Realpolitik Lessons: Correctly Wielding Power In The 21st Century
The shattering of the Postwar Order has forced every country to reconsider its position on the global stage. Once initiated, the process will not end until a natural settling point is reached.
Power is a dangerously misunderstood concept, mainly because it’s inherently difficult to measure without an all-out war. And as that constitutes a massive systems collapse, it’s rarely if ever ideal.
In the rawest sense, power in any context is the ability to effect change. This is true in either natural or social systems.
In a social sense, however, power gains an additional essential component in the power calculus: what people believe it is possible to accomplish. A country’s true power is a composite of its actual capability to do damage and what other countries think it can do. That second variable tend to be the most dynamic and dangerous, tending to promote the emergence of a second order system where interested parties fight to frame narratives about their power.
Putin’s power has been systematically magnified by Muscovite and Western interests alike. Ukraine’s astonishing fightback since 2022 has proven this beyond any reasonable doubt. So why are certain leaders, especially the J.D. Vance wing of Trump’s party, so adamant in arguing that Moscow cannot possibly lose?
Pure convenience. In global politics, facts are irrelevant to the people in charge of most countries. Their main concern is manipulating the country’s national story in such a way that they evade accountability for damaging its core interests and future.
American vice president J.D. Vance going on television the other day to insist that no, actually, Trump made Putin make concessions on Ukraine, is as ever a compelling case in point. This flat-out lie is part of an ongoing spin campaign intended to make it seem like abject non-concessions by J.D.’s idol in the Kremlin count as some kind of win for America. Putin telling Trump that he accepts that Ukraine gets to exist so long as it surrenders territory for peace isn’t any kind of progress, it’s the same damn thing Putin’s boring crew was constantly insisted to Joe Biden’s people.
Ah Vance, you really believe your followers are stupid, don’t you? Of course, you aren’t alone. A tired old comedian named Maher was recently insisting that California governor and lifetime presidential aspirant Gavin Newsom imitating Trump on social media is actually brilliant because you have to “out-dumb” the other side to reach American voters. Always nice when the mask the talking heads put on slips a bit and they out their knee-jerk elitism.
Gosh, I wonder why reputable polling outfits have shown for years that the majority of Americans distrust both sides? Gotta wonder how many of these big-name national personalities are undermining themselves by catering to audiences who want to believe that everyone with less money than them must be dumb.
Still, nobody disrespects their own alleged base across the entire Trump administration more than that traitor Vance. Perhaps I shouldn’t pick on America’s dear weak-chinned fobbit Marine journalist whiner-in-chief VP so much. Vice presidents are beyond irrelevant. But the twit routinely acts as a case study in narrative manipulation for political ends - it’s how he got famous in the first place. Once upon a time he was a darling of the very neoliberal liberals he claims to hate, telling Americans how rural folk in Appalachia are actually responsible for all their communities’ problems, not, you know, rapacious wealth extraction across generations by politically connected companies that left broken bodies, shattered landscapes, and gutted communities behind when they moved on to easier prey.
All countries are held together by a national narrative of some kind, and it’s a politician’s task to make people believe that their active support plays an essential part in the grand drama. A country’s essential narrative connects disparate threads of material fact and lived experience to make a moral claim about why the country deserves to exist. The story is just that - a story, and always contested. Who controls the story sets the standards by which the actions of the powerful are judged.
Anyone who ever noticed how the endless parade of heavily-marketed Disney remakes always sanitize anything that might be perceived as controversial by any major shareholder has seen the process in action. Disney is essentially the tobacco company of global entertainment, hooking children on narratives about the world designed to make them pliable consumers who then bring their children into the profit-driven fantasy world too. Its newness and visibly artificial nature makes it easier to observe the processes at work, but powerful countries are the same.
Countries are not immortal, fixed forces of nature: they arise to serve a purpose and will dissolve if it cannot be accomplished for too long. It may take a generation or two for the process of dissolution to work itself out, but like the movement of tectonic plates it happens one way or another. The only way any country can survive more than about a century is by constantly rebuilding itself around an essential narrative. In the case of countries like Germany and Japan, the shift away from past can be quite stark.
Every country eventually winds up with a regime dominated by political, social, and economic elites who do all they can to separate themselves from the people at large. Maintaining the mutually productive engine that a well-governed country should be is a constant balancing act between competing and interconnected economic and class interests. Democracy is a net good, scientifically speaking, because it forces groups within the regime to constantly fight for marginal improvements in their bargaining position through appealing to voters. This tends to prevent a tight-knit clique from dominating and ultimately destroying the country’s political, economic, and social systems.
A healthy country is like a healthy landscape: diverse, with self-driven agents locating and nestling in niches. When any single type of group dominates, it tends to take over completely, choking the very diversity that allowed it to emerge in the first place. The system erodes, then collapses, requiring renewal. Same principles that govern a garden also rule countries.
J.D. Vance and his ilk are like poisonous weeds that take over in a field whenever it’s been badly disturbed. They colonize any resource-bearing patch they can and establish a narrow monoculture which may look productive at first, but soon falls apart unless intensively maintained to the exclusion of all other concerns.
To protect themselves as they go about looting whatever isn’t firmly nailed down, this sort fights to control the country’s story to set standards of governance in such a way that anything they do is automatically patriotic, righteous, and beneficial to American power. In America, they learned the worst lesson of the War on Terror all too well: once you have control of the steering wheel, Americans will by and large shrug and let you do whatever you want so long as you tell a good story and don’t crash the economy too hard.
Consider that Americans spent over twenty years taking off their shoes at airports simply because of one Al Qaeda plot that failed. Is it any surprise that there are ICE agents walking around Home Depots across Blue States acting like literal TV Nazis telling people they should be grateful for ICE saving the country at Trump’s behest? Or that Trump is abusing the National Guard on the pretext of fighting crime to invade cities where crime rates have actually been on the decline for many years? Now American military assets are building up off the coast of Venezuela - another favorite Team Trump rhetorical target.
Creating an artificial reality big enough for one more voter than your enemy can turn out in the right locations is the key to power in today’s federal system. Both partisan teams are moving aggressively towards removing political competition from hard Blue or Red states through gerrymandering. Success will fuse the American social and political systems to an even higher degree, leading to the majority of voters being effectively disenfranchised at the federal level indefinitely. Welcome to taxation without representation 2.0 - and the “patriots” will stay mum so long as their side is in the driver’s seat.
If you want to understand how broken the USA is, ask yourself: what is each team always saying about the other side nowadays? That it represents an existential threat to America. This despite neither side, you know, amassing a nuclear arsenal and threatening the other with extinction. Normal, healthy battles over federal policy are impossible in this context.
Whatever a major player on one side says or does, the other interprets as an excuse to level up attempts to perpetually rig the game in their favor. Eventually escalation becomes part of what everyone calls self-defense. Americans are very fortunate that the personalities who screamed loudest about the end of democracy in 2024 didn’t actually mean it. It wouldn’t take much to convince a lot of diehard partisans to accept open warfare as a necessary evil under the circumstances.
Not talking about what’s happening out there right now doesn’t prevent the consequences. American politics is today an ongoing case study of how incentives at one layer of the game can produce fatally distorted outcomes at another, like a cell division going systematically wrong that emerges as metastatic cancer. American elites are fighting over control of a narrow national narrative while completely forgetting that the USA is a federation of semi-sovereign states with their own histories and natural interests. The federal government exists to serve everything below it, not the other way around.
It is only normal to imagine that the feds run everything mostly because the entertainment industry - American news outlets included - bakes that erroneous assumption into nearly every non-comedy. When I was a graduate student studying policy, nearly every other student adored the TV drama The West Wing. To them, this was how they imagined that federal politics could ever actually work. Even among the American professional class grand delusions prevail no less ridiculous than their natural enemies who prefer scripted wrestling spectacles.
This intentional choice in how to tell the story of America was made on behalf of Americans: nobody asked us, we were born into it. Our teachers repeat the storyline because if they don’t, they get accused of being unpatriotic, which to the average liberal is apparently like getting stabbed in the gut.
A natural result is an American social system where the language you use is a powerful sorting mechanism. That creates distinct cognitive realities that people are forced to conform with simply to get by in their day-to-day lives. Power increasingly revolves not around hard results, but who can con enough people into agreeing that 2+2=5 because that’s the way they’d like the world to be.
Policy under these conditions is bound to become irrational and self-destructive in the medium run - especially when the one thing all American leaders must agree on is the dangerous proposition that American military dominance is absolute. The harsh truth is that American defense leaders are caught in a trap: they have to project power everywhere, all the time, meaning that America’s might ultimately lacks true depth. America’s mighty military could sustain active operations on existing stocks in a major war for a matter of weeks before production shortfalls in multiple categories would bog the effort down.
That’s why Team Trump, despite pretending to be tough, is willing to use military might against Iran and probably Venezuela, but not Muscovite forces in occupied Ukraine. The powers-that-be have carefully constructed a narrative universe where Putin’s aggression against American allies gets a pass, but Venezuela and Mexico being unable to crush cartels justifies military action by so-called “non-interventionists” like Vance. They decided to portray any engagement between American and ruscist forces as the start of a nuclear conflict - another deliberate, accountability-evading choice. Team Biden insisting that any effort to protect any part of Ukrainian skies was impossible because the US would have to bomb Moscow’s air defenses and airfields was the same.
Meanwhile United States military is almost certainly in a position not unlike Putin’s in February of 2022: so high on its own mythology that simple, robust, distributed solutions deployed by determined fighters acted as an acid bath. What happened to orcs on the road to Kyiv will happen to Americans, probably within a few years.
Frankly, it already did, once: after the violence in Iraq’s civil war during the American-led occupation finally died down once Baghdad was mostly ethnically cleansed, the myth of the “Surge” was constructed to put a bow on a military disaster. The United States Army I served in two decades ago was on the brink of collapse, morale so bad in combat units that officers would get together in huddles when they didn’t think enlisted guys like me were listening to scheme on how they might get out their contracts before being stop-lossed and sent back to Baghdad for fifteen months.
The U.S. Army was broken by the strain of back-to-back deployments to wage a failed counterinsurgency that spawned the horrific Islamic State. It has never truly recovered, materially or in prestige. The old rule that each major branch, Army, Navy, and Air Force, would get roughly equal shares of the Pentagon budget quietly died, the Army losing ground to the point it’s basically trying to reinvent itself as the subordinate ground arm of the Air Force, kind of like the Marines are the Navy. A lot of officers realized that ground warfare is too messy and driven by tactical echelon units, and have preferred to revert to a doctrine revolving around showy set-piece division-level actions or highly managed special forces operations.
But the Army was forced to bear the brunt of the miserable failure of D.C. types to embrace a sensible interpretation of the American national narrative. The Air Force is begging for a comeuppance, while the Navy appears to be on a better trend but remains hampered by being required to keep battle groups and flotillas everywhere. Meanwhile, there’s no way the Navy could hope to swiftly repair battle damage to the fleet. The USA can lose a war at sea without a single ship being sunk, only hit in the wrong spot by a drone.
From top to bottom, American material power has been in relative decline for decades, and not for want of dollars - the Pentagon gets half or more of all American federal income tax revenues, no matter the actual security environment. Wanton abuse and criminal levels of neglect papered over by propaganda have created astonishing vulnerabilities. And no, Team Trump isn’t fixing a damned thing.
People like Vance and his buddy Hegseth try to get away with cosplaying as agents of change because of how easy it is to beat the prevailing standard. Latching onto facts that everyone without a flag rank knows but won’t admit to the public, this set strives to look like they’re uprooting corruption while ensuring that in the future their allies will be the only beneficiaries of any change. I don’t have much use for Elon Musk’s brand of corporate hack, but he was right about the Pentagon needing to get gutted.
Like flies infesting a corpse, the prevalence of Vance-Hegseth types is a marker of very terminal decline. What makes them so dangerous to the future of the USA and the Constitution is that it doesn’t matter what happens, they’ll spin any and all events into their storyline about being the only people capable of saving America. Their audience wants to believe, so they’re golden.
This is the wing of the Trump coalition that’s actively working to set up a situation whereby elections that don’t go their way can be nullified by loyalist factions in the federal bureaucracy. Sooner or later, they’ll talk themselves into an abuse of power that cracks the country apart.
Ambitious Democrats like California’s Gavin Newsom may have already surrendered, but someone is going to fill the rising demand for action commensurate with the Democrats’ rhetoric and certain steps taken by members of Team Trump that are hewing to a dangerous path. Newsom’s kind prefers meme wars over aggressive action to establish the actual limits of the Constitution when fully tested.
That, dear Gavin, means actively claiming and using powers justified under a state’s rights interpretation of the Constitution, forcing Trump to sue California in court, not the other way around. You do this by giving contravening orders to the National Guard. Topping from the bottom, to use some dirty slang you’ll just have to look up if you haven’t heard it before, is how way too Democrats believe they’re going to wind up in charge once Team Trump’s house of cards comes crashing down. Maybe - but only if the other side follows the law despite constantly saying it means whatever they want it to. We’ll see which Democratic governor develops some spine first, if any.
Still, what happens if Trump orders the National Guard to oversee voting in multiple swing states come 2028 or even 2026, closing polling sites in Democrat-leaning cities on a pretext? What happens if the fragile deal holding the Trump coalition together can only be sustained by going all-in on simply dispensing with free and fair elections?
These are the sorts of questions that get asked around the world when rhetoric rises to the level that is has in the USA, when the National Guard is called out willy-nilly and the occupant of the White House says he can order anyone sent to jail for a year if they burn an American flag. The mere asking of certain questions in a serious way automatically breaks the established order in ways that do not serve the cause of advancing American power. That Trump is creating material evidence of overt American weakness by acting as he does will not be missed by foreign leaders.
Foreign analysts cannot miss the gap between rhetoric and action in American politics these days, just as they can’t ignore the fact that Putin has successfully used his nuclear arsenal to bluff multiple American presidents into letting him assault Ukraine. Trump’s people are so accustomed to being able to appeal to multiple domestic audiences with tailored rhetoric that they don’t understand how quickly outsiders got wise to this game. European and Asian leaders flatter and cajole Trump the way they do because they understand what he’s really after: to be viewed as America’s big papa, the guy dispensing kindness and punishment as he sees fit.
As soon as he’s not paying attention, you do whatever is in your own best interests. If Trump gets mad, you can always blame everything on a misunderstanding caused by a subordinate. The subtext to every negotiation with Trump is always make me look good in front of my audience, and I’ll give you whatever concession you need to sell the deal. Hence most countries being fine with the tariff assault unleashed by D.C. - all are banking on making out like bandits while American taxpayers are left holding the bag. Again.
The global result of all this remains an ongoing deterioration of effective American power as its limits become apparent to adversaries and allies alike. Power is as much about what others think you can do with it as your true capabilities. For a very long time American leaders could bluff universal reach, bilaterally threatening most foreign countries with punishment when multilateral institutions run by America weren’t sufficiently binding. Now, and especially because of the negligent way D.C. has always approached the matter of Ukraine, the constraints on American leaders have never been more clear. The more they insist on how amazing they are, the harder they’re actually bluffing.
Even supposed wins like the attack on Iran’s nuclear program wind up backfiring. By attacking Iran when diplomacy was still underway, Trump sent a signal to the whole world that talks don’t really mean anything. Relying on Israeli support to pave the way for those magical American stealth bombers to use up the entire deep penetrating bomb arsenal at once does precious little to instill fear in any enemy not in reach of the Israeli Air Force - much of eastern Iran qualifies. The knee-jerk outrage on Team Trump’s part whenever anyone dares suggest that a single bombing raid might not be sufficient to fully eliminate or even long delay a committed effort to build nuclear bombs is also extremely telling.
The sole consistent message that has come out of D.C. for years has been that the American federal system is comprehensively driven by domestic partisan fights. Now, that means so long as an American military operation fits in with someone’s partisan narrative, any potential target is at risk: Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Iceland - anybody.
However, it is also unlikely that any American action can ever be sufficiently lasting or consequential to achieve what it intends to. American leaders can always be bluffed out of committing to a serious fight by demonstrating the capability to outlast the American attention span or inflict a sufficient level of damage on its interests.
Absent serious democratic reforms at home, fast, America will be unable to win a real war abroad. There is no other way, and probably no hope of reconciling the full diversity that defines the USA under a single all-powerful federal government.
Americans are not well-equipped to cope with a world where D.C. can’t yell and make everyone else jump. The steady Europeanization of the Ukraine War from the D.C. perspective is a direct function of how uncomfortable for the American national narrative it is to be unable to control Putin - hence numerous attempts by D.C. to throw Ukraine under the bus over the years.
Putin rules an empire that looks large on a map, but is really just a European confederation surrounded by colonies. 140 million people and an economy roughly ten percent the size of the USA’s belies the apparent amount of territory under Moscow’s control. Setting aside nuclear weapons, since they’re not true military instruments anyway, the delusion of seeing Moscow as too tough for the USA to fight with kinetic military force if required represents true malfeasance by American power players. Yet D.C. will fight for Taiwan or even Guam? Please.
It’s worth taking a look at the rough balance of global power as it presently stands. There’s little point in getting into the weeds of tank and jet inventories - a coarser resolution just focusing on wealth, capabilities, and focus of the top two power tiers will suffice.
The USA is home to a quarter of global gross domestic product despite housing less than five percent of the population. That’s impressive, and allows D.C. to field ten aircraft carrier battle groups and roughly as many army divisions and air force groupings of equivalent size and function, all of high quality in most respects. Even if the USA has no decent strategic leadership, an adversary has to assume that in a big enough fight all these American assets would eventually be brought to bear. Big and dumb can still do a lot of damage before the tide invariably turns.
America’s narrative on the global stage has been amply discussed. While technically the most powerful of the big three, China and the European Union are the two parties which can match the USA if pressed in their home area. While the Americans have more total combat power available, they’re also saddled by the need to be able to cover two fronts at once and cross wide oceans to reach hostile targets. Globally, this translates to an approximate balance now that the USA has proven so determined to alienate Europe and offend China.
The European Union isn’t a country in the traditional sense, especially since I’m including technical non-members like Norway and Ukraine, thanks to the nature of the alliance rooting so strongly in economic institutions. But for most American and Chinese citizens, more local affiliations dominate national ones most of the time anyway. Countries are abstract, like sports teams. The component parts may change, but the overarching narrative has a lineage and natural course.
As a military and economic power, the EU is the weakest of the three thanks to its tight ties to the USA. Yet even leaving Britain out of the equation, Europe can field a carrier battle group strength force roughly equivalent to one of the USA’s plus a lot more smaller ships and submarines. The Europeans collectively field something like twice as many division-strength formations as the USA and are almost equal in airpower. The EU couldn’t go abroad looking for a major fight with Beijing or D.C., but if one came to the EU it would prevail.
With better than a sixth of the global economy, Europe can hang with the USA or China, especially considering that European companies can enjoy lower labor costs than America by siting production in eastern Europe. On technical grounds, Europeans are equal or even superior to the Americans in most areas, and even more so the Chinese. Europe as a power is both hindered and much strengthened by the limits to what the EU can do and the lack of a strong narrative about itself other than as a safeguard of everyone’s rights. It’s an inward-focused economic collective that mostly leaves social and nearly all political affairs to member countries.
China, by contrast, is closely monitored by a regime that tolerates more dissent and democracy than foreign observers will usually admit but also draws very harsh lines whenever core interests are involved. A community can, in China, quite vigorously protest against a local level government decision that does it harm, citing laws set in Beijing. Environmental groups have long fought pollution by major companies, even government-backed ones.
Beijing holds China together by focusing all propaganda on the need for Chinese people to stay unified in the face of foreign threats. Badly abused by European colonial powers and then Japan, Beijing legitimized its rule after the Chinese Civil War by proclaiming itself the defender of all Chinese peoples.
Chinese authorities don’t actually want to dominate the world the way Americans imagine: that goes against the natural logic separating China from everything else. The national narrative that Beijing has invested in presents China as an aggrieved and recovering nation where federal control over so many aspects of life are justified in the name of building up national strength so it will never be humiliated by foreigners ever again. The more the USA talks about containing China, the more Beijing can tell its population that the true American objective is subjugation and renewed colonization.
That genuine but hardly unfounded paranoia forms the essential contours of Chinese state policy, China’s foreign relations designed to make countries as dependent as possible to preserve leverage for when it’s needed. Chinese investments in rare earths required by most electronics have probably done more to guarantee that America can’t fight for Taiwan than all its new ships and missiles.
In about a decade the Chinese have built up three carrier battle groups, and will reach six in another ten years. China’s army and air force are large and increasingly sophisticated, able to nearly match high-end US kit while maintaining a lot of mass capable of overwhelming through sheer numbers. The pacing challenge for Beijing’s forces is the ability to prevent American or allied forces from reaching Taiwan in a crisis. To ensure that the trade-dependent Chinese economy can’t be held hostage, China also has to build bases across the Indo-Med and do deals with unsavory powers in Central Asia. Preventing a US-EU alliance from overwhelming Chinese resistance demands that Moscow be propped up and hostile to Brussels and D.C.
The narratives driving the three top-tier powers are powerful shaping forces in the world order. America wants to be seen as dominant, Europe aims to promote trade, and China is diligently securing its interests while pursing select areas of superiority. But they’re far from the only important players, and each of these complex entities’ existence as a composite organism coping with serious internal rifts renders them no more powerful than many second-tier countries, unless they share a common frontier that makes military deployments simpler.
Second-tier powers include Putin’s Axis, the Anglosphere, India, Turkiye, Japan, and South Korea. The main criteria for inclusion in this tier is an industrial base capable of fielding battlefield-quality kit in quantity enough to sustain some level of operations abroad. In plainer terms, these are the powers that can almost certainly fend off a Putin-style assault by anyone without outside assistance. All either have access to nuclear weapons or
Putin’s axis includes his empire, Belarus, North Korea, and to a lesser extent Iran. Each has adopted an us against them view of international affairs which pairs well with being on D.C.’s naughty list. Well, parts of it - Team Trump has shown interest in reaching out to Belarus and North Korea. But most of the world knows this pack of jackals for what they are. Each country is dominated by a ruthless regime that uses violence to defend the colonized national narrative. External enemies must be sought to cover for one group in the society slowly consuming all the others. It’s civil war at home or empire abroad.
While Putin’s axis has a lot of residual industrial strength left over from better days, as an economic bloc it’s basically owned by China. All it truly has going for it is depth of mass backed by a few high-tech systems that threaten more than they actually accomplish when put to the test. Think of how many missiles Ukraine has absorbed while actively boosting its military potential. Europe, Japan, and South Korea are squarely in this set’s crosshairs. They also really hate the Anglosphere.
The Anglosphere might sound like a strange grouping, but if you look between the lines, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Canadian provinces, Australian states, and New Zealand form an economic and social collective around 150 million strong with a GDP of around $9 trillion - more than three times larger than Putin’s axis and a full half of China’s. While formally four countries - the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand - goods and services tend to flow more freely between them than the collective and Europe or even the USA, now. The narrative thread linking them, aside from a common ancestry and use of English, is the sense that they barely survived the Second World War through immense sacrifice and can’t let anything like it happen again.
Their combined military strength is much diluted by being scattered across the planet, yet in each theater are strong enough to play a focused role. Britain can maintain a carrier group anywhere in the world and often trains alongside allies. Even more closely bonded to the USA than Europe until very recently, America’s recent heel turn on Canada is resonating across all four of the supposedly close-knit Five Eyes intelligence grouping. Truth be told, about half of America would happily join the Anglosphere these days - and tariffs haven’t begun to really bite yet. The Vance-Hegseth types prefer to align with Putin’s axis, which is another destabilizing factor in global affairs. If the states ever split into neat partisan camps, things would get interesting.
India is an increasingly important geopolitical player thanks to its size and geographic location astride China’s maritime connections to Middle East oil producers. The Indian Navy fields as many aircraft carriers than the Anglosphere, which can at present only generate enough crews for one of the UK’s pair at a time. Though long highly reliant on Moscow for arms, India has been aggressively diversifying weapons sources, making simpler kit at home and working out production deals with companies abroad - French, mainly, since 2022. India’s democracy is in as much trouble as the USA’s, though, and India’s economic and military might remains low relative to its population, considering the disparity between India and China. Civil war in India is a distinct possibility in the next few years.
India has chosen to remain highly autonomous, positioning itself between Europe and Putin’s Axis. It has been something of a project for many Americans to pull India into an anti-China alliance with Australia and Japan often called the Quad, but that fad is dying down thanks to Trump’s antics. India and China do squabble over their long mountain border, but the main point of contention is China’s alliance with Pakistan. India is playing both sides in the Ukraine War, buying Moscow’s oil while producing ammunition for Ukraine. That suggests the same may happen in any confrontation between D.C. and Beijing, making the Quad a joke. India’s national narrative right now is an echo of the USA’s, only the dominance-speak is exclusively focused on Pakistan.
Turkiye is increasingly following India’s example, both in the character of its domestic politics as well as its autonomy on the global stage. Long assumed to be a candidate for closer integration with the EU and a member of NATO, domestic politics in Turkiye and Europe alike have pushed the timeline back to about the time the sun turns into a red giant. Turkiye is in the awkward position of being a Muslim-majority country in an alliance run mostly by countries that always find a way to excuse violence against Muslims while turning a blind eye to favored-ally Israel. These and other factors have provoked Turkiye into what many have described as a neo-Ottoman imperial policy even as Turkiye’s democracy has been badly dented by years of being run by Erdogan.
Turkiye is a leader in drone technology despite the global emphasis on Ukraine, builds warships for Ukraine and others, and produces a lot of artillery shells. The Turks have more or less taken the new regime in Syria under their wing and done a deal with major Kurdish groups to end the long insurgency in Turkiye. Where that leaves the Kurds in Iraq, Syria, and Iran is anyone’s guess. The key thing about Turkiye as a power is that the country’s narrative is nowadays almost exclusively worried about the instability that reigns across the Middle East and North Africa. But from Libya to Iran, Turkiye is a player.
South Korea bears a strong resemblance to Turkiye in the sense of being a non-Christian (mostly) country long dependent on good relations with a major security guarantor. I don’t think many Turks believe that Europe would protect them from Putin, just as South Koreans are rightly beginning to wonder if they can trust the USA to fight if Kim Jong Un tries something. Like Turkiye, the South Koreans have long since taken matters into their own hands, building a powerful military industrial base that has quietly replenished European arsenals with artillery shells and more, allowing European countries send their existing stockpiles to Ukraine.
Seoul is increasingly moving to mend fences with China while building close industrial partnerships with eastern Europe - a shrewd move considering that lower labor costs in Poland and Ukraine coupled to the remains of the old Soviet technological base makes them natural competitors. Instead, the South Koreans will have a stake in European companies that ought to mutually benefit both. Seoul is pursuing a similar strategy in the US. For South Korea, facing the very real prospect of a war with the North at any time, having allies outside of enemy missile range is extremely important. The South Korean military also happens to be robust - like Japan, there’s no need for American-style carrier battle groups. South Korea’s Navy handles surface, subsurface, and air defense warfare to a standard many American vessels probably can’t match.
Like South Korea, Japan has a global economic presence but mostly regional security concerns. Unlike Seoul, Tokyo’s military base is not structured for exports, though building equipment for partners like Australia is increasingly important. Japan’s activities are often said to be limited by its American-written Postwar constitution, but the better explanation for Japan’s relative international insularity is that this is good for business. Where South Korea national narrative emphasizes a country struggling to stay free and democratic, Japan’s is tied to giving the idea of a united Japanese nation purpose through economic means.
Japan thus emphasizes being seen as a reliable, ethical member of the global community. Hard power is seen as a necessary evil required to keep the Americans invested in shielding Japan from Moscow and Beijing, both of which could do Japan serious harm and would claim history as their justification in a bid to get away with it. Japan’s navy and missile defenses are especially potent, and though a major maritime power in its own right Japan has little need of large aircraft carriers when smaller ones will serve. Japan is already kind of an aircraft carrier as it is.
Obviously a full treatment of every country in the world is too much for a single post. Terming these six countries “second-tier” powers isn’t meant to be derogatory, but as a way to denote how the three top dogs are in fact composites of several second-tier powers themselves. Third-tier powers like Israel, Brazil, South Africa, Taiwan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Argentina, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand are all exceptionally important in their local area and even export arms abroad - they just can’t directly match the full weight a second tier or major power can bring to bear outside of their borders. And a top-tier power could, if it chose, defeat a third-tier in time in a one-on-one fight.
The purpose in describing this schema is to show how the international scene is far more complicated than most people are led to believe. National leaders invest in narratives for both domestic and foreign gain - and in the process, bind themselves to a particular path.
Each country looks at all the others, measures intentions against capabilities, and makes policy choices about how to posture itself for the future. Or rather, the regime attempting to run the show does. Precisely how the regime interacts with its national narrative predicts much about its behavior - aggressive powers give plenty of warning ahead of time.
American leaders running around insisting that everything they do is justified and marvelous does incredible damage to the actual foundations of American power, which require multiple foreign allies to ensure forward deployment of assets. American power has always been rooted in a rather incredible bluff: that a country with no prior history of effective engagement in global affairs would suddenly, after 1945, be able to rule the planet through fiat without becoming malevolent. People went along with it first out of necessity, then because it sort of worked. Until it didn’t.
Reonstructing the American national narrative using artificial means the way the majority of Team Trump seems bent on will sabotage American power forevermore. It takes months, even a few years, for the full impacts of certain levers being yanked to out, but they will. The level of disruption can be expected to match that of the 1930s.
Yet still, everything comes back to Ukraine. Were America the power its leaders insist, the USA would have gone to war with Putin over Ukraine long ago.
That anyone who dares suggests this is automatically outing themself as a nutjob in mainstream American discourse is another sign of how deep of a trap the USA is in. Nobody should want a war for any reason. But fear of being attacked makes an attack inevitable. Humans have a natural predatory instinct and hunt in packs. When a leader successfully convinces enough people to embrace cathartic action for the sake of feeling alive, it pays to be prepared for anything.
The best natural solution is open and transparent commitment to basic principles that you stick to no matter what. Only that builds the credibility which makes the right kind of people willing to work together towards a common goal.
The global balance of power - and with it, the stuff that everyone knows to be true about international affairs - is shifting with the wind. Networked drones are playing a critical role n changing what is possible at the tactical level - more on that tomorrow. This will slowly alter what is possible at the operational and even strategic levels - or at the very least, it will alter what leaders believe is possible. Testing through action is the only way to be sure - and many will try.
But always remember: it was the total American inability to live up to certain basic standards that opened the gates of hell. The Postwar Order died from neglect.
World System Brief: Week 34, 2025
With that, onto the weekly overview of important developments. No new wars to report, but hey - August isn’t over yet.
Atlantic
Zelensky reaffirmed Ukraine’s peace talks policy this week: there can be no negotiations on sovereignty, so Putin’s proposals as they stand are a non-starter. Contrary to J.D. Vance’s attempt to spin the outcome of Trump’s ceasefire/peace push, Trump pulled off a performance worthy of Joe Biden and achieved zilch. The Europeans and much of the Anglosphere - especially Canada - are already announcing record aid commitments.
It was pretty cool to see Canada’s prime minister in Kyiv for Ukraine’s independence day to act like American presidents should have going back as far as Obama. Canada may be experiencing something resembling a national rebirth right now as folks wake up to the fact that most American partisans see Canada as an extension of California. I’m not sure, if polled, how many Americans would correctly identify Oregon and Washington as states, not Canadian provinces.
As someone who grew up in rural California, I can attest to how deeply strange it is to listen to right wing types pretend that the entire state is downtown Oakland. They talk about Canada the same way. Word of warning.
Going back to Zelensky - the ongoing political intrigue between his camp and Zaluzhnyi’s continues to be amusing from an impartial outside perspective. To a degree I think both have been playing the western press from the beginning, but that doesn’t mean they’re not rivals, too.
In any case, this week Zaluzhnyi took care to send signals through sources that he is not planning to challenge Zelensky or criticize him while the war continues. Which is a nice way to keep on provoking the rumors constantly spread among his loyal fanbase that he’s going to walk down Bankova Street any second to kick that young whelp Zelensky out of his chair. However, by all appearances that isn’t happening until elections can be safely held. American efforts to feel out Zaluzhnyi and see if he could replace Zelensky that I warned about are now confirmed, and failed.
A poll out in Ukraine testing a Zelensky-Zaluzhnyi matchup does show a close race with a slight advantage to the incumbent, and though it’s dangerous to read too much into a single survey there was a notable trend showing Zaluzhnyi being unusually popular with older voters in Ukraine’s west. That matches up with my standing theory about the existence of a cohort in Ukraine that has effectively traded Muscovite propaganda for American. Zaluzhnyi got way, way better press than Syrskyi during his tenure as commander-in-chief, and one of the most oft-repeated criticisms of the guy is that he was born in russia.
Still, the existence of a group that hero-worships Zaluzhnyi does not mean that they have any influence on his behavior or that the guy trusts them or their motivations. Seems to me that he’s being very deliberate about playing the game as he should and working with Zelensky. Zelensky the other day mentioned being irritated with election speculation when they can’t be safely done anyway - my sense is that Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi have both noted forces trying to push a fight and agreed to quash them.
After the guns finally fall silent, there will be an election in Ukraine, and if Zelensky is wise he’ll actually endorse Zaluzhnyi and take a break from politics. Nothing worse for a brand than constant exposure - a mistake Americans like Trump just can’t stop making, though it always limits their appeal in the long run. And a direct fight immediately after the war would risk a nasty and needless fight over its management. Leave that for a panel of independent Ukrainian experts, plus maybe a sampling of international allies, I beg you all!
Speaking of political forecasts I should cop to being wrong about my prediction for Kamala Harris’ future. I had thought her becoming governor of California before trying again for the White House in 2036 was all but a lock. Apparently, though, she’s tired of the system and wants a break, so isn’t running for governor. Could mean that she’ll re-invent herself again and run for president in 2028, or do the wise thing and fade out for a cycle or two. And fire or execute every D.C. insider who managed to mash otherwise decent raw material for a political candidate into Biden’s see, I’m not racist or sexist - now go handle the border crisis with no power or authority sidekick.
But in predictions that couldn’t have been more spot-on, California governor and definite 2028 contender Gavin Newsom is doing all he can to troll Trump online while not actually fighting him where and how it matters. Democrats will be Democrats, I guess. Leave it to South Park to lead the effing resistance the second time around. They’re better at it, and get as much physically done.
Anyway, moving away from symbolic politics to the kinetic, the Trump Administration took another step towards making the war on drugs a real shooting conflict by deploying Atlantic assets off Venezuela. Not that this itself is likely to escalate, but a pattern of D.C. acting like Confederate leaders aimed to had they won their independence - colonizing and enslaving central America - is developing. It would be just about right for D.C. to target cartels and wind up provoking a massive terrorist attack. The objective: draw the US into a war that inflames local people and collapses the national regime. Armed groups love situations like that; even if they draw their share of attacks, in the confusion rivals do as well.
Now would be an excellent time for the United States Armed Forces to have an officer class trained to sit on their hands when policy goes rogue, partisan hacks exploiting bureaucratic gaps to get away with activities that actively and provably undermine national security. I was just following orders was not accepted at Nuremburg for a reason. Sucks to be the professional placed in such a wretched ethical situation, but that’s one of the hazards of the job. Just as every soldier has an obligation to refuse an order to shoot anyone who demonstrably poses no threat, so are all who wear the uniform required to stand down when they suspect their orders are not lawful.
Yet fealty to this must begin at the top: just as most ordinary German soldiers, even members of the Waffen-SS, were essentially pardoned so long as they hadn’t directly committed a crime, their generals received far less lax punishment. As it should be. The real culprits in the abject surrender of the supposedly apolitical military to partisan concerns using meaningless woke stuff as an excuse are the officers who could resign, but don’t. If the military is paralyzed by a mass resignation, that’s the sort of shock the American media can’t easily ignore or play down.
Odds of that happening? Below zero. I’m just pointing out the inconsistencies in the American national narrative that stand to kill the thing dead.
As for Europe, Trump’s initial insistence that peace talks could happen in days have slipped, through Vance, to about six months. Trump appears to be distancing himself again while catering to both sides - Ukraine is getting new long-range weapons, but Vance can go on TV pretending that Ukraine would be getting a win by surrendering to Putin now. Works for me, even if the USA winds up looking duplicitous and unreliable. That ship sailed, got hit by an iceberg, and went down with all hands.
The Europeans aren’t kidding around, and even if a new American missile of unknown quality is supposed to arrive in Ukraine around mid-October to up-arm Kyiv’s Vipers, it’s stuff Ukraine is producing with European money that has me intrigued. As I’ll get into tomorrow, the Flamingo project and any related systems that emerge at scale this fall really can alter the course of the war - though not without a successful ground campaign, I’m afraid.
Indo-Med
Israel’s steady march to annexing the whole Gaza Strip has led to a new round of intensive airstrikes in what amounts to a natural experiment in how much misery a single group of human beings can tolerate. Yet Hamas isn’t going down without a room and tunnel clearing operation. What a surprise.
The Israelis and Houthis exchanged some more missile fire, so that relationship is holding steady. No new major events out of Syria aside from Israeli troops taking a few more Syrian heights near Golan: Israel seems apt to let that front simmer while turning to the final demolition of Gaza and eviction of surviving residents to Syria or Libya. Putin’s private jet was spotted in Tel Aviv - more backchannel chats between his people and Netanyahu, no doubt. What will Putin demand in exchange for Palestinians being shipped to the half of Libya controlled by Moscow-backed warlord Haftar?
How many Palestinians will wind up diverted to replenish Muscovite ranks under some scheme? In Putin’s russia, hatred of ethnic minorities matches or exceeds anything you’ll find in the deepest darkest corners of the old South. Push comes to shove, the only true russian is someone from Moscow or St. Petersburg. Everyone else is a useful sucker. Not my view, just what you get from the sort of people who hang around Putin.
India-Pakistan hasn’t blown up again yet, and it’s always good to see India junking old Muscovite gear for French stuff, even if one or more Rafales did get popped a few months back. Seems all but guaranteed that Pakistan will orient even more towards Beijing as time goes by. A possible addition to the map above would be a subcategory showing China’s partners, a couple of which (Myanmar) look almost like pure puppets.
And Iran is still tending its wounds and importing new air defense gear ahead of the next round of exchanges with Israel. Slowly evidence has emerged proving that Iranian missiles did score some serious hits in Israel that the Israeli authorities covered up as long as they could. Iran also reportedly still maintains the bulk of its arsenal, not using any of the newer weapons hidden in underground missile complexes. Within a year Israel will be mowing the grass again.
Pacific
It’s been fairly quiet out here on the Pacific side of the world, though wildfire season is only getting started. Moscow has been making a point of running air patrols off Alaska lately in a clear message to D.C. Putin is really rubbing Trump’s nose in it after a summit that predictably went entirely Putin’s way.
What’s kind of sad about Trump is that for all his flaws, with just a few alterations in strategy he could actually accomplish a lot. He’s in a unique position where having battered down all opposition - set aside how much of it was symbolic - he could pivot any direction he chooses. The guy could recognize that his legacy would be best served by maximizing the reach of his power by taking down the most vulnerable opponent: Putin.
If Putin or any of the clowns around him signal in any way that they are ready to use nuclear weapons in any situation short of NATO tanks rolling into Red Square, you know they’re on the run. That doesn’t mean you call their bluffs in public, you simply do all that is necessary to demonstrate just how badly a fight would actually go if you wanted the one Muscovite propaganda alleges. The orcs run rampant when they don’t believe they’ll get smacked down.
For Trump to actually pull off the foreign policy reforms he wants, bombing Iran is the exact wrong move to make. Sinking or seizing every Muscovite shadow tanker would be make an infinitely stronger statement. Until Putin is asking himself every day what Trump might do to him next, he’s not liable to reconsider his policy. Right now the fact that Putin would have to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test to warn that he finally wasn’t bluffing acts as a perfect security blanket. Until that happens - and if it does, it’s a sign of conventional military defeat - anyone can do anything they want to Moscow without fear of the ultimate sanction.
And if the USA won’t lead, then some other country should. Plenty have the capabilities required to adopt Ukrainian drone techniques or act as a cover base for a Ukrainian force. No Muscovite asset should have refuge, not even the Pacific Fleet. Japanese territories remain under Muscovite occupation, and if Japan were to begin testing Moscow’s defenses in a serious way, who could blame them? South Korea is already effectively at war with Moscow - Seoul just doesn’t know it yet. But gaining a temporary edge through absorbing losses fighting Ukraine could tip Kim Jong Un into rolling the dice at any time.
Would America risk a nuclear war to stop him? And if the question bears asking, hasn’t the USA already ceded the better part of its former power?
It’s undoubtedly impressive that the USA can maintain a country’s worth of combat power in the Atlantic, Indo-Med, and Pacific simultaneously. But American ability to encircle Eurasia with sovereign might belies the fact that severe damage to just one aircraft carrier deployed or in port will render the schedule unsustainable. American air bases are heavily defended nodes, to be sure, but there are only so may scattered around the globe. And if they can be paralyzed by a nonstop influx of small drones, their utility is limited.
This is why it’s so important for American leaders to be intelligent and deliberate about every aspect of using their power. America was perceived as a superpower with only one possible rival until Vietnam - after that was when the true Cold War began, D.C. entering a strategic crouch while it recovered from the humiliation of losing tens of thousands of personnel to prop up a friendly dictatorship. The impact of this defeat on the national narrative that was constructed to hold Postwar America together led directly to many of the maladaptive problems afflicting America today.
In the Pacific, China has but to lay a trap, and the USA could all too easily join Moscow on the downward spiral towards a lower tier of power. Of course, if Pacific America’s fifty million people and $6 trillion economy joined the rest of the Anglosphere, we’d be able to hold our own against China with South Korea and Japan on our side.
Food for thought, if incredibly unlikely to matter. Though stranger things have happened in the history of the world.
Concluding Comments
Failure to properly understand power is endemic in America. Likely - and the same is true of geography and history - because to assess it rationally begs some very hard questions about assumptions driving America’s story.
Americans are prone to see power as being able to control others, but this is a thin and temporary form of its potential. Far better is to create webs of relation that allow for change, but tend to restricts its pace. That’s how you wield national power in the Network Age. Directly confronting a declared enemy may make people in a country feel like they’re all participating in a heroic epic, but soon enough the differences in how each person experiences the thing rise up.
Winning a war requires thousands or millions of individuals to sacrifice a part of themselves that they can never get back. Keeping them organized and serving a common purpose is no small task. Historically, scientists have treated humans more or less like cattle, emphasizing active control and direct manipulation. But as Ukrainians have proven, coercive power breaks down faster than bonds forged by common interest. Moscow proves every day that it refuses to accept the existence of Ukraine as a separate country. Ukrainians are forced to fight for the right to define themselves, necessitating some to give up any right to enjoy life at all and hundreds of thousands of others to change forever.
This isn’t a people that’s going to lay down arms and retreat because some self-important fool in D.C. decided that’s what’s best for the world. The only way to actually end the Ukraine war is to win it on Ukraine’s terms. Otherwise it will go on and on.
And I’ll keep on having to evaluate an increasingly unstable front line based on the sample of everything that’s happening open source researchers provide. That, coming up next.