IPE) generate accurate predictions and prescriptions primarily in historical periods of high and relatively symmetric RRV. In low-RRV or high-asymmetry conditions, their prescriptions become systematically mistargeted because they treat symptoms (security dilemmas, institutional decay, revisionism) rather than the underlying replenishment crisis.

Corollaries and Scope Conditions

Corollary 1 (Historical Variation): The predictive success of Waltzian neorealism peaked during the high-RRV industrial era (roughly 1870–1970). Its declining explanatory power since the 1990s reflects falling systemic RRV (demographics, debt, ecological limits, technological concentration).

Corollary 2 (Constructivism Interaction): Ideas, identities, and cultures of anarchy (Hobbesian, Lockean, Kantian) become causally salient precisely when material RRV differentials create legitimacy crises or identity threats. Social construction operates on top of, not instead of, regeneration dynamics.

Corollary 3 (Policy Reorientation): Effective grand strategy in the current era requires securing and redundantly protecting critical replenishment nodes (chips, energy, food systems, rare earths, demographic policy, ecological restoration), developing active defenses against ERDV weapons, and prioritizing absolute replenishment capacity over traditional relative military power.

Scope Conditions: The theory applies most powerfully to great-power and systemic politics. It is less determinate for purely local, low-stakes, or intra-state conflicts where regeneration differentials are small.

Comparison with Existing Paradigms

The following table contrasts Requisite Realism with the two dominant traditions in IR theory:

Purpose and Application

This formalization is intended for scholars, analysts, policymakers, and strategic thinkers seeking a more fundamental causal account of international politics in 2026. It directly addresses the observation that much contemporary IR scholarship and policy prescription operates within an accepted but increasingly inadequate anarchic ontology—treating symptoms while the underlying material regeneration crisis accelerates.

Requisite Realism does not reject the insights of existing traditions but relocates them within a deeper material substrate. It supplies the missing etiology for phenomena such as the Bunker State, fragmentationist strategies, timeline desynchronization, and the broader interregnum—phenomena that are poorly explained by frameworks that take anarchy as given.

The framework is offered as a work in progress, open to empirical testing, refinement, and extension across historical cases and contemporary policy domains.

— End of Document —

A review on an article in the New York Times supporting Requisite Realism Theory

Replenishment Velocity and the Limits of American Power: Chinese Assessments of the Iran Conflict and the Predictive Power of Requisite Realism

By Alan Koch May8 2026

Recent reporting from The New York Times (Pierson, D. and Wang, B. 2026) has brought into sharp relief a development that Chinese strategic analysts are framing as a decisive revelation about the sustainability of U.S. global military engagement. In the context of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli operations against Iran that began in late February 2026, U.S. forces have reportedly expended roughly half of their long-range stealth cruise missile inventory and approximately ten times the annual production rate of Tomahawk cruise missiles. Chinese commentators argue that this has exposed a major flaw in U.S. war strategy: its inability to make weapons quickly enough to replenish its arsenal in a sustained, intense conflict.

This depletion “has significantly diminished the U.S. military’s ability to project its combat power, laying bare the shortcomings of its global military hegemony,” said Yue Gang, a retired colonel of the People’s Liberation Army, in an interview. Hu Xijin, the influential former editor of the Global Times, has gone further, describing the situation as one in which the United States is “on the verge of losing all its pieces” in the strategic confidence game over the Taiwan Strait. An essay in the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Qiushi warned that the conflict has “overdrawn U.S. strategic resources,” while Global Times editorials have depicted America as a “giant with a limp” whose global reach is now visibly constrained.

These assessments are not merely propaganda points. They reflect a coherent Chinese reading of material constraints that aligns strikingly with an emerging theoretical framework in international relations: Requisite Realism and its central concept of replenishment velocity. Introduced in early 2026 by Alan Koch in The Gadfly Doctrine, Requisite Realism argues that in the contemporary technological and industrial era, the fundamental variable determining state power and the viability of military action is not the anarchic structure of the international system per se, nor even the initial stock of deployable capabilities, but the rate at which critical requisites—precision munitions, industrial throughput, fiscal capacity, and the political will to sustain production—can be regenerated relative to the tempo of consumption in conflict (Koch, 2026). When replenishment velocity falls below operational demand and cannot be restored within relevant strategic time horizons, even the most powerful state confronts structural limits that render continued projection of force increasingly costly and ultimately self-defeating.

The Iran case provides a vivid empirical illustration. A regional power with limited air defences and no peer naval or aerospace capabilities has nevertheless forced the United States into a munitions burn rate that exceeds peacetime production capacity by an order of magnitude for key systems. U.S. officials, including Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Admiral Samuel J. Paparo, have sought to downplay the implications, insisting that Middle East operations have not compromised the priority of deterring China in the Indo-Pacific and that American wartime capabilities remain credible. They note that the campaign achieved significant effects—neutralisation of Iranian leadership targets, air superiority, and successful special operations—without exhausting the full range of U.S. munitions relevant to a Taiwan contingency.

Yet Requisite Realism suggests these reassurances may understate the deeper ontological problem. In a high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary such as China, consumption rates for anti-ship missiles, long-range precision strike assets, and supporting logistics would likely dwarf those observed in Iran. The theory’s predictive claim is that the decisive variable is not the absolute size of the initial arsenal but the velocity of industrial and logistical regeneration under conditions of attrition. Where that velocity proves inadequate, the rational strategic choice shifts from escalation or sustained coercion toward negotiated coexistence or calibrated restraint (Koch, 2026). Chinese analysts appear to have internalised precisely this logic, interpreting U.S. difficulties in Iran as evidence that Washington would face even steeper replenishment challenges in a Taiwan scenario.

The timing amplifies the political consequences. President Trump had hoped to approach his forthcoming summit with Xi Jinping from a position of demonstrated strength. Instead, the deadlock in Iran and the visible strain on U.S. munitions stockpiles have eroded that leverage. Beijing now possesses additional narrative and psychological capital with which to court U.S. allies, question the reliability of American security guarantees, and press for concessions on Taiwan arms sales and trade issues. The episode also lends credence to Chinese arguments that U.S. global military hegemony rests on brittle industrial foundations rather than inexhaustible capacity.

None of this implies that American power is in terminal decline or that deterrence in Asia has collapsed. The United States retains unmatched alliance networks, technological edges in certain domains, and the fiscal depth to expand production if political will is mobilised. Requisite Realism does not reject these factors; it simply insists that they are secondary to the material ontology of replenishment. Anarchy may structure incentives, but depletion disciplines outcomes. In this sense, the theory offers both explanatory power for the current moment and a forward-looking lens for assessing great-power competition in an age of precision-strike abundance and industrial interdependence.

For policymakers in Washington, London, and allied capitals, the lesson is clear: restoring replenishment velocity must become a core national security priority, on par with force modernisation or alliance management. This requires not only increased defence spending but fundamental reforms to acquisition processes, workforce development, and supply-chain resilience—measures that have proven politically and bureaucratically difficult even in peacetime. For scholars of international relations, the Iran episode and the Chinese reaction underscore the value of theoretical innovation that takes material sustainment seriously. Requisite Realism, still in its formative phase, appears already to be demonstrating the predictive and explanatory utility its proponents claim.

In an era defined by the interplay of technological intensity and industrial limits, the states that master replenishment velocity will enjoy decisive advantages. Those that do not may discover, as Chinese observers now suggest the United States is doing, that global hegemony can limp long before it falls.

References

Koch, A. (2026) ‘Requisite Realism: A Material Ontology of Power in the Technological Age’, The Gadfly Doctrine, 12 March. Available at: https://alkoch55.substack.com/p/requisite-realism (Accessed: 8 May 2026).

Pierson, D. and Wang, B. (2026) ‘China Sees a “Giant With a Limp” as U.S. Drains Weapons on Iran War’, The New York Times, 8 May.

References (Requisite Realism working paper Library)

© 2025 Alan Koch. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Alan Koch • 28 April 2026

Abstract

In early 2026, ChinaTalk launched an economic security essay contest judged by four of the most influential figures in contemporary U.S. China policy: Jake Sullivan (former National Security Advisor), Chris Miller (author of Chip War), Dan Kim (former Chief Economist for the CHIPS Program Office), and Dan Wang (author of Breakneck. The two prompts were explicit: (1) What high-level KPIs should policy target, analogous to the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate of 2% inflation and full employment? (2) Where would you allocate $10–50 billion for maximum impact on economic security—defensive, offensive, or a portfolio approach? These parameters framed the entire problem within the security dilemma ontology: the task was to harden the U.S. industrial base against Chinese coercion, optimise surge capacity for potential conflict, and identify chokepoints to defend. The prompts did not invite writers to question the premise of adversarial anarchy, explore negotiated coexistence as a temporal strategy for replenishment, or allocate funds toward diplomacy and mutual restraint. They incentivised “guns over butter”—industrial revival explicitly tied to war-fighting readiness. Lt Col Jahara Matisek’s winning essay delivered precisely what the structure rewarded: a sophisticated Economic Security Dual Mandate, five KPIs, and a $50 billion “Endurance Build” portfolio. This review demonstrates why that selection, while internally coherent within the prevailing paradigm, embodies the ontological flaw that Requisite Realism exposes. The essay and its endorsement by the panel reveal a systemic bias toward escalation within the security dilemma rather than recognition that replenishment velocity is the prior condition for any viable strategy.

Thesis

Where replenishment velocity of essential requisites falls below operational consumption and cannot be restored within strategic time horizons, the rational policy response shifts from war preparation to negotiated coexistence, as time rather than force becomes the decisive variable of state survival. The ChinaTalk contest’s prompts and Professor Matisek’s winning essay exemplifies what Robert Pape (2026) calls the escalation trap: by design, they promoted KPI-driven industrial revival for coercion resistance—sacrificing butter for guns—while ignoring the ontological prior of replenishment velocity. The distinguished judges’ selection of this framework reveals how even the most respected China hands remain captive to an outdated security-dilemma ontology, risking strategic miscalculation at the precise moment when industrial reproduction capacity determines the correlation of forces.

1. The ChinaTalk Contest, Its Prompts, and the Structural Bias Toward Escalation

The ChinaTalk economic security contest was not a neutral forum for ideas. Its structure actively shaped the intellectual terrain. The two prompts—”What are the most important high-level KPIs that policy should aim for? What is the analogy of the Fed’s ‘2% inflation and full employment’ target for economic security?” and “Where today would you put $10–50bn to get the most for your investment in economic security? Feel free to propose both defensive and offensive ideas, and either a portfolio of ideas or the one large idea you think will deliver the most value”—embedded a clear set of assumptions. Economic security was defined as the capacity to withstand and respond to Chinese coercion. The analogy to the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate signalled a technocratic, metric-driven approach to a fundamentally political and ontological problem. The funding question presupposed that the solution lay in capital allocation to industrial capacity, not in diplomatic off-ramps, negotiated restraint, or strategies that buy time to restore positive replenishment velocity. In short, the contest incentivised “guns over butter”: policies that prioritise military-industrial surge and chokepoint defence over investments in coexistence that could slow adversarial depletion velocity.

Lt Col Jahara Matisek’s winning essay aligned perfectly with these parameters. It proposed an Economic Security Dual Mandate (Minimum Viable Capacity + Maximum Credible Coercion Cost), five KPIs with precise targets (Time to Reconstitute 6–12 months, Surge Ratio 3–5× for 12–18 months, etc.), and a $50 billion four-pillar “Endurance Build” focused on energetics, midstream magnets, sub-tier finance, and machine tools. This was not an outlier; it was the logical output of a competition designed to reward sophisticated operationalisation of the security dilemma within the prevailing ontology. The panel—Sullivan, whose NSC tenure shaped the Biden Administration’s integrated deterrence and “small yard, high fence” strategy; Miller, whose Chip War framed U.S.-China competition as a zero-sum technological race; Kim, who implemented the CHIPS Act’s industrial policy; and Wang, whose analysis highlights China’s state-driven acceleration—collectively embodied the paradigm the prompts assumed. Their unanimous selection of Matisek’s essay (each judge awarding it first place in turn) was therefore unsurprising, yet deeply revealing.

1.1 Why This Essay Won: The Security Dilemma as Contest Design

The competition did not merely tolerate a security-dilemma framing; it required it. Writers were not asked to consider whether the U.S. industrial base’s vulnerability stemmed from an unobserved ontological error—the negative replenishment velocity in critical requisites such as tungsten carbide tooling. They were not invited to model how negotiated coexistence could serve as a temporal strategy to buy time for restoration, as Requisite Realism proposes. Instead, the prompts channelled all intellectual energy into refining metrics and allocating capital for coercion resistance. Matisek’s essay excelled at this task: it translated the dual-mandate analogy into concrete KPIs, justified the $50 billion portfolio with reference to surge shortfalls and sub-tier fragility, and offered falsifiable targets that appealed to the technocratic sensibilities of the judges. In doing so, it reproduced and reinforced the very escalation trap the Requisite Realism corpus identifies: each round of KPI sophistication and capital expenditure assumes the prior problem is solvable within the existing ontology, when in fact the ontology itself is the constraint. The result is policy that is hyper-active—more dashboards, more billions, more programs—yet strategically inert, because it never interrogates whether the system possesses the material viability to absorb those investments under sustained adversarial depletion velocity.

This structural bias explains the essay’s victory and, more importantly, why the judges’ endorsement cannot be dismissed as mere preference. It reflects a deeper continuity in elite China policy thinking—one that has repeatedly underestimated China’s capacity to weaponise interdependence at the level of industrial reproduction. Requisite Realism, developed across the linked working papers, supplies the external vantage point from which this continuity becomes visible as a flaw rather than a feature.

2. Anarchy as Failed Ontology: The Unobserved Prior

Traditional international relations theory—Waltz (1979), Mearsheimer (2001), Walt (1987)—posits anarchy as the foundational axiom from which the security dilemma, balancing behaviour, and rational state action logically follow. Even Susan Strange (1994), who contests pure anarchy by mapping four structural power domains (security, production, finance, knowledge), presupposes that states are already viable units capable of exercising or resisting those structures. The unobserved prior in US economic security policy is the negative replenishment velocity in foundational industrial requisites. As Ontology or Assumptions? (Koch) argues, the field has mistaken an assumption for an axiom. The result is a policy discourse rich in activity but poor in outcomes.

Requisite Realism supplies the corrective ontology. Its five axioms establish a strict hierarchy:

• Axiom 1 (Material Priority): No structure of power exists without a material substrate.

• Axiom 2 (Knowledge Requires Physical Cognition): Knowledge depends on biological cognition, symbolic inscription, storage media, and energy-powered transmission.

• Axiom 3 (Production Requires Inputs): Production necessitates extractable matter, energy conversion, tools, labour, and infrastructure.

• Axiom 4 (Security Requires Sustainment): Coercive capacity demands fuel, production networks, maintenance, and human sustainment.

• Axiom 5 (Finance Requires Material Settlement): Financial systems rely on expectations of material delivery; without it, symbolic power unravels.

From this hierarchy flows the central claim, articulated in the foundational Requisite Realism paper (Koch, 12 March 2026): “Anarchy does not constrain power; depletion does.” Replenishment velocity—the rate at which critical industrial inputs can be restored relative to operational consumption—is the ontological prior to anarchy. Anarchy is operative only among materially viable units. Where replenishment velocity falls below consumption, forward deployments live off inventories, maintenance cycles lengthen, production queues stall, and strategic choice narrows from expansion to conservation. The ChinaTalk essay’s KPIs are downstream metrics that become meaningful only after this prior is secured. The contest’s prompts, by design, never reached this layer.

3. Engineered Depletion Velocity and Relative Replenishment Velocity

The refinement introduced across the Requisite Realism corpus adds two dynamic concepts that convert latent interdependence into active, time-sensitive power asymmetry. Engineered depletion velocity is the adversary’s deliberate erosion of an opponent’s reconstitution rate through control of upstream intermediates. Relative replenishment velocity is the differential between one actor’s reconstitution speed and cost and its rival’s, measured under sustained pressure. As MADisruption and Replenishment Deterrence develops, when depletion velocity is engineered faster than replenishment can respond, the result is not classic deterrence but a creeping form of mutual assured industrial disruption—MADisruption—in which both sides suffer mounting degradation of their material base long before kinetic thresholds are crossed.

Tungsten carbide tooling illustrates the mechanism. The United States has conducted no commercial tungsten mining since 2015 and remains more than 50% import-reliant; approximately 60% of consumption goes to cemented carbides essential for cutting tools, drill bits, and precision manufacturing. China produced approximately 67,000 of 85,000 global metric tons in 2025 (USGS, 2026). In 2025, U.S. tariffs rose to 50% on several Chinese tungsten products while China imposed export licensing on 20 related items. The result is compounding temporal asymmetry: shortages migrate into machine-tool ecosystems, flattening munitions output by 9–18 months and forcing strategic triage by 18–24 months. China does not need to destroy existing inventories; by modulating depletion velocity it systematically degrades the West’s capacity to build the capital equipment required for onshoring alternatives.

In an era of convergent demand pressures from high-consumption weapons systems, sustainment requirements such as maintenance and spare parts, and AI infrastructure, constraints on replenishment capacity reshape the balance of power before open conflict peaks.

China does not even require even a third of the replenishment velocity the United States must sustain. Its modest blue-water navy is oriented toward defending its near abroad and its single overseas base in Djibouti, with North Korea as its only treaty ally. The United States, by contrast, sustains over 600 overseas bases and an extensive alliance architecture — including NATO, the US-Japan Security Treaty, the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty, ANZUS, the Quad, AUKUS, and the Monroe Doctrine — that commits it to simultaneous multi-theatre operations, while maintaining close security partnerships across the Middle East (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan).This global posture is further undermined by a critical maintenance overstretch: the United States lacks a merchant marine sufficient to supply its military and forward bases, forcing heavy reliance on foreign-flagged vessels and private contractors. At the same time, a defence budget exceeding one trillion dollars is now surpassed by interest payments on America’s roughly forty-trillion-dollar national debt. Ferguson’s law holds that when debt-service costs exceed defence spending, a great power has entered structural decline (Ferguson, 2016). This fiscal and logistical reality directly contradicts the ChinaTalk contest’s invitation to propose an analogy to the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate of 2% inflation and full employment — a technocratic framing that encouraged essayists to refine metrics and capital allocation within the security dilemma rather than interrogate the ontological prior of financial replenishment velocity.

4. Why This Argument Cannot Be Ignored

Three factors make the Requisite Realism critique impossible to dismiss as merely academic dissent.

First, timestamp: this review is published on the same day as the ChinaTalk essay (28 April 2026), creating an immediate, side-by-side juxtaposition of two frameworks—one operating within the prevailing ontology, the other exposing its foundational flaw.

Second, empirical grounding: the tungsten case is not hypothetical. USGS data, 2025 export licensing actions, and documented machine-tool bottlenecks provide measurable evidence of depletion velocity already at work.

Third, falsifiability: the framework generates testable predictions. Under sustained tungsten or rare-earth constraints, divergence between U.S. and Chinese replenishment trajectories—measured in the pace of tacit skill formation at scale among toolmakers and machinists, time to commission new magnet plants, recovery of machine-tool output, and munitions surge capacity—correlates directly with a contraction of feasible strategic options. This is exactly the outcome the ChinaTalk KPIs claim to prevent, yet cannot, because they track downstream performance metrics rather than the upstream replenishment variable that ultimately determines them.

As Mutually Assured Disruption (Koch) extends the logic, the alternative to addressing the prior is not continued competition on Western terms but a slow-motion MADisruption in which both sides degrade their industrial base through the very measures intended to enhance security. The judges’ framework, by ignoring this dynamic, risks accelerating the condition it seeks to avert.

5. The Off-Ramp: Negotiated Coexistence as Temporal Strategy

When replenishment velocity of essential requisites falls below operational consumption and cannot be restored within strategic time horizons, the rational policy response shifts from war preparation to negotiated coexistence. Coexistence is not a concession. It is a temporal strategy for rebuilding the material conditions of power—so that the classical tools of realism (deterrence, balancing, surge) regain meaning. The escalation trap the ChinaTalk contest and its winning essay embody is the belief that more capital, more KPIs, and more programs will eventually close the relative replenishment velocity gap. RR demonstrates the opposite: every additional layer of investment atop a negative-velocity base delivers diminishing returns while America’s adversary continues to deliberately modulate its depletion velocity.

A sharpshooter strategy therefore concentrates on the single prior—tungsten carbide ecosystem restoration—rather than dispersing $50 billion across symptoms. This includes guaranteed offtake for domestic and allied powder production, precision grinding capacity, workforce pipelines, and explicit modelling of degradation curves that incorporate adversary-engineered depletion velocity. Where domestic effort alone cannot close the gap in time, negotiated commercial exchange and coexistence buy the temporal space required. The full Requisite Realism corpus develops this logic as the necessary complement to any serious economic security policy.

6. Implications for Theory and Policy

RR advances Strange’s production structures by grounding them in replenishment capacity and adversarial depletion dynamics. It qualifies offensive realism by showing that geographical hegemony logics become self-negating when requisites are deeply interdependent. Policy must reorient around replenishment velocity as the central planning variable and engineered depletion velocity as the principal threat vector—rather than treating critical minerals as interchangeable inputs amenable to market solutions or broad diversification. The distinguished judges, having lent their authority to a velocity-blind framework produced by a structurally biased contest, now face a choice: defend the assumption that anarchy is the starting point, or engage the prior that Requisite Realism has placed on the table.

Conclusion

The ChinaTalk contest and its winning essay provide a valuable dashboard for endurance under coercion, but they operate one ontological layer too late—by design. The prompts’ emphasis on KPI analogies to the Fed’s dual mandate and capital allocation for coercion resistance channelled all effort into refining the security dilemma within the prevailing ontology, rather than questioning whether that ontology itself is the constraint. By failing to observe that anarchy presupposes viability, and that viability has already been eroded through engineered depletion velocity in foundational requisites such as tungsten carbide tooling, the framework prescribes escalation where an off-ramp is required. The endorsement by Sullivan, Miller, Kim, and Wang does not validate the approach; it exposes how deeply the ontological error has penetrated even the highest levels of China policy expertise, reinforced by a contest structure that rewarded guns over butter. Requisite Realism, through its full library of working papers, supplies the corrective: secure the prior, or negotiate the time to do so. The future belongs not to those who command the longest chain of investment, but to those who weave the densest, most adaptive fabric of replenishment and who understand how to impose depletion velocity on rivals while accelerating their own curves.

Closing insight: Coexistence is not a concession. It is a temporal strategy for rebuilding the material conditions of power. Until the policy community acknowledges the flaw the ChinaTalk framework embodies—a flaw baked into the contest’s very design—it will continue to fight the last ontological war while the next one, over relative replenishment velocity, has already begun.

References (Requisite Realism Library)

Koch, A. (2026a) Requisite Realism: A Material Ontology of Power in the Technological Age. The Gadfly Doctrine, 12 March.

Koch, A. (2026b) When Relative Power Misleads: Requisite Realism’s Prior Ontology and the Future of Realist Theory. 16 April.

Koch, A. (2026c) MADisruption and Replenishment Deterrence.

Koch, A. (2026d) Mutually Assured Disruption.

Koch, A. (2026e) Ontology or Assumptions?.

Ferguson, N. (2016) The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. London: Allen Lane.

Jervis, R. (1978) ‘Cooperation under the security dilemma’, World Politics, 30(2), pp. 167–214.

Matisek, J. (2026) ‘China-Proofing the American Industrial Base’, ChinaTalk, 28 April.

Mearsheimer, J.J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton.

Pape, R.A. (2026) The Escalation Trap. Available at https://escalationtrap.substack.com(Accessed: 28 April 2026).

Strange, S. (1994) States and Markets. London: Pinter.

US Geological Survey (USGS) (2026) Mineral Commodity Summaries: Tungsten and Rare Earths. Washington, DC: USGS.

Walt, S.M. (1987) The Origins of Alliances. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Waltz, K.N. (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Koch 2026 | The Gadfly Doctrine

© 2026 Alan Koch.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Requisite Realism vs Offensive Realism:

“Tacit knowledge and intergenerational learning form the primordial axiom of material replenishment. The forge where the atelier becomes factory, sustaining the flows that define durable power. Offensive Realism weighs only depleted residue once this prior ontology is ignored, leaving anarchy’s scales to crack under exhausted stocks.”

Why Requisite Realism Offers a More Parsimonious Realist Theory

By Alan Koch April 16 2026

In the study of international relations, few concepts carry the axiomatic weight of anarchy. For more than two decades John Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism has offered one of the most parsimonious accounts of great-power behaviour by treating anarchy as an immutable structural prior: a self-help system in which states must maximise relative power or face elimination (Mearsheimer 2001). The theory’s elegance stems from its refusal to interrogate the origins of that anarchy. Yet elegance is not explanatory completeness. Requisite Realism advances a more fundamental challenge. It declares a single, immutable ontological prior—the continuous material reproduction of energy, infrastructure, logistics, industrial capacity, and the tacit knowledge that sustains them—as the condition of possibility for any durable power (Koch 2026). Anarchy, on this view, is not primordial but derivative: a human-constructed realm whose character and intensity are shaped by success or failure in replenishing those flows. This essay argues that Requisite Realism’s derivative ontology delivers superior explanatory and predictive power. By grounding theory in a prior that Offensive Realism brackets, Requisite Realism renders intelligible outcomes that appear puzzling under conventional realist assumptions, most notably the quiet erosion of material power under liberal globalisation and comparative advantage.

Offensive Realism achieves theoretical economy by accepting anarchy as given, much as Kenneth Waltz had done before it (Waltz 1979). From that single assumption Mearsheimer derives a clear behavioural imperative: states pursue hegemony because the structure leaves them no choice. Capabilities are treated as relatively static endowments whose distribution can be measured at any moment. The result is a model whose forecasts hold only so long as the underlying regenerative flows remain intact. When they degrade, relative-power calculations become misleading precisely because the prior condition the theory assumes has already been violated (Koch 2026).

Requisite Realism corrects this by moving one level deeper. Material reproduction is not a background variable but the fixed axiom against which all else is judged. Energy security, logistical networks, industrial ecosystems and crucially the tacit intergenerational learning that turns an atelier into a scalable factory are not resources states possess; they are flows states must continuously replenish. Once this prior is declared, anarchy ceases to be an unexamined given. It becomes derivative: a realm whose stability or brutality depends on humanity’s collective capacity to sustain the material substrate that makes organised political life possible. From one simple axiom flows a cascade of derivative phenomena: the durability of alliances, the reliability of deterrence, the limits of power projection, and the very intensity of anarchic competition itself.

The theoretical payoff is greater parsimony in application. Offensive Realism requires analysts to accept its foundational assumption without reserve; any erosion of the material base is treated as exogenous. Requisite Realism, by contrast, begins with a single testable condition. When regenerative capacity falls below threshold, apparent operational strength, fleets at sea, aircraft aloft and sanctions imposed can persist for a time on depleted stocks. Yet each such action accelerates underlying depletion rather than restoring it. Strategic misreads therefore arise not from miscalculation of relative power but from reading the wrong layer of reality. Bureaucratic politics and organisational processes (Allison and Zelikow 1999) compound the problem: parochial interests and standard operating procedures delay the transmission of regenerative signals from the material “root” to decision-making “branches.” The system projects vigour while quietly exhausting the conditions that make vigour possible.

This explanatory advantage becomes concrete when applied to the political economy of globalisation. Susan Strange long ago identified the structural tension between production and financial structures in the global system (Strange 1988). Under liberal globalisation, the financial structure gained ascendancy. Capital flowed to wherever labour or regulatory costs were lowest, offshoring industrial capacity in pursuit of short-term profit. What appeared as efficient specialisation according to comparative advantage delivered lower consumer prices and higher shareholder returns. Yet it simultaneously exported not merely factories but the tacit learning, supplier networks, and regenerative capacity that transform artisanal skill into industrial-scale reproduction. Without this living substrate, relative power becomes a mirage sustained by depleted stocks rather than renewable flows.

The consequences for great-power durability are now visible. The United States retains formidable operational military assets and financial dominance, yet repeated official assessments document vulnerabilities in the defence industrial base: single-source foreign dependencies (often adversarial), eroded surge capacity, and atrophied lower-tier suppliers in machine tooling, rare-earth processing, and precision components (Department of Defense 2018; GAO 2025). Offshoring for profit has left logistics and munitions production exposed to disruption, precisely the regenerative shortfalls that Requisite Realism treats as violations of the ontological prior. Quarterly earnings and stock valuations register success, yet the threshold of replenishment is quietly crossed. Apparent stability persists while the material root degrades.

Offensive Realism struggles to explain or predict this dynamic because it brackets the material substrate, treating anarchy as given and capabilities as static. Requisite Realism, by declaring replenishment prior, reveals how comparative-advantage-driven globalisation constructs a more brittle anarchy: one in which financial power masks industrial erosion until conflict or coercion exposes the gap. States that subordinate production to finance risk rendering their relative-power advantages transient. Those that deliberately reconfigure flows through reshoring, investment in tacit-knowledge pipelines and alignment of incentives with regenerative imperatives will better satisfy the unchanging ontological demand.

Clausewitz observed that “theory becomes infinitely more difficult as soon as it touches the realm of moral values” (Clausewitz 1976/1984, p. 136). Requisite Realism embraces this difficulty where Offensive Realism evades it. By treating anarchy as given, Offensive Realism can present power-maximisation as tragic necessity. By defining anarchy through its material prior, Requisite Realism restores accountability: leaders are responsible not only for their position within the system but for whether they sustain the flows that constitute the system itself. Industrial hollowing-out ceases to be mere policy error; it becomes a violation of the conditions that make durable power possible.

The contemporary relevance is immediate. Great-power competition today turns on supply-chain resilience, energy transitions, critical minerals, and semiconductor sovereignty. Offensive Realism can describe the rivalry but struggles to explain why some competitors maintain durability while others erode beneath surface metrics of strength. Requisite Realism offers a clearer predictive lens: the decisive variable is not the current distribution of capabilities but whether each actor continues to reproduce the material substrate that will sustain future capabilities. States or coalitions that reconfigure flows under stress preserve their ontological foundation. Those that cannot discover that relative-power logic eventually loses traction.

In sum, Requisite Realism does not supplant Offensive Realism; it grounds it. By engaging the prior condition that defines anarchy itself, Requisite Realism restores theoretical accountability without sacrificing parsimony. It explains both why competitive logics endure and why they suddenly fail when regenerative flows are exhausted. For scholars and practitioners navigating an era of material strain and perceptual lag, this derivative ontology is not an academic refinement but a necessary corrective. Theory that refuses to interrogate its own foundations risks becoming elegant yet irrelevant. Requisite Realism insists that the foundations must be declared and thereby makes international-relations theory once again accountable to the material reality that sustains it.

References

Allison, G. T. and Zelikow, P. (1999) Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2nd edn. New York: Longman.

Clausewitz, C. von (1976/1984) On War. Edited and translated by M. Howard and P. Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Department of Defense (2018) Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States. Washington, DC: DoD.

GAO (2025) Defense Industrial Base: Actions Needed to Address Risks Posed by Dependence on Foreign Suppliers. GAO-25-107283. Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office.

Koch, A. (2026) ‘Requisite Realism: A Material Ontology of Power and Enforcement in Contemporary International Relations’. Working Paper. Available at: https://alkoch55.substack.com/p/requisite-realism (Accessed: 15 April 2026).

Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W. Norton.

Strange, S. (1988) States and Markets. London: Pinter.

Waltz, K. N. (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

You are welcome to share this work with attribution. No commercial or modified uses allowed without permission.

© 2025 Alan Koch.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A Hormuz blockade, instigated by the Trump Administration following the collapse of peace negotiations in Islamabad which was confirmed in President Trump’s Truth Social post announcing a full American embargo on all ships coming and going through the Strait of Hormuz (Trump 2026), furnishes a parsimonious test of Requisite Realism.

This material ontology of power, articulated by Alan Koch (2026a), holds that state power is delimited not chiefly by anarchy or rival intentions but by the non-substitutable material requisites, energy flows, critical minerals, supply chains, tacit learning and industrial substrates, that underpin all higher structures of security and production.

Coercive disruption of these requisites frequently proves self-negating. It yields MADisruption (Koch 2026b) and, crucially, what Koch terms Replenishment Deterrence: the structural impossibility of sustaining protracted conflict when the initiator’s own alliance depends on an adversary’s supply of irreplaceable inputs.

The Hormuz blockade exemplifies this logic with elegant economy. It echoes the uneven impact of the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Just as urban middle-class Americans saw their credit- and wage-dependent lifestyles collapse while rural communities in Appalachia, Missouri, and Louisiana, long habituated to subsistence on hogback resources, experienced little additional hardship, so Iran, steeled by decades of sanctions, proves resilient while America’s East Asian allies confront immediate deprivation and the US-Israeli military effort risks logistical self-limitation through dependence on Chinese rare earth elements (REE) and tungsten (Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b).

Requisite Realism’s ontological sequence is ruthlessly reductive. Material requisites constitute the foundational substrate of power; political authority evaporates when those substrates fracture.

MADisruption (Mutually Assured Disruption) operationalises one dimension of this insight for economic warfare. Weaponising a global chokepoint such as Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of world oil transits, does not isolate the target but instead triggers mutual disruption across interdependent systems.

Replenishment Deterrence extends the analysis to the kinetic realm. It demonstrates with minimalist axioms why even a superior military coalition cannot prosecute sustained war once its replenishment velocity collapses. Power is measured not by initial stockpiles but by the capacity to regenerate munitions, sensors, and platforms under conditions of contested supply. When those conditions hinge on an adversary’s dominance of critical minerals, escalation becomes ontologically self-deterring (Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b).

This material ontology offers greater parsimony and explanatory power than both offensive realism and liberal institutionalism. While Mearsheimer’s offensive realism (2001) correctly stresses structural pressures under anarchy, his later collaboration with Walt (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007) explains US Middle East policy primarily through the domestic influence of the Israel lobby. Such recourse to unit-level political mechanics sits uneasily with the purely structural claims of offensive realism and reveals a theoretical vulnerability.

Liberal institutionalism, exemplified by Ikenberry (2001), places excessive faith in rules-based orders and institutions to constrain power politics. Yet it struggles to account for the hard material chokepoints and replenishment constraints that increasingly govern state behaviour. Requisite Realism avoids these pitfalls. By remaining strictly material and substrate-focused, it generates predictions without auxiliary domestic variables or institutional optimism, rendering it ontologically superior for explaining contemporary great-power competition (Koch 2026a).

Iran’s position mirrors the Depression-era rural household. Successive sanctions regimes since 1979 have compelled Tehran to internalise a resistance economy of import substitution, shadow fleets, barter trade, and domestic refining. Industrial output rose substantially between 2011-2022 despite financial isolation (Kalb 2024). Additional deprivation, while painful, does not threaten core sustainment; Iran has already internalised the scarcity that others now impose.

By contrast, East Asian economies, tightly coupled to just-in-time global chains, lack equivalent buffers. China’s incremental crude imports are overwhelmingly Middle Eastern; Philippine energy security rests on 98 per cent imported supply. The continued Hormuz closure by Trump to “all ships” will exhaust jet-fuel stocks within days, grounding tourism and container shipping while idling Philippine tractors and spiking fertiliser costs. Manila, a formal US treaty ally, is thereby driven deeper into Beijing’s economic orbit, precisely the outcome Washington seeks to forestall in a great power rivalry (ABS-CBN News 2026; The Diplomat 2026).

The replenishment-deterrence dynamic renders the US-Israeli alliance’s military posture equally precarious. Advanced munitions, precision-guided systems, and strike aircraft such as the F-35 depend on permanent magnets and high-performance alloys whose production requires REE and tungsten. China controls over 90 per cent of global REE refining and permanent-magnet capacity, and roughly 80 per cent of tungsten supply.

US and Israel’s strategic stockpiles for these inputs are measured in weeks to months, not years. Replenishment of depleted inventories, already strained by weeks of operations against Iranian targets, would require either politically unacceptable domestic mining expansion or renewed dependence on Chinese exports subject to licensing controls. In short, the very alliance waging kinetic pressure on Tehran cannot maintain operational tempo without the tacit forbearance of Beijing, the very power whose influence in East and West Asia the Hormuz policy is ostensibly intended to counter.

Requisite Realism’s parsimony lies here. With only a few axioms about material substrates and replenishment velocity, it predicts the counter-intuitive outcome, America and Israel harming their own coalition’s endurance more than Iran’s, without recourse to auxiliary variables of intention, misperception, or domestic politics demanded by rival IR theories (Koch 2026a; Koch 2026b).

This asymmetry is not contingent but required by the ontology. Urban professionals in 1930s New York confronted breadlines because their livelihoods rested on fragile, interdependent systems; rural households simply tightened belts on resources they had never externalised. Iran is the rural household of the contemporary order; East Asia and the US and allies defence-industrial base are the urban middle class.

The blockade does not isolate Tehran; it embargoes Washington’s partners while exposing the replenishment limits of its own campaign. As Koch observes, power is constrained not only by rivals but by the material systems required to sustain it (2026a, p. 7). In an era of proliferating chokepoints and concentrated critical-mineral processing, MADisruption and replenishment deterrence together offer policymakers a leaner, more operationally useful map than the ornate security dilemmas of classical realism (Koch 2026b).

Whether the Hormuz policy accelerates negotiation or entrenches energy crisis will test Requisite Realism’s prescriptive corollary: great powers must calibrate coercion to preserve the material requisites of their own coalition and alliance replenishment velocity. On present evidence, the Trump administration has violated that axiom, confirming the theory’s predictive bite. For scholars and practitioners alike, the lesson is clear: in material ontology, the first casualty of self-negating coercion is strategic coherence.

References

ABS-CBN News (2026) ‘Aviation, tourism, agriculture … the economic sectors hit by the war’, 25 March. Available at: https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/world/2026/3/25/aviation-tourism-agriculture-the-economic-sectors-hit-by-the-war-2311 (Accessed: 12 April 2026).

Ikenberry, G.J. (2001) After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kalb, Z. (2024) ‘Mobilized resilience and development under sanctions in Iran’, Development and Change, 55(1), pp. 1-30.

Koch, A. (2026a) ‘Requisite Realism: A Material Ontology of Power and Enforcement in Contemporary International Relations’. Working Paper. Available at: https://alkoch55.substack.com/p/requisite-realism (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

Koch, A. (2026b) ‘Mutually Assured Disruption’. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/alkoch55/p/mutually-assured-disruption (Accessed: 12 April 2026).

Mearsheimer, J.J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W. Norton.

Mearsheimer, J.J. and Walt, S.M. (2007) The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Diplomat (2026) ‘Is the Philippines really about to restart joint oil exploration with China in the South China Sea?’, 26 March. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2026/03/is-the-philippines-really-about-to-restart-joint-oil-exploration-with-china-in-the-south-china-sea/ (Accessed: 12 April 2026).

Trump, D. (2026) Truth Social post confirming American embargo on ships coming and going from Hormuz, April. Available at: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump (Accessed: 12 April 2026).

You are welcome to share this work with attribution. No commercial or modified uses allowed without permission.

© 2025 Alan Koch.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A New Heuristic for Great-Power Competition

By Alan Koch

Mutually Assured Disruption (MAD) has emerged as a powerful new heuristic for foreign-policy analysis. Unlike nuclear MAD, which rested on symmetric destructive capacity, this version rests on asymmetric material interdependence. A state that weaponizes one maritime chokepoint inevitably disrupts its own allies, its forward military posture, and its own industrial base. The 2026 Iran conflict has provided the clearest demonstration yet. What began as a limited campaign to degrade Iranian capabilities rapidly revealed the globalized nature of energy arteries and the prohibitive costs of single-point coercion in an interdependent world.

The immediate trigger was regional. Iran’s retaliation closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG transit. Oil prices exceeded $100 per barrel, the International Energy Agency released 400 million barrels of emergency stocks, and refined-product shortages spread across Asia. Beijing responded by curtailing exports of jet fuel and diesel, with shipments falling nearly 40 percent month-on-month in March. The move was framed as domestic necessity but carried clear geoeconomic intent. China had cultivated dependence through capitalist logic: airlines and governments purchased the cheapest product and rationalized domestic refining capacity in the process. When Beijing tightened supply, the pain was shared. Australia, which sourced roughly one-third of its jet fuel from Chinese refineries in 2025, saw reserves fall to 29 to 32 days. Japan lost 99 percent of Chinese jet-fuel imports year-on-year. Singapore and Malaysia faced substitution pressures that drove prices higher and forced emergency sourcing (Guardian 2026; South China Morning Post 2026).

Taiwan’s predicament was especially acute. The island imports over 99 percent of its oil and 95 percent of its energy needs. Its semiconductor industry, responsible for 90 to 92 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips, consumes roughly 10 percent of national electricity and more than half of industrial power demand. Stable, high-volume electricity and temperature-controlled cleanrooms cannot tolerate feedstock shortages. Although Taiwan does not import large volumes of finished Chinese jet fuel, it operates within the same regional product-balancing system. Any sustained disruption at Malacca would raise insurance premiums, reroute tankers, and tighten LNG and refined-fuel availability, forcing load-shedding at fabrication plants. The Silicon Shield that underwrites Taiwan’s strategic value would erode from within (Atlantic Council 2026).

The MAD heuristic reveals the self-defeating logic at work. Any US-led effort to blockade or interdict Chinese energy imports via the Strait of Malacca would impose parallel constraints on Taiwan’s chip production and on US bases in Japan and Australia. The latter already rely on host-nation support agreements and commercial contracts embedded in the same interdependent refining ecosystem. The tool designed to coerce Beijing would simultaneously degrade the very capabilities Washington seeks to protect. The Hormuz precedent has rendered such options mutually assured economic disruption rather than unilateral leverage.

This paradox flows from a deeper material ontology of power that traditional international-relations theory has underweighted. Requisite Realism supplies the missing framework. By grounding analysis in the secure sovereign control of energy transformation, critical inputs, and logistical endurance, the approach treats prosaic requisites such as refining capacity configured for local crude, strategic reserves, and onshore rare-earth processing as ontological constraints that delimit state behavior in an anarchic system (Koch 2026).

China has internalized this logic more consistently than its rivals. It built refining overcapacity, strategic reserves, and pipeline diversification while adversaries optimized for lowest-cost procurement. The result is calibrated coercion below the threshold of armed conflict. Refined-fuel export curbs and rare-earth licensing requirements allow Beijing to accumulate leverage over adversaries’ industrial endurance.

John Mearsheimer is correct that the Iran war is unlikely to alter the raw distribution of power resources in the short term. Yet his emphasis on wealth and population size as the bedrock of great-power status, while structurally important, remains incomplete. Great powers also depend on the material requisites that translate those resources into scalable, resilient projection. The United States faces growing vulnerabilities here. It remains heavily dependent on foreign processing for rare earth elements, with China controlling over 90 percent of refining and permanent-magnet production essential for advanced munitions and sensors. Semiconductor fabrication at the leading edge is overwhelmingly concentrated in Taiwan. Equally critical is the defence-industrial base’s capacity for sustained replenishment, which continues to suffer from workforce shortages and supply-chain fragility when scaling munitions for protracted conflict.

The pattern echoes Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower cautioned that a permanent armaments industry and its political allies could distort national priorities and crowd out balanced investment in the foundations of endurance. Mick Ryan, a leading Australian strategist, has repeatedly highlighted the opportunity costs of the AUKUS submarine program. He notes that its escalating expense crowds out near-term readiness and logistical hardening, even as he calls for defence spending to rise toward 3.5 percent of GDP to accommodate both high-end capabilities and broader resilience needs (Ryan 2026).

The recent F-15E Strike Eagle rescue over southwestern Iran, which cost an estimated $300 million to $500 million in destroyed aircraft and operational expenditure, illustrates the arithmetic (Wall Street Journal 2026; Australian Financial Review 2026). When each airman’s extraction approaches the GDP of small nations and million-dollar munitions are expended against cheap drones, the cost-benefit calculus of protracted conflict becomes unsustainable. One cannot win a drone war, much less great-power competition, if every soldier’s life is valued at half a billion dollars.

The 2026 Iran war has performed an involuntary service. It has moved foreign-policy analysis from narrow cost imposition to systemic benefit assessment. In this new calculus, closure of Malacca or the Taiwan Strait would generate worldwide disruption far exceeding any localized gain. The episode has globalized chokepoint thinking and, paradoxically, strengthened China’s position by demonstrating that Beijing can absorb short-term shocks while adversaries remain locked into commercial logics that deepen dependence.

Requisite Realism offers the necessary parsimony to navigate this landscape. It explains current asymmetries: why China’s refined-fuel leverage persists despite its own crude-import dependence; why AUKUS submarines cannot compensate for thin strategic reserves; and why commentary on Australian defence has often remained more reactive than predictive on fuel security and rare-earth independence. More importantly, it is predictive. It anticipates that without deliberate investment in sovereign midstream capacity, hardened reserves, and diversified supply chains, future crises will follow the same pattern of post-shock adaptation rather than pre-emptive assurance.

The forthcoming 2026 National Defence Strategy and parallel allied reviews therefore face a clear test. Will they treat material requisites as non-discretionary foundations that shape platform acquisition and coercive planning, or will they continue to subordinate endurance to alliance signaling?

The answer matters. In an era of contested global supply chains, deterrence rests less on the ability to close a single strait than on the capacity to endure when others do. Mutually Assured Disruption is not a counsel of despair. It is a call for strategic recalibration. Requisite Realism, with its focus on the material and production capabilities as preconditions of power, provides the intellectual architecture for that recalibration. Only by internalizing its constraints can policymakers ensure that security and endurance prosper together.

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Eisenhower, D. D. 1961. ‘Farewell Address to the Nation’. 17 January. Available at: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

Koch, A. 2026. ‘Requisite Realism: A Material Ontology of Power and Enforcement in Contemporary International Relations’. Working Paper. Available at: https://alkoch55.substack.com/p/requisite-realism (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

Guardian. 2026. ‘Two of Australia’s largest sources of jet fuel could be cut off’. 30 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/30/australia-jet-fuel-crisis-south-korea-china-restrictions (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

Hong Kong Free Press. 2026. ‘Taiwanese airlines to hike fuel surcharges 157% on international flights’. 4 April. Available at: https://hongkongfp.com/2026/04/04/taiwanese-airlines-to-hike-fuel-surcharges-157-on-international-flights/ (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

Mearsheimer, J. J. 2026. Interview on The Bottom Line, Al Jazeera, 3 April.

Ryan, M. 2026. ‘Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy Must Build Better Adaptation Foundations’. Futura Doctrina, 13 February. Available at: https://mickryan.substack.com/p/australias-2026-national-defence (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

South China Morning Post. 2026. ‘Australia and Japan face jet fuel supply crunch as China cuts exports’. 2 April. Available at: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3348642/australia-and-japan-face-jet-fuel-supply-crunch-china-cuts-exports (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

Wall Street Journal. 2026. ‘U.S. Special Ops Planes Destroyed in Iran Cost More Than $100 Million Each’. 5 April. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-war-news-2026/card/u-s-special-ops-planes-destroyed-in-iran-cost-more-than-100-million-each-TNFAZRMdqQY2wuzmIfQI (Accessed: 5 April 2026).

Ontology is not optional; it is prior. Much of International Relations theory is therefore built not on explicit ontological axioms, but on layered assumptions about what constitutes power, agency, and constraint. These assumptions often remain implicit, allowing theories to achieve conceptual elegance while masking foundational gaps.

In Kenneth Waltz, anarchy and the distribution of capabilities are treated as given, yet the material composition and regeneration of those capabilities remain under-specified. In Alexander Wendt, ontology shifts toward ideas and identities, but still presumes a stable material background that is rarely interrogated. In both cases, ontology is present but unarticulated.

In John Mearsheimer, power is located in state competition under anarchy, while in Susan Strange it is relocated to the structures of security, production, finance, and knowledge. Both capture essential dimensions of international order, yet both begin from conditions that are assumed rather than grounded.

Requisite Realism makes this implicit layer explicit. It locates the foundation of power in the material substrate that precedes anarchy itself: energy, infrastructure, logistics, and industrial capacity. These are not static endowments but dynamic flows. Power depends not on what a state possesses at a given moment, but on what it can continuously reproduce.

The result is a shift in explanatory focus. Traditional theories explain patterns of behaviour under assumed conditions. Requisite Realism explains the durability of those conditions. It identifies when and why systems break down, not simply because actors miscalculate, but because the underlying flows that sustain power degrade or collapse.

A more rigorous approach therefore requires moving from assumed ontology to declared ontology. Once the material substrate of power is specified, theory gains not only explanatory clarity but also limits. It becomes possible to identify when strategies will fail, not as errors of judgement, but as violations of the conditions of possibility themselves.

In that sense, Requisite Realism does not replace existing theories; it grounds them. When ontology is made explicit, theory does not weaken. It becomes accountable to reality.

https://alkoch55.substack.com/p/requisite-realism

Fareed Zakaria’s recent column in The Washington Post identifies a genuine transformation in the economics of conflict. Low-cost attritable systems (drones and loitering munitions assembled for tens of thousands of dollars) now impose disproportionate losses on platforms costing millions, inverting the classic cost-imposition logic of post-Cold War supremacy (Zakaria, 2026). The observation is acute. Yet the frame that “the future of war is arriving faster than most imagined” is misleading. It remains tethered to an obsolete paradigm that Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap and John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism had already failed by early 2026. Zakaria thus emerges as the Fabian of contemporary commentary: cautious and incremental, advancing with deliberate authority only to discover his piece no longer fits the material realities of the technological age.

Allison predicted that a rising power’s challenge to a hegemon would spark structural fear and pre-emptive war (Allison, 2017). Mearsheimer reinforced this view: states maximise relative power in anarchy through territorial conquest and platform dominance (Mearsheimer, 2001). Both dominated Western international relations for decades but failed spectacularly. By February 2026, with the United States entangled in multiple theatres and munitions depleted across Ukraine, the Red Sea, the Caribbean and the Indo-Pacific, the true dynamic was not Thucydidean collision but Koch’s Spider Trap (Koch, 2026b). A rising power need not launch missiles across the Taiwan Strait. Sustained pressure on material requisites (rare-earth elements, permanent magnets, semiconductor ecosystems and precision manufacturing chains) erodes replenishment dominance and deterrence. China’s dominance of 60–70 per cent of global mining, over 90 per cent of processing and 94 per cent of high-performance neodymium-iron-boron production has transformed the battlefield (IEA, 2025; CSIS, 2025). A Tomahawk without its rare-earth seeker is inert metal; an F-35 without neodymium actuators is grounded ambition. The prey exhausts itself chasing shadows while the spider waits.

Requisite Realism provides the ontological foundation missing from both traditional realism and Zakaria’s caution (Koch, 2026a). It relocates the master constraint from anarchy and relative capability to non-substitutable material substrates (energy networks, rare-earth processing chains, semiconductor fabrication ecosystems and logistical infrastructure) that sustain power. These form the invisible architecture beneath Susan Strange’s four structures of security, production, finance and knowledge (Strange, 1988). Disruptions render power self-negating: enforcement erodes faster than gains accrue. The cheap-drone dynamic Zakaria notes is no unforeseen acceleration. It manifests a deeper material ontology in which replenishment velocity trumps static capability or first-strike supremacy. Offensive realism overlooked structural power over production. Zakaria diagnoses the symptom but attributes it to speed rather than ontological shift.

Zakaria’s evidence reveals the flaw. He describes battlespaces where adaptation compresses to days, production to weeks and decision loops to seconds. Rather than seeing institutional latency, the column frames this as surprising velocity. The analysis stays trapped in older realist grammar: power as deployable hardware overturned by faster innovation. Requisite Realism rejects this. Depletion, not anarchy, now binds. The “new economics of war” concerns not faster arrival but the shift from territorial conquest and platform dominance to replenishment deterrence and systemic sustainment.

This misalignment reaches into knowledge production itself. Traditional scholarship and flagship commentary move through slow cycles: years of review, cautious editing, and incentives that reward refinement over rupture. Fareed Zakaria’s prose captures this condition precisely. It is deliberate, armoured, incremental. In another era, it would have been unassailable.

Now it reads as Fabian. A battle tank advancing with doctrinal confidence, only to be disabled by a cheap, attritable drone assembled in a garage in Shiraz or Kiev. The analogy holds. It is not only platforms that have been outpaced, but ideas themselves.

Zakaria sees the fragility. He names the shift. Yet he misreads its source. What appears to him as sudden acceleration is in fact accumulated latency: institutions moving at yesterday’s tempo while the material world has already changed cadence.

His authority, carefully constructed through measured prose, becomes part of the dislocation. The very style that signals credibility also signals delay. It reflects a system of editorial gatekeeping that cannot match the industrial velocity of technological and military change.

The result is not error, but misfit. The analysis lands, but too late. The platform moves, but too slowly. The piece, like the tank, arrives on the battlefield already exposed.

Stephen Krasner foresaw the needed pragmatism two decades ago. “Good enough governance” prioritised functional arrangements over ideal institutions under real constraints (Krasner, 2004). The logic applies to strategy and theory alike. When realities shift monthly via drone feedback and supply reconfigurations, adaptation must precede validation; practice must outrun doctrine. Insisting on completeness before action (or peer-reviewed consensus before circulation) produces the paralysis Requisite Realism identifies at the material level.

Policy has adjusted. The shift from regime change to “regime alteration” (evident in Venezuela) embodies Krasner’s pragmatism and Requisite Realism’s focus on sustainment. Ideas, like power, are judged by whether they can be maintained amid disruption.

This essay appears first on Substack, not conventional channels. The choice illustrates the argument. When warfare evolves at industrial replenishment speed, validation mechanisms that lag become self-negating. Timely analysis cannot await misaligned cycles.

Until International Relations creates complementary pathways preserving standards while matching velocity, the discipline of IR will trail the conflicts it analyses, and power will operate without its most relevant theory.

References

Allison, G. (2017) Destined for war: can America and China escape Thucydides’s trap? Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

CSIS (2025) ‘China’s new rare earth and magnet restrictions threaten U.S. defense supply chains’, Center for Strategic and International Studies. Available at: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-new-rare-earth-and-magnet-restrictions-threaten-us-defense-supply-chains (Accessed: 21 March 2026).

IEA (2025) ‘With new export controls on critical minerals, supply concentration risks become reality’, International Energy Agency. Available at: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/with-new-export-controls-on-critical-minerals-supply-concentration-risks-become-reality (Accessed: 21 March 2026).

Koch, A. (2026a) Requisite Realism: A material ontology of power and enforcement in contemporary international relations. Working Paper. Available at: https://substack.com/home/post/p- 190800769

Koch, A. (2026b) ‘Thucydides trapped and why offensive realism failed in 2026’, Substack, 1 March. Available at: https://substack.com/home/post/p-189474975

Krasner, S. D. (2004) ‘Sharing sovereignty: new institutions for collapsed and failing states’, International Security, 29(2), pp. 85–120.

Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001) The tragedy of great power politics. New York: W.W. Norton.

Strange, S. (1988) States and markets. London: Pinter.

Zakaria, F. (2026) ‘The new economics of war’, The Washington Post, March.