From the vantage point of 2046, the early AI panic over “machine-written” prose looks less like a defense of authorship than a doomed attempt by threatened gatekeepers to preserve scarcity, status, and the fantasy of the unassisted human mind.

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The Symvol-generated lesson:

The YouTube version for sharing:

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Here is the source Substack post:

Here’s where you go to use the platform itself:

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I come to this subject with a bias—an old-school, familial slant.

I come from a long line of lawyers: both grandfathers, both parents, elder male and female siblings, an uncle, a godfather (judge), and now my eldest son prosecuting for the Navajo Nation. In my family, law was never a bloodless abstraction. It was a profession, discipline, calling, belief that humans can build rules sturdy enough to contain their instincts.

Understand: lawyers, more than most, know how rules get bent, ignored, selectively enforced, written by the already powerful. They live inside the machinery of those conflicts. No illusions there.

But lawyers also know the alternative is rarely freedom in some frontier-movie sense. It is power: the strong setting terms, the connected evading consequences, the violent defining reality, and everybody else being told to deal with it.

America’s stunning success as a federal constitutional republic and union of states rests on this legal mindset. We took a continental-scale collection of regions, economies, sects, ethnicities, ambitions, and grievances and built an operating system that could metabolize conflict—a genuine model for the world.

Americans do not eliminate conflict; we franchise it. We run it through constitutions, legislatures, courts, contracts, elections, appeals, federalism, due process, law suits. The system is slow, exasperating, paper work-infested—truly Byzantine. But, again, it beats the kinetic alternatives.

Like America-source-coded globalization, that world-shaping achievement is so familiar that we mistake it for the natural order of things. It is not. We built it, maintained it, argue over it incessantly. It lives and breathes.

Which is why the word lawfare comes at me with its rather accusatory conclusion already baked in.

Law plus warfare: a portmanteau engineered to make the former sound contaminated by the latter. Courts become battlefields, lawyers as combatants, procedure a weapon, some bad actor abusing the law for political purposes.

It is a powerful term, which is why it escaped its original military habitat and now gets sprayed around domestic politics, international relations, corporate warfare, NGO campaigns, sanctions fights, election litigation—you name it.

It is also misleading in precisely the way powerful terms often are: it captures one visible slice of reality, then asks us to mistake that slice for the whole damn pizza.

The modern usage traces to Charles Dunlap Jr., then an Air Force officer, who in 2001 described lawfare as a method of warfare in which law was used to achieve a military objective. Later, he sharpened the definition to legal proceedings as a substitute for traditional military means in pursuit of a warfighting objective.

That was a very post–Cold War anxiety. The US seemed so dominant in conventional military power that weaker adversaries got creative. They exploited civilian-casualty concerns, global media, alliance politics, international humanitarian law, human-rights organizations, foreign courts. If you cannot beat the Leviathan on the battlefield, you wrap it in legal red tape, put it on television, force the aggressor’s allies to own on moral grounds.

That is the classic lawfare story: the weak using law to complicate the strong man’s use of force. Fair enough, and really, when you think about it, why we have laws in the first place.

So, yeah, the legal process becomes part of the battlespace. But it is also a narrow aperture through which to view a much bigger historical transformation.

The more important story is not that warfare is metastasizing into law. It is that warfare, along with commerce, diplomacy, technology, and sovereignty itself, is being inexorably dragged into a thicker and more pervasive global legal order.

That is globalization doing what globalization does.

We speak of globalization as flows: trade, capital, people, data, energy, ideas, viruses, carbon, weapons, supply chains. But flows carry things along with them—rules. And once rules accumulate like so much sediment, somebody eventually hires a lawyer to go dig into that muck.

Ships crossing increasingly crowded oceans produce maritime law. Trade produces tariffs, customs codes, subsidies, standards, investment treaties, dispute-settlement mechanisms. Finance produces banking supervision, anti-money-laundering rules, sanctions regimes, disclosure requirements, beneficial-ownership registries, armies of compliance officers. Data flows produce privacy law, cybersecurity requirements, localization mandates, platform regulation.

This is the real globalization chain:

Connectivity→Interdependence→Rules→Institutions→Legal Contestation

That last bit is not system perversion, much less failure. It proves that a system exists.

Rules require interpreters. Interpreters require institutions. Institutions generate rulings, appeals, compliance orders, dissents, jurisdictional fights, procedural delays, very thick binders. Naturally, when your side loses the fight, the whole arrangement is dismissed as illegitimate, but it ain’t. It’s just you experiencing adulthood, the international edition.

The usual pejorative reading of lawfare misses this completely. It assumes that when states use law strategically, something dirty has entered an otherwise neutral realm. But there has never been a politics-free international law. States write treaties, join institutions, litigate, invoke principles—all for pragmatic reasons, such as to define interests, constrain rivals, reassure allies, attract investment, gain time, win arguments, justify downstream coercion.

This is nothing more or less than statecraft with citations.

Of course, everybody and anybody seeks to “use” law strategically. But the real question is whether the growing strategic use of law displaces older, nastier, more destructive means of pursuing advantage.

On that score, the answer is clearly yes.

A smaller state that cannot confront a larger neighbor at sea can bring an arbitration case, like the Philippines v. China under UNCLOS in 2016. Sure, China rejected the unfavorable ruling, but the case changed the operating environment by clarifying legal claims and puncturing Beijing’s narrative. That is not nothing; it’s a weaker state establishing facts of record, often in response to stronger powers establishing facts on the ground—again, a fundamental purpose of the law in general.

Ukraine’s campaign against Russia offers a starker example. Kyiv could not compel Moscow to respect the International Court of Justice’s rulings regarding its invasion. Yet Ukraine effectively dismissed Russia’s genocide-prevention rationale, and that gave the rest of Europe a legal framework for joining the fight militarily, diplomatically, economically, and informationally—right effectively enabling might.

That whole endeavor might seem meaningless to a superpower, but it’s a survival mechanism for small powers.

This is what law does in a connected world. It rarely substitutes for power, but it changes the terms on which power operates by de-legitimizing it.

And this is where the old lawfare framing needs to be flipped. We are told to fear law becoming another weapon of war. But the deeper trend is war becoming less exempt from law. That is a very different thing and a very good thing.

For most of recorded history, force enjoyed spectacular legal privileges. Empires made rules, colonial powers governed populations without permission, wars of conquest were entirely acceptable, atrocities a frequent externality.

The American-framed post-1945 order did not abolish force, but it did start making force explain itself. The UN Charter, Geneva Conventions, human-rights covenants, maritime law, trade law, arms-control arrangements, war-crimes tribunals, financial rules—all pushed in the same legalizing direction.

A regime seizing territory today must anticipate sanctions, embargoes, export controls, asset freezes, investor flight, legal claims, satellite imagery, multinational firms fleeing, social-media evidence, decades of potential litigation.

Enough to stop wars completely? Hardly. But plainly more cost-imposition than before.

To me , that’s not the militarization of law but the juridification of power—increasing reliance on formal laws, legal frameworks, and courts to govern social, economic, and political interactions.

Sure, good news for lawyers and mucho frustrations for the rest of us, but clearly an improvement on past practices.

Civilization is rules, paperwork, restraint, reciprocity, appeals, procedures, taxes, inspections, etc. Think of them as civilization’s job description—an optimizing function now being pervasively invaded by, and recast as, the AI stack.

The International Criminal Court is where this whole argument becomes wonderfully uncomfortable for Americans—or at least this administration.

The ICC arose from the post–Cold War confidence that certain crimes should not vanish behind national sovereignty simply because domestic institutions were too weak to prosecute them. Its core operating principle is complementarity: national courts are supposed to act first; the ICC steps in only where they are unwilling or unable.

That’s not world government by any stretch. The practical limits are obvious: to wit, much of the court’s early attention fell on my Gap—namely, African cases. Still, the underlying proposition remains radical and worth defending: nobody is above the law.

The US has been entirely hypocritical when it comes to the ICC: as in, good for thee but not for me. Sure, we invoke international law, human rights, and a rules-based order whenever confronting adversaries, but, once the fighting starts, we refuse to recognize any higher order.

And, yeah, that comes off as very vigilante-like, befitting a great deal of our domestic history.

Naturally, the world’s biggest military worries about having its actions reviewed by a global court.

The ICC’s scrutiny of alleged crimes connected to Afghanistan brought US conduct and personnel into the Court’s orbit. Ditto for Israel operating in Gaza.

The Trump reflex? Sanctions and visa restrictions aimed at Court personnel, non-too-subtle threats from our SECSTATE (!) that we seek to dismantle the ICC brick by brick.

That strikes me as the worst form of lawfare—intimidating an international legal institution.

Sure, we want a court for the places that cannot police themselves—my Non-Integrating Gap—but not one that might suggest that great-power status is not a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card. That’s not America defending the rules-based order but arguing for its permanent exemption from such strictures.

The ICC ain’t flawless. But threatening its judges, sanctioning its staff, or treating judicial independence as a hostile act whenever the Court looks in an inconvenient direction is a fabulously hypocritical way to defend a global order.

Our current antipathy for the ICC is also strategically shortsighted. As globalization spreads and empowers, our singular power wanes in relation to the whole, meaning we are on a long-term glide path of relying ever more on a rules-based order—plain and simple. Don’t believe me? Well, then you’re not paying attention to US bond rates.

The radical acceptance here is simple enough: lawfare is legal statecraft in a globalizing world, or the strategic use of increasingly dense rules and institutions to manage conflict, pursue interests, constrain behavior.

Some of it will be cynical, abusive, predatory—just like in America’s legal system, but that’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The logical path ahead is easily detailed, if hard to achieve: better law, more credible institutions, clearer jurisdiction, fairer procedures, stronger evidentiary standards, more consistent enforcement, greater reciprocity—the same package that made America the great and prosperous union it is today.

So let’s bury this notion of some immaculate divide between “legal” and “strategic” in international affairs. The only question that needs answers is whether legal competition strengthens the common framework or corrodes it. Clearly, we need more of the former and less of the latter.

Sad to say, Trump is the worst possible POTUS for this job, being an apex lawfare predator himself. But this too shall pass, which is why and how we keep hope alive for our global rules-based order.

The long arc here is not law becoming warfare. No, it is warfare being forced to answer to law.

That is not some nefarious complication of globalization but rather one of its best examples of progress.

Glass definitely half-full.

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ECONOMIC TIMES: The dreaded ‘N’ word is back again as Trump runs out of Iran options

Iran does not need a nuclear weapon to prove that America and Israel lack a clean military solution. It needs only enough capability, uncertainty, and regional reach to turn “ending the program” into a forever war.

There is a very thin line between having just enough nuclear capacity to deter invasion or strategic decapitation and having just enough nuclear capacity to make invasion or strategic decapitation the only answers left on the menu.

Iran has been working that angle for a long time, and quite deftly.

Talk about the “nuclear option” in Washington is not evidence that the US is preparing to use nuclear weapons. It’s just talk.

But it is evidence of something more familiar and, strategically, more revealing: the conventional menu is exhausted. You can bomb, sanction, and sabotage alright. You can assassinate, interdict, threaten, isolate, decapitate, escalate—all the while threatening strategic escalation. But eventually you reach the part where you have to ask what your campaign is actually supposed to accomplish.

Alas, such strategic self-awareness is not something Trump or Hegseth possess. That is where Iran’s nuclear program stops looking like a target set and starts looking like a political fact demanding radical acceptance, which was my basic message back in the day.

Two decades ago, I described Iran as having achieved a sloppy, asymmetrical form of nuclear deterrence. I still think that is basically right.

Sloppy, because this is not Cold War deterrence. Iran does not have an openly declared, tested, survivable nuclear force. It does not field a transparent second-strike capability. It does not offer the world a coherent doctrine, clear red lines, the grim comfort of knowing exactly how the apocalypse would unfold. All of those are powerful self-inhibitors, which makes Iran’s lack of them all the more unsettling—like a toddler handling a loaded pistol.

This is the ultimate in asymmetry, because Iran does not need any of that to complicate the calculations of the world’s preeminent military power. Tehran needs only to make one proposition credible: you can hurt us, you can delay us, you can kill our people and wreck our facilities, but you cannot erase our nuclear option—or end our regime—without entering a much larger war whose final-solution logic you dare not follow.

That, my friends, is bomb utility without the bomb—arguably the best kind for a rogue regime.

Or, more poetically it’s Schrödinger’s bomb.

It exists and it does not exist. Iran may have a weapon, may be able to assemble one quickly, may possess every component, may have dispersed it all beyond finding—or may be farther away than its enemies fear (remember Saddam’s fake-out?). Until somebody opens the box, which can arrive in the form of a test, declaration, intel determination, mushroom cloud—nobody knows with any certainty.

But understand: that uncertainty is not a defect in the deterrent. It is the deterrent.

Post-Trinity, the US never needed a Schrödinger’s-bomb posture, because its nuclear deterrent was eventually designed around an explicit bilateral reality: the Soviets had the bomb, we had the bomb, both sides had enough of them to destroy the other after absorbing a first strike, and everybody who mattered understood the basic Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) equation.

The greatest—and grimmest—achievement of the Cold War was to make deterrence legible, particularly through countable assets (e.g., launchers, bombers, submarines, missile fields), all of which expressed a mutually comprehensible capacity for retaliation (again, MAD).

Israel, by contrast, has practiced the ambiguity game for decades. Its bomb is widely assumed to exist, strategically central, and deliberately never admitted. That opacity lets Israel enjoy much of deterrence’s benefit while avoiding the full diplomatic, legal, and proliferation consequences of declaration.

Iran’s version is just a cruder inversion of the same trick: Israel says, Everybody knows, but nobody can make us say it. Iran says, Nobody knows, and nobody can safely assume we don’t.

Same difference.

The old Cold War countability model is flipped on its head by Iran. The uncertainty is about whether the retaliatory threat exists now, how rapidly it could exist, where the relevant capabilities are located, and what would happen politically if an attack convinced Tehran that suicide-by-global-cop was suitable.

The Iranian bomb thus exists, for the most part, in the minds of American, Israeli, Gulf, European, Russian, and Chinese decision-makers. It is a possibility embedded in calculations about escalation.

You can destroy centrifuges but you cannot bomb away the knowledge—much less the strategic lesson absorbed every time foreign bombs fall on Iranian territory.

This is the first radical acceptance: You cannot bomb a country back into nuclear innocence once it has learned how to make the thing. You can delay but not erase its path.

This is why the phrase “take out Iran’s nuclear program” has always been BS. You can start that task conventionally but you will never finish it—certainly not by airpower alone.

But “finish the job” is the only metric that matters in the minds of most strategists. It’s not merely a matter of limiting nuclear capacity, but changing the political intent that drives it. Exerting that level of control over a nation … that only follows all-out war and occupation and that’s just not on the table for either the US or Israel.

Iran has watched the last quarter-century of American warfare: Iraq taught one lesson, Libya taught another, Afghanistan taught a third, North Korea supplied the obvious counterfactual.

Iraq had essentially submitted, only to be subjected to regime change anyway. Libya gave it up and got its regime permanently demolished in response. North Korea built the bomb and made itself a country nobody is eager to invade.

Afghanistan offered a side lesson: the US often bites off more with its military than it can politically chew.

Tehran can easily draw out the lessons here: disarmament is just begging for regime change; compliance doesn’t guarantee regime survival; American military power is devastating, but not infinitely sustainable; having your own bomb seems to work just fine.

This is not an argument that the Islamic Republic is well-behaved enough to trust with a bomb. I’m just saying Tehran is acting logically. All the leadership needs here is to believe it can deny its opponents the kind of war they really want: clean, short, decisive, final—a nuclear future permanently foreclosed.

Tehran can manage that indefinitely.

Now add the regional complication: Israel possesses a regional nuclear monopoly. No mystery here: Israel is a small state with a history of existential war, surrounded for decades by enemies that have at various points challenged its legitimacy and threatened its survival. Never again refers primarily to never fully depending on someone else for survival.

Fair enough.

But deterrence is a two-person dance. The same nuclear monopoly looks different from Tehran. Iran is told it cannot have the bomb, cannot get near the bomb, cannot decide in any future that it might someday need the bomb.

That makes Iranian interest in nuclear deterrence entirely intelligible.

Such a one-sided deal only works for Iran if Tehran believes it has a secure, acknowledged, durable place in the regional order without needing to match Israel’s ultimate insurance policy. Until China steps up big-time, that condition cannot possibly be imagined, much less met.

Which gets us to the exit ramp, if anyone still wants one.

Iran needs to be told, credibly and durably, that it has the right to exist—just like Israel.

Remember when Moscow and Washington signed the first SALT deal? That was the implicit strategic payout for both sides: We have the right to exist.

This is not an endorsement of the Islamic Republic. It is not indulging its repression, antisemitism, regional mischief, missile programs, proxies. It merely matches Israel’s right to security.

The second radical acceptance here is recognizing that the Islamic Republic cannot be treated indefinitely as an illegitimate temporary condition whose disappearance is the unstated objective of American and Israeli policy. A state that is told it has no legitimate future will seek the most powerful available guarantee of a future. It’s as simple and logical as that.

If neither Israel nor Trump is willing to extend that basic recognition to the Islamic Republic, then Iran’s rush toward the bomb makes complete sense as regime insurance.

We made the same devil’s bargains with the USSR and Mao’s China. We eventually made up with Communist Vietnam. We have learned to live with NorKo’s nukes.

All were dealt with because they existed and had capabilities, interests, and the ability to impose costs. None of them could be wished out of the world by moral disapproval or military actions.

Iran is the same kind of problem: not something you solve by liking it but by deciding you want a political settlement over permanent confrontation.

Once you’re there, the political settlement is not mystical: Iran accepts intrusive inspections, enforceable restrictions on enrichment, and a visible firewall between civilian and military nuclear activity. In return, we’re talking phased sanctions relief, economic normalization, credible assurance that regime extinction is off the table.

That is the deal Washington keeps refusing because it wants both nonproliferation and regime-change, two goals that cannot coexist.

Nuclear latency is not peace or stable mutual deterrence, but it is a middle ground that can be held by both sides. Regime change demands the sort of prolonged political-military commitment Washington has repeatedly discovered it does not want to sustain.

Per the article cited, that leaves, in the minds of some, nuclear use as a theoretical answer to deeply buried capability. But it is strategically unusable precisely because of what it would do to the region, the nonproliferation order, American alliances, and Iran’s own incentive to weaponize whatever survives.

Schrödinger’s Iran occupies the space between what its adversaries can do and what they are prepared to do.

Schrödinger’s bomb occupies the space between what Iran may possess and what its adversaries can know.

Together, those two uncertainties define the deterrent, and we should be able to work with that, honestly.

The answer here is not to celebrate nuclear latency or bless an Iranian bomb—the usual critical comebacks. The answer is to build a regional arrangement in which Israel and Iran’s sovereign survival do not depend on either state treating the other’s extinction as a desirable strategic outcome.

We can work the disease or the symptoms.

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I know. I’ve been going with comic book-style artwork more and more. It’s the nostalgic in me. In my house growing up, we had a hassock that hid a treasure trove of comic books collected by my three older brothers and two older sisters. Whenever I ran out of things to do as a kid (that actually happened back then), I’d open that hassock and lose myself in all manner of tales.

So sue me! It’s actually how I started learning a lot of history through famous novels—those “illustrated classics.” Probably how I ended up with a BA in Russian Literature and way too many action figures for any adult male to own.

Anyway …

The Trump–Hegseth defense of the Iran war has reached that point where the rhetorical maneuvering is so mindless that you have to admire the sheer chutzpah.

This cannot be a forever war, they say, because it has not lasted forever.

As the Brits say, brilliant!

The administration’s pitch is boldly tautological:

So sayeth our Secretary of Indefinity.

CITIZEN NOTE: This is the moment you want to put your hand on your wallet.

Understand: a forever war is not something you recognize only after it has devoured a generation, hollowed out a defense budget, produced several memoirs, three congressional commissions, and a cottage industry of think-tank fellows explaining why the next surge must surely be different.

A forever war is a design problem. More specifically, it is what happens when a state substitutes the continuing application of military power for a political strategy capable of creating an end state.

You know, the tell-me-how-this-ends thing history credits to Petraeus.

The calendar is not the key data point here. The key question is whether anybody can explain what comes after the next “successful strike.” If not, then you do not have an exit strategy. You have a war subscription: automatically renewed, difficult to cancel, billed to future administrations.

War-as-a-Service

The phrase “forever war” is a complaint about elapsed time: a conflict that has gone on for a long time becomes a forever war. Afghanistan: forever war. Iraq: forever war. Vietnam: forever war.

But duration doesn’t explain much.

World War II was brutal, global, industrial-scale slaughter on an unprecedented scale, making all of today’s wars seem puny by comparison—almost phony wars in the vernacular of that era. Yet it posited an end state from the start (Atlantic Charter): Germany and Japan defeated and disarmed, their political systems remade, their militaries radically recast. A new security architecture emerged.

The Korean War ended in an armistice, and the peninsula remains divided and dangerous. Yet even there, a system emerged, enabling a long-term equilibrium nobody particularly likes but everybody gets.

A forever war must be understood as something else—and something less.

It is, at its core, a war without a plausible political landing zone. It is the moment when military action ceases to be an instrument of policy and becomes its permanent replacement.

That is how you get endless phrases like “restoring deterrence,” “degrading capabilities,” “protecting freedom of navigation,” “reassuring allies,” “countering malign influence,” “preventing the reemergence of threats.”

These are all perfectly reasonable activities—in isolation. But string them together without a political architecture, and you have built yourself a very expensive treadmill. You keep walking, convinced you’re getting somewhere, but you never arrive.

Roddenberry’s Managed Apocalypse

The best single meditation on the forever-war problem remains the original Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon.”

That episode deserves a place on the syllabus of every war college, national-security staff, and congressional committee partial to the phrase “surgical strike.”

Eminiar VII and Vendikar have been at war for centuries but they have solved the messy part. Rather than physically destroying cities, they use computers to simulate combat. A simulated strike determines who would have died. Those citizens report to disintegration chambers and dutifully vanish.

No ruined cities. No smashed desalination plants. No refugee waves. No mass trauma broadcast across the web. No mass graves to cover up. Elegant, as the leadership of Eminiar VII puts it.

The two planets have turned war into public administration. They have made it predictable, sanitized it, lowered its visible price. They have created a war so humane that it can be endless.

Starting to feel familiar?

“War is hell” only when it imposes intolerable costs (h/t W.T. Sherman). It destroys cities, families, political coalitions, budgets, legitimacy, dreams. Eventually, the accumulated destruction forces somebody to decide something.

Like two Tech Bros, Eminiar VII and Vendikar have engineered that pressure out of the system. That allows them to keep the rivalry, process the killings, sustain the intergenerational grievance. They removed the shock and awe quotient that might otherwise force a settlement.

Don’t blame the powerful computers. The leaders’ real problem is that their political imaginations have atrophied.

Kirk, brutal pragmatist and radical un-acceptor, destroys the computational war machines and, by doing so, restores the physical consequences of their decisions. He basically tells them: If you want to fight, then fight. But do not call this peace, much less moral progress.

My point here is not that we are Eminiar VII but that we’re rapidly collecting the instruments of such antiseptic warfare: drones, standoff munitions, algorithmic targeting, unmanned forces, cyberattacks, sanctions, persistent surveillance, remote kill chains, automated defenses.

The illusion of all that “control” is a strategic narcotic, and both Trump and Hegseth are entirely addicted.

By my definition, a conflict that can be managed indefinitely is a conflict that can be indefinitely mismanaged.

Ukraine’s Armed Intermission

Ukraine is the old geopolitical version of the forever war—the frontier edition that determines the shape of the map. Russia really doesn’t care about land. It wants Ukraine constrained and firmly in its ideological orbit. Putin wants to own Ukraine’s future, pure and simple—not unlike a Trump right now with Venezuela.

Ukraine wants the opposite future, obviously.

Those diametrically opposed positions means there is NOTHING TO NEGOTIATE!

I know, a Gordian Knot too tight for even Son-in-Law and Golfing Buddy to sever!

A ceasefire would only freeze the argument. Real peace produces rules.

The solution-set is fairly obvious: enough Ukrainian military capacity, Western connectivity, economic recovery, and long-term security backing that Moscow cannot rerun the invasion at some later date.

The problem is that Russia regards such an outcome as strategic defeat, and that stalemate gets us a forever war.

Iran’s Subscription Model

Iran is a different beast altogether, which is precisely why comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan are so misleading.

No one serious is saying Iran is about to become Afghanistan 2.0. Iran is not some hollowed-out state awaiting external reconstruction, so forget about occupation. But what that leaves us is a permanent, low-visibility, high-cost campaign of remote coercion—more like keeping Saddam in the box across the 1990s.

We strike Iran when it gets too close to whatever red line we have most recently declared. America protects bases, patrols shipping lanes, reassures Israel and the Gulf, intercepts missiles, hunts networks, imposes sanctions, deploys more assets, spends down munitions, regularly announces that deterrence has been restored.

Until it isn’t, then we rinse and repeat.

And, no, that is not strategy.

Iran’s view is not hard to understand. It is surrounded by superior forces, so it builds deterrent depth: missiles, drones, hardened facilities, cyber capabilities, regional partners, a nuclear option kept close enough to the table that everyone must factor it in.

Its adversaries naturally see that same strategy as proof that Iran is the region’s core destabilizer.

And there you have the loop. Everybody doubles down. Everybody calls it deterrence.

Problem is, deterrence is not a strategy if it must be reestablished every few weeks. That’s not deterring a problem, that’s servicing it.

The administration says this war is not endless because it has not lasted as long as Afghanistan. Whatever.

But the real question—the one that dwindles our munitions stock and sends sailors overboard—is whether ANY political destination has come into view. We can all keep mumbling “Abraham Accords,” but that’s not some magical incantation. For now, we have no strategy beyond punishment.

Palestine’s Permanent Emergency

Palestine is the most elemental forever war because it is a war over one place. Two peoples claim historical belonging, security, dignity, legitimacy, and political future in the same cramped geography. Neither is leaving. Neither can be wished away.

Israel seeks secure existence and control over the terrain from which it has repeatedly faced attack. Palestinians seek a future not defined by permanent military subordination, territorial fragmentation, and dependency.

That’s the entire tragedy in one paragraph.

Israel can kill at will but it cannot erase Palestinian identity. Palestinian militant groups can kill Israelis but will never destroy Israel. So the cycle continues: violence as deterrence, revenge, recruitment tool, political replacement.

The two-state solution was never magic, just a framework that has decayed as facts on the ground render it physically moot. The alternative is not some stable “status quo.” There is only a permanent emergency administered at varying levels of violence.

THAT is a forever war: not the absence of negotiations, but the absence of a political destination that both sides can conceivably reach.

Stopwatches Versus Maps

This is where the Trump–Hegseth defense turns from evasive into almost childlike naïveté: they offer a stopwatch instead of a map.

They say: We have not been fighting long enough for this to be called a forever war.

The response should be: Show us the political map of the ending. Not the target deck, munitions list, next carrier deployment. Show us the end state.

Because if the answer is simply that the United States will strike again when Iran becomes threatening, then the administration has not escaped the forever-war model. It has simply updated it: fewer occupation zones, more drone feeds; fewer visible American casualties, more permanent exposure for people living in the region; less nation-building, more conflict maintenance.

The ultimate forever war is not one in which everybody fights every day. It is the one in which all parties learn to accept the recurrence of violence as the normal price of living inside an unresolved political order.

The warning sign here is that nobody in charge appears able to say what would make it stop.

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Looking back from 2046, it is difficult to reconstruct just how strange the early AI years became. Not because the technology was trivial. It was anything but. It’s that we suddenly couldn’t figure out whether we were witnessing/confronting the rise of a tool, collaborator, competitor, accomplice, or the first mirror smart enough to scare us with its reflection.

In the old vocabulary, a “knowledge worker” was someone who turned expertise, information, analysis, and judgment into organizational action—or so it was sold. It was a term of art that, even then, carried the odor of managerial self-congratulation. Still, the term survived because it named something real. The advanced economies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries steadily migrated more of their productive activity into the manipulation of words and symbols: reports, models, presentations, contracts, forecasts, software, policy papers, financial statements, risk assessments, marketing campaigns, operational plans, intelligence products, strategy decks, legal filings, research briefs, media narratives, the endless administrative exhaust generated by large institutions trying to explain themselves to one another.

We called this “thinking,” which was generous. Much of it was just formatting.

Much of the rest was moving information from one folder to another while preserving the illusion that each human being added value along the way.

Then the machines became capable enough to see the pattern. They evolved beyond simply retrieving a document or correcting a spelling error to ingest the vast material of modern organizations (e.g., emails, transcripts, spreadsheets, slide decks, reports, operating manuals, customer records, regulatory filings, field notes, research archives, code repositories, contractual language, public data streams). All that was sucked up and transformed into usable forms of explanation, comparison, projection, advice.

At first we called this automation, because that was the word we were most comfortable with. But it was the wrong word. Automation is replacing repetitive physical or clerical tasks with machines. What was arriving all around was an emerging but broad generative capability approaching preliminary cognition. These new systems could draft the memo, summarize the meeting, identify anomalies, compare contracts, translate source material, build scenario trees, generate working models, write code, find contradictions, prepare the briefing, answer routine questions, produce the presentation your vice president will never bother to read.

This was a profound break, and it sort of snuck up on us. We’d heard about AI for years and years. but until ChatGPT landed, it all pretty much felt like automation getting marginally smarter around the edges. Now, for the first time, vast amounts of what passed for white-collar productivity could be treated as a computational challenge reasonably met. That’s not because machines suddenly became human but because much of the work had never been all that cognitively demanding in the first place.

I did my PhD the old-school way and it required patience, recall, pattern matching, some linguistic fluency, academic compliance, a deep tolerance for repetitive revision and the capacity to assemble words in logical order to relay the underlying analysis. But most of all it required a willingness to sift through more material than any sane person wanted to read—like my scanning twenty years of a Romanian foreign affairs magazine and twenty years of an East German foreign affairs magazine, all to ferret out official state visits and agreements that served as rough proxies for developmental aid flows.

If you wanted a PhD, you needed that sort of humongous sifting effort, the kind that took months to complete and sent you on treks to research libraries across the land. Was all that hunter-gatherer behavior all that useful to my training? Not really. Certainly not once that mode of searching and acquiring and calculating could be done by machines.

The whole point of my PhD diss was the analysis that the hunting and gathering made possible. Automating the latter didn’t diminish the former but rather elevated it, making so much more analysis possible at such a finer degree of execution.

Anyway, computers became extraordinarily good at all of that up-front stuff—like, stunningly good. So, when that capacity arrives, do we welcome it or do we decry it for the ease at which it takes vast amounts of procedural work and turns it into a series of prompts answerable within minutes and approximating what is easily a year’s hands-on-materials research in the old model?

Well, being humans, we naturally panicked.

This is not how things have been done for decades—even centuries! How can we possibly sort out this human-machine blending now underway all around us?

Back in the late-2020s, the early panic came from realizing that the knowledge economy had built a vast caste system around tasks that, once properly decomposed, turned out to be far more machine-legible than its practitioners had ever admitted.

Lawyers discovered that mountains of discovery were not legal wisdom. Consultants discovered that turning interviews into slides was not strategy. Analysts discovered that producing a long report was not insight. Middle managers discovered that transmitting status updates upward and directives downward was not leadership. Writers discovered that grammatical fluency, while useful, was not the same thing as having something to say (God forbid!).

Most disconcerting for authors, publishers suddenly discovered that the ability to manufacture competent prose at scale was not a defensible oligopoly—as in, we decide what is book-worthy!

This was hardly the end of knowledge or knowledge work. It was just the end of the old way of doing things.

The work did not disappear. It migrated upward, or maybe sideways. The machines developed ever more sophisticated abilities to infer from the available record, from the grand corpus of written and posted analysis, from the Big Data flowing everywhere.

That was when the term knowledge worker finally began to die.

Why?

We gradually stopped defining people by the information they could process (you lawyer, me doctor) because information processing became ambient and accessible to all. We stopped pretending that merely producing an articulate document constituted intellectual labor.

But, of course, this is where things got truly interesting and personally threatening, because, once information processing became everybody’s superpower, then we started distinguishing between those who could merely generate language and those who could generate true judgment.

The machines made language superabundant but also made judgment increasingly difficult to fake.

Looking back, we were doomed to suffer this mania. We had suddenly stumbled unprepared into an age in which machines could take in vast piles of text, conversation, data, instructions, media, etc. and then produce a startlingly impressive range of usable linguistic formations in virtually every of the world’s languages. It started with summaries, outlines, translations, briefings, arguments, code, correspondence, scenarios, critiques, drafts—you name it. But then it expanded—almost overnight—into entirely finished works of something alright, which some said was art and others decried as slop.

Suddenly, nobody was quite sure what constituted authorship.

What seems strange now is how quickly so many otherwise serious people converted a difficult transition into a moral panic—the part of this whole show that truly pissed me off. It ended up being one of those periods that later generations file alongside the Red Scare: when institutions persuaded themselves that contamination was the central danger, and then built procedures to hunt for it and to publicly shame its perpetrators.

The contaminant here was not communism. It was the apostasy that a machine had helped someone write.

The accusation was almost comically vague. “AI-generated,” “AI-influenced,” “AI-assisted,” “AI-manipulated.” The terms were thrown around as though describing sharply distinct categories rather than a confused continuum of human-machine collaboration.

Honestly, it reminds me still of the whole God only made two sexes BS surrounding gender identity and sexual preferences: taking the grand and complex spectrum and reducing it to absolute sin versus pure virtue.

Did you ask a model for an outline? Did it help organize notes? Did you dictate a paragraph and have it cleaned up? Did you use it to compare two versions of a speech? Did you ask it to flag repetitions, summarize research, translate a foreign-language source, devise a better headline, generate a list of objections, tighten syntax, or find the one paragraph in a thousand-word memo that still did not make sense?

For a while, these questions carried an almost inquisitorial charge.

Understand: the rich and powerful have always availed themselves of minions to do this for them, giving them a huge advantage over everyone else. Now, suddenly, anybody could wield such analytic power, so, naturally, the gate-keepers freaked out and deemed it slop, whether it was or wasn’t, because the whole thing suddenly became about lineage, and the rich and powerful know how to defend lineage.

So, the gate keepers and finger pointers began treating ordinary writing as a crime scene.

They wanted to know where every phrase came from. They wanted detectable signatures. They wanted watermarks and provenance protocols. They wanted software to decide whether your prose had been written by you, the way a border guard once inspected a passport. They wanted disclosure requirements that kept expanding because no one could agree what, exactly, was supposed to be disclosed.

No dictionaries were harmed in the making of this book!

And, naturally, those on top wanted rules—their rules driven by their enforcement. There is no institutional reflex stronger than this: when a new technology makes an old category unstable, write a policy that pretends the category remains stable.

Marriage is only between a man and a woman!

The Panic Was About Power

The loudest formulation came from publishers and their legal entourages.

We cannot own a work touched by AI, they warned, because the AI was built on copyrighted material. If its outputs are shaped by an unlicensed archive of prior work, then the resulting text lacks clean lineage. There is no clear assignment, no secure chain of title, no confidence that the publisher can acquire, control, license, defend, or insure what it is buying.

In the abstract, not at-all crazy. Publishers have obligations. They need contracts they can defend. They require authors to accept responsibility for the work.

All true and reasonable as starting points. But that was not how the argument unfolded. The rhetoric quickly leapt from a legitimate question (Could a system reproduce protected material too closely?) to an absurd conclusion: any work touched by AI was inherently compromised.

That was the tell: it wasn’t about legal uncertainty but power.

Publishers spent centuries operating within a basic scarcity model: only so many books from only so many authors made their cut. Thus authors did basically all the work and then turned it over to publishers to print and sell.

The rise of machine authorship disturbed that equation—breaking it actually. No, the systems did not replace judgment, but they made many of the up-front authorship efforts supremely cheaper and damn near instantaneous. That was the real shock.

The old publishing order knew how to value raw talent. But it did not know how to value material in an era when competent analytic and writing labor was suddenly abundant.

So, the publishers reflexively reached for the oldest defense of a threatened order: moral hierarchy.

The machine was not merely a tool but constituted contamination. The author who used it was not merely adapting to a new workflow, they were somehow suspect—a cheat, faker, con artist.

Most hypocritically, the snooty industry that had always depended on people reading, learning from, borrowing from, reacting to, and synthesizing prior work suddenly developed an exquisitely sensitive theory of intellectual purity.

The Great Hypocrisy

Understand: every author is trained on copyrighted material.

Once you radically accept that truth, a lot of the BS and fear-mongering is revealed as nonsense.

Any writer is a living archive of other people’s ideas.

You read books, articles, speeches, histories, novels, essays, letters, advertisements, propaganda, instruction manuals, reviews . You emulate the rhythms of your parents. You fill up on your teachers. You steal structures constantly. You imitate favorite authors. You carry phrases for decades, never remembering from whence they came.

You use words like whence because it amuses you to sound pompous at times.

That ain’t theft, it's actually just culture—a shared way of viewing and describing the world around us.

No serious publisher ever demanded a total inventory of influences before buying a manuscript. No author was required to report every book that helped form their cadence or voice. No one was asked to identify every thinker whose language they had internalized, every journalist whose leads they admired, every historian whose explanatory architecture they had appropriated.

Why? Because the whole enterprise would be ridiculous in addition to meaningless and unhelpful.

Yet, during the authorship scare, that absurd standard was smuggled in through the back door. Suddenly, there was talk of lineage, source purity, clean attribution.

Again, there was a genuine issue here. Systems, or just human research assistants, could sometimes reproduce material too closely. Models could be built using content acquired in ways that raised serious legal and ethical questions, resulting in class-action suits. That was the industrial dispute that firms like Anthropic attempted to resolve, however imperfectly, but it was never a good enough reason to declare that a human being using a language tool had forfeited authorship of the final work.

The fact that a machine had learned patterns from a vast body of text did not establish that a particular sentence copied a particular writer. It did not erase human creative judgment. It did not make the final text ownerless. And it certainly did not turn ordinary assistance—editing, outlining, translating, summarizing, red-teaming an argument—into some kind of literary original sin.

The Fantasy of the Unassisted Author

The authorship scare depended on another fantasy: that writing had once been a clean, solitary, almost sacred activity, carried out by a single sovereign consciousness on a blank page.

This was nonsense, too.

Writing has always been augmented. Duh! Check out the acknowledgments portion of any serious non-fiction book and you will see dozens or even hundreds of “helpers” to be thanked.

But let’s start at the beginning, for all you purists out there.

The alphabet externalized memory. Books made ideas portable. The printing press industrialized mass replication. The typewriter took us from pen (rubbing paper) to keyboard (finger tapping letters). The word processor abolished the physical friction of rewriting. Search transformed recall. Digital archives widened the researcher’s reach. Spellcheck altered the meaning of a “finished” draft. Grammar tools spread certain editorial biases (I’m looking at you, Oxford comma!). Collaborative documents like Google Docs made visible the fact that much professional writing had always been collective.

By the time conversational AI arrived, nearly every serious writer was already embedded in an environment of technological support, standing on the shoulders—not of giants—but of writers and writing in general.

We researched on machines, filed on machines, stored drafts on machines, searched archives with machines, exchanged notes with machines, corrected typos, tracked changes, searched synonyms, checked dates, formatted citations, compared versions, improved syntax—all with machines.

But then, one day, the machine could answer in complete and legible sentences.

That’s what freaked people out.

The new systems made both visible and comprehensive the machine assistance being sought—and exploited. Suddenly, the machine was offering draft language, proposing structure, refining expression.

But the right question was never whether the machine had produced words.

Machines had always produced words. So did printers, typewriters, word processors, editors, secretaries, researchers, ghostwriters, public relations teams, Congressional staffers, the list goes on and on. No serious adult believed that the physical act of producing words, by itself, encompassed the full authorship of anything.

Authorship comprises intention, selection, responsibility.

Who defined the problem?

Who decided what mattered?

Who supplied the experience, institutional knowledge, causal logic, narrative arc, smart-ass turn of phrase, the moral boundary, the political purpose?

Who rejected the easy answer and persevered?

Who understood what could not be said?

Who accepted the consequences when the thing went public?

THAT is the author. The rest is just workflow.

The Schoolhouse Version

The schools handled the moment badly—more so the parents and administrators than the teachers. Sure, everybody had legitimate concerns. A student who turns every assignment over to a machine without learning how to think, write, reason, or revise is not being educated.

Writing is a way of thinking, not unlike speaking or reading or just daydreaming. There is a discipline to be learned and practiced: How to organize an argument, deciding what data counts, making a complex sentence clear enough to understand. Those are cognitive exercises not to be skipped.

But educational systems initially responded as educational systems often do: by making the visible symptom the entire problem.

Cheater! I say. Plagiarist!

Schools bought detection tools, relying on algorithmic probability scores as evidence of misconduct. They launched investigations of suspect students.

The detectors were often farcical. I can still submit writing I did years before LLMs appeared and have my content judged 80% AI-generated.

Detectors were biased, and punished non-native speakers. They flagged formal writers. They mistook revision for deception. The em-dash became AI’s scarlet punctuation.

Worst of all, as humanity approached the event horizon of the Singularity, we decided that the key skill of the age was not using powerful tools well, but hiding their use from authorities.

What a huge waste of time and effort!

Eventually, sanity emerged. The better schools redesigned assessment. They used oral defenses. They required drafts, notes, source trails, annotations, revisions, discussions, presentations, live demos.

But they also taught students how to use AI critically: to interrogate claims, find weak links, compare arguments, challenge assumptions, identify fabricated sources, distinguish fluent nonsense from actual reasoning.

That was the turning point.

The goal was no longer to preserve a fictional pre-machine purity. It was to produce adults who could collaborate with powerful systems without becoming intellectually dependent on them.

I know, it all seems so simple in retrospect.

The Laws Caught Up

The law was slow, as law usually is. But eventually the categories sorted themselves out.

It all came down to some basic questions:

• Was there meaningful human authorship in the final work?

• Did the final work improperly copy protected expression from someone else?

• (my favorite) What obligations, if any, did developers have regarding the material used to train their systems?

Those were completely different questions involving different facts, different parties, different risks, different remedies. Once that sorting became clear, the fever began to break.

Human authors could use increasingly capable systems and still own the work they created—provided they exercised real creative control, contributed meaningful original expression, accepted responsibility for the final result. A machine’s participation did not automatically make the work uncopyrightable. Nor did a disputed history of model training magically transform every output into infringement.

All the same sins long recognized remained in play: You can’t reproduce a living writer’s work, passing off machine output as firsthand reporting, fabricating quotations, inventing sources, and the like.

The framework that matured was not complicated:

• Use the tools

• Do not steal

• Do not lie

• Do not outsource judgment

• Take responsibility.

Now, was that so hard?

What We Finally Learned

By the late 2030s, almost no one could sustain the old distinction. “Human writing” versus “AI writing” became like “human photography” versus “camera photography.” As my friend Steve DeAngelis would say, the distinction described the tool but failed to explain the act.

Now, every serious writer works inside some version of a human-machine loop.

Reporters use systems to organize interviews, search public records, compare accounts, find contradictions, build timelines, draft basic background. Scholars use them to navigate enormous literatures and test competing interpretations. Novelists use them to maintain continuity, challenge plot logic, locate chaff in an overlong manuscript. Analysts use them to translate raw information into scenarios, alternatives, implications, decisions.

And, yes, people use them to write.

The horror!

In the end, the machines did not abolish writers. That’s because, while the machines could make language plentiful, they could not make judgment plentiful. Humans retain their place in the process.

The Embarrassment Fades

I am old enough now to remember the anxiety firsthand, and I confess that I find it embarrassing for all involved. Not the caution, nor the debates over compensation (ka-ching!), nor the fears about students.

The embarrassment lies in the hysteria: the confidence with which adults insisted that they could preserve human distinctiveness by policing the workflow of sentence production. That’s what really pissed me off: being told I had to write differently if I wanted my prose to be accepted as legitimate.

As usual, we wanted a bright line where history gave us a spectrum. We wanted to identify the pure human artifact in a civilization already saturated with tools. We wanted to go all Amish over LLMs in a righteous none-shall-pass(!) manner.

In the end, we remembered that being human means using tools and machines at will. That’s how we’ve always “cheated” and progressed, and that will never change.

In retrospect, we picked the wrong battle at the wrong time.

The enduring question was never, Did AI help write this?

The enduring questions remain Is this material good? And who is willing to stand behind it?

That is authorship in a nutshell—utility and accountability.

Once we finally understood that, the authorship scare disappeared in our rearview, having veered into the dustbin of history (totally stolen phrase) where it belonged.

Humans love to confuse technological change with moral collapse. It’s just our thing.

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1) Can Moldova marry Romania to gain EU citizenship?

ECONOMIST: Might Moldova merge with Romania?

Fun fact: I was once reasonably fluent in Romanian, having taken a year of it to conduct my PhD on Ceausescu and Honecker (I simultaneously studied German just enough to read it too).

Everybody in the know is talking about Moldova being Putin’s next target once he somehow freezes the Ukraine war, and Moldova is clearly paying attention, having publicly broached the idea of being reabsorbed by Mother Romania.

The historical logic is straightforward. Much of present-day Moldova (Bessarabia) was part of Romania between 1918 and 1940, when Stalin, empowered by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, issued an ultimatum and seized it. Moscow then joined its central districts to territory east of the Dniester and created the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic: border-making as imperial hostage-taking.

Oh so Stalin.

Reunification remains politically difficult, but, as a strategic insurance policy, the appeal is obvious. And just like that: Moldova inside Romania would be Moldova inside NATO and the EU.

I say, if you like it, then you should put a ring on it.

[FINAL NOTE: I have found few things more bizarre than trying to read Romanian in Cyrillic, which is what Moldavian basically is. Thus, I never claimed it as a language I knew, even as I sort of did.]

2) Something to chew on, alright

YAHOO FINANCE: Nestlé Wants to Turn the GLP-1 Threat into an Opportunity

GLP-1s are rewiring big chunks of our consumer economy.

Their first-order effect is obvious: people eat less, especially the processed stuff. With GLP-1s, you just don’t crave junk like you used to, thank God.

The second-order: Nestlé is designing a new product stack around the GLP-1 user: high-protein, portion-aligned meals; shakes to preserve muscle mass; collagen products pitched at the cosmetic costs of rapid weight loss; and special formulations aimed at the rebound hunger that follows discontinuation.

That is how capitalist systems adapt to disruption. The product that breaks an old consumption pattern also creates new needs, new categories, new customers. Estimates are that 10 percent of Americans will be on GLP-1s by decade’s end, so, no time to waste.

3) The Leviathan downsizes

WAPO: Pentagon weighing a smaller post-war U.S. military presence in Persian Gulf as Iran conflict takes major toll on bases

We’re not contemplating a smaller regional footprint because we’re winning against Iran. We’re contemplating it because Iran has demonstrated, at painful scale, that our legacy Gulf basing architecture is an ever juicier target set.

The Pentagon is assessing whether or not to rebuild damaged facilities as they existed before the war. Good subject of inquiry. What does rebuilding do in the age of the Military Singularity? Other than invite swarm attacks?

Our lack of strategic confidence is showing.

The pre-Singularity model assumed fixed, well provisioned bases inside the Gulf delivered deterrence: presence + capability = deterrence.

Now, presence is just target-set provision, and capability is losing on the exchange rate, resulting in nada deterrence but instead unlimited tit-for-tat dynamics that constitute neither war nor peace but cost everybody plenty.

The operational environment has changed. Time to get rid of a lot of overseas bases, because presence ain’t the effect it used to be.

4) Burning down the dacha

WAPO: Russians pull billions from banks, fearing Kremlin will seize deposits for war

Local money tends to be the smartest money when it comes to understanding local conditions. And Russian money is starting to head for the exits.

Russians are pulling billions from bank deposits in a record cash outflow, driven by intensifying Ukrainian drone strikes (highly incentivizing) and the growing fear that the Kremlin, having burned through sovereign wealth funds, must eventually reach for private savings. Once citizens conclude that the state may requisition their deposits, money ceases to be capital and becomes something to hide.

You can command an economy but not confidence. Bank runs are a far cry from actual revolution, but they are a decided vote of nyet confidence.

Smart money is talking; heed its voice.

5) I have to go with the Iranians on this one

WAPO: Bessent unveils sweeping campaign of sanctions and pressure against Iran

I don’t think “economic asphyxiation” is possible. Instead I think it just guarantees the scenario pathway I dubbed “North Korea with oil”

Iran has been dealing with sanctions since its beginning as the Islamic Republic. Its main export is oil, and 80% of it goes to China, who is not incentivized whatsoever to knuckle under to Trump on this one.

Sanctions can make Iran poorer, weaker, more corrupt, more dependent on China. Big whoop. They can also shrink its legitimate economy while expanding its shadow one—not an issue for the IRGC.

But absent an actual blockade—or Chinese cooperation—they will not produce collapse or surrender. At best, this is the way to declare the war over. Problem is, as the Iranians themselves point out, when you lead with kinetics and then retreat to sanctions, the world is pretty much gonna interpret that as a lost war.

So, our big gamble with Israel produces a permanently isolated, militarized, repression-hardened regime with enough oil revenue to survive: North Korea, only with a far larger population, central geography, and hydrocarbons galore.

This is what being supremely lethal has bought us.

6) Hot tub time machine

WAPO: The ocean just broke a temperature record that may have stood for millennia

The planet’s most important climate record is not being set on land but in the oceans, that globe-spanning waterway absorbs more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Global average sea-surface temperatures have climbed to nearly 70°F, a new modern high that may exceed anything experienced for millennia.

This feels like a systems warning. Warmer oceans energize storms, scramble fisheries, bleach reefs. With this great absorber of volatility appearing to max out, everything is going to get wilder.

I harp on connectivity. Well, the oceans are the ultimate connector. When that connective tissue overheats, every regional shock travels farther and hits harder. As a species, we continue to reduce our environmental margin of error.

Nobody can bunker their way out of this future as the adaptation prerogative inexorably expands.

7) Europe is just too cool to succumb to AC—for now

NY POST: European heatwave killed more people in one region than height of COVID — and locals still refuse AC: ‘Don’t want to be Americans’

If stubborn Americans have proven anything, it’s that climate adaptation is cultural long before it is technological. Europe’s summer heatwave just produced more than 16,000 excess deaths in a single week, according to a sort of climate-change statistic equivalent to the NFL’s now-ubiquitous DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) measurement.

What would our sideline reporter note here? Only about 20% of European homes have air conditioning, versus roughly 90% in the US.

Like excess death calculations during heat waves, the NFL’s DVOA moves past raw counts to measure impact against a normalized baseline. Instead of looking at raw points or total yardage, DVOA evaluates efficiency on every single play relative to what an average team would achieve in that exact game situation.

In this case of excess deaths triggered by a heat wave, statisticians are thus comparing total mortality during a heat wave to a non-crisis seasonal baseline.

In both cases, the headline number can obscure the underlying system. A modest-looking heat wave can be catastrophic when it arrives where homes, grids, and populations are unprepared.

The lesson for Team Europe? Refusing air conditioning will not “preserve” its civilization. It’ll just make it sweatier and deadlier.

8) Globalization changes its flag

ECONOMIST: Chinese firms are wrapping their supply chains around the globe

Despite a deluge of hysterical books proclaiming it to be true, globalization is hardly in retreat. It is being rewired—at speed—and increasingly under a Chinese banner.

Chinese firms have spent more than $200 billion building factories abroad in just the past three years (so much for COVID), planting increasingly dense industrial ecosystems across the Global South, Europe, and the Gulf. In Egypt’s Suez Canal Economic Zone, hundreds of factories now populate Chinese-built industrial parks.

Meanwhile, the US Navy is left to work Hormuz in a still clear division of global labor: US as Leviathan, China as SysAdmin.

This is not the old China trade model of exporting finished goods from the mainland. It is China Inc. externalizing its entire stack: ports, railways, logistics, component suppliers, factories, financing, eventually local labor pools. Chinese logistics firms now operate or hold investments in over 130 foreign ports!

Washington, in its usual self-regarding myopia, sees only “transshipment” designed to circumvent tariffs. Me? I see a risen New Core power laying down connectivity faster than the Old Core can respond.

Future global value chains will eventually stop saying “Made in China” alright, but they will still run on China’s clock. That is labor turned into equity.

9) You spin me right round, baby, right round

NBC NEWS: The Iran war is pushing U.S. allies and rivals to a risky new frontier for global trade: The Arctic

The Iran war’s most pragmatic legacy may be a new trade map, as what was once considered too dangerous is now within daring reach of those forced by geopolitics to make do.

With Hormuz traffic still dramatically shrunken and the Red Sea/Bab el-Mandeb corridor too dangerous for normal traffic, the familiar east-west logistics spine is fracturing. The fallback routes—Mais oui!—are more North-South in their vectoring, not just making for the southern capes (Horn, Good Hope) but now working the Arctic (Northern Route) like never before.

Check it out: a Chinese container line has launched a regular Ice Silk Road service from China’s eastern coast to England along Russia’s Northern Sea Route. It runs roughly 20 days, versus 40-ish via Suez and 50-plus around the Cape of Good Hope. South Korea is now exploring the same.

My usual point: disconnected security crises do not stay local. They reroute capital, trade, infrastructure investment, strategic attention. The Arctic is becoming the global logistical network’s ultimate Plan B—northern ice breakers trumping southern chokepoints.

This is one of several reasons why Russia still matters.

10) The good fight is getting the crop right

WAPO: World hunger decline is the fruit of growth

One of globalization’s least recognized achievements, coming as it does through controversial technological advances (GMOs), is nonetheless its most consequential: fewer people going hungry—that staple of future dystopian projections. Severe global hunger fell for a third consecutive year in 2025, to roughly 650 million people, or less than 8 percent of humanity (1:13).

Clearly, we’ve collectively processed the COVID hump, whatever its dynamics.

As co-owner of some of the best farmland in the world (Ohio), I take this responsibility with utmost seriousness. There is no room in America’s ag future for complacency. Roughly two billion people still experience moderate or severe food insecurity, while healthy diets remain unaffordable for closer to three billion.

Moreover, the gains are uneven on a regional basis, with hunger tending to correspond with those areas (Western Asia, Middle East, Africa) where population is growing fastest. Add in some conflict, climate shocks, debt, and weak state capacity and you’ve got a problem humanity either fixes or those people will be put on the move bigly—and northernly.

The underlying mechanism is clear enough: connectivity creates growth; growth raises incomes, expands food production and distribution, and makes states and households more resilient. There is the North’s sanctimonious tendency to treat global hunger as a moral failure among those suffering it, when the real victory is won by extending globalization’s infrastructure and technologies to places still desperately seeking food security while preserving the Global North’s export capacity as it comes under climatic stress.

Can there be a more virtuous campaign?

11) Trump in nucking-futs mode

WAPO: Trump’s steam obsession risks crippling the U.S. carrier fleet

Remember when Reagan thought Star Wars was basically already here in the early 1980s? At least his vision contained an insert-miracle-here logic: strategic supremacy purchased through a glittering technological leap. Trump’s Top Gun instinct runs in reverse: carriers looked cooler back in WWII, so why not bring back steam catapults—the cutting-edge technology of the 1940s?

Trump’s order to replace the Ford-class carrier’s electromagnetic launch system with steam catapults on the future USS Doris Miller is beyond gonzo, turning personal techno-nostalgia into naval architecture. The change is expected to cost at least hundreds of millions and will surely f-up an already stretched carrier-production schedule.

But guess what, my friends? Drones need neither tech to launch from carriers operating as future mother ships.

When complexity compounds, you do not master it by retreating to familiar machinery but by learning to operate, repair, and scale the systems that will define the next fight. Left to his own devices, Trump would have us deploy a museum fleet.

Talk about nostalgia weaponized!

12) Wine country migrates

ECONOMIST: World-class wine is being made in a corner of Sweden. Yes, Sweden

The global ag map keeps redrawing itself, here one corked bottle at a time. Southern Sweden’s Skåne region recently produced a white wine that beat established French, Italian, and Spanish competitors in a blind tasting. Meanwhile, England’s warming growing conditions increasingly resemble Champagne’s climate of decades past, enabling serious sparkling-wine production from Champagne grapes not grown in Champagne!

This is climate change’s deceptive upside: the Global North gains new economic options even as its historic agricultural centers absorb mounting heat, drought, and volatility. So, the story here is not just what the Upper North gains—for however long—but what the Lower North loses in the meantime. Sweden’s warmer, longer seasons have made it all possible, but the country’s roughly 50 commercial wineries remain a boutique industry, not a new Bordeaux. Point being, global capacity is likely being lost in this implicit real-estate transaction.

For any one spot on the map, the question concerning this new reality is duration (who knows how long this will last?), which is determined by speed (climate velocity). A few degrees of warming can turn marginal land into profitable acreage, but then add a few more and volatility skyrockets.

Climate adaptation is not simply production moving north. It is a race between new opportunity and accelerating instability. Compared to agriculture’s normal rhythm, we’re talking an entirely different clock.

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The Space Stone fixes the map.

The Mind Stone fixes the will.

The Reality Stone confronts the permanent exceptions.

The Power Stone rebuilds the ability to make, move, replace, and sustain the things that make deterrence more than a press release.

The Time Stone makes the strategic clock work against the revisionists instead of against us.

The Soul Stone makes a sovereignty-first, opt-in order worth choosing.

So, can we imagine Trump getting the Gauntlet? Running the table? Achieving the global balance of power he seeks with his America First agenda?

Not the cinematic version, obviously: no glove, no cosmic jewelry, not even a goddamn golden trophy! So, no purple warlord gazing sadly at a sunset after erasing half of existence because he doubted humanity’s ability to adapt and evolve.

What Trump wants is something more recognizable.

He wants America to stop being treated as the designated adult in every international family breakdown. He wants fewer wars with no obvious American payoff, fewer allies who demand protection while offering moral commentary, fewer collapsing states exporting migrants and criminals, fewer global supply chains held hostage by people who hate the system but enjoy its revenue streams.

He wants a smaller bill, plain and simple.

On that score, we all know that Trump is correct. America HAS to achieve this rebalancing over time, the questions being timing, speed, sequencing, and acceptance of this new understanding, new alliance vibe, new balance.

I can track with Trump on all of that, and basically do in America’s New Map. Obviously, it’s the execution where we part ways.

The trick, as this series has argued, is that America only gets a smaller bill when it helps create a world that generates fewer unpaid liabilities. You cannot simply leave the scene with the fire still raging. The smoke follows you home, as we seem to discover every summer now.

Point being, eventually somebody sends the invoice to your address anyway.

That is why the six Stones matter.

They are not foreign-policy trophies but conditions that must exist simultaneously before an American president can plausibly say that the United States is doing less abroad because the world is functioning better.

Get only one or two right and you have a news cycle. Get all six right and you have a different operating system.

The Space Stone fixes the map. Ukraine survives as a sovereign, armed, Western-oriented state while Europe finally assumes the central responsibility for keeping Europe secure. Taiwan remains uncoerced because China concludes that blockade, quarantine, cyberattack, offshore-island nibbling, or invasion will not produce a fast, cheap, politically decisive victory. The routes connecting the system—Black Sea, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Indo-Pacific, ports, cables, data, energy—remain open enough that no collection of revisionists can turn access into extortion.

The Mind Stone restores will. Allies cease treating US protection as an all-inclusive resort package. Europe rearms. Asian partners provide access, capacity, logistics, political nerve. The global middle decides that America’s network, however given to freak-outs and periodically self-sabotaging, is still the better long-term place to park its capital, technology, aspirations, sovereignty.

The Reality Stone ends permanent exceptions. Iran no longer gets to pair nuclear ambiguity with proxy warfare and expect a new round of negotiations every time it bares its fangs. Cuba escapes its decades-long role as the Caribbean’s authoritarian museum exhibit. Venezuela becomes something other than an oil-rich generator of migration, corruption, criminality, and geopolitical bargains for sale.

The Power Stone supplies the material basis. America and its allies stop pretending that a few exquisite platforms plus the best PowerPoint deck in the world equals strategic capacity. They build munitions, drones, ships, air defenses, chips, machine tools, secure networks, energy capacity, critical-mineral processing, logistics, the industrial depth required to keep deterrence alive after the first month of a real emergency.

The Time Stone moves the strategic clock ahead. Every year makes Taiwan harder to coerce, Ukraine more embedded in Europe, allied capacity greater, supply chains more secure, Iranian delay less profitable. Russia discovers that its war has not broken the West but forced Europe to rearm. China sees its own coercive window narrowing rather than widening. The American network gets stronger even when nothing dramatic happens.

Finally, the Soul Stone gives it all a purpose. America stops selling a rules-based order that sounds like a tax on the middle class administered by “globalists.’ We get serious about offering an opt-in order of sovereign, functioning states that connect because connectivity delivers something tangible: security, prosperity, energy, technology, infrastructure, opportunity, controlled borders, a future worth staying home for. And, yeah, if that works well enough, in time we reopen America for new members—just not in the grabby sense postulated by Trump.

That’s the gauntlet.

Trump’s actual national-security agenda already contains more of this logic than many of his critics admit. The 2026 National Defense Strategy lists homeland defense, China deterrence, greater allied burden-sharing, a supercharged defense-industrial base as its four core lines of effort. The NATO allies’ commitment to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and security by 2035.

The raw materials are there, as is the fiscal capacity. The question is whether they can be made into strategy.

The danger here is painfully obvious. Trump’s political instincts cut both ways:

• His impatience with European freeloading can force Europe to grow up, or it can persuade Europe that America is no longer dependable.

• His hostility to endless war can produce disciplined bargaining and better burden-sharing, or it can become a rush for bad deals that merely schedule the next war.

• His economic nationalism can rebuild production capacity, or it can become tariff theater that isolates American firms, raises costs, treats supply chains as a morality play.

• His pathological attraction to personal diplomacy can create leverage, or it can lead him to confuse flattering strongmen with stable outcomes.

• His demand that America put itself first can restore the domestic legitimacy of global engagement, or it can drift into an America Alone posture that leaves the world’s most dangerous spaces to be organized by Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and whichever armed group recently acquired enough drones to become a maritime version of Allstate Insurance’s Mr. Mayhem.

That’s the fork in the road.

The good version of Trump says: America will not carry everyone. Capable allies will act like capable allies. Borders will mean something. Markets will be reciprocal. Supply chains will be secure. War will not become a permanent social program for the foreign-policy class. Dysfunctional regimes will no longer receive infinite extensions on their failures. The United States will be strong enough to deter aggression and connected enough to help good outcomes scale.

The bad version says: America is tired, so the rest of you can fuck off.

Good Donald leaves behind a functioning system. Bad Donald produces a world in which America gets less warning, fewer friends, more expensive crises, more supply shocks, more nuclear risks, more demands for intervention after the damage is done.

The mantra of the series:

That is why the Western Hemisphere matters, but cannot become a bunker fantasy. We have the best geographic hand in the game: continental scale, energy and food abundance, two oceans, a massive consumer market, innovation, financial power, and neighboring countries that can become strategic assets rather than chronic management problems.

The administration’s strategy places the homeland and Western Hemisphere at the top of its hierarchy, which makes sense as a foundation for American security. But hemispheric strength should be the base from which America organizes a wider network, not the excuse for abandoning that network.

An America that helps turn Mexico, Canada, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America into more secure, connected, prosperous partners gains strategic depth. An America that treats the hemisphere as merely a wall plus a commodity source gets a smaller, poorer, angrier neighborhood and then discovers that geography is not a force field.

The same principle applies worldwide.

The United States does not need to dominate every country. It needs to keep the open-world network more useful than the authoritarian alternatives. China has simply gotten better at offering things—trade, infrastructure, technology, manufacturing, financing, attention—while the US too often offers lectures, sanctions, a domestic political system that seems permanently pissed off

We don’t need to become China; we need to make ourselves useful and trustworthy again.

The United States has assets China cannot replicate: alliance ties that are voluntary, a huge and innovative private sector, world-leading universities, genuine financial depth, better immigration capacity, enormous energy and agricultural resources, established legal institutions, a culture that remains extraordinarily good at attracting ambitious people from everywhere else.

None of those strengths are self-executing; they require purpose.

The Soul Stone provides that purpose: A functioning order of sovereign states, freely connected, sharing responsibility, rejecting coercion.

That is the actual snap: half of America’s global liability disappearing because the world’s key regions stop exporting instability, allies begin carrying their share, supply chains become resilient, major revisionists discover that burning down the system costs more than joining it.

We don’t need to be omnipotent. We need to do what we’ve done before: take the best parts of our union model and competently scale them regionally, hemispherically, globally.

Do not forget: we are the model for globalization—its source code. That is the Gauntlet Trump would actually need to earn.

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The Space Stone fixed the map.

The Mind Stone fixed the will.

The Reality Stone confronts the permanent exceptions.

The Power Stone rebuilds the ability to make, move, replace, and sustain the things that make deterrence more than a press release.

The Time Stone made the strategic clock work against the revisionists instead of against us.

Now we arrive at the Soul Stone, suitably orange for our Thanos-in-Chief.

And yet, this is the hard one, which, I suppose is why it comes last.

The first five Stones are, in theory, measurable. You can count ships. You can count shells. You can track defense spending, industrial output, air-defense interceptors, secure supply chains, exercises, alliance access agreements—hell, just the number of governments that stop firing missiles at their neighbors.

The Soul Stone asks a more annoying question.

What’s it all for?

That question has become difficult for the United States. For three decades after the Cold War, America’s foreign-policy establishment (me included) offered a story of globalization, liberalization, institutional expansion, economic interdependence, democratic convergence, a rules-based international order that eventually becomes self-sustaining.

Much of that happened, and most of was good—great even.

Hundreds of millions escaped poverty. Trade expanded. Technology spread. Authoritarian states were drawn into global markets. Old rivalries became manageable. The world became denser, richer, faster, more connected, and, for a while, less violent in the ways that mattered most.

Then the bill arrived.

Americans watched manufacturing jobs disappear, communities hollow out, borders become more permeable, wars multiply without clean victories.

Europeans got security, prosperity, and an American military presence large enough to make strategic adulthood optional.

Developing countries got a lecture about governance from the same system that often seemed happy to let global finance, multinational capital, and Chinese infrastructure deals make the real decisions.

The result was predictable. Ordinary people began to ask what the system actually did for them. That is not populism; that is basic citizenship.

The Soul Stone begins there.

The old order forgot its customers

The liberal international order did not lose credibility because it was insufficiently explained at conferences. It lost credibility because it became disconnected from the lived experience of too many citizens.

Ordinary people do not wake up wanting to sabotage globalization, alliances, immigration, trade, technology, or international law. They just want a future they can understand. They want decent jobs, safe communities, enforceable borders, functional public services, affordable energy, upward mobility for their kids, leaders who seem more accountable to voters than to donors and the most obnoxious people on social media.

That is an entirely reasonable list.

People have not stopped wanting democracy. They have stopped accepting democracy that cannot deliver—very different.

Admittedly, Trump saw this before most of the foreign-policy establishment did. He saw that “rules-based order” had become a phrase that sounded like a demand for permanent sacrifice from “fly over” citizens on behalf of a system whose benefits are hoarded by people with frequent-flyer status.

Most pointedly, Trump saw that uncontrolled migration was not merely an economic variable or a humanitarian abstraction. He saw that trade without reciprocity could produce dependence. He saw that allies accustomed to American protection could become strategically passive. He saw that endless wars often had no discernible connection to national success.

And, yeah, Trump’s diagnosis was frequently right.

The problem? His remedy was frequently an argument with a mirror—the conflation of self-hood and national identity.

The Soul Stone asks whether Trump can turn that diagnosis into a constructive American purpose rather than a larger and louder version of national resentment, aka MAGA.

Sovereignty and connection

First, we must retire a false choice: sovereignty is not isolation, and connection is not submission. A country can control its borders and still participate deeply in an international system. In fact, given the migratory pressures exerted by climate change, that is the only version of internationalism likely to survive politically.

But understand: people support openness when it delivers security and opportunity. Americans have done that throughout our republic’s history. The United States therefore needs to offer a different formula: sovereign states, openly connected.

Nation-states remain the basic unit of political legitimacy (says the Wisconsin ex-pat), but they’re not some embarrassing transitional structure awaiting replacement by a Davos panel.

Sovereign states do better when they are connected to productive networks: markets, technology, capital, energy, education, infrastructure, data, supply chains, security partnerships.

That is my opt-in empire.

Countries join not because Washington commands them to salute, but because the American-led network makes them stronger, richer, more resilient, less vulnerable to coercion.

The Trump administration’s strategy already frames sovereignty, economic independence, secure supply chains, stronger borders, burden-sharing, and deterrence as mutually reinforcing goals. It also treats Indo-Pacific alliances as foundational to regional security. That is the raw material for a coherent doctrine.

The doctrine should be simple enough to print on a refrigerator magnet:

• America will defend its own sovereignty, and it will work with states that defend theirs.

• America will not ask allies to become dependencies, but it will ask them to become contributors.

• America will not subsidize regimes that make a business model out of exporting instability.

• America will trade, invest, build, and connect—but it will not mistake strategic dependence for economic efficiency.

• America will resist coercive revisionism, but it will not spend generations trying to rebuild every society that fails its own people.

That is not withdrawal but superpower adulthood.

The opt-in empire

The United States does not need to dominate every country. It needs to remain the preferred system. That distinction is everything.

China’s model has obvious attractions. It offers infrastructure, manufacturing, trade, loans, telecommunications, surveillance systems, a doctrine of political noninterference that sounds marvelous until … the debt matures, data gets harvested, or Beijing decides that “noninterference” does not apply to a country that has become strategically useful.

Russia offers a different product: cheap weapons, political manipulation, mercenaries, illicit finance, propaganda, the chance to become a client state.

Iran offers drones, proxies, ideological theater, endless promises that resistance will birth prosperity just as soon as the next enemy is defeated.

America and its allies need to offer the alternative that actually works: investment, education, advanced technology, security cooperation, reliable energy, legal mobility, open markets, transparent standards, resilient infrastructure, a political model in which sovereignty does not mean permanent isolation from the world.

That is how we built this juggernaut called the United States.

The proposition is simple enough: if you want to connect to the world’s most capable network, there is a place for you—eventually perhaps even a star on our flag. The price is basic reciprocity, institutional reliability, protection of your own sovereignty, a refusal to become a platform for coercive powers that seek to break the system from within.

That is the answer the global middle seeks. They don’t need a sermon about democracy from Washington. They need an offer they can measure.

• Can you help build our energy capacity?

• Can you secure our supply chains?

• Can you open your market?

• Can you invest without owning us?

• Can you provide technology without surveilling us?

• Can you strengthen our defense without turning us into a pawn?

• Can you help our people stay, work, and prosper at home?

That is the competitive test and America has to win it.

The uncomfortable public-opinion problem

America’s reputation has taken a real hit under Trump. That does not mean China has won the future. Public opinion is not a treaty.

Governments that tell pollsters they admire China can still send their children to American universities, seek dollar access, ask for US security cooperation, buy advanced American technology, quietly worry about Chinese power.

Still, America cannot spend every day telling the world that it is being ripped off, then expect the world to line up enthusiastically for partnership. Transactional diplomacy works when both parties believe they gain something. It fails when one party seems to regard every interaction as an opportunity to humiliate the other.

Trump’s best foreign-policy achievement would be making the American system so useful that other countries prefer it even when they find America annoying.

You know, like our situationship with Canada.

That is a much more achievable goal. The United States was never universally loved. But it was often the country others wanted nearby when the local bully showed up.

The domestic bargain

There is no foreign-policy Soul Stone without a domestic equivalent.

Americans will not support a global role that seems to come at the price of national cohesion, secure borders, energy reliability, productive work, functional infrastructure, accountability for elites who fail upward.

The answer is not to abandon the world. It is to make international engagement visibly serve the country that pays for it.

That means reshoring critical production without pretending every product can be made in Ohio. It means legal immigration that strengthens the country alongside enforcement that proves citizenship and borders still mean something. It means arguing for alliances as force multipliers, not charity cases.

Most of all—in my America’s New Map vision—it means a serious hemispheric strategy that turns North American resources, Mexican manufacturing, Canadian depth, Caribbean and Latin American stability, and secure borders into a continental advantage. It means convincing voters that integrating neighbors is cheaper than dealing with failed states after they export migration, criminality, and instability northward.

Trump is uniquely positioned to make this argument because his political coalition already understands the first half: America should not be played. The second half is harder: America should not throw away the system that made it the player everyone else has to deal with.

That is the soul of a successful America First strategy.

Not America alone. America central.

Not a world run from Washington. A world in which Washington remains the indispensable organizer because the network it anchors is still the best bet available.

One last go-around before I call this meeting:

1. The Space Stone gives America a map that works.

2. The Mind Stone gives the map credibility.

3. The Reality Stone ends the systems that survive by exporting failure.

4. The Power Stone rebuilds the material base.

5. The Time Stone makes the balance improve with every passing year.

6. The Soul Stone provides national purpose.

That is the one “snap” worth imagining.

Not half the world gone, but our half of the world deciding that burning down the system is no longer the best available business model.

Remember: the order that lasts is not the one people fear. it is the one they choose when they are free to choose.

There will be one last post in the series to sum up the entirety of the series.

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Everybody wants to know who is winning the AI race. Wrong question, or rather, too small a question. The better question is: who is building the stack the rest of the world will end up living inside?

That is the strategic question. Not who won the benchmark this month. Not who dropped the flashiest model. Not who went viral on developer Twitter. The real issue is whose AI system becomes infrastructural for everybody else.

That is how to think about AI in grand-strategic terms. Not as a bomb. As a world-ordering technology.

Once you make that move, the map clarifies fast. The world is not sorting itself under one universal AI hierarchy. It is sorting itself around three distinct political economies of AI: the United States as the closed frontier core, China as the open-weight diffusion core, and Europe as the rule-making core.

That is the triangle. And the rest of the world is already positioning itself around it.

America: the premium layer

America still dominates the prestige end of the market: closed frontier models, premium APIs, flagship consumer interfaces, tightly controlled deployment environments. If you want the highest-status branded cognitive service, the odds are still that you are renting American.

Don’t underestimate this as a business model, because, in truth, it is likewise a geopolitical strategy.

The American instinct is to preserve the lead, protect the frontier, restrict access to the highest-end inputs, keep the commanding heights inside a friendly cloud-and-chip ecosystem. The logic is familiar from every earlier American technological wave: dominate the top of the value chain, lock in enterprise dependence, use alliances plus standards plus export controls to keep the moat deep.

So America sells crown jewels, by design.

That has obvious advantages: premium pricing, strong enterprise lock-in, brand gravity, global prestige, tight safety and update control. But it also creates concentration liabilities: a handful of firms become gatekeepers, talk of safety often disguises political efforts to keep a market closed, which, in turn, pushes others across the world to look for workable alternatives.

Which is where China enters the picture.

China: the diffusion layer

China has chosen the opposite trajectory. If the US wants to own the premium apex, China looks to win by supplying everybody else.

That is the strategic significance of open-weight Chinese models. Chinese labs and firms have leaned into broader release, local deployability, broad developer access, ecosystem spread. China is building much of the open-weight runway—a sort of let-a-thousand-platforms-take-flight approach.

Rather than seek benchmark nationalism, China is all about installing baseline capability—ASAP. They want to be the family of models that everyone and their cousins can actually run from the get-go, no instructions required.

That matters more than people admit. The future of global AI, I suspect, will be shaped less by who owns the most expensive premium endpoint and more by who supplies the default cognition layer for countries, firms, and developers that need cost-effective, localizable, sovereign-controllable tools. China is in the business of spreading tools and business is good.

Chinese models are especially attractive in price-sensitive markets, in sovereign deployment contexts (key government activities), in nations wary of depending on US providers (our politics are so unpredictable), and in political environments where Chinese infrastructure is already dominant—by design.

Sure, China competes, like everybody else, for the top benchmark scores. It’s just that, at the same time, China is scrambling globally to become the most broadly adopted layer underneath everybody else’s adaptation.

That is a different path to a different dominance.

Europe: the rules layer

Europe is sort of the would-be Goldilocks here, as it doesn’t sit at the frontier like America, but it also does not seek to dominate the diffusion edge like China. Europe, as usual, works the rules angle: legal framing, standards-setting, regulatory legitimacy.

Europe—sort of the California of superpowers—sees itself as rules-maker and thus referee. That may seem kinda wimpy by comparison, but remember that, in a digital economy, rules equate to architecture.

The EU AI Act and related European governance efforts shape what gets documented, how systems are classified, what counts as high risk, how firms organize compliance, what language the rest of the world uses to talk about responsible deployment. That’s boring but important stuff. Europe may not own the best models but it can still shape their development and deployment with their requirements.

Remember my mantra: in globalization, demand rules while supply drools. So, maybe not your preferred definition of power because it’s indirect and slow, but it’s real enough to matter.

And in those parts of the world, particularly states that borrow regulatory vocabularies from Brussels more readily than technology stacks from Beijing, and you begin to see how that power travels far.

Three different strategies

So now the big picture comes into focus.

1. United States trying to dominate the premium layer of frontier cognition.

2. China trying to dominate the distribution layer of widely deployable cognition.

3. Europe trying to dominate the legitimacy layer of governable cognition.

None are running the same race, however much their courses overlap and interact. That is what so much commentary gets wrong, treating AI dominance as a single metric when there are at least three: who wins attention, who wins deployment, who writes the rules.

Web visits tell you who wins attention. API tokens tell you who wins integration. Enterprise surveys tell you who wins money. And regulatory spillover tells you who writes the operating conditions.

How the rest of the world sorts itself

Once that three-sided contest is clear, the rest of the world becomes legible.

Countries are not picking “AI” in the abstract. They are choosing among stacks, standards, pricing models, cloud relationships, sovereignty bargains, geopolitical dependencies. That naturally produces four broad camps.

First are US-leaning allies and premium markets: Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Israel, UK, Singapore, parts of the Gulf. These countries lean American because they still trust their alliances, want robust enterprise support and cloud integration, believe that top-end performance matters.

Second are China-linked diffusion markets: parts of Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and sanctioned or semi-isolated states such as Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Belarus. In these nations, Chinese infrastructure and open-weight systems often fit better on price, availability, and political compatibility.

Third is Europe’s regulatory sphere: the EU itself plus nearby or aligned states that absorb privacy norms, compliance habits, and rights-based governance approaches out of habit and past/current dependencies.

Fourth are the swing votes: India, Latin America, much of ASEAN, many African states. These guys will hedge, bargain, and mix systems so as to preserve flexibility and agency.

And, yeah, this is where the strategic game gets interesting, because the swing regions are where the future balance gets decided—not just by innovation but affordability, accessibility (does it come in Swahili?), and the ease/difficulty of deploying the technology locally (power reliability is a biggie). Then, let’s not forget regulation, which, by extension, reflects the local government’s political trust of its vendors. No trust, no financing.

Understand, the rest of the world is not passively waiting for an AI kingpin to win. Their version of digital non-alignment is arbitraging all three sides of the triangle.

The emerging global map

The practical truth remains: most countries will not own the frontier. Many will not write the rules. Most will not generate regionally—much less globally—dominant open-weight ecosystems. Instead, they will import, adapt, localize, combine, and hedge the best they can.

That means the world is sorting itself into AI alliances, AI sovereignties, and AI renters. That doesn’t exactly translate into US-versus-China storylines.

And, again, let’s remember how EU-as-California still matters as a peer civilizational regulator. Diffusion follows trust, and trust follows rules.

The right historical analogy

As argued here before, the closest analogy is not nuclear deterrence. It feels more like the internet plus strategic trade.

AI is a general-purpose infrastructure that reorganizes comparative advantage, dependency, and the geography of control. Whoever supplies the stack does not simply peddle software. They shape defaults, set switching costs, establish standards, and forge long-term dependencies.

If AI is the ultimate ordering technology, then we’re collectively embarking on a world-ordering contest.

Repeat after me:

The real issue is who builds stacks, who governs interfaces, who captures dependencies, who writes the rules for everybody else.

It is tempting for many strategic thinkers to reduce this all down to “drone hellscapes” and “killer robots,” but it’s actually going to be both more mundane and insidious than that.

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The Space Stone fixed the map.

The Mind Stone fixed the will.

The Reality Stone confronts the permanent exceptions.

The Power Stone rebuilds the ability to make, move, replace, and sustain the things that make deterrence more than a press release.

Now comes the green Time Stone, the one that should scare every strategist, because it tells you what has already happened, what might happen next, and how badly your previous assumptions have aged.

In the Marvel version, it lets Doctor Strange peer into millions of possible futures and discover, with grim certainty of a Pentagon tabletop exercise, that only one of them ends well.

Trump does not get that luxury. He gets the same clock as everybody else. The only question is whether it is running for you or against you. That’s where my skills fit.

Timing, or better said sequencing, is the central problem of American grand strategy today. We seek to create a new, more balanced, less taxing (on us) global order, but that takes lining up allies and “replacements” (like China, India, Europe) in the right sequence, under the right timelines—otherwise globalization’s sacred timeline gets disrupted right when things get interesting (the Technological Singularity).

Washington keeps treating time as neutral—the blank calendar space between one emergency meeting and the next.

Time is not neutral. It rewards states that build, learn, connect, prepare, and compound advantage. It punishes states that defer choices, consume their inherited strength, mistake temporary calm for strategic success.

The Time Stone asks whether Trump can flip the clock.

Can he end or freeze the wars where delay favors the bad guys? Can he buy enough time for allies to rearm, supply chains to diversify, industrial capacity to expand, deterrence to become more credible? Can he force revisionist regimes into early choices, rather than letting them substitute delay for success?

There is a difference between strategic patience and strategic procrastination. Washington has too often practiced the latter.

Whose window is closing?

Start with China. Our standard story is: China rises, China grows, China builds, China threatens, eventually China becomes too big for the rest of us to manage. That story had a good long run, but the clock has changed.

China is still enormous, formidable, the only plausible peer competitor out there. And it is building military capabilities at a deeply concerning pace.

But … China is also super-aging, slowing done, supremely indebted, dangerously overbuilt, politically rigid, increasingly dependent on a global economic system that it seeks to reorder without accidentally wrecking.

None of that means China is collapsing next Tuesday, so stop listening to that experts crowd.

It does mean Beijing faces a narrowing set of choices. A country that is getting old before it gets rich, carrying enormous debt, struggling to stimulate domestic demand, relying on central control to manage increasingly complex problems … that is not a regime with time on its side.

This is where the Taiwan temptation becomes dangerous.

Xi Jinping may someday conclude that waiting makes the task harder: Taiwan gets more resilient, Japan gets more capable, the Philippines becomes more accessible to US forces, allied industrial capacity expands, semiconductor dependence becomes less concentrated, China’s own demographic and economic headwinds become more severe.

That is a window alright, but it’s more Beijing’s problem than Washington’s.

Trump’s Time Stone must close that window without forcing China to leap through it.

Tricky, I know.

Our goal is to make every passing year improve the balance against Chinese coercion. Taiwan becomes harder to blockade, harder to paralyze, harder to occupy. Taiwan’s modernization will not remove the risk of occupation, but it can make any effort far costlier, riskier, more uncertain for Beijing.

That is time working for you.

Russia: Do not confuse pain with collapse

Russia poses the opposite temptation.

Every time the Russian military trades another horrific casualty list for another handful of wrecked villages, somebody declares that the system must be near the point of failure. Eventually, perhaps. But great powers with authoritarian habits can convert human misery into battlefield persistence for much longer than observers expect (h/t Adolph H.)

Russia is under real strain: manpower pressure, high casualties, labor shortages, budget stress, depletion of liquid reserves, higher taxes, the sheer shoveling of national wealth into the furnace of imperial nostalgia. But Russia can likely sustain its current war effort through the rest of the Trump administration.

Point being, Russia may be losing its future while still being able to ruin Ukraine’s present. Trump’s Time Stone needs to understand both sides of that equation.

The wrong answer is an open-ended war whose only theory of victory is that Russia eventually becomes too exhausted to continue. The other wrong answer is a rushed peace that lets Russia freeze the conflict for later consumption.

The useful answer is to settle the war in a way that shifts the burden and changes the clock.

Ukraine gets armed, connected, rebuilt, and embedded in Europe. Europe becomes responsible for European deterrence. Russia gets no right of renewed coercion, no political veto over Ukraine’s future, no easy path back to normal commercial integration without changing its behavior.

We need to make time hurt Moscow more than Kyiv.

Every year of Ukrainian reconstruction deepens its Western links. Every European munitions factory expansion adds deterrence. Every new air-defense system, logistics hub, ammunition line makes Russia’s next gamble (aka, Moldova) less attractive.

That is locking in Russia’s strategic failure while making Europe finally grow up—the clock reset.

Iran: Delay is the weapon

Iran has turned delay into an art form. Delay negotiations. Delay inspections. Most of all, delay resolution until the nuclear program is farther along, proxy networks are revitalized, Sunni regimes are more divided, some new crisis forces Washington’s attention elsewhere.

Then Tehran starts a new timeline—a new clock with a new US administration, a feat it has pulled off time and again.

This is why the Iranian nuclear problem cannot be treated as a familiar diplomatic folder that gets handed from administration to administration with a fresh cover sheet.

The IAEA has warned that it has been unable to conduct normal in-field verification for an extended period because of the conflict. That is a clock. Every year of nuclear latency increases the temptation to accept an Iranian threshold capability as simply another irritating feature of the regional landscape.

Trump’s Time Stone needs to accelerate the choice where Iran accepts intrusive verification, enforceable nuclear limits, constraints on proxy warfare, and a regional economic off-ramp—or gets to be the Shiite version of North Korea for as far as the eye can see.

What cannot continue is the old do-loop in which America negotiates the same basic issue every few years while Iran improves its leverage between meetings. The point is to stop letting Tehran turn time into a weapon of regional coercion.

Build time into the system

The Time Stone is not primarily about deadlines. It is about compounding, stacking either success or failure.

• America and its partners need policies that get better with age.

• Ukraine’s integration into Europe should deepen every year.

• Taiwan’s resilience should improve every year.

• Allied munitions production should rise every year.

• Critical supply chains should become more secure every year.

• Energy capacity should expand every year.

• Digital infrastructure should become more resilient every year.

• The democratic network should become more economically attractive every year.

The United States needs a strategic calendar rather than a crisis calendar.

A crisis calendar asks: What is the emergency today?

A strategic calendar asks: If nothing dramatic happens this year, does the balance move in our direction anyway?

That is the grand strategic standard.

If the answer is no, we merely postpone a worse future. If the answer is yes, then our deterrence is working.

This is where Trump’s alleged impatience could become an advantage. Trump likes outcomes. The Time Stone demands them. But he must learn the difference between a quick deal and a favorable clock. The quick deal ends the news cycle. The favorable clock sets the next decade.

The gift of delay

The most counterintuitive point is this: America does not need to solve every problem now. It needs to decide which problems must be solved now because delay helps the adversary, and which problems can be managed while time makes the American network stronger.

• Taiwan is where delay must favor deterrence, not Chinese coercion.

• Ukraine is where settlement converts a brutal present into a stronger European future.

• Iran is a case where delay must be denied as a strategic tool.

• North Korea is the obvious counterexample: this is how you keep somebody bad in an acceptable box.

Not every bad actor gets to control our calendar.

Trump’s successful use of the Time Stone would therefore be all about sequencing. That is how the United States moves from endlessly reacting to events toward shaping the environment in which events occur.

Again, time is never neutral; it either compounds your strengths or your weaknesses.

Say it with me:

1. The Space Stone gives you a map that holds.

2. The Mind Stone gives you a coalition that believes it will hold.

3. The Reality Stone breaks systems that survive by pretending nothing can change.

4. The Power Stone gives you the ability to sustain all of that.

The Time Stone asks the only question that matters after you have acquired the rest: Are you building a future that gets easier to defend?

Strategy is not about having more time. It is about making time take your side.

Next up, the final Soul Stone.

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The blue Space Stone fixed the map.

The yellow Mind Stone fixed the will.

The red Reality Stone confronts the fiction that failed authoritarian systems can remain permanently dysfunctional while exporting their problems indefinitely.

Now comes the Power Stone.

In Marvel’s universe, it is purple, luminous, capable of ruining a tremendous amount of property very quickly—something the Donald would naturally be attracted to. In the real world, it is a factory shift in Scranton, shipyard crane in Virginia, missile motor built in one of those towns that never receives a Cabinet visit, and a data center drawing enough electricity to unsettle everyone on the local grid. It is also a mine, refinery, port, rail spur, warehouse full of spare parts that no one notices until an ally needs them tomorrow.

In short, it is the material base that determines whether geopolitical promises are real.

There is an awkward truth that foreign-policy professionals often avoid mentioning at the conference: great powers do not prevail merely because they possess better concepts. They prevail because they can build things—at volume, speed, for as long as the contest requires. They can replace those things after they are expended, intercepted, damaged, hacked, embargoed, simply worn out.

Ukraine reintroduced this truth to a Western defense establishment that spent decades imagining war as a ballet of precision munitions, exquisite platforms, networked sensors, operational PowerPoints with bevelled arrows of different colors. We’re talking a grinding continental war where drones meet trenches, artillery shells get used by the trainload, air-defense interceptors become their own strategic category. The future arrived, and it looked suspiciously like a factory: How fast can I make robots and drones versus you?

That is the Power Stone. There really is no military power in the abstract. It is always productive power. It’s why Stalin knew Hitler was screwed the minute he declared war on the US. It’s also why Rhett Butler ruins the party at the beginning of Gone With the Wind.

The arsenal is not a museum

America remains extraordinarily powerful. It fields the world’s most capable military, possesses unmatched global logistics, leads a gigantic economy, enjoys major energy advantages, sits near the technological frontier, benefits from the dollar’s central role in the global financial system. Its university network, venture-capital system, consumer market, alliance structure give it advantages no adversary can easily replicate.

In short, we have to try to lose.

But then look at munitions inventories, shipbuilding timelines, repair capacity, supply-chain dependencies, defense acquisition rituals. Much of this Cold War inheritance is being managed like a boutique: impressive products, limited inventory, delivery sometime after the relevant crisis has ended (h/t Allen Drury’s novel Pentagon).

Our challenge? China does not treat production as a boutique business.

China doesn’t merely build weapons. It stockpiles the capacity to build weapons, treating industrial depth as strategic depth and strategic depth as deterrence. It understands that shipyards matter as much as ships, foundries as much as fighters, machine tools as much as missiles, electric power as much as AI models.

That does not mean China is guaranteed to win anything. It’s got its own issues: demographic decline, debt, waste, political rigidity, battered real-estate sector, leadership so centralized that bad news may struggle to reach the very top, and … oh … they ain’t fought a real war in half a century.

But China has scale, and scale matters.

The Trump administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy gets the basic hierarchy right: homeland defense first, deterring China second, allied burden-sharing third, revitalized defense industrial base fourth. It calls for faster acquisition, expanded capacity, innovation, AI adoption, removal of the institutional obstacles that prevent the United States from producing at the scale great-power competition requires.

Sensible enough. The harder part is translating phrases such as “supercharge” into actual factories, workers, production lines, contracts, inventories, on-time delivery.

Production, not performance

Trump understands a version of this instinctively. His political worldview begins with the conviction that America has allowed itself to become too dependent on foreign manufacturing, foreign supply chains, foreign minerals, foreign capital flows, foreign goodwill. The concern is legit. It’s just that tariffs are not a proxy for industrial capacity.

The Power Stone requires a more difficult undertaking: an industrial strategy that can produce what national security actually consumes now that we’ve reached the Military Singularity.

America needs to build semiconductors and the machine tools used to build them. It needs drones, missile bodies, seekers, motors, interceptors, components that turn launchers into sustained air-defense capacity. It needs ships, submarines, icebreakers, tankers, repair vessels, dry docks, cranes, skilled tradespeople capable of keeping maritime power afloat and available. It needs transformers, grid equipment, secure comms hardware, satellite components, batteries, advanced sensors, the vast catalogue of ordinary replacement parts that determines whether sophisticated systems remain operational after Day 100.

America also needs abundant energy.

The AI race is an electricity race wearing a software hoodie. The defense-industrial race is similar, but with steel, chemicals, data, transport, and workforce requirements added. A secure cloud stack, AI training cluster, advanced chip fab, critical-mineral processing, electrified military bases—they cannot run reliably on a grid that is fragile, constrained, endlessly delayed by permitting procedures.

Here, Trump is correct: energy abundance is national-security policy.

Critical minerals fall into the same category. Batteries, precision-guided weapons, radars, aircraft, semiconductors, electric systems, sensors, secure comms all depend on materials processed in vulnerable supply chains. US policy already recognizes this and is moving in the right direction on rare-earths.

That is necessary, but it is a first brick rather than a finished fortress.

We need arsenals, plural, but it ain’t gonna happen via some mindless America First push for NorKo-style autarky. We cannot produce everything ourselves.

Our central advantage is that we sit inside the richest and most technologically capable network of states in history. Japan and South Korea possess immense manufacturing strengths. Europe retains advanced industrial capacity. Australia and Canada offer raw materials, energy, strategic depth, political reliability. Taiwan remains a critical semiconductor producer. India can scale manufacturing and digital capacity. Mexico can turn North American integration into something usefully tangible.

Thus, our objective should be Arsenals of Democracy, plural.

The US provides the network’s central command, its largest market, deepest pool of finance, world-leading technologies, strategic force, indispensable security backstop. Allies and partners supply distributed capacity, redundancy, proximity, resilience, industrial specialization, growing responsibility for their own regions.

As stated previously, every capable ally needs a job. The days of outsourcing all that to the Pentagon alone are over.

NATO’s 2025 commitment to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and security by 2035 is useful, especially the 1.5 percent slated for infrastructure, civil preparedness, networks, resilience, industrial capacity. Those are the boring elements that keep the exciting systems operating.

The China test

China is not invincible, but it has assembled manufacturing scale that should worry any country hoping to compete with it. It dominates or holds major positions in numerous critical supply chains, including processing capacity for vital minerals and manufacturing ecosystems important to batteries, electronics, drones, missiles, and other components of modern military and economic power.

Our answer cannot simply be to sanction China more aggressively. Beijing is too smart and too talented when it comes to workarounds. We also can’t shut ourselves off from co-evolving with China’s immense efforts in AI.

America therefore needs sufficient domestic and allied productive capacity that Beijing cannot turn industrial scale into strategic coercion. Call it deterrence by production.

Other countries are more likely to align with the United States when alignment means participation in supply chains, research, manufacturing, standards, contracts, technology, and prosperity—not simply purchasing American weapons at premium prices and applauding politely at alliance meetings. In that regard, the emerging national security production partnership with Israel is a good model. Point being, if you want states to join the network, give them a meaningful stake in building it.

Power without fantasy

The Power Stone does not require a permanent war economy. It requires a country and coalition that can shift rapidly into a war economy if circumstances demand it, without discovering that its productive base was outsourced, financially optimized, politically fragmented, strategically neglected.

It does not require every factory to sit in the United States. It requires vital supply networks to exist beyond any plausible adversary’s veto.

It does not mean writing blank checks to defense contractors for systems that arrive late, cost more than promised, and cannot be produced in meaningful numbers. There, Alex Karp is correct. It means rewarding volume, speed, repairability, interoperability, availability.

The Military Singularity makes the US military-industrial complex more like the NFL, where the insider motto is availability is capability.

Trump’s genuine Power Stone achievement would be to turn his deepest political reflex—that America should not be strategically dependent—into an allied industrial strategy rather than tariff fits of pique.

That would make the Space Stone durable because a map holds only when it can be defended. It would make the Mind Stone credible because collective will matters only when it can be sustained. It would make the Reality Stone effective because coercive regimes must reassess their choices when their targets can out-produce, outlast, out-connect them.

Power is not what you can display. It’s what you can replace, the ultimate threat being I can do this all day long.

Next up: the Time Stone.

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• CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE: The Changing Military Balance in the Black Sea: A Ukrainian Perspective

• SECURITY AND DEFENCE QUARTERLY: Technological Maturity for Jeune École: The Case of Ukraine’s Naval Strategy

• LOWY INSTITUTE: Uncrewed and Untested: The Wrong Lessons for a Hybrid Navy

• AUSTRALIAN ARMY RESEARCH CENTRE: Drones in Modern Warfare (2024–2026)

• LOWY INSTITUTE: Modern War and the Systemic Learning Deficit in Western Military Institutions

• ENGELSBERG IDEAS: Ukraine Is Mastering 21st-Century Warfare

• BREAKING DEFENSE: Everyone Is Learning the Wrong Lessons From Ukraine’s Drone War

• MODERN WAR INSTITUTE AT WEST POINT: Build at Scale, Innovate at the Edge, Close the Feedback Loop Fast: Transforming Acquisition for the Drone Age

• IRREGULAR WARFARE CENTER: Six Key Lessons From Ukraine’s Drone War

The Military Singularity is not a future event waiting somewhere beyond the horizon. It is the accelerating point at which machines sense, target, decide, strike, learn, and regenerate combat power faster than legacy military institutions can define requirements, authorize action, train personnel, or replace losses.

Scared? We all should be.

Ukraine has supplied the most sustained battlefield laboratory. Iran has supplied the broader strategic test: massed one-way attack drones and missiles, air-defense magazine depletion, regional escalation, and the difficulty of defending complex societies against persistent low-cost attack. Together, they suggest that the central unit of military power is no longer the individual ship, tank, fighter, or artillery piece. It is the adaptive, networked, industrially replenishable kill web.

This is not an argument that humans disappear from war—not totally. It is an argument that humans are being pushed upward and outward. Here are twelve emerging lessons, as I collect them.

1. Platforms become nodes

A single exquisite manned platform is no longer the natural center of combat power; it is increasingly a vulnerable node inside a broader network of sensors, decoys, unmanned scouts, electronic-warfare systems, munitions, autonomous strike vehicles.

Ukraine’s Black Sea campaign makes the point beautifully: it did not acquire a conventional fleet to challenge Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ship for ship. Instead, it assembled a kill web of long-range missiles, intelligence, maritime drones, and precision strike that severely constrained Russian naval operations—hell, driving them to the far side of the Black Sea. Platforms still count; they’ve just lost their centrality when it comes to decisive military effect.

2. Adaptation is the decisive advantage

The winning military is the one that shortens the loop between battlefield observation, software revision, manufacturing adjustment, fielding, and operator feedback. That’s the new OODA loop.

Ukraine’s remarkable advantage is not any particular drone model; they’re largely inter-changeable. It is their ability to maintain continuous connection among combat units, engineers, manufacturers, software developers, and procurement officials, allowing revised systems to return to the front in days or weeks rather than after a traditional Western acquisition cycle measured in years. What Ukraine has built is a self-learning military organism.

Ukraine grabs the Holy Grail!

3. Cheap offense imposes strategic cost

The old relationship between cost and military effect is breaking down when cheap, proliferated drones can force defenders to expend scarce, expensive, and slowly replaceable interceptors. This is the lesson the Pentagon is learning right now with Iran.

Iran’s drone-and-missile model is built around that logic: mix inexpensive one-way systems with more sophisticated missiles, complicate target identification and engagement, compel an adversary to spend premium defensive weapons against lower-cost threats. Even when the defender succeeds tactically, it can still lose the strategic exchange by exhausting magazines faster than they can be rebuilt.

That is asymmetrical warfare at its finest.

4. Transparency kills concentration

The drone age makes battlefield presence increasingly visible, and visibility makes concentration increasingly dangerous. Armored formations, logistics convoys, artillery batteries, command posts, ammunition dumps, air-defense radars—even ships at port(!) all face an expanding surveillance-strike problem. The side that emits, moves predictably, concentrates physically, or depends on fixed infrastructure becomes discoverable—and eventually targetable—by a vastly growing constellation of cheap sensors.

The counter? Dispersion paired with rapid networking, mobility, concealment, deception, redundant communications. In sum, a shitload of effort.

Ukraine’s drone war shows that unmanned systems are transforming tactics and force structures precisely because they make detection and targeting pervasive. Understand: for most of modern history, the detection and targeting part was hugely difficult and time/resource-consuming. Now it’s whoop! There it is!

5. Production is now a combat function

A nation’s military strength increasingly lies not in its peacetime inventory but in its ability to manufacture, repair, modify, and surge autonomous systems during a war—just-in-time production.

Ukraine’s drone-industrial expansion violates every known Pentagon rule: its drone-manufacturer base grew from seven firms in 2022 to at least 500 by 2026, while projected annual production capacity rose from roughly 5,000 systems to seven million.

It all comes down to the industrial architecture behind those numbers—distributed firms, commercial components, competitive design, constant combat feedback. This is what the American neo-primes like Anduril want to achieve over here.

6. Attritability beats prestige

The future force must assume that many systems will be lost and design for replacement rather than worship survivability to the point of unaffordability. That doesn’t mean every weapon should be cheap, disposable, or technically primitive. It does mean a force optimized around a handful of irreplaceable trophies will eventually be outnumbered, out-scouted, and strategically paralyzed by the prospect of losing them.

Unmanned systems offer mass because they can be accepted as expendable in ways that an aircraft carrier, fifth-generation fighter, crewed tank, or highly trained pilot cannot. Ukraine’s use of armed maritime drones shows how quickly an expendable vehicle can climb the capability ladder.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration wants to build gold-plated battleships.

7. Electronic warfare speeds autonomy

Electronic warfare accelerates the demand for systems able to navigate, identify, coordinate, and complete missions with degraded or absent communications. The battlefield contest now runs through jamming, spoofing, cyber disruption, satellite-navigation denial, fiber-optic control links, autonomous terminal guidance, relay drones, rapidly changing software. This is where “human in the loop” becomes self-limiting. In a heavily contested EW environment, humans can establish mission intent but then are going to end up submitting to machine execution under tactical conditions evolving too rapidly for human intervention. Ukraine’s experience has made EW, autonomy, and rapid adaptation inseparable elements of one system.

8. The kill chain is a system

The drone is just the final visible component of a much larger architecture of detection, classification, communication, targeting, electronic attack, interception, battle-damage assessment, replenishment.

Ukraine’s increasingly integrated drone families make the point: reconnaissance drones find targets; relay drones extend communications; electronic-warfare systems disrupt defenses; interceptor drones counter incoming threats; strike drones attack; and assessment drones verify results.

In other words, tomorrow’s military competition is not drone versus tank or drone versus ship—it is adaptive system versus adaptive system—as in, drone-on-drone action.

9. Sea denial has been democratized

Frankly, this one is a stunner.

Start with Ukraine, which has demonstrated that a state lacking a traditional navy can nevertheless contest an entire sea, drive a stronger fleet away from key waters, and protect vital commerce—all through an integrated asymmetric campaign. That is a profound warning to every navy built around the premise that maritime combat power resides principally in big, crewed, capital-intensive hulls—a lesson Trump’s Pentagon doesn’t seem to be picking up.

Ukraine’s success comes from coupling maritime drones with shore-based missiles and intelligence, forcing Russian warships to operate differently and reducing their freedom of maneuver. Iran’s long-standing strategy in and around the Strait of Hormuz offers an earlier, if less combat-proven, version of the same basic logic: use missiles, mines, fast attack craft, drones, and geographic chokepoints to threaten a materially superior navy and place globally consequential commercial traffic at risk.

An important caveat": neither case proves that small unmanned craft alone can deliver global sea control, sustained escort, undersea dominance, or transoceanic logistics. The Military Singularity, for now, applies to sea denial but not sea control; it can produce and sustain a negative but not a positive.

10. Manned systems must earn their place

The question is no longer whether manned platforms persist, but what uniquely valuable function justifies their cost, concentration of risk, human exposure. The answer ain’t “because that’s where the shooter sits.”

Crewed aircraft, ships, submarines, and land formations remain important as high-power sensors, command hubs, arsenal ships, undersea persistence platforms, long-range logistics bases, repair centers, political instruments of presence and assurance.

But here’s the new requirement: all these platform must derive their value from the robotic formations they generate, sustain, coordinate, recover. The old force structure model is thereby flipped on its head: a small number of hardened manned nodes support a much larger autonomous periphery, meaning almost nobody is on the front-line anymore.

11. Human control migrates to policy

The more autonomous combat becomes, the more essential human control becomes at the level of political authority, escalation management, rules of engagement, accountability. Notice the lack of actual triggers in any of those domains.

Machines can perform increasingly sophisticated tasks but they cannot legitimately decide a nation’s political aims, balance escalation risks between nuclear-armed adversaries, administer occupied populations, negotiate surrender, bear moral/fiscal responsibility for a campaign.

On that score, my old Leviathan-SysAdmin distinction becomes more relevant: machines make the Leviathan function faster, but no amount of autonomous killing generates the legitimate order, recovery, and governance associated with the SysAdmin task. There is no consequence-free warfare, as Trump seems to think.

12. Institutions are weak link

The true Military Singularity appears when battlefield technology changes faster than militaries can reform their doctrine, procurement, promotion systems, command authorities, and force structures.

Which would be right around now.

This is the core challenge we face: Ukraine has not merely revealed a technology gap; it’s exposed a learning gap among institutions conditioned to reward process compliance and slow, centralized acquisition. The danger is we keep prioritizing familiar competencies over new solutions despite access to unprecedented real-time evidence from Ukraine and Iran.

To which I say, THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS WAR!

The Strategic Choice

America and our allies now face two futures: preserve the old hierarchy with platforms central and drones peripheral; or build a distributed military ecosystem featuring massive stocks of expendable autonomous systems alongside a decidedly reduced-but-hardened layer of manned platforms that exists to command, sustain, repair, rearm, and politically control that machine force.

Ukraine has shown that the future of war belongs to the side that learns and regenerates fastest. Iran has shown that low-cost, persistent attack can impose unsustainable burdens on even the most advanced defensive systems. The Military Singularity therefore does not vanish humans from the battlefield.

But it does mark the point in history when militaries that still think in terms of platforms discover they are fighting an ecosystem—and losing to it.

Here’s to avoiding learning that lesson the hard way.

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Find the original article here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2000/october/force-structure-will-change

In January 1993, we wrote an article in Proceedings about the election-year debate on foreign policy and its implications for U.S. Navy force structure planning.1 The piece later was cited as one of the journal’s best during its 125th anniversary celebration. Emboldened by such recognition, we decided to update our analysis to see what the Clinton years have accomplished in shaping the major arguments about what sort of crises and enemies we should focus on—and plan U.S. force structure around.

This endeavor might strike some as quixotic (Clinton had no foreign policy, and the world is thus a mess!), but we think the debate has faded into an inertia favoring the status quo of incremental modernization, albeit more by trial and error than by grand strategy. In addition, we think this election’s non-debate on foreign policy demonstrates just how comfortable the public has become with a consensus that the United States is neither the global policeman nor a 911 force—that the U.S. military rather should be a selective enforcer of “mini-containment strategies” against regional troublemakers.

What does that mean for force-structure planning?

• Despite calls for full-speed ahead on a revolution in military affairs (RMA), the “creeping incrementalism” approach to modernization is not going away soon.

• The defense budget definitely has a floor, and a yet-to-be-determined ceiling not far above it, and this means stable service shares, which also means each service “transforms” within its own resources.

• The Navy and Marine Corps keep the general course established in 1992 in “. . . From the Sea”—a warfighting-focused, forward-deployed swarming force that sacrifices some numbers and technology to maintain its day-to-day readiness for quick crisis response.

Incrementalism in Defense of Force Structure Is No Vice

Wistful Cold War memories have left many U.S. military experts and strategists yearning to continue technological revolutions. They are alarmed by what has happened in the world in the 1990s, sensing great international disorder combined with confusion in U.S. foreign policy. The real history is far more benign:

• Bush and his wise men ably wage the Persian Gulf War, leading many to hail a new form of high-tech war. The administration’s real accomplishments, however, are forming the coalition that fought the war and masterfully riding along with the Soviet Bloc’s dissolution. The New World Order really is about the North’s advanced countries cooperating in new ways, with the losers of the world relabeled as “rogues.” Bush and Cheney start the proportional, incremental shrinkage of the Cold War force, and Desert Storm buttresses the Powell Doctrine’s “overwhelming force” concept. Then Somalia beckons. . . .

• Clinton I interprets Bush’s New World Order too expansively, and plunges into humanitarian interventions where our national interests seem nil. Instead of focusing on defense relations with allies, his administration plays ambulance to the Third World, turning the doctrinal spotlight on military operations other than war. Aspin tries to set a floor on force structure in the Bottom-Up Review, but the maintenance costs associated with Cold War readiness standards create a squeeze, especially on procurement.

• Clinton II backs off from the Southern Strategy. So it is a reluctant “yes” to the Balkans but a quiet “no” to Africa. The Defense Department refocuses on the fault lines between North and South and, by playing firewall, settles down to a series of mini-containments that necklace the planet—Cold Warrior reborn as Rogue Warrior. Aspin’s force levels nearly are reaffirmed in the Quadrennial Defense Review, and the rising costs of sustaining that military squeeze both modernization and force structure.

Across all three periods, each service seeks to adapt itself to the changing security market, though largely through repackaging its product in new “expeditionary” wrappers. But through it all, each buys—in ever-smaller numbers—those platforms and systems deemed essential to a “full-service” force, meaning one simultaneously:

• Warfighting oriented (ready for two major theater wars)

• Globally engaged and military-operations-other-than-war capable

• High-tech

As the decade ends, the Pentagon budget features:

• A fairly static top line, as the deficit is cured and surpluses arrive

• Rock-solid service shares

• Continued force structure shrinkage as platform prices and support costs rise

In short, despite the hullabaloo about “the” RMA, the supposed brilliance of those “asymmetrical warriors,” and something called network-centric operations, incrementalism still rules force planning. In addition, if you ask the services what their number one priority is, the answer always is personnel and their care.

What might be the alternatives? We see three competing national security visions, each with a geostrategic focus that favors one service marginally over time.

I. It’s the Great Powers, Stupid!

Those who view the world more as a complex system of security relationships focus on:

• How the advanced countries get along

• Number of “poles” in play (uni-, bi-, or multipolar)

• Whether Russia and China really can be brought into this playpen

Geostrategists worry about the big pieces and let everything else fall in line. Sure, the G-7 runs the economic side of the house, but presidents must lead in these all-important dyad relationships, and they think Clinton played “trade president” to distraction. This is the cry of George W. Bush’s “Vulcans,” where everything old is to be renewed again—except arms control. Pointing to proliferation of missile technology that clearly bears the imprint of our old Communist foes, they call for national missile defense, promising (wink, nudge) to protect allies as well.

This camp sees the main foreign policy task of the next decade being the processing of Russia and China into the great power fold on our terms—meaning they learn to play by our rules. Once the North is in order, the South should fall in line, especially since the rogues would not have anyone of consequence to supply them in their nefarious activities. However, there is a danger in getting too explicit with Moscow and Beijing about “acceptable behavior.” While ostensibly trying to consolidate the community of advanced countries, we may end up casting Russia and China into the gap as globalization’s bad boys.

II. Mind the Gap!

Those who view the world more as an economic system focus on:

• Troublemakers (rogues) who challenge the status quo

• Regional balances of power that might disrupt economic flows

• Other regional disruptions that affect the global economy (e.g., a failing Indonesia)

These risk analysts treat every region with sensitivity for its unique vulnerabilities but calculate U.S. interests primarily along financial lines. Some countries count in the globally networked economy and others do not. Instability involving the former must be contained, but that involving the latter can be routinely ignored or treated with palliative measures.

This is the realeconomik of the second Clinton administration after Somalia. A successor Gore administration probably would take the same approach. In this vision, rogues are something for the military to take care of while the rest of the government attends to domestic and international economic affairs. Countries that disregard markets, such as Iraq and Serbia, will always represent either potential economic disruptions or something to be contained. So when it comes to missile schemes, there is more support for theater defense than national defense.

This camp sees the main foreign policy task of the next decade being the effective management of the economic and technological gaps dividing North and South. You keep the North’s economic expansion on track by making sure nothing—and no one—in the South messes it up. When situations down there get really ugly, you do what you have to, but you avoid serious involvement unless key economic fault lines are involved. This group also will agonize more about human tragedies in failing states, but they will use U.S. military forces only as catalysts to mobilize other nations’ forces.

III. Leave No Failed State Behind!

Those who view the world as a collection of “tribes” focus on:

• Rising anti-Westernism and the specter of “clashing civilizations,” with key disruptive agents being terrorists and drug traffickers

• Commodity-dependent economies withering away in globalization’s harshly competitive environment

• Societies under siege from destructive transnational forces (e.g., narcotics, AIDS, pollution, climate change)

These social activists believe that the United States needs to care far more about the world’s “backward” economies, where most of the planet’s births and violent deaths will occur. Forget your pork barrel Star Wars, and shift funds to something more useful!

It is the cry of Seattle Man, and it finds occasional resonance in the campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader. Antiglobalization types feel pain erupting all over the world from predatory free-trade practices that expose Old Economy sheep to New Economy wolves. They have seen the enemy and “they is us!”—the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. This unlikely coalition sees the adaptation of the global to the local—not vice versa—as the next decade’s main foreign policy task. The South needs help now, and if it does not get it, it will bring its pain to us—one way or another. Slowing down globalization’s march also will give much-needed breathing space to the New Economy’s “losers” in the North (e.g., low-tech labor).

Three Visions, Three Militaries

So to sum up the three competing political visions, either the United States concentrates on:

• The North’s advanced-power relationships—system-level vision

• The troubled “arc of instability” between North and South—the unruly nation-state level vision

• The South’s chronic pain—subnational-level vision

Admittedly, these are ideal representations that, while reflecting the general thrusts of various elite groups in the United States, offer few firm predictions as to how any one administration would behave once in office. Anyway, reality usually occupies the mushy middle, where ideal types are rarely to be found. The base case always is continued incrementalism. Still, it is useful to track how such visions would logically skew force structures to favor one service over another, for it is through such what-iffing that we learn to be careful—lest we get what we wish for.

System visions favor air forces. The system vision employs the longest, over-the-horizon perspective. It is concerned with maintaining the United States’ high-tech lead, and that emphasis naturally favors the Air Force as the Future Force. This approach merges air, space, and cyberspace into a seamless whole, with the operational paradigm being that of system administrator—less warfighting Leviathan and more air traffic controller. Interventions increasingly are virtualized: we enable or manipulate the combat expectations of others (both allies and foes), but go out of our way to avoid real in-theater presence. This is the Kosovo air campaign taken to its logical extreme, with force structure planning emphasizing effects-based weapons, stand-off delivery, and networking capabilities.

In this vision, the United States seeks a future of niched advanced-country militaries that play “spokes” to our “hub” (i.e., we worry about major security disruptions, and they take the lead on local ones). The information umbrella replaces the nuclear one, and a Northern Hemispheric Security Zone finally realizes the Vancouver-to-Vladivostok dream of the Baker-Shevardnadze era. Once joined in interlocking fashion, the North’s countries (United States, other NATO, Japan, Russia, and eventually China and maybe even India) effectively criminalize warfare in the South, policing all such outbreaks as simply “illegal” in the globalized economy. This is the mergers and acquisition approach to international security—we effectively buy out our competition over time.

Nation-state visions favor naval forces. The nation-state vision addresses the actual and potential messes created by an Iraq or other unruly state at the North-South boundary, along which much of the advanced world’s lines of communication lie. It is concerned with maintaining the United States’ capacity to project power rapidly around the world, possibly in a unilateral fashion. That emphasis naturally favors the Navy and Marine Corps as the Response Force. This approach blends responses to rogue states and their putative antiaccess/asymmetrical strategies into a littoral strategy, with the operational paradigm being that of the SWAT team. Coalitions serve as window-dressing during conflicts, but later as an important source of stay-behind, on-the-ground, peace enforcers. Interventions are increasingly routinized and drawn out into lengthy, sequential containment operations.

This is the Iraqi containment process taken to its logical extreme, with force structure planning emphasizing platform survivability, the capacity for loitering and constant surveillance, and the day-to-day application of discrete force at will—thus to contain any and all challengers to the North’s growing Zone of Peace. Meanwhile, the South’s Zone of Conflict is largely tolerated because it lies outside the pale of globalization’s New Economy. In the lexicon of Thomas Friedman, the United States concentrates on making sure the “Lexus” world keeps functioning smoothly, applying military power in those few areas of the “Olive Tree” world where local instability might cross the gap.2 This is the outsourcing approach to international security—we do what we do best (high-end, rapid power projection) and then subcontract follow-on operations to local firms.

Subnational visions favor ground forces. The subnational vision has the shortest and most real-time perspective of never-ending messes that lie outside the community of advanced countries. It is concerned almost exclusively with keeping the violence “over there,” while adopting the emergency room credo of “treat ‘em and street ‘em.” There is no sense of eventual rehabilitation, just a desire to stay on top of the flow by keeping sufficient numbers of boots on the ground, an emphasis that naturally favors the Army and National Guard as the Constabulary Forces. This approach merges military operations other than war, cooperation with nongovernmental organizations and private voluntary organizations, and U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping coalitions into one big sloppy whole. All interventions are quagmires on some level, because we always are treating chronic cases. This is the Haiti humanitarian operation taken to its logical extreme, with force improvements emphasizing logistics, infrastructure restoration capacity, and nonlethal technologies.

In this vision, the United States seeks to prevent a future known as The Coming Chaos, where the South’s bad neighborhoods simply swell beyond capacity and eventually pour into the North’s great gated community.3 Some inevitabilities along this path are:

• The development of regional police forces leading to an eventual global one, probably sponsored by the advanced nations cooperating in the United Nations

• The increasing use of mercenaries or contract military personnel in peacekeeping operations

• The evolution of U.S. ground forces toward greater reliance on reserves

This is the privatization or divestiture approach to international security: we effectively spin off the military-operations-other-than-war portfolio from the Defense Department, with the Army’s constabulary forces as catalysts for multinational interventions that limit our involvement.

What Really Matters to Key Constituents

How does the United States choose among these alternatives, if it decides to choose at all? We have talked mostly about the services, because they must build and manage the forces, but there are many other players: the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), unified commanders, the defense industry, Congress, and the American public. Practically none of these voices, however, is really engaged in the outside (i.e., economic) world or thinks in grand strategic terms. They are fundamentally domestic or inwardly looking constituents.

Across the Clinton years, OSD has been scared away from a focused strategic outlook. Thus, it has let all strategies bloom in a crowded seedbed, with none emerging to full stature. In addition, OSD suffers from an internal clash between the acquisition types, who—in cahoots with defense industry—want all the new technologies, and the bean counters, who struggle with the services to balance programs under the flattened top line. In all, OSD is torn among all three visions.

The unified commanders have been searching for a post-Cold War role. Recently they have begun presenting engagement in a diplomatic vein to justify maintenance of last year’s forces. The problem, however, is that they do not know whether to engage more with new states or with old friends. Distant from Washington, they cling to the past—asking to keep the forces they used to have. They are torn between the national and subnational visions, not quite knowing which gives them a better play in the game.

For defense industries, survival is most important. Yet they fight for a limited pot. They still are the source of innovation in technology, so they favor the system vision.

The Hill thinks about people, bases, and the defense industry—all domestic concerns. As deliberative bodies of elected representatives, they do not have “strategic vision.” They repeatedly make clear that “perfect readiness is never having to use the forces overseas.” They are constrained between the administration’s budget submission and their own budget committees. If they had a choice, they would buy the system vision, for it means high technology and no messy international involvements. The marginal upward changes they make to budgets are mostly in this direction, when they are not otherwise concerned with military pay and benefits.

The public, torn between pride in technology and humanitarian concerns about the South, is relatively indifferent to the state-level, mind-the-gap vision.

What This Suggests for Naval Force Structure Planning

The defense community concerned with these debates is a very narrow group, not well connected to the public—and they are split in all three directions. There is a great opportunity for leadership to clarify direction, but at the same time, there is no clear pressure from the external environment as to what the choice might be.

We know there are constraints that, until broken, mean all strategies cannot be serviced. These constraints include:

• The top-line defense budget—the prospective (and dubious) federal surpluses all have been allocated by the candidates, with very little additional for defense

• The legacy forces and the personnel who operate them—one of the United States’ great strengths, but a force that constrains innovation and change

• Presence commitments abroad—for the time being, the United States will station nearly 100,000 military personnel in both Europe and East Asia, with maybe 25,000 containing Iraq

• Service shares—in the absence of clear strategic choice, they remain the same

As noted, the domestic drivers currently are stronger than the international ones. Oddly enough, the domestic constituents do not line up strongly on the vision favoring naval forces, even though they enjoy a slight advantage in budget shares.

Naval forces, then, will end up hedging against several strategies—within the cited constraints. They cannot afford to operate the forces they have right now, much less to recapitalize them at the pace and to the extent they want. They may well have to give up a little on both input (less of the most advanced technology) and output (more shrinkage in force structure), but this still leaves them in a great position to support the mind-the-gap vision as the United States’ premier Response Force.

1. Thomas P. M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney, "It's Going to Be a Bumpy Ride," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1993, pp. 23-26. back to article
2. See Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999). back to article
3. Read anything by Robert Kaplan and you will get the general picture. See The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Random House, 2000); or his The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy(New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

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The blue Space Stone fixed the map.

The yellow Mind Stone fixed the will.

Now comes the red Reality Stone.

This is the one where Thanos gets to bend the universe to his desires, turn guns into bubbles, make planets do weird shit, generally remind everyone why no sane civilization should hand ultimate power to an angry giant with a taste for gaudy jewelry.

Trump’s version is more familiar—on more levels than I care to admit. He looks at certain countries, sees “the status quo,” and he no likes.

• Iran: perpetually nearing the nuclear threshold, permanently sponsoring the regional militia franchise.

• Cuba: an antique authoritarian regime that has somehow makes “still existing” seem like a strategic achievement.

• Venezuela: a petro-state that converted the world’s largest proven oil reserves into an economic evacuation drill.

And everybody says: Well, what can you do?

That is what the Reality Stone has to break: not regimes so much as that assumption—one we long harbored about Eastern Europe during the Cold War, only to be proven wrong one afternoon in 1989.

Now we encounter the stubborn assumption that failed authoritarian systems are permanent features of the landscape. That they get to impoverish their own citizens, export instability, cultivate foreign patrons, build coercive networks, periodically create crises where we must intervene.

The Reality Stone says: no more.

Not magical regime change thinking, no we will be greeted as liberators by Thursday, no more Green Zones.

We’re talking reality-based change. The kind that alters incentives, destroys the old model’s ability to reproduce itself, gives the underlying society a better deal than permanent coercion.

I can imagine Trump proclaiming: We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Iran: The central distortion

Iran is the big one, not because it is the most powerful state in the Middle East but because the Islamic Republic has perfected a particular model of regional disruption: keep the center insulated, distribute the violence outward, maintain nuclear ambiguity, make everybody else pay a premium for stability.

It is a franchise operation Ray Kroc would admire: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, armed groups in Syria, Houthis in Yemen. Missiles and drone transfers, maritime harassment, threats to Israel, the occasional punch to the face of Gulf states. The goal is not regional war—just making normal regional life expensive enough that everybody eventually seeks bargains on Tehran’s preferred terms.

That is Iran’s reality. Trump’s Reality Stone must change it.

The immediate nuclear problem cannot be solved by declaring facilities “obliterated,” because knowledge is not a building. Centrifuge expertise does not vanish when a bunker is buried. Nor can it be solved by returning to a deal that treats centrifuge counts as the whole problem while ignoring the everything else.

Trump’s real win would be a deal—or a post-conflict settlement—that imposes three inescapable realities.

• Iran’s nuclear program must be limited, verifiable, and continuously inspectable. Inspectors on the ground, visibility into enrichment, credible accounting for uranium stocks, and clear consequences for cheating.

• Iran’s ability to project violence through proxies must be reduced, exposed, made prohibitively expensive. No more cheap deniable attacks that create expensive American and Israeli responses while the regime itself pretends to be an innocent bystander.

• Finally, Iran needs a real off-ramp.

That may sound like rewarding bad behavior, but countries do not stop doing bad things until a different future becomes materially possible.

Iran has a huge, educated population. It has energy, geography, historical depth, a large domestic market, industrial capability, a crossroads location. Iran’s ruling system has accomplished nothing with these assets. Thus, the objective is to make the regime—or whatever comes after it—choose between integration and decay.

No nuclear weapon, no regional proxy empire.

In exchange: phased sanctions relief, market access, infrastructure investment, regional trade, energy development, a chance for Iran to become a serious country again.

That is the only end state that does not require America to patrol the Persian Gulf forever while everyone waits for the next crisis.

Cuba: The museum exhibit with a security service

Cuba is Iran’s opposite in scale but its cousin in political logic. The regime has lasted so long that people mistake longevity for competence.

Cuba’s real strategic significance is not its military power but its role as a political-security node—a forever portal useful to larger outside powers seeking a foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

Cuba also functions as a kind of ideological consulting firm for badly governed states.

Need help managing dissent? Havana knows people.

Need a security service that can keep the political system intact? Havana has a slide deck.

Need a foreign-policy identity built around resisting America? Cuba wrote that manual.

For years, Venezuela supplied much of the fuel for that outsized role. In return, Cuba supplied political and security assistance. That relationship made both regimes more survivable.

Trump’s “great” Reality Stone outcome here is not a flag-over-the-capitol fantasy—much as I’d love to see Cuba as the 51st state. It is a transition that breaks the island’s political monopoly while avoiding the perennial post-authoritarian disaster: the old security network that survives under new branding, politically connected insiders looting, emigré capital arrives to buy up everything else, ordinary citizens feel left out and betrayed, all generating nostalgia for order and seeding the next strongman.

A Cuban transition has to be Cuban-led—not a Super-Marco party jamboree.

Political prisoners released, political parties allowed, media opened, economic activity freed from party control, property claims systematically managed, security institutions dismantled and replaced. .

Then comes the real American contribution: treating Cuba as a neighbor in need of rapid integration.

And, yes, this is where I start the 51st state chant in the hallway.

The United States has a tremendous advantage here: proximity, family links, culture, markets, capital, an enormous Cuban diaspora that can be an engine of reconstruction if it is not allowed to become an engine of revenge.

The point is not to make Cuba American—at least not right away. The point is to make Cuba functional.

Venezuela: The oil-rich warning label

Venezuela is what happens when a government discovers that ideology, corruption, oil wealth, criminal networks, and authoritarian survival can be blended into one toxic national cocktail.

Venezuela should be one of Latin America’s great economic powers. Instead, its authoritarian crisis drove mass migration across the hemisphere, empowered illicit networks, distorted regional politics, created a ready-made opening for Cuba, Russia, China, and Iran to buy influence.

The current transition offers a useful illustration of the Reality Stone’s limits. Removing an autocrat is an event. Building a functioning country is a process.

The Venezuela file needs several things to go right at once: a credible electoral path, security guarantees that prevent a violent elite backlash, sanctions relief tied to specific benchmarks, transparency in oil revenue, restoration of public services, international financing, anti-corruption capacity, in sum a plausible reason for millions of Venezuelans abroad to imagine returning home.

That last part matters.

If Venezuela becomes a place where people can work, invest, educate their children, and expect basic services to function, the pressure radiating across the hemisphere starts to ease. Colombia benefits. Brazil benefits. The Caribbean benefits. The United States benefits.

And Cuba loses a patron. Iran loses a partner. Russia and China lose one more distressed state available for low-cost geopolitical shopping.

That is my idea of successful systems administration.

Trump’s reality test

The Reality Stone has a harsh rule: you do not get credit for a changed headline; you get credit when you change incentives.

Iran is not “solved” because a president announces victory after a bombing campaign. Cuba is not “solved” because some aging autocrat disappears from a balcony. Venezuela is not “solved” because Maduro leaves the stage.

This is why Trump, oddly enough, may be better positioned than the conventional foreign-policy caste to attempt the fixes.

The Donald cares not for the ritual language of diplomacy. He likes leverage, and visible outcomes. But he also carries the standard Trump risk: confusing the moment of coercion with the achievement of strategy.

Pressure is not transformation.

Strikes are not political order.

Regime collapse is not transition planning.

The United States has learned each of those lessons repeatedly, at enormous cost. I am so tired of such “winning.”

The correct approach is pressure plus possibility: make the old system impossible to sustain, make the better system possible to choose. We’re working Cuba right now like crazy on the former—not so much on the latter (although one can hope those messages are being suitably transmitted sotto voce by Marco).

The Space Stone stops the map from being burned.

The Mind Stone makes everyone believe arson fails.

The Reality Stone takes long-standing exceptions and tells them the exception is over.

The world’s broken systems survive on the belief that nothing better can happen. Change the belief and the system finally faces reality.

Next up: the Power Stone.

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The blue Space Stone fixes the map.

The yellow Mind Stone fixes what everybody thinks about that map.

Not in the Professor X sense, sadly. Trump does not get to put his hands to the sides of his head and make Xi Jinping decide that amphibious invasions are spiritually unfulfilling, make Vladimir Putin apply for a nice job in commercial real estate, or persuade Brussels that three percent of GDP on defense is basically a Pilates membership.

No, the Mind Stone governs the decisive stuff: perception, confidence, fear, will, calculation, credibility. In other words, it governs deterrence and alliances and those are not separate things.

A military alliance is just hardware, treaties, plans, stockpiles, uniforms. It only becomes a strategic fact when it actually responds to history.

The United States can have aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, global logistics, nuclear weapons, silicon, capital markets, the dollar. But if adversaries think Washington is distracted, allies think Washington is leaving, swing states think Beijing represents the better long-term bet … well, all of that power gets discounted to near zero.

The Mind Stone is how Trump prevents that discounting.

I know, awkward after Trump himself has spent a decade making the world question whether the United States can hold a thought for more than one news cycle. He threatens allies, praises strongmen, tossed around tariffs, treated diplomacy like its professional wrestling.

But stay with me for a minute here: Trump’s central diagnosis of the alliance system is not wrong. The United States has subsidized an astonishing amount of strategic passivity.

In The Pentagon’s New Map, I called it America’s “transaction strategy”: allies get prosperity, social spending, moral superiority, highly regulated cheese, and an international environment safe enough to argue about whether American nuclear weapons make you feel emotionally seen. In return, those allies buy up our sovereign debt, allowing us to keep living large while maintaining our military Leviathan/SysAdmin combo.

It was a good deal all around but it could not last forever and shouldn’t have. We raised up a world of peacefully coexisting superpowers and now it’s time for everybody else to pay their own bills. Ours arrived with the 2008 global financial crisis and we’ve been struggling ever since.

The 2026 US defense strategy puts the matter with typical Trump-era subtlety: homeland defense comes first, deterring China comes second, burden-sharing comes third, rebuilding the industrial base comes fourth. Allies must carry far more of the collective burden, including the new five-percent-of-GDP benchmark.

That is tough love alright, but needed.

The issue is whether Trump employs it as a hammer that smashes alliances, or as a lever that finally makes them work.

I know, just saying that out loud makes me worry.

The threat in the enemy’s head

What you own doesn’t deter. Deterrence is what the other guy believes you will do with what you own.

Russia did not invade Ukraine because NATO lacked tanks. Russia invaded because Putin believed the West lacked the will to impose costs commensurate with the crime. He was wrong about some of that but he was not crazy to test it.

China’s Taiwan calculation works similarly. Beijing does not need to believe it can defeat the United States in some abstract, scoreboard sense. It needs to believe it can produce a fast enough fait accompli, severe enough economic shock, and enough allied paralysis that Washington abides.

Iran’s network of proxies is another cognitive wager: that every incremental act of coercion will be treated by the US as annoying but too expensive to counter with military escalation.

In all three cases, the adversary’s real weapon is betting on Western hesitation.

In my fan-fic world, the Mind Stone destroys that expectation by making it clear that aggression will fail to achieve its political objective—no matter whatever tactical military gains ensue.

Russia can seize land and still lose Ukraine. China can fire missiles and still fail to control Taiwan. Iran can activate proxies and still find itself less secure, less prosperous, and more isolated afterward.

That is the psychology Trump needs to create and sustain.

Here we spot his natural advantage: Trump is not Mr. Ambiguous, but he is very good at making people wonder whether he might do something insanely disruptive and disproportionate—you know, the Nixon Madman Theory.

It is a risky tool. Strategic uncertainty can scare allies but it can also freak out adversaries. You want to convey uncertainty about your tactics—not commitments. Everybody should know what America will defend—just not how crazy our response will be if they test us. That is the usable version of Trump’s unpredictability.

Allies are not dependents

The essential transformation is psychological before it is budgetary. America’s allies need to stop thinking of Washington as an emergency contact who will always pick up after the first ring. They need to think of themselves as co-owners of the security order.

Europe, after Ukraine, cannot return to its old fantasy that history has been permanently outsourced to the Pentagon. It is a rich union that can totally defend itself, so the the question is not capability but will.

Here’s how we change minds:

• America says: spend more, build more, train more, plan more, host more, stock more, and take the first responsibility for the security of your region.

• Then America says: if you do all that, you get more—not less—access to American technology, intelligence, industrial cooperation, financing, favorable trade treatment, and the ultimate strategic backstop.

That will be decried as “extortion” when it’s really a reasonable membership model—the difference between free-riding and equity participation.

Japan, the Philippines, Australia, South Korea, Europe—all must aspire to become regional security managers (aka, the Nixon Doctrine). That is what a functioning alliance network looks like.

Swing states are watching

But the Mind Stone cannot stop at treaty allies. The whole middle is watching.

India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey, big African powers, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans—all are trying to determine who will write the next operating system.

Most do not want to choose between China and the US, with good reason. That bullshit strikes them as belonging to our collective Cold War past. Choice is expensive. Hedging is the foreign-policy equivalent of buying index funds.

These players want Chinese trade, American technology, Gulf capital, European regulatory access, Russian weapons (when discounted), and the freedom to call themselves nonaligned as needed.

I get it. I’d want all the same.

Our challenge here is not to force a grand civilizational loyalty oath but to make our American network the more attractive long-term platform.

China offers infrastructure but also baked-in surveillance. Russia offers security assistance if your goals center on becoming a logistics hub for mercenaries and mineral smuggling. Iran offers drones and “resistance” ideology and the invitation to be bombed by Israel.

America and its allies need to offer something better: access to capital, high-end technology, energy, secure supply chains, education, investment, market connectivity, defense cooperation, sovereignty where it matters.

That is my opt-in empire.

Our offer is not do what Washington says or else. It’s join the network that makes your country richer, safer, more connected, harder to coerce.

The problem, admittedly with Trump, is that the US cannot sell that product if everyone assumes the offering may disappear after the next presidential post.

Conversely, public opinion is not alliance policy. Governments can distrust China while taking Chinese loans. Populations can dislike America while desperately wanting American visas, investment, security ties, cloud infrastructure, access to its consumer market.

Point being. if America looks erratic, punitive, transactional in the narrowest sense, and indifferent to the futures of countries outside its formal alliances, then China gets to sell itself as the dependable-if-unlovable alternative.

That would be a grotesquely self-destructive strategic own-goal-ism.

Trump’s psychological conversion

This is this series’ counterfactual experiencing profound strain;

• A successful Trump cannot simply intimidate allies, he has to graduate them.

• He cannot simply tell swing states to pick a side, he has to make the American side worth picking.

• He cannot simply threaten adversaries with military force, he has to convince them that force produces the opposite of its intended political result.

That is Mind Stone work—somewhere north of a Jedi mind trick but south of a full-on Vulcan mind meld.

[And, yeah, I know I’m mixing my fan-fic universes here. So sue me!]

The message to allies: America remains in, but no longer carries you.

The message to adversaries: test us if you must, but you will not get the prize.

The message to the global middle: the open world still has room for your sovereignty, your growth, your ambition.

The message to Americans: we are building a system in which fewer people get to make their failures America’s emergency.

Trump’s deepest political intuition is that Americans hate being played. On that call, he is absolutely correct.

The strategic task is to ensure that Americans’ resentment becomes a demand for a better system, not an excuse to abandon the system that made America rich, secure, and central in the first place.

Mind over matter, as it were.

The Space Stone makes the map harder to burn.

The Mind Stone makes everyone believe arson will fail.

Alliances do not run on trust. They run on shared interests backed by enough will that everyone trusts those interests can and will survive a crisis.

Next up: the Reality Stone.

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Thanos starts with Space, which makes sense. You cannot reorganize the universe until you control the map, says the map guy.

Trump’s version is less blue, less genocidal, more orange, and very much on brand: Stop subsidizing everybody else’s problems. Make the freeloaders pay. End the stupid wars. Get a “winning” deal. Build a wall somewhere—anywhere! Preferably a big, beautiful one with somebody else picking up the tab.

But the underlying strategic desire is perfectly intelligible. America wants fewer liabilities—over there.

The Eastern Hemisphere presents a truly impressive pile of IOUs: Europe’s habitual dependence, the Middle East’s never-ending feuds, China’s grandiose historical grievance (enough with the Century of Humiliation already!), Russia’s perennial urge to redraw a map it keeps losing, and an assortment of smaller actors who have discovered that a few drones and a Telegram channel is enough to mount a troublesome foreign policy.

The Western Hemisphere, by comparison, looks like the sensible option. Two oceans, friendly neighbors (well, mostly), food, energy, capital, technology, strategic depth (in terms of climate change), and that huge internal market—nom, nom. Plus, it’s a hemisphere that could, with the proper amount of American attention, become a far more coherent economic and security space (Marco’s listening now) than it has been after the US spent a century treating Latin America as backyard, drug vector, source of cheap labor.

So: why the hell not just fold the tent and declare a Trumpian “win”?

Let Europe discover the joys of adult supervision. Let the Middle East work out who stole whose sacred history first. Let Asia conduct its power transition in whatever tense, deeply armed, emotionally repressed, indecipherable manner it must. America can patrol the home neighborhood, trade selectively, drill enthusiastically, finally stop being the global ER.

You have to admit: that’s all very Thanos. It’s also a terrible grand strategy.

The Eastern Hemisphere does not disappear merely because America stops enjoying it. It keeps manufacturing the things that drive American presidents insane: wars, refugees, energy shocks, disrupted trade, supply-chain seizures, financial panic, terrorist sanctuaries, nuclear crises, allies who rediscover their enthusiasm for Washington precisely when something starts exploding nearby (Send in the Marines!).

As Thanos as it sounds, the globe is not divided into a “stuff we care about” half and a “stuff we can ignore” half. It is one connected operating system. When major nodes fail, the error messages show up everywhere. That’s modern globalization and there’s no going back.

So the useful Trumpian thought experiment is not: How does America abandon the world? It is: How does America make enough of the world less combustible that it can stop being the default Leviathan/SysAdmin Force for every conflict that somebody else allowed to metastasize?

That begins with the Space Stone, because the map is where the bill arrives.

Here is the enduring American complaint, stripped of all the MAGA bumper stickers and cable-news pyrotechnics:

• Everybody loves the global security architecture until somebody has to pay for the roof.

• Europe underinvests in defense for decades, then Russia starts getting grabby again—as it has throughout history.

• Asian allies welcome US presence, then spend years wondering if “strategic ambiguity” means Washington is clever or simply allergic to finishing sentences.

• Gulf states buy American weapons, complain about American lectures, hedge with China, talk to Iran, and then suddenly remember the importance of the US security guarantee whenever somebody attacks a refinery.

• Then the shooting starts, and America receives the invoice.

Uncomfortably accurate, is it not?

The United States has made security too easy to consume. We built the world’s largest and most durable alliance network, then watched many participants confuse mutual defense with a streaming service: unlimited access, no commercials, somebody else pays! NATO as Netflix with everybody sharing account passwords.

Trump’s genuinely useful instinct is that allies need to become less like clients and more like equity partners. In this world and going forward, that actually is fair and reasonable. But that only works if America does not take its toys and leave the room, which Trumpos threatens daily.

Understand: our goal here is not American absence. Snap! It is a map that does not keep generating rescue missions.

Ukraine: Europe gets Europe

Ukraine is the first repair job because Russia broke the European map in the most nineteenth-century manner imaginable: tanks, artillery, territorial claims, historical grievance, a leader who apparently believes imperial nostalgia is a renewable energy source.

Moscow’s real objective has never been merely acquiring land. Land is merely the receipt. The real prize is control over Ukraine’s future. Russia wants a Ukraine that cannot choose its own alliances, cannot build its own economy, cannot join Europe, cannot become militarily capable, and cannot cease being psychologically available for reabsorption into a Russian sphere of influence. We’re talking a creepy, stalking, violent ex menacing his former lover, meaning there is no limit to the evil on hand.

That is the thing Trump has to defeat if he wants to claim a real win: not every Russian soldier walking backward across every contested line. That would be nice but it’s also not how wars between nuclear-armed sides generally end.

The test is simpler: Does Ukraine survive as a sovereign country with a military, economy, access to the outside world, westward path? Or does it become an exhausted, disarmed, nominally independent buffer state whose principal export is future tragedy?

As we have all learned with Putin, the latter is not peace. It is Russia’s down payment on the next war to be unfrozen when the hunger returns.

A Trump settlement that works therefore has to leave Ukraine armed, connected, and increasingly European. Armed means Ukraine can make renewed invasion expensive. Connected means rail, ports, power grids, supply chains, investment, insurance, markets, reconstruction, diaspora capital, defense-industrial partnerships. Increasingly European means Europe cannot continue treating Ukraine as a moral cause administered by American military logistics.

The real goal is a country that becomes richer, more capable, and harder to intimidate with every passing year.

Europe gets Europe; that is the Trumpos transaction.

Washington helps lock in the settlement, supplies strategic depth, keeps the nuclear backstop credible. Europe does the bulk of the long-term work: air defense, ammunition, logistics, reconstruction, training, industrial investment, economic integration, the drearily necessary business of becoming self-capable enough to deter Russia on its own.

This is the best version of Trump’s burden-sharing demand. Not good luck, Surrender Monkeys! More like: Congratulations. You finally have a continent worth defending. Now defend it.

That is less abandonment than graduation. It’s been my mantra for decades now: If you want to win the peace, you gotta leave the place more connected than you found it.

The real end state is not a ceasefire line. It is a Ukraine so deeply connected to Europe’s security and economic systems that attempting to reconquer it becomes, even by Russian standards, a catastrophically dumb investment.

Ask Poland or the Baltics: they get it.

That is how Trumpos fixes the map.

Taiwan: Do not let the map break

Ukraine is what happens after deterrence fails. Taiwan is where deterrence has to succeed before anybody starts firing.

We must not compare them too casually. Ukraine is a huge land war. Taiwan sits at the maritime intersection of China’s ambitions, Japan’s strategic anxieties, America’s alliance credibility, the world’s semiconductor supply, and the largest naval power transition since … forever.

Taiwan is a systems issue, not merely some trip-wire to something worse.

If Beijing can coerce Taiwan into submission, it proves that American security commitments are negotiable under pressure. It changes Japanese calculations, spooks the Philippines, encourages every Asian state to hedge harder, disrupts technology supply chains.

That is why the Trumpian objective cannot be “talk tough about China.” Beijing has grown beyond that.

The objective is to make every available coercive option look like a strategic own-goal.

Blockade Taiwan? Then the blockade must fail to isolate the island politically, financially, digitally, physically.

Launch cyber campaign? Then Taiwan’s government, electricity, communications, ports, banking system, basic social order must keep functioning.

Seize offshore island? (I know, it’s so 1950s) That’s gotta cost—big time.

Invade? Then the operation must look so slow, costly, uncertain, and regionally explosive that even an increasingly nationalist Chinese leadership concludes that history can wait.

Deterrence is never merely the threat to fight. It is the demonstrated inability of the adversary to win on acceptable terms. That is a higher bar, not easily grasped. Real deterrence requires Taiwan become far harder to coerce—not just better armed in the familiar way, but more resilient as a polity. Decentralized command.

Japan’s geography matters. The Philippines’ access matters. Australia’s strategic depth matters. South Korea’s industrial and military capacity matters, even as North Korea holds much of Seoul’s attention hostage.

But each ally needs a job, otherwise the alliance remains dinner theater.

Trump could be uniquely effective here. Not: Pay more or we’re gone. Instead: You want the American umbrella? Fine. Bring the pole, the fabric, sandbags, bodies capable of holding it up when the balloon goes up.

The status quo in the Taiwan Strait is not elegant.sucks, but beats the alternatives. The whole point is to make it stay that way.

The world runs on routes

Now we step back to take in the whole picture.

Ukraine needs access to the Black Sea. Countries survive on exports, imports, investment, transport, infrastructure, a future their young people find more attractive than emigration.

Taiwan matters because it is plugged into a global network of technology, shipping, data, capital, alliance geography.

The Red Sea counts because a bunch of low-cost drones fired by non-state actors can force vast rerouting costs onto global shipping.

The Gulf ranks because energy markets still matter.

Undersea cables make the list, as do ports, data centers, pipelines.

Our map is a network diagram with territorial consequences. That is the part that the MAGA types never get. They think America can move from world cop to hemispheric Roomba simply by choosing not to engage.

You may be the devil or you may be the Lord but you’re gonna have to pay somebody.

If the Red Sea becomes a militia toll booth, American consumers pay.

If Taiwan becomes a Chinese dependency, American technology companies pay.

If Russia gets to dictate Europe’s security architecture, American alliances pay.

Eventually, American voters pay. The world sends the invoice. It always does.

What Trumpos needs to win

The Space Stone is not about making America omnipresent. That is the old, exhausted model. It is about making aggression too expensive and regional security more locally owned.

• Europe gets a sovereign Ukraine and takes responsibility for Europe.

• Indo-Pacific allies get continued American strategic commitment and become real contributors to deterrence.

• Commercial powers get open sea lanes and accept their participation in safeguarding them.

• Russia, China, Iran, other assorted entrepreneurs of disorder get the same message: proximity is not permission; coercion does not scale into control; wrecking the system will cost you more than using it.

That is the baseline ruleset Trump needs if he truly wants to reduce America’s liabilities: not a map dominated by the United States but one resistant to arson.

The Space Stone does not earn Trump the right to leave the world. It earns him a world that needs less rescuing.

Fix the map, you reduce the bill. Fail to fix it and the bill always comes due.

Because lines on maps survive only when enough people believe that crossing them will end badly.

Next up: the Mind Stone.

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This is the first in an end-of-summer series. I’ll be largely offline during the last week of August, so consider this a modest exercise in posting ahead—and an immodest exercise in geopolitical fan fic.

After all, a cluster of posts needs a frame. AI got one. I ran that series: China, models, chips, data, infrastructure, sovereignty, the whole lovely digital-colonization bundle. This one is lighter in packaging, if not in subject matter.

The initial spark was an AI-generated image of Donald Trump as Thanos. You have seen the genre: Trump in gold armor, Trump as Rambo, Trump as Pope, Trump as Jedi knight, Trump as the business end of whatever collective hallucination the feed requires that day.

But this particular image stuck. Because Trump as Thanos is not merely visual absurdity. It is a foreign-policy metaphor with surprising structural integrity.

Thanos, for the fortunate reader who has spent the last decade reading books instead of watching Marvel movies, is the purple, superpowered villain who concludes that the universe is overpopulated, resource-constrained, and heading for catastrophe. Sounds like somebody we know? His solution is not zoning reform, technological innovation, more trade, better governance, or even some decent SysAdmin work.

Nope.

Thanos collects six Infinity Stones—the ultimate six-pack Hollywood construct known as the “MacGuffin,” puts them in a very expensive glove, and snaps half of all life out of existence.

Problem solved.

Marvel’s six Stones—Space, Mind, Reality, Power, Time, and Soul—each confer control over a fundamental dimension of existence. Put them together and their bearer enjoys near-omnipotence. That, naturally, is where the real-world analogy begins to get dangerous, entertaining, and frankly a bit too plausible.

Trump’s dream geopolitical outcome has never been traditional American primacy. He does not want Washington administering the whole global system, managing every alliance grievance, funding every European security shortfall, conducting every Middle Eastern family therapy session, and then getting a lecture from Brussels about the carbon footprint of the aircraft carrier that saved the day.

Trump wants the bills to shrink. He wants the liabilities to go away. He wants the responsibility to be shared—or, better yet, transferred to whatever “losers” he can line up. He wants America to stop being the planetary adult in the room, because he understandably suspects that everyone else has become remarkably comfortable behaving like children.

In its rawest form, that is a Thanos proposition, translated to the Trumpos universe.

Not that Trump wants people to literally disappear (okay, some people), but rather, he wants a large portion of America’s global obligations to vanish from the balance sheet. The Eastern Hemisphere, with its old wars, ancient hatreds, collapsing states, overarmed revisionists, dependency-minded allies, and endless demand for American attention, begins to look like one giant red-ink column.

The Western Hemisphere, by contrast, looks like the Trumpian control panel: North America’s energy, food, capital, technology, geography, and, potentially, an integrated democratic neighborhood from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego—all new stars on the Trumpian flag.

There is a certain cold logic to this, as I have noted here repeatedly. The United States is blessed with two oceans, friendly neighbors, continental resources, a huge internal market, technological leadership, and a financial system the rest of the world still uses even while complaining about it. No other great power begins with that hand.

So why not fold the tent? Why not let Europe rediscover the dangerous pleasures of continental self-reliance, let the Middle East sort out its own thousand-year group project, let Asia work through its own power transition, and let America concentrate on fortress hemisphere plus selective commerce?

That is the Thanos temptation.

To be clear, it is a terrible grand strategy if it simply means abandonment. The United States cannot snap the Eastern Hemisphere out of existence. It cannot disengage from China while remaining dependent on Asian manufacturing. It cannot ignore Europe while its economic and technological capacity remains essential to any democratic coalition. It cannot abandon the Middle East when its disorder affects energy markets, migration, terrorism, shipping, Israel’s security, the basic operating conditions of global trade.

The world is too connected. Geography still matters; it just no longer constitutes the swing vote.

Here is where the thought experiment becomes useful instead of merely lazy.

What if Trump could get the outcome he actually seeks—not an Eastern Hemisphere that disappears, but an Eastern Hemisphere that stops generating open-ended liabilities for the United States?

What if he could detach America from its role as first responder to every avoidable crisis because the major zones of instability had been stabilized, the major allies had become adults, and the major revisionists had concluded that coercion is a losing business model?

That would not be withdrawal. It would be successful systems maintenance.

And, yes, it would require the Six Stones. Not six summits ending in a signed document that somebody ignores before dessert, but six structural fixes of the sort I daydream about.

The Space Stone is first because global order starts with the map. Trump would need to settle Ukraine while making Europe, at long last, carry the preponderance of responsibility for its own neighborhood. At the same time, he would need to deter China from snatching Taiwan. Add the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and the world’s critical sea lanes, and the assignment becomes simple: preserve access, stop conquest from becoming a viable strategy, and solidify the map again.

The Mind Stone comes next, because deterrence is always partly a psychological contest. Trump’s great contradiction lies here. He has spent years unnerving allies. But a successful Trump might convert allied anxiety into allied adulthood. Our closest military partners step up and the vast global middle decides that the American network remains the better long-term bet, restoring the habit of believing that the free world can actually deliver.

The Reality Stone deals with places where everybody has grown accustomed to calling dysfunction “the status quo.” Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela fit this description nicely, if unhappily. Iran is the big one, Cuba is the antique version, Venezuela is the collapsing petro-state package. The goal is not magical regime change but breaking the assumption that these systems are permanent, normal, and allowed to export their pathologies indefinitely.

The Power Stone is the least glamorous but most important. It is factories, shipyards, munitions, air defense, logistics, energy, chips, critical minerals, finance, cloud capacity, secure data networks, and allies that produce security rather than merely consume it. For all the speeches about American decline, the United States and its allied network still possess extraordinary advantages. The Power Stone asks whether Trump can make “America First” mean American and allied industrial strength—not just tariffs as ceremonial aggression.

The Time Stone asks the question strategic thinkers should ask more often: whose clock is running? China may feel that its window on Taiwan is narrowing. Russia needs the West to tire before its own manpower gives out. Iran has long relied on delay as a strategic weapon. Trump’s best case is to reverse the clocks. Freeze conflicts where delay can help the good guys. Settle Ukraine, harden Taiwan, force Iran to knuckle under, build hemispheric stability.

Finally comes the Soul Stone, which is the tough one. It asks what this whole thing is for. The old liberal international order lost much of its public legitimacy because it began to sound like a demand for endless sacrifice in exchange for PowerPoint decks about rules. Ordinary citizens saw porous borders, deindustrialized communities, wars without victory, elite impunity, and then heard that the system was functioning beautifully. Naturally, they grew skeptical.

Trump’s potential contribution—again, in the best possible version of this thought experiment—is to reconnect national sovereignty with international order. That is not a return to isolation. It is an opt-in order: countries join because integration delivers more prosperity, security, mobility, and autonomy than hanging around with Beijing’s data collectors, Moscow’s wrecking crew, or Tehran’s militia franchise.

So that is the series.

Not “Trump becomes Thanos and makes half the world disappear.” The argument is more demanding: What would Trump have to accomplish for America to shed vast global liabilities because the system has become more stable, not because America has abandoned it to entropy?

Six Stones, six fixes, one cinematic gauntlet.

Ukraine and Taiwan to fix the map. Allies and swing states to fix the will. Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela to puncture the myth of permanent authoritarian dysfunction. Industrial capacity to restore credible power. Strategic sequencing to fix the clock. And a renewed bargain between sovereignty and connectivity to supply the soul.

North Korea, incidentally, does not get a Stone. It is dangerous but not a hinge of global order.

The more consequential challenge is whether an American president whose instincts lean toward subtraction can achieve the harder outcome: a world that asks less of America because it is functioning better. That would be the real snap.

The best way to escape a bad system is not to leave it. It is to make it stop producing bad outcomes.

Let filming begin.

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1) The counter-narcotics treadmill

WAPO: Deadly U.S. boat strikes have failed to curb cocaine supply, Pentagon and DEA officials say

Having worked my share of counter-narcotics command-post exercises in the past, the headline is painfully familiar: tactical activity is not strategic effect.

WAPO reports that the administration’s lethal strikes against suspected drug-trafficking boats have not reduced the cocaine entering the US. Instead, the campaign is driving criminal networks to alter routes and tactics while degrading traditional investigative methods.

It’s called squeezing the balloon: pinch one spot and the air expands to another.

That is the enduring asymmetry of the drug war. The state celebrates targets destroyed, vessels sunk, and packages seized because they are observable outputs. The trafficking network measures success differently: tonnage delivered, revenue protected, personnel replaced, routes diversified, authorities misdirected.

Destroying a boat can feel decisive. But a boat is a disposable node in a resilient commercial system. Hit one corridor, and traffic shifts to another; raise the risk, and traffickers change conveyances, shipment size, departure timing, corruption arrangements, destination points.

The more a campaign privileges killing over investigation, the more it can destroy the human intelligence and international cooperation needed to dismantle the organization itself.

Busy as beavers, this campaign nonetheless lacks a plausible theory of victory.

2) The 21st century dry county

WAPO: A desert town may run out of water. Others could face the same fate.

The future, Mr. Rango, the future: not a county that bans alcohol, but one that has no water left to sell, build with, irrigate from, or live on.

Kearny, Arizona, roughly the size of my hometown (2k) approaches precisely that condition. Its local reservoir is effectively empty, leaving the mayor hunting for scraps from other communities with senior water rights.

That is the emerging political geography of the American West. In the old dry county, the restriction was moral—no booze. In the new one, the prohibition is physical: no new subdivisions, no water-intensive industry, no lawns, no pools, no expanding your crop acreage.

This is death by tax-base strangulation.

Water-rights seniority makes this future especially unforgiving. The Rango-style villainy will not be a single corrupt mayor controlling the pipes. It will be the accumulated arithmetic of scarcity: every prior claim, every new development, every delayed adaptation decision finally arriving at the same empty reservoir.

Fade to black.

3) The arms race continues in America’s schools

WAPO: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

Drones patrolling my kid’s high school. What a positive sign!

At least nine schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado are installing systems that let teachers activate small drones designed to race through hallways, break windows, and spray an active shooter with pepper irritant. The manufacturer, Austin-based Mithril Defense, says its devices can reach a threat within 15 seconds.

That’s RoboCop speed!

The sales pitch is irresistible, but each layer of defensive technology also registers a social failure. We are building a domestic counterinsurgency architecture around children rather than reliably preventing the conditions that make it necessary.

The rules of engagement questions pile up, alright.

4) No bid, no bother

NYT: Trump’s Fixation on Arctic Ships Led to Billions in No-Bid Contracts

I covered the asymmetry in America’s New Map:

The Arctic opens up not because the world suddenly discovered its strategic value, but because climate change is physically redrawing the map faster than states can build the capacity to govern it.

The US needs icebreaking capacity. Russia’s Arctic fleet, geography, and long experience create a genuine disparity. But a strategic requirement is not a blank check. The Trump administration committed nearly $7 billion for 11 polar icebreakers—roughly twice the number the Coast Guard had said it needed—through no-bid arrangements following Trump’s discussions with Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb. The first four are to be constructed in Finland under a waiver of the usual domestic-construction rule for national-security vessels.

Thing is, competitive bidding exists to test price, design, delivery schedules, and industrial claims—not merely to slow presidents down.

Ships are only the visible part of the bill—the tip of the iceberg, you might say. Bases, ports, maintenance, trained crews, communications, logistics, and year-round operating support determine whether icebreakers are a real Arctic strategy or simply an expensive photo op.

As for trusting this administration’s long-term cost projections … please.

5) Beavers are marching

NYT: As the Climate Warms, Beavers are Coming for Canada’s Arctic

Beavers did not get the Trump executive order. They have neither paused, deregulated, nor asked permission. They are simply marching north.

As warming makes Canada’s Arctic less forbidding, beavers move beyond the boreal forest and across the treeline, reaching subarctic communities. There, a beaver work crew builds dams on streams, an effort they’ve perfected going back to the last Ice Age, turning them into lakes and altering the surrounding ecosystem.

This is climate change at its most tangible: not a distant temperature chart, but an ecosystem engineer relocating its industrial base. Beaver dams retain deeper, warmer water; that water can accelerate permafrost thaw, alter fish habitat and water flows, reshape tundra terrain. In Arctic Alaska, satellite records have identified more than 10,000 beaver ponds, with their numbers doubling in many areas since century’s beginning.

This is pure adaptation + movement = survival.

6) Wrestling reversal—2 points!

ECONOMIST WORLD IN BRIEF NEWSLETTER (no link)

The sort of thank-you-sir-do-you-want-another bravado of the Iranians is something to behold.

The Economist newsletter sums it up nicely:

The new head of Iran’s Supreme National ‌Security Council said the Strait of Hormuz would not reopen until America “changes its behaviour” and accepts Iran’s conditions for ending the war, according to Iranian state media.

Good thing we’re winning.

7) And I thought America was the “hottest” country in the world!

NYT: Why Europe Is the Fastest-Warming Continent

America may remain the planet’s most overheated—and overhyped—political system, but Europe is the fastest-warming continent in the literal sense, warming more than twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.

That makes Europe a strategic laboratory for climate adaptation. The continent is wealthy, technically capable, densely populated, institutionally interconnected. It is also encountering compounding heatwaves, droughts, shrinking snow and ice, record-warm seas, wildfire, and pressure on rivers and agriculture. In 2025, at least 95% of Europe experienced above-average temperatures.

Expect Europe, therefore, to work the adaptation side of the climate equation hardest: heat-resilient urban design, water management, grid hardening, building retrofits, revised agricultural systems, insurance reform, cross-border disaster planning.

The exporting of such rules naturally follows.

Europe becomes the first advanced region forced to radically accept a harder truth: adaptation is not a technical add-on to normal life. It is the organizing principle of normal life.

8) An enemy who adapts

NYT: How Iran Adapted Its Attacks as U.S. War Munitions Dwindled; The Iranian strikes that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan show how quickly Iran’s war-fighting skills have evolved, as the Pentagon runs low on interceptors.

The most dangerous enemy is not the one who absorbs punishment but the one who studies it.

NYT reports that Iranian strikes which killed three US soldiers in Jordan reflected a rapidly evolving Iranian approach to penetrating American defenses—at precisely the moment the Pentagon faces strain on its supply of defensive interceptors.

How quagmire-like.

This is the strategic problem beneath the headlines: American forces possess extraordinary strike power, surveillance, missile-defense systems. But Iran does not need to match the US platform for platform. It needs to identify the seams: saturated defenses, finite interceptor inventories, predictable operating patterns, vulnerable logistics—in sum, the political asymmetry between relatively cheap attacks and expensive defense.

That is adaptation as warfare. A drone, cruise missile, or proxy salvo is not merely an attack; it is a probe—testing sensors, response times, etc. Each exchange produces data. The side that learns fastest eventually bends the cost curve in its favor.

The question is therefore not whether America can destroy targets in Iran or across the region. It plainly can. It is whether it can sustain a defense against an adversary learning, iterating, and spending far less to impose steadily higher costs.

Again, how quagmire-like.

9) Conformity is such a lonely word, everyone is so untrue

ECONOMIST: Should every Indian follow the same rules? The ruling party’s apparently liberal argument for making everyone marry, divorce and inherit like Hindus

The AI stack becomes our age’s civilizational ledger: where societies record not only what they value, but who has the authority to define those values, curate their application, compel obedience.

India’s debate over a uniform civil code makes the issue unusually visible but the dynamic is the same. The ruling BJP presents replacing religion-based rules on marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption with a single legal code as a matter of universal rights—particularly for women. Yet the practical effect, critics argue, is to make minorities conform to norms historically shaped by the Hindu majority. The state of Uttarakhand has already enacted such a code, placing customary Muslim family law under legal constraint.

That is precisely the political question embedded in AI governance. “One rulebook” can sound fair, modern, emancipatory. Sometimes it is. But rules are never self-executing abstractions: someone writes the ontology, decides exceptions, labels data, trains models, audits outputs, imposes penalties for noncompliance.

The issue is not whether a common code is possible. It is whether those governed by it retain meaningful power over its terms.

10) Gulag Mar-a-Lago

NYT: He Was Deported to a Country He’d Never Heard Of. He May Never Go Free.

The phrase may be polemic, but the underlying practice deserves the harshest scrutiny: the US removing men to a third country they had never lived in, transferring them through military facilities, placing them in a foreign maximum-security prison with no clear prospect of release.

Globalization’s version of Siberia.

NYT describes Roberto Mosquera, a 59-year-old Cuban national who had lived in the United States since age 12, being detained after a work-permit appointment, moved through detention sites without lawyer contact for nearly two weeks, ultimately flown with four other detainees to Eswatini in southern Africa. Upon arrival, they were transported in a metal cage to Matsapha Correctional Complex, a maximum-security prison.

“War crime” has a specific legal meaning generally tied to armed conflict, so it should not be used casually here. But extraordinary rendition is not an inapt frame: secretive transfer, third-country detention, denial of meaningful due process, potentially indefinite confinement in a state with which the prisoner has no social or legal connection.

The administration’s cynical label—“depraved monsters”—cannot substitute for law. Criminal history may justify prosecution or lawful removal; it cannot erase the prohibition on arbitrary detention or turn human beings into cargo for offshore warehousing.

No wonder the Trump administration wants to dismantle the International Criminal Court brick by brick (h/t Marco Rubio).

11) Reconnaissance by fire

WAPO: Covert CIA program said to be behind mysterious attacks on Galápagos boats

It becomes increasingly difficult to lecture China about coercion in the South China Sea while America appears prepared to blow up boats at will in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean—and to sustain a Cuba policy whose human consequences are plainly severe, bordering on war crimes.

We are the world’s #1 rogue superpower right now, with our involvement/complicity with Iran—and, by extension Gaza—pulling us ahead of Russia, sad to say.

WAPO reports that the mysterious attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos are part of a covert CIA program: presidentially authorized operations designed to conceal Washington’s hand. The obvious questions are purpose, evidence, proportionality, precedent. When does “countering illicit activity” become reconnaissance by fire—testing opponents, signaling reach, and normalizing the use of force below the threshold of open war?

Washington rightly fears a Chinese quarantine or blockade of Taiwan. But its ability to organize resistance to such coercion depends on more than carrier groups and legal briefs. It depends on credibility. Every unaccountable American strike at sea makes Beijing’s inevitable whataboutism more persuasive—not necessarily more true, but more effective.

12) Feeling out the future

WAPO: We’ll soon get a glimpse of future temperatures, thanks to this record El Niño

There’s a line in How Green Was My Valley about the past being a place one can visit in imagination. This year’s record El Niño offers the reverse experience: a fleeting, unpleasant visit to the future.

El Niño does not create global warming, but it can temporarily reveal what a warmer baseline feels like by adding another layer of heat to an already altered climate system. The result is not simply hotter days. It is a preview of the cascading effects: stressed power grids, disrupted agriculture, intensified drought in some places, destructive rainfall in others, and public systems built for conditions that no longer reliably exist.

Call it a climate fast-forward: a preview of the late 2030s arriving early, before societies have made the investments and adaptations that future was supposed to demand.

I rewatched Project Hail Mary again last night and I am haunted by the assumption, expressed throughout, that, when Earth gets super-stressed by climate (there, a weakening sun), the answer won’t be countries co-operating so much as turning on one another.

In that regard, Hollywood is much like Karl Marx: very pessimistic on the ability of democracies to handle structural crisis.

I continue to disagree, much—admittedly—due to the fact that my entire life’s work is about handling and processing structural crisis.

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