Trump Rolls Over For Putin: Understanding Global Power Dynamics
What do Obama, Biden, and Trump have in common? They all got played by Vladimir Putin, ceding American power out of ineptitude and cowardice. And so the Postwar Order died.
It wasn’t quite Munich 1938 up there in Anchorage, Alaska, but boy did Team Trump try their level best to embrace their inner Chamberlain! From Obama to Biden to Trump, American leaders have proven themselves totally clueless about Vladimir Putin and his pitifully weak empire. Functional Quislings all.
Ronald Reagan must be turning in his grave, with most of the American right-wing heroes of old joining him - and Churchill too. I’m kind of glad my dad didn’t live to witness the abject humiliation of America on public display as American soldiers in battle dress knelt to roll out the red carpet for the murderous ruler of an inherently lesser nation.
This, Americans, is what defeat looks like if you’re seeing the situation with Muscovite eyes. This is how you ultimately lose everything - and fully deserve to.
I’ll be perfectly honest: I’m a veteran, yet if the American federal government was ever attacked, I’d stand by and let D.C. burn. Ukrainians have proven that they deserve to live free, defended by the global community. Americans had better hope they’re never forced to endure a similar test of grit and mettle. It’s now a proven fact that the majority would back their leaders in choosing surrender as long as the invader promised not to harm their parochial interests.
Fun fact: a supposedly “big military power” that fails to subdue a smaller neighbor, loses most of its stock of military hardware, and is forced to resort to literal meat waves to seize territory at roughly fifty corpses per square kilometer is neither a superpower nor even a great power. To seize the rest of Donbas - the territory Putin is demanding Ukraine simply give up outright - Moscow will have to throw away as many lives again as it already has to this point. Ukraine’s casualty rates are meanwhile falling. And the Ukrainians hit targets across the Muscovite empire every night, something that was absolutely not true three years ago when the US media was insisting that Putin was doomed to fall at any moment.
So why do D.C. hacks keep handing Putin easy wins - and by extension, their nemesis Xi Jinping too? How is it that they can’t get it through their thick skulls that Moscow’s “progress” in Ukraine over the past few years is laughable, living evidence that Moscow’s forces are incredibly vulnerable?
Oh wait, they’ve got the most convenient excuse in the cosmos: Putin has lots of nukes. Even if it’s suicide to actually use them against America or Europe, possession of enough serves as a fantastic get-out-of-jail-free card for D.C. chickenhawks aiming to co-opt the language of peace to push surrender on Ukraine. They’ve invested so much in the mythos surrounding nuclear weapons for a simple reason: the things are trump cards in debates thanks to social convention. Serious scientific treatment of the things is anathema.
I have to admit, even knowing the quality of intellect that prevails in today’s D.C. machine, I didn’t see Trump and his people being quite this virulently pathetic. It really does add credence to the rumors that Putin has serious dirt on Trump - and probably the Clintons, Bidens, and Obamas of the world too. It would explain a great deal.
Great Power Politics 101 time, folks: the country of roughly 140 million people with a GDP half the size of California’s is in no way equal to one with 333 million people and around a fifth of the world’s entire economic output. Especially not when the first “power” is struggling so mightily, losing nearly as many soldiers every month as it can bring into service. No, nuclear weapons don’t automatically reset the scales, and the US has a more effective arsenal anyway, if it ever came to it.
These ludicrous hacks live off pure mythology. Possibly the single biggest lie across all of human history that millions of people seem determined to believe is that the D.C. Beltway crowd and their Ivy League teachers have the faintest clue about how to run a phone booth, much less a country.
Team Trump’s universal tell is the now-constant insistence that Trump is achieving the incredible against all odds and only leftist Democrats can possibly disagree. It’s one of the clues that they’re scam artists, with the first objective being to keep members of the team from defecting. Gotta gin up hatred of the other side to avoid your supporters realizing that you’re screwing them over. Team Biden and Obama diehards do the same thing in their own way. They surrendered to Putin’s nuclear bluffs too.
This generation of useless leaders - George W. Bush and Bill Clinton included - will be remembered as the architects of America’s demise through simple neglect. Each of their administrations actively enabled Putin at every turn even while pretending to uphold the pillars of American global power by bombing weaker countries left and right. They have betrayed the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of American veterans and left the American taxpayer on the hook for trillions of dollars of national debt. Yet the worst sin of all to my mind is sacrificing Ukraine and the Postwar Order.
America is not and never has been special: no country is. All are ruled by the same laws of science. A country is just a shell, an institutional claim to territory that can manifest in healthy and adaptive - or deeply self-destructive and maladaptive - modes of operation.
Yet the lie of America being special is pervasive; Americans who question it are liable to be labeled unpatriotic or worse, even the minority in this country who ever wore a uniform. Journalists who insist to be chasing the truth above all else happily repeat the narrative. And so a social order is sustained that is inherently delusional and unable to achieve anything of worth. Can it be any surprise that American foreign policy is a perpetual omnishambles?
Summits like the one in Alaska - and the big allied meetup in D.C. after - are extremely important events because they force each side to commit to a particular public narrative about what happened and why. This always plays into the domestic concerns each participant is primarily speaking to - the way they tell the story says a lot about their true concerns. They reveal essential patterns in each side’s strategy that sheds important light on their future plans and how they actually view the world.
Unfortunately for America, the democratic world, and Trump’s own legacy in the long run, what the silly summit in Anchorage revealed was an American administration totally out its depth, transmitting signals of chronic weakness just like Team Biden did in 2021. The outcome will prove far more catastrophic for the United States than Ukraine in the medium and long run: Trump has committed a massive unforced error that has shattered what little remained of D.C.’s leverage over America’s allies. All the smiles and glad-handing in D.C. early this week was a show: the nicer foreign leaders act to Trump in public, the more certain they are that he’s irrelevant.
It was obvious to anyone who has paid attention to Putin’s rhetoric since 2021 that this summit represented a massive win for him simply by happening at all. The entire subtext was established to call Team Trump’s bluff about being able to pressure Putin into peace on every level - and level threats. The humiliation runs far deeper than Trump’s lackadaisical efforts to get a ceasefire deal done coming to a bitter close with a shake of Putin’s chipmunk cheeks. Incidentally, gotta love how we’re back to a peace deal being the only way forward according to Trump, which was Zelensky’s original position before he had to start showing openness to a ceasefire to please Trump this spring. What a ridiculous game!
Back to the threats part of Putin’s visit: from the very beginning, Putin has used his nuclear arsenal to ward off through fear the just and necessary direct intervention Moscow’s assault on Ukraine deserves. His single biggest strategic victory since 2021 has been using non-credible threats of nuclear war to get his way in Ukraine. In his historic diatribe justifying the attempt to destroy the country issued in the summer of 2021, Putin pointedly equated Ukraine joining NATO to a nuclear strike against the Muscovite empire because of how many people this would remove from his imaginary russian world.
Nobody who pays attention to the evolution of high-level rhetoric missed the threat this argument represents, bluff though it has been proven to be. Team Biden’s behavior, from giving Putin a summit after he first moved massive forces to Ukraine’s border in 2021 straight to offering Zelensky a ride out of Kyiv when the all-out invasion happened in 2022, is 100% explained by the D.C. crowd accepting at face value Putin’s hollow threat to go nuclear if he didn’t get Ukraine.
Of course, when Putin’s forces were thrown out of Kharkiv and Kherson city despite Moscow formally annexing the latter, guess what happened? Nothing nuclear, though the saber was strongly rattled. Muscovite military doctrine calls for nuclear escalation in this kind of situation - likely taking the form of a demonstration in the form of an atmospheric “test” over hostile soil - to force the start of serious negotiations under threat of the situation escalating out of control. He ultimately didn’t go there not because hollow threats to attack orc troops in Ukraine issued by certain disgraced American ex-generals named Petraeus, but because Beijing isn’t ready to treat nukes as the dominant currency of international affairs quite yet. China’s deal was simple: don’t go nuclear, and we’ll stay neutral-but-leaning-towards-Moscow.
Moscow’s nuclear bluff was even further called by Ukraine’s Kursk campaign in 2024, which seized and held Muscovite home turf - another doctrinal cause for nuclear escalation - and again by Operation Spiderweb in 2025, when Ukrainian drones knocked out a third of Moscow’s nuclear-capable bomber fleet. Still, despite all that the Ukrainians have proven, the nuclear threat was still the elephant in the room in Alaska: whenever Trump talks about avoiding world war three breaking out, what he really means is someone using nukes.
Nuclear use and world war three are equated in American rhetoric for a reason: this is a ready-made excuse any American leader can issue to justify backing down from a nuclear rival in a confrontation. The moment nuclear threats are invoked, generations of media mythologizing the things and the scientists who built the first ones takes over the minds of all involved, rendering rational discourse impossible.
Basically, anything nuclear has become a simple synonym for apocalypse in American public life, people trained to falsely believe that one nuke goes off and everyone dies. If you want to score the ultimate high ground in a foreign policy discussion with Americans, accuse the other side of risking nuclear war on any grounds. Putin knows this, taking care to slip in clear allusions to the possibility of nuclear conflict whenever he can - and create potential pretexts. His entire trip to Alaska was part of an elaborate nuclear threat, the pattern virtually identical to the one that preceded Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
The essential narrative that sustains the Putin regime’s grip on power is that the russian world has no borders: anywhere a Russian-speaker lives is a place where Moscow has a national interest. Any place a Russian-speaker historically lived is inherently part of the russian world, to be reclaimed when the time is right. Hence Moscow’s propagandists constantly harping on the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine. The maneuver both places Ukraine as the oppressor and gives Moscow a license to pursue claims elsewhere.
Alaska and most of Cascadia, what the rest of the world knows as the maritime Pacific Northwest, hosted some Muscovite bases a couple centuries back, so we’re in Putin’s sights, if obviously to a lesser extent than Finland or Lithuania. Hawai’i was once on Moscow’s radar, so Medvedev would surely claim it too if he could. Oregon’s Willamette Valley is today home to tens of thousands of Old Believers, refugees from the Muscovite-dominated branch of the Orthodox faith. Putin claims sovereignty over them, too. Spot the inherent threat in the ruscist claim to speak for all Russian-speakers everywhere and have a right to use nuclear weapons to defend the russian world?
The crux of Muscovite claims on Ukrainian territory is that Ukraine isn’t a real country at all, just a bunch of rogue russians contaminated by western (particularly Polish and Lithuanian) ideas. Ukraine has no inherent sovereignty - and really, neither does the USA when Russian-speakers are involved, Constitution be damned. Moscow didn’t sign it, after all.
Aware that American leaders treat nuclear weapons as the horsemen of the apocalypse, by taking time during a highly security-challenged visit to go to an Orthodox Church near Anchorage Putin was deliberately undermining American sovereignty just like he does in Ukraine. His message: we know you’ll never use a nuke against us because of the potential consequences, so talk of deterrence through mutual assured destruction is a joke. The world is all about deals, so count yourself lucky we’re not actually demanding Alaska. Today.
When Putin goes on about Ukraine and russia sharing the same origin and heritage that they’re brotherly countries, he’s also warning Americans that there are no rules or limits when Moscow’s interests are involved. Stabbing a so-called brother in the back is to be expected in the russian world. But you’d better stay out, or else you might have to face the bear yourself.
The irony, of course, is that Moscow only makes this rhetorical play because it can’t actually make good on its claims. Putin’s regime would not have survived this long if it was truly willing to commit suicide. Putin is still trying to score gains on the cheap.
A truly strong American leader would respond to this sort of messaging with the spirit of Bastogne: nuts! Make us not do whatever we please!
That’s demonstrating strength, which is a prerequisite to deterrence. American leaders have lost the head game of it all.
The whole point of having a big shiny nuclear arsenal - or even a small one - is to make it clear that everybody dies if things get truly out of control. The moment you start acting like this is something that can never be allowed to happen at any cost, you break the deterrence spell, practically begging someone like Putin to make a move. A real nuclear escalation becomes much more likely to happen through accident or sabotage.
What Team Trump revealed about themselves in Alaska is that their lust for power in D.C. is so strong that they really will sell out anyone if threatened with a nuclear fight. Everything for them reduces to establishing the grounds for never having to cede power at home. This means that Europe, Taiwan, and South Korea are all just bargaining chips. America’s only true ally is Israel, for ideological reasons - and because none of Israel’s enemies have nukes. Yet.
Trump’s partial demolition of Iran’s nuclear program is further confirmation of the primacy of nuclear weapons in his foreign policy. Even if Iran does get half a dozen nukes, that doesn’t actually mean much in practical military terms. Yes, Tehran could probably take out one or two targets and kill a lot of people. The response would be infinitely more painful - and Israel would survive. Yet there would be no Tehran, possibly even Iran.
Look at Gaza, pointedly obliterated by conventional means in a signal to Israel’s potential enemies. If Israel were ever nuked, does anyone truly believe that Israel wouldn’t kill tens of millions in reply?
Attacking Iran’s nuclear program was never about stopping Iran from getting a bomb someday. It was about delivering a message to any country the US or Israel dislikes: we will use extreme violence to stop you from joining the nuclear club in an operational sense, because we know full well that once you’re to that level, you can bluff us at will. North Korea has proven it as much as the fall of regimes in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Team Trump may have gone into the Alaska summit aiming to balance the priorities of the three main wings of his coalition - Rubio-Graham, Vance-Hegseth, Musk-Kennedy - and this seems to have prevented him from proclaiming that a deal had been done outright. But in the wake of a meeting where Putin clearly successfully bluffed that American support for Ukraine is starting world war three, Trump’s rhetoric has betrayed his active choice to side with Putin, whether out of political convenience or fear.
He’s still retaining a hedge position where he’ll try to take credit for any Ukrainian counteroffensive this fall, but fear of looking like a chump ranks below fear of Putin, it seems. And US media will probably downplay any Ukrainian victories anyway.
Though in baring his belly like a good puppy to uncle Vlad, Trump has placed himself in an impossible bind: European leaders have assembled in a massive show of support for Zelensky, making it clear that they’re not going to smile and go along with the USA any more. Why bother? Trump is pushing tariffs and trade wars that explicitly target NATO allies while questioning the Article Five commitment to collective defense. Who would trust their security to the USA under these conditions? Europe’s economy is nearly as large as the USA’s and boasts a bigger population. European military potential is already ramping up at a pace American companies can only dream of, because Americans will still be holding stakeholder meetings while the Europeans finish five new factories.
The Europeans will now smile in public to keep Trump placated then do exactly what’s in their best interest behind the scenes, where American media and politicians don’t bother to look. It’s time for Europe to rise with Ukraine at it’s heart and shove back the Muscovite invaders. Ukraine is the front line of Europe, and only the first country that will come under attack until Putin is defeated. It is now clear that the USA will abandon Europe if pressed. Smashing Putin’s forces in Ukraine and setting Muscovite industry back far enough that it never stands a chance of catching up with escalating European production is the way forward. In a few years he’ll be dead and a succession crisis will likely tear the empire apart even if Ukraine doesn’t trigger the collapse through military means this year or next.
Monday’s big meetup of democratic leaders and Trump was pure spectacle in typical D.C. fashion, the American media predictably obsessed with whether Zelensky would wear a suit (yes, you pathetic weasels concerned about appearances, he did) and acting as if European surrender to Trump’s whims is all but guaranteed. Behind the pomp, though, the terms of the impending divorce seem well sealed, though the politicians are sure to spin matters differently in public. Preserving the tattered illusion of transatlantic unity is still important to many. But it’s done.
It’s so incredibly sad that something as important as peace and actually stopping the violence once and for all has become another petty American political football. Note how aggressively violent bigots like Vance wrap themselves in the language of peace and stopping violence whenever they talk about Ukraine? It’s a naked attempt to exploit the fact that those of us who understand how wars like this actually end have to keep talking about military operations which will cost a lot of lives. We look harsh and aggressive, despite them being the ones kicking good people out of uniform and government service because of political ideology.
Pure Orwell for people who are actively supporting Israel’s annihilation of Gaza to cry crocodile tears about all the death and mayhem in Ukraine. Especially when after the meetup with Putin it’s apparent that the deaths they’re most interested in preventing are those of Muscovite soldiers presently invading Ukraine.
There’s a reason for this: in the warped Clash of Civilizations narrative that most of Team Trump adheres to, the world is split into culture zones bound to fight for dominance. The right-wing flavor of the story has it that weak and decadent Europe is undeserving of its heritage, so the true “traditional Christian” USA and russia get to divide it between them then mutually turn to the task of controlling the Chinese and Islamic Worlds.
Moscow has ruthlessly played the neo-Confederate American idiots who embrace this ignorance. That neither even recognizes the other as truly Christian is irrelevant; like the naturally antagonistic Nazi Germans and Imperial Japanese they’ve common enemies to attack before settling affairs with one another. Geopolitically, Team Trump sees the Americas and Western Europe as belonging to D.C., with Moscow getting Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Each can exploit as it likes in its own sphere, compete across the Global South, while mutually acting to contain China and keep the Islamic World in check. Oceania and Eurasia against Eastasia, as Orwell would have described it.
The Vance-Hegseth wing of Team Trump sincerely believe that they have the right to use violence to take control of institutions and subvert the U.S. Constitution as needed to realize their warped vision of Christian America in their part of the planet. One of Putin’s biggest propaganda coups of all time was to convince a bunch of deluded Americans angry that their country has been looted across a generation that life is somehow better in the russian world. This poisonous seed is bearing fruit across the USA.
Few are willing to admit it, but American partisan warfare is now escalating to the point that a peaceful transfer of power in 2029 is looking like a 50/50 shot at best. There has never been a more important time for people to understand more about what countries are and how they operate.
The most important takeaway here is that an effective Moscow-D.C. axis has formed. These hacks may cosplay as peace-loving Americans who love their country but everything about their movement is now a dagger at the throat of the Constitution at home and democracy abroad. Theirs is an egoist ideology and pyramid scheme designed to accelerate the collapse of the Constitutional order as it has stood for decades and replace it with something unrecognizable to most Americans.
They see Putin getting his way by running roughshod over cherished western institutions, and they feel that their time has come. Raw power follows its own logic. You’ve got to understand it to fight back.
The Science of Countries: Why The Postwar Order Died
Narratives are crucial to the function of countries, because despite maps making them look coherent, they’re anything but. All countries are grand geographic illusions that ride and die on the narrative that the majority of people living in them choose to believe. They’re constructs, which isn’t a criticism: just the way things are.
It’s the very abstract nature of a country as people experience the thing that makes it so dependent on narratives: a coherent national narrative is a kind of engine driving action in a distinct direction across space and time. Inside a country’s boundaries, people and groups go about their business, engaging in activities across three primary systems: economic, social, and political.
Each functions broadly like a market; over time power centers develop that pursue monopoly. Monopolistic pricing incentives preclude a truly efficient distribution of resources, making everyone poorer overall, so present the basic challenge in any large grouping of people. Even where a single monopoly does not form, a small group with enough power will simulate one.
Countries are full of groups that actively compete for resources, and therefore power. Groups that gain a position of relative dominance in any domain have a very strong incentive to do whatever they can to lock it in - they become self-sustaining organisms in a very real sense. Members act as if the group reality is their own because they are bound to its fortunes. This often allows those in a position of power in the collective to manipulate group rules and remain insulated from normal competition.
In any group, as well as their broader country, an endless cycle of boom and bust tied to shifting incentives and perceptions thereof leads to periods of rapid change followed by longer epochs of relative stability. Rather than fully resetting affairs each go-round, however, what’s more typical is a slowly-morphing group of power interests aligning to act in concert around a collective narrative to secure their own survival.
Countries naturally produce a regime that actively seeks to manage national collective affairs so that the landscape always favors its concerns. Control isn’t necessarily deep or universal, but tends to be persistent enough to become pervasive in time. A natural divide forms between regime and people which, if unchecked, leads to violent conflict. Rising inequality undermines trust between groups and individuals, lowering total growth potential in every dimension by producing self-defeating conflict spirals.
Regimes, much like a particular configuration of elements in a system, tend to change gradually, then all at once, as pressures build. The need for reform is usually denied and resisted because people dependent on the status quo come to fear the consequences of even the slightest change in conditions. Think tectonic plates locked together, stress rising until something cracks. Or a drought-stricken, beetle-infested forest primed to transform into an inferno with a single spark.
The same processes underway within countries are also going on between them: the world system is an aggregate of all country-level economic, social, and political systems, which are themselves aggregates of more regional ones. Borders represent a kind of cellular membrane marking a tendency for stuff to work a particular way within as opposed to the way things are elsewhere. Country relationships are primarily mediated by geography - as one random example, New Zealand and Ireland are highly unlikely to ever engage in direct sustained violence because it’s difficult for either to pose an existential threat to the other. Any national issues folks from either might develop can be worked out through sports, maybe with a good riot after a closely contested match.
How countries conceive of their place in global affairs is a direct function of the narrative that sustains them internally. To get at this dynamic, you have to review the rhetoric of leaders in a country over time and compare that to their actual behavior. The sources of a country’s foreign policy are a mix of internal and external factors, but they always out in stuff like military capabilities obtained and actions ordered. Some countries view themselves as inherently unwilling to wage aggressive wars. Others bake fighting them into their identity. That the regime in Moscow is more driven by its identity than plain simple sense is the variable nearly everyone missed, including myself. It’s why the orcs went after Kyiv, not just Donbas. Destroying Ukraine is their present crusade, and the idea of a united Europe will be the next. Others will follow.
Countries do develop a kind of national character as a result of their being sustained by narratives. For this reason, it was not difficult to project in early 2021 that Putin would launch a major invasion of Ukraine’s east and secure a land bridge to Crimea. Going for Kyiv before taking the east was not expected, but in line with the same theory of Muscovite intentions. The path to February 2022 was only a straight line to war because the USA failed to live up to its role as cornerstone of the Postwar Order. Biden refused to live up to America’s part in the narrative that sustained its place in the emerging global community after the Second World War. Putin saw what was happening and decided the odds were in favor of taking all of Ukraine at once.
On January 6th, 2021, a bunch of Trump backers assaulted the Constitutional formality that officially declares the winner of the prior presidential election in a ridiculous bid to keep Trump in office. The partisan response to this outrage dramatically worsened a tragedy that took the lives of several Capitol Police officers at the hands of supposedly law-and-order loving Trump acolytes. Despite the Capitol being fully secured from these American orcs within hours and Biden’s victory officially confirmed, the world was treated to a multi-week spectacle where thousands of military personnel belatedly locked down D.C. on the improbable chance a repeat targeted the inauguration.
The American narrative about being a world-leading democracy crumbled in days: responsible leaders who should have known better let their anger at Trump betray how hollow their protests of his actions were. Had Trump declared himself dictator for life as many opponents were imagining in those days that he might, the majority of them would have said much, and done nothing - just like they are today, after decrying him as a fascist throughout 2024.
Putin saw this futile and paranoid show of force for what it was: a sign of astonishing weakness. He knew his time had come: there would never be another moment like it. His subsequent large-scale movement of equipment to the border with Ukraine that spring earned him a summit with Biden, fully confirming his suspicions. His subsequent historic diatribe replete with nuclear threats over the summer and second, more extensive military buildup on Ukraine’s borders beginning in fall, demonstrated just how deterred he was by American strength. By December, intelligence reports illustrating Ukraine’s inevitable demise to superior Muscovite firepower as documented by Michael Kofman et. al had flooded the media, setting the stage for Biden to rule out sending even a single airborne brigade to Kyiv to help secure the evacuation of American citizens.
At every critical juncture, D.C. signaled that it would not defend Ukraine. Putin might even have been satisfied with Donbas alone had he not seen a golden opportunity to go bigger.
Trump is presently making the exact same mistakes that Biden and Obama did in pressing Ukraine to surrender to Putin’s demands, and for mostly the same reason. Moscow has long served as a convenient foil or imagined business opportunity for some, but truly stepped over the brink of a cliff with this war. The only ways out in the long run are all-conflict with NATO or the collapse of the empire: no middle ground is possible, because sooner or later there’s going to be a succession crisis that whoever is in charge in Moscow may cope with by starting another war. Putin’s decades-long narrative about the might of the russian world coupled to his abject failure to conquer even Ukraine’s eastern-most province despite so many losses mandate a proper demonstration of Muscovite power, lest a fatal power vacuum form.
Trump is doing everything in his power to throw Putin a lifeline because he, like Biden, is afraid of either scenario. Rather than get out ahead of the problem and make it clear to the regime members who surround Putin that they had better cut their losses and try to win in the second, D.C. leaders are taking the coward’s option and trying to abdicate all responsibility to affect the outcome. Just kick the can down the road and make it another generation’s problem. Which is how we got here in the first place.
Putin being escorted by F-22s and treated to a B-2 flyover in Alaska was not, as the media portrayed, a stark demonstration of American power after the attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, but a reminder that the USA will only take the risk of using these expensive tools if Israeli airstrikes have already paved a clear route to the target. But it’s characteristic of the emerging American self-narrative that it cannot abide any suggestion that America will not always dominate in a fight. Especially against China.
China’s own self-narrative over the past few decades has been structured around being ready to pull the USA into a trap when the time comes then use the shifted balance of power in the aftermath to dominate the Western Pacific. Make the Americans look unreliable, portray a Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan as better for the fragile world economy than any war, then execute a sudden fait accompli that establishes China’s new maritime border somewhere east of the island. Anybody wants to argue otherwise had better bring a lot of ships, missiles, and drones.
Beijing has been cultivating this scenario ever since 2003 proved that America’s talk about being the big defender of the free world was so much propaganda. Wars of choice have consequences - as will bungling them. Small wonder that so many conservative Americans are determined to write off the War on Terror as a mistake made by a few D.C. hacks and not a supported sacrifice of thousands of mostly-rural Americans on a futile crusade by Boomer elders still mad the USA lost in Vietnam.
The very imbeciles who are constantly insisting that the USA has to face down China are the ones setting America up for defeat at Beijing’s hands. A now fully bipartisan refusal to treat Putin for what he is and take the necessary actions to sustain America’s claimed role on the world stage has shattered the American self-narrative beyond repair, practically begging Beijing to press its plan.
Allies who have fought for so long to pretend this future wasn’t coming are stuck: the USA of today and going forward is not the one their policy systems have planned for. America’s self-narrative is shifting to conform with its now-fully clientelist political-economy, where which side wins an election determines whether your industry comes under attack or gets subsidized. Some degree of this is normal in even the most democratic countries, because elections are the mechanism by which regimes are kept in check by the general population, but the regimes themselves don’t just go away. Elections force regime members into competition that erodes the tendency to separate themselves from the populace and create a separate caste, limiting their ability to unite against the interests of the general public.
In the USA, however, the competition is fratricidal and toxic. A few interests benefit at the expense of others, because money rules. Politicians are investments in a country where half the population lives paycheck to paycheck.
Moscow is playing the USA like a fiddle right now because the Muscovites understand the dynamics of power systems far better than the expert class serving D.C. The latter are part of the myth-making complex that is responsible for American behavior becoming so self-defeating. They can’t admit certain harsh realities because this would break the illusion of D.C. being all-powerful when it chooses.
So Putin’s propagandists keep on feeding them exactly what they need to cast the Ukraine War as a sad bloody affair with no possible outcome but Ukraine accepting the inevitable. Their success in snowing Team Trump means that Ukraine can’t have NATO membership - thus ceding the alliance’s right to act as it chooses. Yet something with even less credibility than Article 5 is expected to magically work when the Muscovites know America’s word of guarantee amounts to nothing. Ukraine is also supposed to give up territory Moscow would otherwise have to spend another million casualties to seize. Further, the Ukrainians have to accept the russian orthodox church acting as a permanent spy agency without restrains.
To think that Ukraine or Europe would accept surrender masquerading as a deal rather than fight on is utterly delusional. Yes, the USA currently provides critical resources that can’t easily be replaced, like real-time satellite intelligence and Patriot missiles. But the latter are becoming less effective all the time, and the Europeans have been rushing to fill the gap on the former. Ukraine might not be able to risk a major counteroffensive this year if America cuts all support, but with European production ramping up incredibly fast, by next summer a larger operation costing fewer lives is entirely possible.
So long as Beijing sees a breach forming between the USA and Europe, the future without American support for Ukraine isn’t so bad. China isn’t actively stopping the Ukrainians from sourcing drone materials or giving Moscow armored vehicles and artillery. Beijing doesn’t want Putin to win any more than the Europeans do, but also doesn’t want to be isolated. The more independence that Europe shows, the more China will feel free to hedge its bet on Moscow.
The past couple months have already seen Ukraine’s allies making up the financial gap left by the end of US aid. If the Americans can’t see the simple logic in spending less than 10% of a single year’s annual budget in exchange for nearly exhausting Moscow’s military reserves, American leaders are basically brain dead. The country may as well break up and be done with it. This would not be as catastrophic as many believe. Broken federal institutions are the problem, not Americans themselves.
Countries live and countries die - often over questions of that country’s character. Europe’s monarchies lost power and many longstanding countries ceased to exist because the complex systems that comprise a country are functional in nature. They emerge from deeper interactions at the regional and community level. Signals and forces are constantly passing between higher and lower order geographic levels. Thomas Lessman has for many years maintained an excellent website dedicated to illustrating how the pattern of major countries at the global level has shifted in the past.
Neither America’s borders nor identity have ever stayed fixed for long. America’s fundamental self-narrative has very dramatically shifted at several points throughout its history. America can first be said to exist about four centuries ago, taking coherent shape closer to three. About every eighty years since the first dramatic narrative revolution there’s been a new one corresponding to major shifts in the American national system as a whole; each time the basket of assumptions that made up the notion of America changed, as did core institutions.
1775 was not the outbreak of a true revolution - King George remained enthroned, after all - but a war of independence waged by a minority of colonial subjects who sought to establish a new nation based on a set of laws that enshrined certain inalienable rights common to all. Founders’ America was an uneasy compromise that never quite settled serious regional divisions rooted in deep cultural differences - ownership of slaves being one. This America was one where each state was effectively its own country, the federal government small and limited.
Growth of federal power and the expansion of slavery conjoined to produce the Civil War eight decades later. Slavery may have been the single most salient issue driving the collapse of Founders’ America, but the deeper problem was the power of the federal government in D.C. to enforce policy in states where society actively rejected it. Slaves escaping to free states were still considered property under federal law, citizens who supported laws eliminating the sick institution forced to participate in it by the federal government.
Fear of the Free states doing the same thing to them and forcing abolition drove the original Deep South plantation states to secede and attack Fort Sumter. The Confederacy spent much of the conflict attempting to conquer the Union’s capitol, not defend its own territory, and only a fool could believe that once in power the Confederates would not have done to the North what the actually victorious North did in the South: enforce ideology through policy. Hence the true cause of the American Civil War being, as is the case in all military conflicts, control over a scarce resource: formal power over the federal government.
A new Imperial America emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War, one united at the federal level by the drive to seize new territories and keep industry happy more than anything else. Rather than actually resolve the core issues of power that led to the civil war, the end of slavery allowed the reunified regime to build a new narrative of the country founded upon national expansion in all dimensions. As always seems to happen in wartime, close relationships between powerful economic interests and the government were continued. Imperial America saw nonstop internal violence against various dissident movements and minorities to match aggressive colonization efforts across the American West that led to the genocide of numerous indigenous peoples.
This version of America ran into a brick wall starting in the 1930s, when the wave of globalization that brought most of the world’s financial institutions into close contact led to fast-moving economic shocks after the First World War. Even though the USA was only involved for the last year, the global impacts of the thing decimated markets and caused an unending stream of smaller political conflicts. Europe’s empires were beginning to come apart, and the world economy was a mess. The Second World War finished them off, forcing a systematic reboot of the entire global economy, which had to shift from direct colonial extraction to more indirect means.
Postwar America emerged from the wreckage; its foundation America’s temporary position as the sole bastion of undamaged industry outside of Soviet complexes in the Urals. Today it is hardly remembered in mainstream American history just how close the country came to dividing again in the 1930s. The pain of the Civil War has never truly healed, and the vicious politics of the American South to this day stem directly from the failure to resolve the conflict by securing the rights of the former slaves and their descendants.
One of the major reasons the 1950s are today remembered as being so regimented and sterile in popular culture is that the return of millions of veterans threatened to continue a massive destabilization of society that began in the wake of the First World War and carried on through the Great Depression. Fears of Soviet-backed communist infiltration were not entirely unfounded, but much like the talk of Putin manipulating American elections in recent years were hyped. Still, powerful interests in the USA were trying to find any excuse to distract Americans from very real social divides, And this was the age when mass media was first available to propagandists of every stripe. Why else would the McCarthy people go after entertainers? They knew a source of power when they saw it.
Small wonder that the natural response was to generate create an artificially compressed vision of America across the scope of media, a constructed narrative designed to make citizens feel good about the country and themselves and bad towards designated enemies. A parade of those were readily found, leading to thousands of American military fatalities across eighty years with precious little accountability or in-depth examination of the forces that send them into battle.
Unfortunately for America’s high and mighty, the last two decades have seen the rise of another country-threatening crisis at the same moment the internet arrived - a new form of media that no one has yet proven able to control, though powerful interests are trying. Partisanship bound to economic interests that increasingly reflect regional cultural divides is self-amplifying through all forms of media, and most Americans lack the training to cut through the bullshit. Denial of what’s happening is prevalent except among the exact sorts who shouldn’t be mobilized: lurking monsters who see an opportunity to make a move against someone they’ve decided is bad.
Meanwhile the country is increasingly blind to just how bad the storm is getting outside. The essential binding factor of the American-led Postwar Order was demonstrated in the actions taken when Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi forces into Kuwait in 1990. D.C. put together an international coalition to repel the invasion despite Baghdad’s repeated threats to use chemical weapons to maintain its hold on what it claimed was a lost province. All the big military experts assumed that American fatalities would run in the thousands. The first George Bush - a combat pilot during the Second World War who understood the cost of war - went in anyway. Coalition deaths were under three hundred from all causes.
Bush’s son broke the vital narrative thread preventing American military might from being seen as a threat to the rest of the world for decades. Now, thanks to Obama, Biden, and Trump’s collective negligence, it has fully unraveled. Team Trump is clear in their position that the USA has no true allies. Postwar America is dead, and something else will replace it - and if what attempts to is maladaptive, the USA can and may die.
Putin’s empire won’t fare any better in the next decade. It has already lost the war in Ukraine, and almost certainly restarted the long disintegration of the Muscovite empire - it will just take some more time for the Ukrainians and Europeans to prove it. But while going down, Putin was able to destroy Postwar America. Trump, like Biden and Obama before, just rolled over and showed him his belly, like the ugly chubby dog that he is.
Geopolitical Brief, Week 33 2025
It’s been a week for summits and high geopolitics - appropriate for August, which is traditionally when world wars break out. As I’ll outline in the operational brief tomorrow, the Ukrainians are giving every sign of being on the verge of making a large-scale push, or at least a series of intensive smaller ones. Be hilarious if a month from now Trump was looking like the chump he is as a Muscovite combined arms army gets trounced and a Ukrainian corps charges through the gap thirty or forty kilometers.
Globally, most eyes have been on what promise to be the very last gasps of Trump’s moribund peace push, which was always just a ploy to win a Nobel Peace prize by selling out Ukraine, it seems. The rest were looking at Israel, wondering if we’re about to see hundreds of thousands of Palestinians shipped off to southern Syria. Bet the Druze angling for autonomy with apparent Israeli backing will love that outcome…
Atlantic
European leaders backing Zelensky have sent the necessary response to Trump: he may have to play nice and wear a suit so you and your thin-skinned, weak-willed backers don’t feel disrespected, but we know where we all stand now. Trump didn’t stand at the press conference with Putin proclaiming that they’d done a deal because of the optics, so the Europeans will be all smiles and politeness in public. Everyone knows what’s up now, though. The posture of the Europeans sitting around Trump during their talks this week said much, as did Trump looking rather surrounded. I get the feeling that Zelensky went home determined to order preparations for a major counteroffensive to proceed.
The Europeans have already stepped up to replace direct US financial aid, so right now the big question is how readily they’ll draw down their existing arsenals to power Ukraine to a win. Peace is only going to last if the orcs have suffered a military defeat in occupied Ukraine that forces them to negotiate for real, with or without Putin’s approval. European production lines are already set to replace American supplies within a few years, and though there have been some concerns about America playing game with intellectual property, the Europeans are guaranteed to be working on solutions there, too.
Europe is manifestly fighting for its own freedom on two fronts now. At some point, the USA will leave the Europeans in the lurch - it’s a matter of when. The rational response is to take this for granted and move with haste to establish alternatives. Do not place your hope and trust in America’s federal government for at least another decade.
On the other side of the Atlantic the refusal of the so-called “resistance” to do anything but hold demonstrations and back further gerrymandering of states until the whole country is red or blue is very telling. In France, you threaten to raise gas taxes and people literally shut the country down for weeks on end. Americans threatened with the loss of their Constitutional rights donate to their favorite powerless politician and call it a day. Funny how the memory of the civil rights movement has been distorted by a generation of suburbanite professors who enjoy holding signs and changing, so people have forgotten the active disruption of government activities that made peaceful protests so frightening to leaders.
If Team Trump keeps heading down the road he is, the Canadians will have to get real good with drones to repel an attempted Thunder Run on Ottawa by 10th Mountain Division one of these days. Until lately, I’d have thought something like this beyond fantasy. Now… and it’s having to worry about this kind of thing that makes the world Team Trump is trying to build such a mistake.
Fortunately, American Army doctrine presumes dominance, and so mostly sucks. A few hundred Canadian volunteers who have been paying attention to Ukraine could teach them a harsh lesson. A few thousand could probably take D.C. Count me among those American citizens who would call that liberation.
Indo-Med
The Eurasian-African conflict arc hasn’t seen many especially notable developments this past week. India and Pakistan aren’t shooting, Iran is still playing possum, and while the Yemenis did fire off one missile at Israel, their efforts these days are mostly to remind the world that they’re still around. Israel blew up a power plant in reply, because I’m sure it really mattered to the Houthi regime.
Israel’s Gaza policy is probably getting its strongest pushback to date right now, mostly from inside Israel. It’s fascinating how Israel is widely considered a democracy, yet polls showing the majority of Israelis wanting any deal that releases their hostages are basically ignored. Hence Israel’s protests evolving towards something more meaningful, maybe. Since Israel can and will find an excuse to renege on the deal later, it costs nothing to pause the fighting in Gaza - unless you’re Netanyahu, and need the war to continue to evade criminal prosecution. Ah, when regimes become too separated from their people…
Syria is still tense, but no worse than the week prior. Turkiye is looking bent on re-establishing a bit of its Ottoman-era holdings in Syria, which would pair pretty well from Erdogan’s perspective with the apparent winddown of the long fight against the Kurds. Turkiye comes out looking pretty darn strong in the region thanks to Moscow’s self-impalement in Ukraine, Europe’s need for military supplies neutralizing most of the standing human rights critiques levied at Turkiye, and holding Syria’s fate in it’s hands. Lebanon’s too, and possibly Iraq’s. Nukes for the Turks coming soon, maybe? Why not?
The Middle East is always just a stone’s throw away from a new level of hell. If the latest reported ceasefire proposal in Gaza actually pans out, Israel may turn back to Iran. Netanyahu might actually think he can be king for the rest of his life. Trump could well be thinking along the same lines. Never underestimate a narcissist.
Pacific
The Ukraine War has indirectly shattered the foundations of the peace that has held across most of the Pacific for many decades. North Korea’s expanded commitment of troops to support Moscow’s fight and growing military-industrial ties will make the Korean peninsula much more dangerous in the coming years.
Combat experience, even if personnel are badly used, is invaluable. North Korea now has a precious asset the South lacks, and while this shouldn’t be sufficient to offset Seoul’s material and technological superiority, it is unclear just how effectively South Korea’s government would respond to an attempt to breach the DMZ. If the North sent a brigade on a surprise incursion and they seized a string of mountain villages near the armistice line, would Trump back Seoul in its bid to repel them?
It isn’t possible to be certain any more, and that in and of itself is intensely destabilizing. Periods of relative order in the world system are predicated on a narrative that both reasonably reflects reality and makes resistance to the status quo appear futile, if sometimes commendable. If North Korea feels that its combat experience coincides well with the recent political instability in the South thanks to the ex-president declaring martial law on a pretext, a gamble is possible.
When the world system goes into collapse, the cause is apt to be as much people’s faith in its future being shaken as actual material factors. Even though everyone always kind of knew the USA was a hypocrite as a world power, belief that it was better than any alternative allowed leaders to pretend that history was over. Once shaken out of that pleasant dream, behavior is bound to change.
As I frequently point out, the refusal of D.C. to step up and fully back Ukraine has implications for every other global flashpoint. Taiwan of course is staring down a future of effective blockade with or without an American military defeat. The proximity of Taiwan to China creates a strong potential for Beijing to flood the skies and seas around Taiwan with cheap drones. It doesn’t matter how many America tries to forward deploy, China can always bring more to bear over time thanks to simple geography.
Invading Taiwan outright will almost certainly always be more trouble than it could possibly be worth when Beijing can cut Taiwan off from the world at will. The pacing threat defenders of Taiwan need to be planning for is not repelling an invasion in a one-off orgy of destruction, but shipping supplies under threat. That’s a prerequisite to any form of ground-based support anyway, and depends on the ability to periodically and temporarily roll back the enemy’s forces in a defined area.
Right now the Pacific is tranquil, despite the good people at Elmendorf-Richardson having to cleanse any place Putin touched. That filth should never have been allowed to land, and it’s a shame nobody had a drone in place to fly into the chief orc’s jet on takeoff. Those F-22s on the jet’s wing to make sure no light aircraft tried to make a play would have done nothing against a fiber-optic FPV drone flight inbound.
Concluding Comments
Tomorrow I’ll be back with the week’s operational update. Hope this sketch of the science of the international system was of some help understanding what’s happening to the world right now.
Though systems collapse is inevitable, the magnitude and felt impact are both functions of preparation. That’s one of the core tasks of effective governance, but broken incentives all too often cause people with power to under-invest. A necessary process is made so much worse thereby.
The world that Team Trump aims to build on the bones of the Postwar Order is one where anyone who want government services has to come through the right politician, where all rights are negotiable and certain people get more than others. At home or abroad, if a powerful leader wants something, they have a right to lay a claim. Small suffers what it must, big does what it will. Why else is this exact rhetoric used to tell Ukraine to surrender?
The dystopian future that brings about is worth fighting to destroy before it takes root. Like an invasive weed, tribal clientelism erodes and annihilates civic society in the classic sense. The antidote is simple, universal principles: a code that it’s easy to evaluate all other players by.
Willingness to respect established borders is one. If nothing else, it transforms most wars into skirmishes at the margins. Attempts to destroy a country because you don’t want to have to accept its people’s natural right to freedom? Everyone rises up against that as they can, or we all suffer in the long run.
Chain up your leaders, people, or Earth Forces will have to rise to get the job done. Hopefully one day we’ll drag Putin to the Hague, but if not - any means of eliminating him will do. And all who try to come after. It’s them or us. Self-defense is not a crime or a sin, but an ethical obligation of being alive.