The Iran Conflict of 2026 has had a few interesting twists and turns in recent weeks, which may or may not reveal an underlying trend in the transmogrification of US financial, technological and ideological empire:

1. US base strikes diminished in volume but critical assets (AWACS) were struck in a sufficiently precise manner to indicate satellite assistance from China or Russia

2. Through Pakistani mediation, Iran agreed to a ceasefire with the expectation that Hezbollah would also be included. When this proved not the case, it showed the Iran does in fact view Hezbollah as its proxy in its hostility towards Israel while diminishing the relative deniability of this practice, which they have historically leaned on to pursue their various asymmetric warfare strategies.

3. The Strait of Hormuz was to be opened, then not opened fast enough, then the US implemented a dueling blockade, which drew increased encouragement from China to ensure the Strait is in fact opened

4. As initial negotiations failed, the US postured a stance towards “economic warfare” that would continue to cripple Iran’s already fragile economy

5. The US is attempting to buy out Iran’s current stockpile of enriched uranium in order to achieve it’s pre-existing nonproliferation objective, mostly defined by “partners” in Israel

6. 40 of 47 Democrat senators voted to suspend arms sales to Israel. While this does not change actual policy change yet, it represents a clear turning point in the nature of US-Israel relations.

7. The US is the primary global exporter of oil and natural gas for the forthcoming months, if not longer.

8. The US has now isolated China prior to Xi and Trump’s Summit, currently scheduled for May.

The path of this conflict is so meandering that it is difficult to say that, in the vein of a true Trump believer, “this was the plan all along”. However it matches with the broad assumption of this previous article that the US’ aggressive actions effectively came with no downside risk. The United States is already the global primary exporter of advanced technology, has seen its reserve currency status diluted over decades and not just in recent years, and has persistent domestic social unrest due primarily to the wealth inequality produced by its pre-eminent position in the global economic system. It cannot any longer remain “American” and maintain its position of global hegemon, and so when faced with either its identity or its livelihood, it sees no problem risking both to get what it wants.

This is not just the attitude of the institutional structure, but also the means by which most Americans have viewed the conflict since its beginning - even though they question the acts involved, they are hardly tearing down the barricades to prevent the state from addressing themselves against a 5-decade antagonist to their foreign policy aims and general well-being. Panicans and collapsitarians (Douglas Mcgregor, John Mearsheimer anyone?) have continually predicted doom since the beginning of this conflict and yet here we are, on the precipice of it wrapping up, all major goals achieved (including regime change, as there is in fact a fundamentally regime in place if a deal does reach concurrence ) - first by military means and then by economic and diplomatic ones - with a government that effectively questioned the policy only on the margins.

Israel has become a noose around Trump’s neck, and what have the Democrats done for him? Opened up the discourse to reset relations, all while Trump provides the deep state its most meaningful desires in Iran and recenters the global energy system even more around US natural gas. There is simply no losing because there is no winning either, it is merely a continuation of pre-existing advantages in differing forms - old wine in new bottles, but still the same bottles from which “drunkards, fools and the United States of America” indulge (to paraphrase Chancellor Bismarck).

Furthermore, the future pursuit of asymmetric, fifth-generation warfare against the United States will only more directly invite direct confrontation, where targeted air power, sanctions (both primary and secondary) and the leveraging of continually higher echelons of technology will only drive further pre-eminence for the United States, but by an empire of “negation”. That is to say: no further intervention is required, only the proactive discouragement of policy which the US establishment dislikes.

And by contrast, what do they like? The natural progression of commerce, science and technology, because within the pre-existing transnational technocapitalist superstate, it is already wholly overweight to their interest.

So in the end, all the outcomes of this conflict, minus the lives and materiel lost, are “win-win-win, win-win-win, win-win, win-win”. Yes, it is an oppressive global economic system which produces alienation and destroys human freedom at the drop of the hat. But what’s the alternative, communism??

As of this writing, it is now 20 days since the United States and Israel attacked Iran and kicked off a protracted, standoff-weapons-driven conflict that has now turned primarily to the destruction of energy production and transmission, as well as the otherwise broad discouragement of travel to the Middle East (a non-irregular occurrence).

The Trump Administration, in attacking Iran, has exhibited the same general tendency it has in most of its foreign policy decision-making - that is to say that in domains where it has complete discretion and is unshackled by Congress (as has been the case for the Imperial Presidency for nearly 80 years now), Trump and his advisors opt for scenarios that present asymmetric upside: aggressive control of Greenland, deposing Maduro while maintaining the regime itself, aggressive tariffs whether they are legal or not, and opportunistic multilateralism (board of Peace, Gaza reinvestment and so on) that promotes the general acquisitiveness of the US establishment while not paying much attention to norms, rules or new first principles as established.

In attacking Iran - whether it was truly motivated by an attempt to pre-empt Israel (as Marco Rubio indicated) or not - the Trump administration is extending it’s desire to reorganize global energy production around an exclusively US-driven framework while playing both sides of the actual price of energy.

If Iran were to acquiesce to US coercion and bring forward a more liberal, moderate regime focused on economic integration, energy prices would go down and global growth would continue to accelerate.

If Iran resists and protests - causing disruption by targeting oil and LNG facilities in the Gulf States, not simply trying to respond directly at Israel - the cost of energy skyrockets and that facilitates further US shale exploitation and greater export volume from the United States, and perhaps also gives enough economic incentive to US oil conglomerates to meaningfully redevelop Venezuela and further drive US control and capacity up while the rest of the world’s energy capacity could enter a chaotic and possibly terminal decline.

There are moments in the history of the United States which help define its movement forward as a political, cultural and economic force. The Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Yalta Conference - these are all milestones on a road of seemingly continuous ascension. It is hard to say that whatever is happening now actually matches these events, but in a historical sequence, they are fairly evenly spaced. The prospect of the United States cornering the global energy supply - not only to curb China, but to bring Europe and other casual allies to heel - can equate to a new founding moment that will embolden the state with more absolute control, more opportunity to “create its own reality”, to borrow a phrase from Karl Rove, on a global scale that has never previously existed.

This pursuit of asymmetric upside means that no one nation can stop it, and no assemblage of “middle powers” is likely to assuage it. There perhaps only remains a “Russian exception”, by way of their nuclear deterrent, developed when they themselves were a superpower, in some ways facilitated only by lend-lease from the United States. Other states remain, but their standard of living is too dependent on the United States as the center of the global economic system - whether that is China, India, Europe, Pakistan or even North Korea by extension of the Chinese system.

In this context, it is important to remember the other half of Rubio’s rationalization, which cited the extensive missile capacity of Iran, but limited launcher capacity, while a surprise campaign could denude their launch capability no matter their actual missile inventory. Waiting to the last possible moment before Iran developed a strategic advantage is another sign of hyperpower - simply put, when an adversary is close to developing a capability you mistrust, you not only remove that capability, but also their ability to furnish such capabilities in the future. Even if Iran maintains launchers, they can be fewer, further between, and more easy to identify when positioned for launch even as they are driven more deeply underground.

At this time, even China is primarily interested in second-strike nuclear capability. They are not strategically positioned to pursue conflict, despite all their progress, and hence seek only to avoid it by appearing strong but feigning weakness when conflict comes about. They are, like the Europeans, unable to gather the physical capability or political will to involve themselves in the current Middle East conflict, despite having their energy sorer for the taking there too.

The United States will only benefit from troops on the ground for the sake of proving it still maintains military preeminence and no longer lacks the post-GWOT fear to act - same as was the case for “Vietnam Syndrome” or the comfort that overtook the nation in the Post-WWII period. No other nation on Earth fights out of a willingness to prove inconvenient to its enemies, the only nations that fight seem to be those whose survival are at risk, and even in those cases, much of the populace (including Iran’s) seems to retain a “come what may” attitude towards the downside.

Prior to the development of more robust ocean-going commerce in the late 15th century, Europe was typified by medieval fiefdoms, lords, knights, kinship bonds and clans, church tribute, and the proliferation of feasts and local festivals which maintained a strong social fabric to the exclusion of what was otherwise considered slow economic development - particularly in the wake of the Black Plague.

It was in part the disruption of the Plague which led to innovations in agricultural methods, increases in total productivity and the greater investment of time in artisanal trades an the improvement of manufactured goods - so much so that Europe did become the research lab for innovations like gunpowder, printing and other technologies from the East that hadn’t found suitable mechanics for growth in their regions of origin.

So in the process of exploring the world - primarily for the development of commerce - we would understand that Europe has become it’s “not self” (to borrow a Joycean phrase). This is the kind of not self, or not feeling thyself, which typifies the malaise, the slow reproduction, the confrontation with global multiculturalism, and the guilt over the history of the slave trade, colonization, neocolonialism, various total wars and so on, which has led a genus of the species to go from “not self” to perhaps “not exist at all”.

What is it, perhaps, in the “seeds of this history”, that can restore a sense of vitality? A basis of common understanding and a willingness to exchange again on equal, confident footing with the outside world? Ultimately these are forms of free association. Historically these may be guilds or civic societies, and in many ways the modern corporation is a structural descendent of the guilds of old, but now the corporation has consumed so much of the natural life of man that the associations it offers don’t enrich life - one doesn’t even see “company towns” anymore, they’re simply too expensive to support, and people know as soon as it gets too costly, the jobs would be shipped overseas forthwith.

Corporations at one time invested in their workforces because they needed a growing-yet-captive labor supply. This problematization meant that if they could capture their labor force with enough incentives, they could guarantee the production needed to meet the growing global demand that was found in the postwar “Golden Age of Capitalism”. We know that by the procession of the division of labor, guilds expanded to corporations and eventually overseas trade colonies emerged, which with time formed the need for new governments and colonial administration, but now we are attending the unwinding of this expansion, because the global population is expected to peak in the next 30-40 years, and even with its peaking, it’s unlikely that it will command ordinately greater capital intensity than what is already the case today (primarily limited by credible institutional development in the global south).

So where does western society go? Is it simply a low tax, low regulation regime which will drive a return to the private forms of association that seem to create greater dynamism and productivity? The answer is probably yes, but it is also in denying the “quest for security” that typifies the unwillingness to engage in meaningful work that we will perhaps outgrow the doldrums of the late information age, and see greater industrial expansion, the settling of new lands (including those beyond the atmosphere) and even wars of conquest and expansion - rather than simply strategic incompatibility.

It is not to say that these are good things, but based on the malaise and passivity we see today, is there possibly a better means to channel our energy overall? The social consequences of this are simple: enclave politics, but one that doesn’t necessarily come in direct conflict with multiculturalism - at least as affluent liberals would have it. The development of US suburbs prefigured this in the popular imagination by offering upwardly mobile, previously working class professionals and white-collar works the ability to find “clean, safe, spacious, affordable” accommodations, and in many cases that led the generations which followed to pursue “urbanism and walkable cities”, which by liberal definitions of the past may be a euphemistic vanguard for fascism.

The Great Recession led to the impoverishment of US suburbs, and in many ways that increased urbanism of the rich has contributed to lower birth rates (by virtue of there being less empty space to fill with children). With that in mind, enclave politics will probably generate greater prodigiousness in exurbs, homestead regions, or urban communal organizations (there would require more ethnic homogeneity than any to be sustained). Government policy should “do no harm” to these contexts if it wishes to maintain the vitality of these initiatives, lest like the suburbs, the perverse incentives and tax benefits created led to “glut” and the subsequent impoverishment we see today.

About 12 minutes into his “rousing” speech at the Munich Security Conference last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (assuredly a holder of many other titles and roles) said outright the Europe and the United States should remain allied for particularly mercantilist ends: developing space commerce, maintaining western mineral supply chains, and supporting each other in gaining market access to the growing consumer base of the global south.

Further on in his speech, Rubio uses the aphorism of how the concept of cowboys actually comes from Spain - much as it is identified as American. The “Vaqueros” were horseback cattle drivers of old who took methods developed there and brought them to the new world, but so many were of mixed origin - African, indigenous, Caribbean, mestizo, and yes also eventually Scotch-Irish.

It is an interesting historical rhyme that the son of Cuban emigres would find himself in Germany speaking about the need for vitality to return to the West, and indeed presenting many thinly veiled arguments for the West to return to a sort of mercantilist imperialism of old in order to propel itself into the future. Indeed, if one were to extend his perspective on a much more “scaled” timeframe, we would find a sort of subtle unity among people of European origin in that most ancestry depends on the spread of Yamnaya peoples, the mingling of eastern and western steppe herders, the taming of horses and the standardization of dairy as a large portion of the diet. Indeed, in the era of crusades and conquests, these advantages often played out favorably for Europeans - knights and explorers were on average taller, stronger, fitter and more aggressive than their Central Asian, Arab and North African counterparts, which led (following a great deal of consumptive commerce, one might note) to the expansion of European influence following the era of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the reorganization of European life around the sort of industrial rationalism with which it is so strongly identified today.

And yet, that sort of transition is also what has led to the exhaustion of “European Races”, the degradation of the bonds of community, of mutual trust, of feast days and of social reciprocity in favor of markets have ultimately led the West to its “business model” of today: constant importation of new demographics and working classes, eager to achieve some sort of dream that was restricted to the successful workers of previous generations, but ultimately finding themselves in a new land where a deep alienation persists as to the nature of one’s own cultural, national and ethnic identity.

Easily enough, the analgesic for this historically has been the concept of “rugged individualism” or “the frontier”. Indeed, the closing of the frontier (dated to 1890) is what historian Frederick Jackson Turner identified in 1893 as a signal of the declining vitalism of the West. While technology and culture have continued to evolve, the strong motivation, the ambition, the ruthlessness which so markedly defined “European Man” (again in quotes, you see) between 1450 and 1850 also gives way to the need for stability, for familiarity, for community - marked in no little symbolism by the rise of socialism and social democratic movements in those same countries that exhausted themselves on the pyre of imperialism in the centuries before.

Again we are talking about Cowboys in order to convince ourselves of Western Vitalism, but the truth is the west has given up. Indeed Rubio represents a sort of newcomer class to the “West” - previously isolated Latinos who know make up a significant component of both US demography and the more aggressive end of the Republican party - and have returned to Europe to lecture them (more gently this time) on their values.

Just like Kennedy represented the rise of Irish Americans, with his team practicing plenty of the dirty tricks necessary for him to win. He too was forced to buy into the pre-existing “Anglo-Saxon” power structure, and save for the exception of the military industrial complex that probably killed him, his fresh blood did add vitalism to a broader movement, but the aftermath only brought on more decay.

Apocryphally, there are Twitter Race Science™ stories of those in developing nations demanding a sort of recolonization, whether in South Africa or elsewhere, because “white people managed things better”. Unfortunately for both parties, this is an imaginary claim - those white people are long gone, and they were only a measly portion of them to begin with! The decline of a natural aristocracy leads to decay and feeble attempts at revanchism like what Secretary Rubio was practicing last week, and while they may sustain nations in the short run, in the long run, the inevitable remains. Perhaps centuries from now, a new leadership class will arise to reintroduce vitality, but it certainly will be somewhere else on earth, and they certainly won’t be talking so much about cowboys.

The recent Super Bowl halftime performance by Bad Bunny revealed some interesting contradictions in the modern conservative political narrative around demographic change, integration, and the nature of American Empire. These could be named thricely: 1) demographic expansion in the United States leads to cultural interchange, which 2) then drives greater co-identification within a broader political sphere and eventually serves to 3) reinforce the core over the periphery, because the core is still seen as the “center of the action”, even as the periphery is increasingly recognized as relevant to the “discourse in the core”.

It is an interesting rehash, thus, of the Monroe Doctrine, that Bad Bunny effectively waving the flag of every North American country and saying “we are all American” while in the United States at a United States sporting event nudges at a political realignment that essentially puts conservatives in control - if they were to welcome it. The modern media environment is such that whatever gets clicks, engagements, attention is what has currency, and the pop culture of the past (or “segments” of it like Kid Rock that were never tremendously popular to begin with) simply fade into irrelevance as the great mass of men take control and drive the discourse forward.

This is to say: there is no longer any such thing as “discernment” in the cultural sense. The tides of history have swept away race, class, ethnic and social distinctions in order to create an “aggregocracy”: not a democracy in which the people exercise popular sovereignty in any meaningful way, but where society has reached such a tense, advanced state of development and equilibrium that nobody is willing to really upset the apple cart, which implies that people are getting enough of what they want most of the time that there is no purpose to really be preoccupied with social change - let the tides of change come as they will.

While this seems like an appropriate attitude in the United States, which has consistently outperformed other advanced countries (not counting China here) primarily because of the reach of 1) the reach of its corporate entities, 2) the laxity of its tax structure and 3) the ability to incorporate its vassal states in expansive supply chains and economies of scale that are simply not as attainable for countries like France, Germany, Australia or the “middle powers” that would presume to stand up to Donald Trump (as Mark Carney might have it, at least).

It is in this implicit incorporation of vassal states that the United States continues to see expansion in the future, merely by leveraging an increasingly distributed division of labor - even as efforts to re-shore production persist - should the wealth of this particular nation continue to expand.

And yet, this relative placitude in its populace also makes up the same conditions within prerevolutionary France or Weimar Germany - a sort of willingness to let bygones be bygones until some precipitating event introduces a new level of chaos and destitution, and ultimately leads to the accession of a “strongman” who promises to “set things right” and “restore the nation” to its former glory.

Many would say that Trump is this figure, but he fails to actively incorporate the kind of stakeholders he’s looking for in a new social contract, and constantly accepts the tradeoffs imposed on him by the national security state (whether in the Ukraine or Israel) while executing a sort of fascist performance theatre that he is personally in no particular manner really attached to (hence ICE’s recent exit from Minnesota).

Ultimately, Trump would love to be a “lib” president in that his deepest, darkest desire seems to be for popularity (his dalliances with Jeffrey Epstein notwithstanding). In this context, he would gladly sacrifice 5 or 10% of his “white” vote in order to gain 15 or 20% with Latinos and the concomitant popularity and acclaim that go with.

From the perspective of an American Empire that may or may not be seeking more active strategic conflict with China, achieving a state of oversupply with regards to manpower (primarily from Latin American countries and principalities) would be the first step to buffeting the otherwise still replete industrial and military logistics capacity of the United States (on top of the persistently low oil prices that Trump is also doing his part to architect).

At this stage, the Trump administration is reformulating the American Empire to be better aligned to withstand the vexations of a new pole to the East, and whether Trump is getting intentional or unintentional assists from American pop culture doesn’t matter as much as whether the cultural output of this period is built simply for snacking, for passive consumption, for droll chicanery, or whether it will actually add to the “American pop canon” in such a manner that it becomes recognizably and identifiably American, or whether it simply drives the United States further down the road of ethnic balkanization and regionalization from within.

Fixed capital and Human Capital must coexist to survive - namely, if a nation develops sufficient fixed capital, it will inevitably begin to import labor in conditions where human capital does not sustain the standard of living or expectations set forth by the population as a whole.

In the United States as a whole, the trend against mass immigration - rapid ICE protests notwithstanding - is 60 or 70 years in the making, at least since the Hart-Cellar Act. The narrative of the United States being a “Nation of Immigrants” originated in part from John F. Kennedy writing on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League, but the phrase has stuck on liberal lips and conservative craws as a means to define the United States as a country formed by the assent to the conceits of the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with… well, well, you know the thing”).

While the pendulum swings back and forth, the history of United States and western societies more generally as “open” and “free” is based firstly on honor-bound clan balances of power and secondly on the ability to import and integrate higher-value-added sources of labor. This is true all the way back to antiquity, where the aggregation of new stakeholders - whether it be in Athens or Rome - led to a more advanced political economy than neighboring states, and ultimately drove a virtuous cycle that enabled greater political autonomy, the defeat and subordination of a variety of enemies, and the subsequent incorporation of those enemies into a broader, more specialization-driven economic and trade system.

The downside of this cycle is the decline of the standard of living for a great many of the people who constitute the early “core” of an imperial structure, while eventually those on the “periphery” (to borrow framing from Immanuel Wallerstein) see it as more advantageous to participate in the core’s economic system and gain higher marginal benefits as a result.

This could potentially explain why it is actually many newcomer populations to the United States, mostly Latinos, who constitute the largest incremental vote gains for the “anti-immigration” side of the aisle - the Republicans. These voters, although not a majority of their own demographic, are fighting harder to maintain the marginal utility of a system which they are new to and which they still find benefits them sufficiently to fight in order to keep others out. It is no small coincidence that nearly 30% of ICE agents and 50% of Border Patrol agents in the United States are Latino. The reasons for this may vary, but even if it is simply because they want to hold down a job, the benefits of empire are sufficient for them to “turn their back on their kin” (a blood and soil liberal framing if we could ever conceive of one).

The impacts of increasingly nationalistic Latino populations on US politics will probably make the nation unfamiliar in other ways, but it also infuses the United States with new vitality and new energy. US Latinos are not short of astronauts, scientists, capable manufacturing engineers or committed soldiers - all the constituent stakeholders which allow for a strong national state to persist through instability. Furthermore, the willingness of US Latinos to integrate within “American” culture - while putting their own imprint on it - is effectively the only tool the economic system needs to continue driving a value-added expansion.

Despite China outstripping the United States in Capital Formation, its population will likely halve in the next 60 to 80 years, while the United States will continue to grow at a steady pace. This does not mean that China will ultimately lose a conflict with the United States, but it makes one unattractive, and if the population decline is sufficient, it will likely undermine the overall stability of the CCP and drive then Chinese populations into the arms of greater economic integration with the United States - where they will inevitably adopt a more servile position than they experience in their own institutions.

In fuller irony, the Maduro raid also raises the interest and loyalty of many US Latinos who have historically rejected or migrated away from Liberation Theology-tinged leftism which has predominated in Central and South America. This particular ethnic group will continue to drive more and more of the discourse in American politics, much the same way that North Africans, Near Easterners, Huns and Gauls began to predominate in the high period of the Roman Empire.

The real “theological” risk to the United States is that identity fails to reorient into a new basis of integration… “the center does not hold”, and ultimately individuals and groups will find it more attractive to fall back on tribal divisions than to devote their loyalty to a central state. Such are the wages of empire, but an empire that is predicated on growth will never survive without fresh blood: much as the Romans may have looked at the Rape of the Sabines as a necessary evil (if they discussed it at all), they also rationalized it by emphasizing that Sabine wives were treated humanely. Ultimately, this is a microcosm of what allowed that Empire to grow: the growth inherently involved dilution, but with that dilution also came vigor and energy.

It is eventually, perhaps, when all the new vigor of foreign lands does not hold that the center does in fact fall to pieces.

Military technology is not necessarily a scientific challenge or a tactical challenge as much as it is a challenge of engineering and experience. Military capability is a function of many factors, partly the size of one’s military, experience in both senior and junior ranks, and inherited learning both from continuous conflict (where possible) and also from the openness and “nurturing” warrior spirit needed to pass down meaningful learnings so new operators can avoid the mistakes of the past - and potentially even getting killed in the process.

To this end, the raid to arrest Maduro that was executed by Delta Force at the orders of the Trump Administration shows both a level of technical savvy and aggressive ability to execute that far exceeds the level of peer adversaries in Russia, China, Iran and - obviously - Venezuela. Such that “the strong do what they please and the weak suffer what they must” is an old maxim made new again in this “multipolar” world, but the themes emphasized in this blog (namely the “Strategic Competition as a Feature of Civilizational Decline”, “The New Unipolar Moment” and “The United States and China: Has The Torch Already Been Passed?”) much has been explored as to the nature of the current strategic impasse between China and the United States.

In history, where fading empires met rising ones, significant conflict was avoided primarily through integration. This could be considered the case of Greece into Rome or The British Empire into that of the United States. Between the United States, China and its entourage, there is limited capacity for strategic institutional integration because of 1) fundamental cultural differences 2) inherent contradictions between the style and function of the US Federal Bureaucracy and the CCP and 3) popular unwillingness to integrate - has even a single polling bureau thought it necessary to ask whether their is a desire for the US and China to become more tightly merged within themselves?

Additionally, as was explored in the Federalist Paper 10, the constitution of one or another state as they merge can form an oppressive faction which undermines the idea of a state as a unifying body. With this the case, there is limited possibility of strategic integration between China and the United States - except where one is a client of the other - and for that reason conflict will inevitably be the only alternative.

The Current State of the Strategic Conflict

As time proceeds and conflict intensifies, obviously the first order of business is maintaining air superiority in any hot strategic conflict, something for which effective air defense is one of the most meaningful countermeasures. With Venezuela, whether due to bribery, power outage, or actual technical failure, the first domino has already fallen.

Yes air superiority is also signified by a majority of force in the air, in addition to the ability to deny ground-based countermeasures through electronic warfare, along with the ability to sustain such capacity for the duration of a conflict, but on all those measures, it’s unlikely that China or Russia can actually exceed the capacity of the United States, which is now seeing a new investment cycle with the F47 and increased missile defense spending.

There are other means by which this can be undermined - total depletion of military infantry and ground warfare to protect strategic air chokepoints, broader political instability or economic collapse, but this is arguably as likely in China or Russia as it is in the United States. It’s already taking place in Venezuela. While Iran has stated it’s desire to substitute the loss of Venezuela’s meager oil output within BRICS, relations with Venezuela have been a critical economic lifeline for the current Iranian regime.

In recent days, this may have been so impactful as to help precipitate the observed collapse in Iran’s currency and the popular protests, repression of which has now turned violent, while the sequestering of these two client states seems to be more and more definite with their patrons in Russia and China unable to stop the collapsing “house of cards”. Iran already saw a failure at the hands of western air superiority in the “12 Day War” of June 2025, it is unlikely to be able to stop further airstrikes that could further destabilize or decapitate the Iranian regime if Trump seeks to pursue such a path.

The Real Grand Strategy at Play

In the wake of the Maduro Abduction, Trump welcomed oil executives to the White House, who demonstrated a sincere lack of interest in taking on the economic and political risks associated with rebuilding Venezuela’s oil production, particularly as prices trend ever lower.

It would appear in these circumstances that industry interests are actually not aligned with the Trump policy, so what could the angle be? It is well understood historically that much of what drove the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and collapse was low oil prices. While some of this is supposed to have occurred due to coordination between the Reagan Administration and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, the desire for competitors to outbid other sellers in the price war state that occurred in the 1980s global economy may have been the real driver, but only a driver inasmuch as the Soviet Union simply paid the price for its own mismanagement. With a modernized economy that has much the same export composition, Russia faces the same risks as the Soviet Union did, only 45-odd years on.

Thus, we must consider the strategic objectives at play today. In driving oil prices to unnatural lows, the Trump administration achieves a multitude of strategic goals which may not be obvious on the surface: 1) maintain lower prices for American consumers and the supply chains that serve them amidst a rampant Affordability Crisis, 2) undermine Russia’s ability to compete with other sources of energy on global markets (given that their fixed costs are higher than many Middle Eastern suppliers), 3) drive Chinese buyers into the arms of Saudi and the UAE, which make up the majority of China’s oil imports (ultimately recycling their accumulated capital into US markets given that the United States is their security guarantor, which Trump so cautiously guarded with his first international trip of his new adminstration) and 4) with the active destabilization of Iran and Venezuela, isolate China internationally, exacerbate its divisions with Russia, and force a dual end to both the Ukraine War and a conflict in Taiwan.

We already see economic pressure beginning to mount on the single lifeline Russia has had for external capital - exports to China and India - now that the US is both chasing down tankers and Russia is seeing a backlog on deliveries. While preventing the strategic loss of Taiwan and its chip capacity is ultimately the most uncertain aspect of this grand strategy, an isolated China is less able to act credibly on the international stage, and without conflicts in the Middle East and Europe beggaring attention, at the very least rebuffs what has been a crisis multiple decades in the making and allowing the US to continue maintaining its global security supremacy for at least another generation.

This very last point - US hegemony - is only possible because of other factors which show that the United States may have greater wherewithal to survive a strategic conflict than China, Russia or any other foe, primarily because of demographics, economic and capital multipliers, and the continued quality and loyalty of its military to the constitutional state. This is something that will be explored in a future article.

While we are reaching the peak of PowerPoint presidencies (after all an immigration slide did save Trump’s life), the address by Donald Trump last night failed to show the economic coherence necessary to actually break the United States out of its long term fiscal and consumer deficits - let us explain.

Trump made three key arguments and two key promises during his speech. The arguments: 1) prices are trending lower under Trump than Biden, 2) wage growth is beginning to exceed inflation for the first time since the last Trump administration and 3) many food categories have seen minor price decreases after substantial gains.

In contrast to the arguments, the two promises of substance offered were: 1) tax returns for the average family exceeding $11,000 USD and 2) a “warrior dividend” of $1,776 for each active serviceperson in the US military.

While the latter is obviously a backslide from the much-bandied “tariff dividend” (and a decent enough way to start building a mercenary mindset in the US military), the reality of these benefits is unfortunately reminiscent of the Biden administration, when the COVID-induced “American Rescue Plan” Act of 2021 promised additional tax credits and benefits of up to $10,000 for families of 4 below certain income thresholds, in addition to various other forms of stimulus which drew the avid criticism of Larry Summers.

It is no surprise that this legislation was followed by a surge in the costs of airfare, sporting events, cars, hotels, and all sorts of foodstuffs - these are the things that people with the highest propensity to consume end up consuming when they have a little extra cash. In fact, most stimulus taken on by the United States and western nations has seen the poor as simply a channel to subsidize demand - something generous enough, surely - but it is strictly opposite to the Chinese model of intensive subsidies in various components of the agricultural sector, including stockpiling, to maintain low food prices, low inflation, and consistently increasing productivity in the food sector.

Indeed, subsidies to alleviate bottlenecks in the food sector - whether it’s meat herd sizes, beef processing, the inputs for crops (which should be coming down with the price of oil), and incentives to increase the labor supply in these sectors - would all have direct impacts on the price of food. At the same time, food prices in particular, when high, do significant damage to productivity, whereas lower food prices enable other forms of consumption to benefit from scale and volume - whether that is in manufactured goods, hotel and leisure, or productive tools for work like electronics and home goods.

While imitating the Chinese model may seem un-American (hint: the “New Deal” showed that it really isn’t, even if it didn’t work all that well), subsidizing demand without adopting some aspects of “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” will only make the situation worse. The American economy, due to its romance with neo-Liberalism, has become highly concentrated among large firms. In all aspects of the consumer economy, large firms will exhibit rent-seeking behavior around bottlenecks in the supply chain - something observed as early as another Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” - and government intervention is required to either break up the firms profiting from bottlenecks or otherwise taking direct economic action to alleviate the costs around the bottlenecks. When it comes to China, this same model is applied in almost every sector of the economy - energy and manufacturing the most notable.

While applying such methods to every sector will likely be an excess and undermine the overall efficiency of the US economy, adopting active state intervention around key bottlenecks will help drive: 1) increased social cohesion and family formation, 2) longer term sustained consumption and economic growth, 3) lower total debt to GDP, 4) increased total productive capacity within the US economy and 5) a better position to consolidation US empire while maintaining long term economic and demographic surpluses necessary to sustain US security concerns.

It may seem unbelievable right now, but these sorts of changes are absolutely necessary - without them, the United States will begin a terminal decline. The current administration is actually best positioned to implement this policy, as it is beholden to fewer special interests than the other side. The phrase “only Nixon could go to China” might apply, but one could also say that “only Trump could copy Xi”. For the libertarians in the crowd, it might be worthwhile to remind them that “the dose makes the poison”.

The development of a society and ultimately “civilizations” proper require a few key characteristics: physical security, economic growth, shared language and culture, a willingness to collaborate and a circumspect view towards out-groups or foreigners who may approach in large numbers.

In the concept of human relationships, this can be considered as simple as “defined boundaries” which allow a local population to grow in excess of its original capacity, causing it to often seek out new lands, new ideas and new ways of doing things - sometimes at the cost of other societies - in order to assert its “will to life” in the Nietzschean sense (the essential desire to grow and expand).

Alternatively, societies which fail to grow ultimately shrink and decline until they become terminal, as was the case for many ancient civilizations including that of Rome, but was also understood as recently as the decline of the Old South under Slavery (where secession was triggered by the resistance to new “slave states” entering the Union) or, indeed, Hitler’s Germany, where geographic segmentation following WWI drove revanchism, irredentism, and with consolidated power, a desire to conquer east for Lebensraum (which had been an idea of currency as early as the 19th century, long before Hitler used it as a selling point for the “master race”).

There are many small nationalities which may proclaim the desire to grow and expand - from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands - but ultimately as intergenerational globalization continues to progress, which the scale and complexity of markets demands as much new labor and capacity as can be procured - ethnonationalist states are simply not well-positioned to defeat non-ethno-essentialist peers even if their capacity to perform, their battlefield efficiency, their camaraderie or their social cohesion are much higher than their adversary.

The United States has historically been an integrationist power - all the way from English, Dutch, Irish and Scots to Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Italians, Russian peasants and so on - and for that it has historically demonstrated more logistical capacity and greater ability to mobilize large forces than the ethnonationalist sensibilities of adversarial states could permit. Most starkly, those would be exemplified in Hitler’s Germany and the Confederate South.

In the modern day, it is actually societies which fail to welcome and integrate immigrants that are showing the most signs of ossification - particularly China, Japan and elsewhere. India still exists in a youth surplus demographically, but that will eventually subside given current birth rates. The ability of societies to enable new social and economic relationships, as well as new forms of entrepreneurship, innovation and communication, are what is essential to giving a “permission structure” for productivity and growth. Some indicate that the “fall of Rome” is a example to be weary of, but the Western Roman empire lasted 1200 years (from 700 BC to 500 AD), and in the east it lasted an additional millennium.

One could consider a form of social and political organization at such a height to “only have room to go down”, but there is no other form of social and political organization in history which is known to have lasted as long as Rome, been as durable, as capable of reform, or as responsive to external threats - yes, even if there are a myriad of examples of its failures. Contemporary speakers - uneducated ones, certainly - will make comparisons between Rome and the Third Reich, Rome and the British Empire, Rome and the Spanish Conquests of the Americas - but those institutions are incomparable. In all cases, the neophyte institutions reaffirm inequalities between ethnicities. In Rome, they incorporate them - at first through rape and slavery (shocking) - but ultimately, in the turnover of elites to ambitious commoners who may or may not have even been of roman heritage on the Italian peninsula.

In many ways, the fall of Rome was not due to the discouragement of the common people, but a lack in the willingness of elites to sacrifice in order to preserve institutions. From generations of civil war to barracks emperors to the final barbarian invasions, policy decisions imply sacrifice and compromise which - in a world of increasingly frequent “elite turnover” - become unattractive, because the pre-existing elites may ultimately not be around to benefit from the institutions they fight to preserve anyway.

In this is perhaps a lesson for the modern era. We are in an age of global capital, where elites travel the world searching for deals while workers (the modern serfs) remain domestic, tied to their land, lineage, language and heritage. Indeed, the cultural bifurcation of elites and commoners is a relationship which Spengler would have observed as requiring of discipline - discipline of the commoners by the elite. In our day and age, perhaps it is the reverse.

What should that mean? Elites need to be able to ape the “working man and woman”, but beyond that need to do it credibly if they wish to maintain control. FDR is the strongest example of this in modern political contexts - even if we was entirely endogenous as an elite, someone who had no personal experience of struggle, he represented common WASP ethics and manners which the plurality of the United States at the time still believed to be the cultural standards. He was far more of an everyman than Coolidge who preceded him or Truman who followed - even if Truman was a country bumpkin, most Americans at that stage were more urbane and cosmopolitan, notwithstanding of course the racism and segregation that still existed in his day.

Currently in the United States, there is no national leader which represents the actual ethos of the modern “working” American. They are alienated in wealth, culture and can fundamentally generate no legitimacy for greater social action. Ethnonationalist tendencies could emerge as an effort to mimic a unified state, but the dilution of both “whiteness” and broader social standards means that hardly a meaningful plurality can emerge to make life easier for a consolidated working class. In most other western countries, the actual demographic that works, produces goods and pays taxes is far more connected to modern hyper-globalized culture - bass-thumping music, short-form video, constant new spectacles in food, sports and entertainment - to have a cohesive cultural basis for social action. This is perhaps by design, hard to say if that is really the case, but it also means that an elite - if it wishes to proffer any vaguely “ethnonationalist” agenda in order to achieve a mimic of cultural unity - will gain neither and lose both in the attempt.

The apocryphal Marie-Antoinette, upon hearing about the lack of bread among the peasantry, was supposed to have proclaimed “let them eat cake”. This drew such a furor at her alienation with the struggle of the common people that it led to hers and Louis XVII’s hanging. In our own age, it is much more common and apropos to show consideration and petty admiration for the struggles of the poor, while the language of elites is much more enclosed and cumbersome, difficult to understand from the outside looking in. Where did you spend summer? What schools did your children go to? How many times has your name appeared on the side of a building? For our modern class separation, the division of cake and bread would seem only so simple to return to.

And yet, as we consume these experiences of culture, authority and structure in our day to day lives, we also experience culture as a sort of mainstreamed porridge, with social indicators and passive consumption of content - whether its White Lotus or whatever appears on Obama’s year-end list - there to maintain the concept of class, camp and status in a covertly political sense and an overtly civilized sense. Most of what we are exposed to regarding elite culture, and by extension high culture, is a matter of manners and taste.

This is in contrast to what is perhaps more classically understood as actual high culture, which would relate to classic literature, classical music (with even eminent figures like Wagner regarded as base and camp), and poetry like that of Milton or the attempts of TS Eliot to contend with the nature of human existence, sanity, original sin, and crimes like rape, incest, pederasty and untold moral failings which are meant to cast into light good and positive, socially constructive values.

Most “high” culture, historically, is reliant on internal drama, a development of a philosophy of the self, and a differentiation of the self primarily from one’s family (like the Oedipal cycle of Sophocles) but also from one’s city or one’s state. This sort of abandonment of social constraint should be considered positive by the elites of today, but as it exists they are captured by the same forces of middle class aesthetics, mass media, and a desire for communicability of culture that reduce the human experience to what can be resembled, rather than what can be thought.

This means: 1) a limitation of internal monologue, 2) a limitation of the exploration of internal contradiction (e.g. stories where they are always “good guys” and “bad guys” and 3) a desire of prerequisite basis of interest in media (e.g. comic book franchises, vs the consumption of media for its own sake).

The decline of unencumbered or “indulgent” forms like this is not merely a consequence of a disappeared landed gentry, but of a limited attention span which has increasingly diminished the capacity for humanity’s complex thought. Indeed, as short-form-video cements its position as the dominant media format of the 2020s, the medium itself is seeing players elongate the attention into serials and soap operas - similar to the style attempted by Quibi - but watching them entails relying on the drama, tropes, conflicts and habits of viewership that are developed through engagement with deeper, longer, more complex pieces of content.

In fact, as cinema is no longer the dominant form of media, cinema itself also becomes more like short-form video: modern movies are typically children’s movies, musicals, horror movies, or superhero flicks, and for the most part they are an assemblage of setpiece action sequences without the need for a strong narrative connection between them. They almost happen as inconsequential coincidences from one to the next, kind of like how life probably now feels for most people, most of the time.

More ironic in this context is the recession of once mainstream, middle class forms of media into elite novelty niches - once Jazz, soon hip hop perhaps, in some ways baseball, which is growing in financial capacity despite overall declines in popularity - the passage of time has cast out media and cultural practices which the middle class once adored in order for elites to collect, picking up the pieces and demonstrating status with their ability to “cosplay” as middle class patrons of old.

High culture served a purpose in past eras which we are lacking today: in previous centuries, high culture pastimes created a clear social order, in the same way the festivity around public executions might have. Yes, they were both something to do, but they also created a sort of etiquette that reinforced the social order: beautiful ballerinas were adored quietly, meandering criminals were hung by the gallows. In our modern context, ritual reinforcement of social order is seen as gauche, but it is also apparently necessary to maintain order and good function of day-to-day society. As such, any economic nationalist agenda not only needs to have an aesthetic component, but also aesthetic regulation by the state - state subsidy for high culture as a means to maintain the consistency, the hegemony and the good order of a functioning society - and yes perhaps also a return to public executions as well.

The current blood feud between “America First” and “MAGA” and its “Israel First” cohort represents an important divergence for broader government and economic policy in the United States. A few key perceptions are emerging (with varying degrees of truth to them):

1. The 2003 Iraq War was a PNAC (Project for the New American Century) construction which, implicitly because of the particular stakeholders at PNAC, fundamentally benefitted Israel by encouraging more structurally permanent engagement of the United States in the Middle East

2. Two groups perceive Iraq as a fundamental cost of their miseries: both the right wing working class and veterans adjacent to Iraq, as well as the left wing and immigrants whose migrations were caused by the war or subsequent conflicts (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan by association, and the increased footprint of the Gulf States in American universities)

3. With Iraq been the most substantial US policy blunder since Vietnam, the institutional class cannot avoid reconciling some of these views with the actual state of US policy by a) reducing US exposure to the Middle East and b) reducing the influence of whomever was responsible for these foreign policy misadventures

4. With each of these constituent parts looking for someone to blame, and the broad group of individuals associated with the Iraq War’s genesis within PNAC - whose leadership broadly could be considered “Jewish” and or “Zionist” - both parties in the United States are beginning a process of divorcing themselves from Israel, which will have a broad range of consequences on US policy going forward

5. Simultaneously, Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that Israel should get ahead of this process by understanding the United States as “The New Rome” (not explicitly, but strongly implied), from which would logically follow the increased migration of Jewish people, dollars and influence from the United States into Israel, increased consolidation of Zionist Nationalism, and a reduced dependency on US Foreign Aid, along with (presumably) a willingness to contradict US interests when it is beneficial to Israel (e.g. in concert with Russia, China or others)

The last point is not necessarily the concern of this article - the United States only needed to engage in the Middle East since the 1970s in order to maintain liquidity in global energy markets. Since the Fracking Revolution, along with the re-emergence of Nuclear as a politically viable alternative, US engagement in the Middle East only benefits Israel, China and to a lesser extent Russia in that it can use it for propaganda purposes (fall of Assad’s Syria notwithstanding).

In the American context, the coalescing of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist sentiment has been “tagged” as antisemitic in the mainstream, but sufficient alternative media exists and with enough momentum to boot that more circumspect perspectives are taking hold. For instance, ideas including those that: 1) many Jews oppose Zionism (at least in its more aggressive forms), 2) Zionism has proceeded without sufficient consideration of the consequences of the pre-existing population of the region, 3) Israel already covertly undermines US interests and intelligence gathering where it sees benefit and 4) the United States does not have the bandwidth for foreign entanglements given the current state of the domestic populace - all of these perceptions make it more difficult to continue to make a 1-to-1 identity between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Surely there are plenty of people who qualify strongly in both policies, but in terms of what is both legally and popularly viable, the anti-nationalist narrative is far more of a political “winner” than the anti-ethnic one.

In the same unfolding of the hard identity between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, the corollary accusation of anti-Semitism and White Nationalism - firmly set in the American liberal imagination since the events of Nazi Germany and World War II - also begins to untangle. The reality for American White Nationalists is that they have been “chic edge lords”, attempting to be aggressive in their perspective in such a manner as to be totally absurd. Whether it was the German-American Bund, skinheads or tiki torches for a statue Robert E Lee, the vast majority of Americans find the aesthetic of American White Nationalism fundamentally unserious, in part because - though America has always had racial stratification and White hegemony - the country is fundamentally one of mixed racial groups since its very beginning, to such an extent that even the definition of Whiteness has been substantially watered down since the days of Benjamin Franklin.

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AncestryDNA/comments/17hp58h/according_to_ben_franklin/

in reference to: https://www.contextus.org/Benjamin_Franklin%2C_On_the_Freedom_of_the_Press%2C_1737.67?lang=en

And so, while “White Nationalism” is still tossed about as an accusation by some and seemingly worn as an ironic badge (with some grains of truth perhaps) by others, what is the real goal of an anti-Zionist, nativist, red-brown allied populist United States? What are the objectives that will guide policy and popular success?

Steve Bannon has called it Economic Nationalism. In days of old it may have been National Socialism, or Social Imperialism, but I would suggest that the mood of today is more of a sort of Neo-Irredentism - let us explain.

Much of the political project followed by National Socialist ideology in the 1930s was driven to reunify the German peoples across east and central Europe who were separated by the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the re-drawing of borders that followed World War I. In fact, this was seen as so credible an ideological belief that the Allies in the West begrudgingly obliged Hitler in such requests in what later on became known as “Appeasement”.

The last straw for Appeasement came in the invasion and “repatriation” of populations in Poland, which Germany pursued in concert with the Soviet Union, and from which Germany then used the subsequent Allied declaration of war to invade Western Europe - not in the least supported by Soviet materiel - and ultimately, in a predictable heel-turn, attempted to capture the political territory and materiel of the Soviets for themselves in Operation Barbarossa.

This final engagement drew in all the forces of support necessary to ensure that the Nazis could be defeated, and while Japan attempted to open a second front with the United States, it only served to “awaken the sleeping giant”.

As such, the last major cycle of “Irredentism” led to the conflagration of most of the inhabited Eurasian landmass. In this new cycle of “Neo-Irredentism”, which in many ways has actual Irredentism at its core (Russia and the Donbass, China and Taiwan) the United States has no external population which it can repatriate - only traditional alliances, allegiances and values which are seen as fundamentally indicative of “Americanness”.

Those previous eras of Irredentism followed massive phases of globalization and the expansion of popular sovereignty, much as has been the case in the Neoliberal era that followed the stagnation of the 1970s. As such, Neo-Irredentism represents an attempt to repair what has been destroyed by the expansion of markets, of which a few principle desires or “moods” follow that we can quite closely associate with nationalist movements of the past: restoration of a strong, masculine and well-ordered society, with clear internal and external boundaries, and a political consensus which permits comfortable social reproduction of pre-existing domestic populations.

Ultimately, this would explain much of the additional popular mood centered around recapturing the ethics and circumstances of the Baby Boom era and the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism” that occurred between the 1950s and 70s. But, in order to focus the energies of a society on these efforts, it is essential that they turn inward in order to build the particular kind of consensus that achieves it. People need a sense of community - whether it comes from the State, from religion, or from familiarity with the people in their neighborhood - in order to maintain a state of psychological and indeed even physical health and wellbeing. In trying to reestablish these bonds while breaking the “anything goes” ethos that flourished with neoliberalism, so called “White Nationalism” (at least of actual whites) seems none too viable a winner.

Take for example: StarGate in the United States, a supposed 21 trillion in foreign direct investment commitments before the end of this year, 1.1% of GDP growth coming from AI data centers, €2 trillion euro stimulus in the EU, Canada attempting to unfurl an increasing number of mega projects.

This kind of centralized development approach is both the symptoms and cause of a broader disease: the myth of effective centralization. The primary political issue in most Western democracies today is the cost of living, which applies all basic goods including: food, transportation and housing. This is taking place while employment is considered relatively high, labor force participation has increased, and energy prices have consistently maintained a lower and lower clip.

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PNRGINDEXM

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V#

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PFOODINDEXM

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PALLFNFINDEXM

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

Realistically, the cost of living seeing a continuous increase has become an economic constraint on its own - one of the primary causes of people having fewer and fewer children, which ultimately leads to labor importation or otherwise substitution, which then increases total costs of production, goods and services.

Just like how median consumers have a higher marginal propensity to consume than the average billionaire, small businesses are more prone to dedicate their available cash and credit to actual productive economic activity. Yet, between 2019 and 2023, in a period when credit creation was essentially unparalleled, small business lending actually decreased by 18%. Small businesses in Canada are falling behind on loans and experiencing increasing delinquencies, while European SMEs have increasingly limited their use of debt despite particularly low interest rates.

So how can one explain relatively stable commodity prices, but low growth, business formation, low lending to entrepreneurs, pie-in-the-sky megaprojects and an otherwise rising cost of all the goods and services which compose daily life? The fundamental reason is an economy of middlemen - habits of mind in the US, Canada and the EU which encourage businesses to firstly avoid risk, then secondly avoid competition, while government discourages competition, particularly on price, in such a manner has served to raise costs throughout the supply chain into the long term.

By contrast, the Chinese and other Asian banking systems are designed by governments to increase the rate and frequency of business formation and to encourage even novice entrepreneurs to be ambitious. At the other extreme, this practice can lead to an excess accumulation of non-performing loans, but it does wonders for overall growth. At the same time, many of China’s largest projects - whether it’s EV batteries, cement plants or massive real estate developments - are at far more risks of non-performance than the average mom-and-pop shop. Indeed, the fascination with megaprojects ignores their tendency to be over-time, over-budget and often under-deliver on total economic impact, yet as westerners see dazzling displays from China, it becomes the new shiny object here at home.

“Big bold investments” and “public-private partnerships” may seem like an effective way to create economies of scale, but in reality they fail to create dynamic growth, inhibit innovation, limit accountability by diffusing responsibility, and their benefits fail to exceed the costs of scale - slow-moving, inefficient, unresponsive systems that add middlemen, price and bureaucracy without creating more value.

The rise of megaprojects is effectively an attempt to overcome the overall decline in economic vitality seen in the West since the post-war economic boom, but a fundamental corollary and cause of this has been a decline in the access to credit, where banking institutions are increasingly concentrated in the US and elsewhere with little incentive or encouragement to push credit “further out on a risk curve” in a manner that encourages a virtuous cycle of economic growth - where many businesses take risk at once, see higher rates of transaction between themselves and consumers, and end up being increasingly credit worthy because the velocity of money is sufficient to ensure they can make their loan payments.

While this is perceived as entirely self-interested (however likely that is) it also represents what is not necessarily a bad bet for the US taxpayer (or bondholders). Why is this the case? It has precedent in both the distant and recent past, it functions as dual-use technology that can be a critical US defense-industrial differentiator, and it promises the possibility of totally bankrupting the AI Model companies, which should be appealing to anyone who hates them. As such, as far as the US political process goes - it’s a 360-win. Here’s the real story behind it.

US Defense Production - CHIPs Act and Otherwise

The Defense Production Act of 1950 was passed in order to maintain the abilities granted to the US executive brand in the War Powers Acts of 1941 and 42, which enabled the Roosevelt Administration to mobilize private businesses for war production by means that ultimately led the US engagement in both Europe and the Pacific, support of its allies and the defeat of the Axis Powers.

Since World War II, Defense Production powers have been used to maintain advantages in heavy industry, specialized alloy production and the production of new materials to maintain a technological advantage over both the Soviets and other adversaries. In more recent years, it has been used increasingly for domestic requirements which pose a strategic risk, including COVID-19, while the Biden administration also invoked it for “critical minerals for battery storage and electric vehicles” as well as baby formula.

While many recent usages are, though somewhat trivial from a legal perspective, clearly overreaches in regards to the original spirit of the law, separate legislation passed during the Biden Administration with bi-partisan support make it clear what the Defense-Industrial Complex (as an apparent “entity”) intend to achieve in collaborating with the AI industry. The CHIPs Act effectively provided hundreds of billions of dollars in direct and indirect incentives to re-shore manufacturing of advanced chips in order to maintain the defensibility of both US defense and non-defense computing needs. Even more of a strategic surprise, this was already an issue which was addressed with legislation that encouraged domestic production at the end of the Reagan Administration, though with mixed results.

In anticipation of the CHIPs Act passing, manufacturing construction spending already began to surge in 2021, peaking in August of 2024, while actual semiconductor production began a contemporaneous increase. It could be considered good luck or mysterious planning that this “capacity-building” also contributes to the overall capacity to build AI data centers, which drove more than a full percentage of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.

source: https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/us-chip-construction-spending-skyrocketed-after-us-chips-act-passed

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLMFGCONS

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPG3344S

AI Capacity as a Defense Differentiator

AI is an obvious dual-use technology in the same way that diesel engines or effective steel manufacturing can be. Its potential use cases are so ubiquitous that there is hardly a defense application which will also go unaffected. Much as emergent players engage in bubble-pushing, companies like Anduril are developing everything from autonomous drones to AI-enabled headsets for close-quarters combat. It is most likely that similar projects also exist in the prime defense contractors, and the usage of remote-monitoring and these sorts of combat enablement methods is as old as carrier pigeons and hot-air balloons, but also applicable to obtuse measures like the McNamara Line in Vietnam, which used early digital and computer technology to create an invisible barrier on South Vietnam’s borders with the North and Laos.

As we speculate about the value of AI in defense applications, it is important to understand that it will take place in an accelerated manner upon the exercise of actual conflict. Similar to the progression of the Ukraine War, future wars between peer adversaries will likely include segmented, tactical missile swarms as part of active communication, negotiation and peace discussions which amount to little more than economic partitioning and “wrestling for control”. In all wars of previous generations, various levels of command exist to communicate active and passive boundaries - both to provide more methodical fighting rhythm - but also to spread mis- or dis-information and gradually achieve tactical outmaneuver at critical chokepoints, whether this is as old as Hannibal’s march through the alps or as recent as the Wehrmacht massing forces in the Ardennes.

It’s impossible to know what is truly happening in war at any given time, but most tactical advantages are realized by the perception of credible and non-credible threats and the attention span of an adversary to respond to them The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk in August 2024 is a clear, immediate example of this - something which took Russia by such surprise that there was still a Ukrainian presence there as late as June 2025.

The possibility of AI-driven warfare, whether it reads like a Palantir SEC statement or not, is that there will be a step-function increase in visibility across not only battlefield positions but also in the economic and productive capacities of the adversary at all times. In place of the traditional example of, for instance, the Allies bombing a German ball-bearing factory with unclear levels of precision in order to disrupt supply lines, we will likely see targeted hypersonic missile swarms on antimony-processing sites or similarly obtuse (and generally inexpensive, but time-intensive) production and development sites which will, as a knock-on effect, increase lead-times of critical supplies to central battlefield, but not manifest as tactical disadvantages until an endgame becomes apparent to all parties - at which time negotiation may or may not still apply.

This implies that winning in modern warfare, as a strategic necessity of all modern states, requires both strategic capacity and immense patience in order to realize a quick series of tactical advantages which accrue to victory, only at the very end (to gratuitously quote Jeff Foxworthy, it’s dumb to say that a missing item is “always in the last place you look”). This has the same tactical character as Alexander conquering east or the Germans taking Paris, but nation-states now have an advantage in it being clear how sophisticated and imbalanced military supply chains can become if not closely tended to. Why this is also increasingly obvious in the popular consciousness, maintaining AI capacity can be made apparent and critical in that it can be turned to visibility, maneuver and, when the time comes, attack, making it essential to maintaining the security of a modern state, and yes also sometimes its citizens (we know that’s not always necessarily the first priority).

Bankrupting the AI Model Companies to Achieve Decentralization

OpenAI deserves the credit of thoughtful product design in its first launch of ChatGPT and the subsequent explosion of both interest and actual utilization of LLM-powered AI tools. There is no other firm or group of people more responsible for the acceleration of interest and relevance that this technology has experienced.

And yet, as is the case with General Purpose Technologies, it is often very difficult for leading firms to capture and monetize the important idea which is behind its initial development. While Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine, James Watt implemented the improvements necessary to make it popular. His 18th-century improvements hardly permitted him to collect royalties on all steam engine production that followed, and if you were to consider which firms most benefitted from the steam engine, it would be the railroad builders of the late 19th century - many of the families of whom still influence American politics and culture to this day.

If we suppose that the firms which capture the most value from General Purpose Technologies are those which build the most effective value-chains around them, then OpenAI attempting to leverage data center capacity for consumer-facing applications would be one flavor, while Anthropic generates its models for work and coding, and different model-builders purport to offer more purpose-specific models and data sets that have differentiated value (i.e. a “moat”) for their specific customer base or community. The issue with each and every one of these firms - aside from actions which could be considered effectively malicious or socially toxic (whether it’s Sam Altman’s false promises or Dario Amodei’s fear-mongering) - is that centralization inherently breeds the sort of monopolistic, protectionist mercantilism which is toxic to society as a whole, and indeed led to the trustbusting movement and the overall outcomes of the “Progressive Era” that followed the Gilded Age (chiefly of railroads).

It’s not that the Model-Builders are malevolent actors, its that they are - by consequence of our particular economic system - willing to pursue malevolent actions as a consequence of their commercial interests. This is more of a social risk which becomes apparent as power, or “value-produced”, becomes more concentrated. As such, defense production for data centers is an almost perfect hedge, because it gives the government clear and reasonable license to commandeer AI capacity into other ends when necessary.

As was the case with the trustbusting movement, activism played a part, but ultimately the power of both government and the legal system was required to open up key industries in a way that permitted more equitable wealth distribution and longer-run economic growth. In the modern context, society would benefit from the ability of government to commandeer AI capacity for both defense and “defense-adjacent” applications, even on the basis of simple or popular economic benefit. There are certainly always other risks that come with government control, but they also offer a hedge against the obvious risk of overly centralized private control.

At the same time, the building of AI capacity for LLM usage is not necessarily as worthwhile as the dual-use that same AI capacity offers when it comes to machine vision, various manufacturing and transportation applications, and the ultimate capabilities that may come with humanoid or service robots which could effectively solve both skilled and unskilled labor crises, and underly what could effectively be a future market-driven abundance agenda.

In the end, if model-makers seek government guarantees, they may not just get screwed - everyone else may benefit as a result.

This being the case, governments can produce wealth through the following means, but only in combination: a healthy, educated and skilled workforce, functioning infrastructure and access to capital, credible property rights, sufficient protectionism to ensure the development of key domestic industries, cheap resources or inputs, and sufficient credit creation to provide confidence in the future, the ability to take risk, the ability of financing to be available on an extended basis and the confidence that mildly inflationary monetary circumstances will deter the underlying deflationary effects of a highly productive economy.

With the introduction of QT and the raising of interest rates through 2022-23, the Fed effectively restricted the new flow of capital into the broader economy while also diminishing the availability of financial assets. This is the equivalent of “jamming on the breaks” to stop inflation, after Powell kept assuring the markets that inflation was transitory.

Now, the variance between the fed balance sheet, bond yields, interest rates and inflation have all returned to some level of synchrony - similar to what was observed from 2014 to 2020 - but now growth has started to suffer for it. The Fed is realizing its position is increasingly untenable in a capital constrained environment, while the US government lacks the dry powder necessary to engage in traditional Keynesianism and the reconfiguration of the US economy through tariffs and tax relief to domestic production means both short-term inflation AND increased private-sector demand for capital to stand up the new facilities needed to on-shore production.

The Fed has indicated that it will continue to lower the funds rate through the end of the year, but it appears that they are also beginning to consider increased QE in order to meet the needs of domestic capital markets while diminishing the impact of their previous capital-constraining approach. This will inevitably lead to inflation, but not the same inflation that the Fed produced by backstopping the looney-tunes approach the US government took to COVID (as was the case for governments around the world).

Where capital goes to productive capacity, before the production can be realized, inflation will be inevitable - this applies as much to the United States today as it did to Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China. What the Fed must do is permit a recapitalization of the US Industrial base - inflation come as it may - in order to realize a reconfiguration of the US economy similar to what occurred in the 1950s, where recapitalization with new technology led to various small boom-bust cycles in the economy, but a real standard of living improvement that was perceived to be unparalleled in human history - probably to this day.

The COVID-era backstopping of the economy was a reaction to foolish economic and health policy, but at the time it brought about questions as to whether Modern Monetary Theory was already in place. The reality is that, if it is an accurate description of how money works, then it always has been. But if money works in such a manner that it only need be created in order to fund the pursuit of societal goals, how does one create money without compromising thrift?

The truth is, any direct benefit compromises thrift, even if it is to the disabled, the infirm or the incapacitated. This is an awful thing to say, and to abandon those groups would be criminal, but it also speaks to what we discourage and encourage as a society. Do we encourage waste, fraud and abuse? Do we encourage idleness? Or should we have policies that make people more productive? That make it easier to make use of the divisions of labor which produce the wealth of successful economies?

Those divisions require stability and predictability, something the Fed has hardly seemed to provide.

The knock-on effects of Trump’s return to office are continuing to roil global trade and global players. France’s debt has been downgraded and Parliament is considering a 6th republic. Britain’s government is dead on arrival. Germany is preparing to suspend the welfare state in order to re-arm. Japan, South Korea, Argentina and Italy cozy up (with right-winger Meloni boasting the best-performing economy in the EU); Brazil, India and South Africa float in the wind. There is no clear path forward for export-led economies where global demand is cooling in line with a global population that could plateau by 2050.

In fact, it is becoming apparent that actual births may have peaked about 10 years ago (coincidentally with the emergence of Trump signaling the beginning of the end for America-driven globalization). The implication of this is essentially that aggregate demand will effectively peak in about 25 years, when those individuals are 35, hence at the age where household formation (and the concomitant spending involved) begins to attenuate. This, again, lines up with 2050 as a terminal date for the current global order.

Is this broader context, Canada has among the most unfavorable demographics of the developed world, with a population bulge at 30-35, despite massively intrusive and unintegrated immigration in an attempt to correct the absence of relative demand as that group ages out of peak consumption.

In that mode, Canada has also happened to be a bastion of WEF-guided policy, including increasingly intrusive health policies, efforts to simulate a guaranteed minimum income (through COVID-era employment insurance), an unwillingness to cede practically anything (even dairy cartels) in trade negotiations with the United States, and broader issues of de-banking, civil liberties, effectively unrestricted immigration, land acknowledgements leading to title confiscation (yes really), collapsing socialized medicine, and a basic lack of social or economic coherence except where virtue signaling is first and foremost demonstrable.

Mark Carney, by the acclaim of most supporters, was elected to “fix” the situation. While he encounters resistance within his own looney-tunes caucus, he is also attempting to stave off economic integration with the United States (at the cost of overall economic efficiency) while also inhibiting the ability of Canada to navigate any and all future crisis through profligate Keynesianism for which he claims not to have support in parliament.

It is clear that, lacking a majority consensus, Canada will effectively follow the fate of India, Brazil and South Africa as economic and political actors free to the highest bidder, with no grand strategy in play and few if any options except doing that which is most satisfactory to a plurality of the electorate in a given calendar year. Alas, this is the WEF agenda incarnate, because it reduces populations to dependents amidst a global cartel of experts, technocrats and wealthy industrialists. It has consolidated power in Europe (at the cost of economic growth), countries like Italy show that it is possible to break away, while countries like Canada are being prepared as an example of how they can be brought back in the fold.

Canada is a canary, already in the coal mine, waiting to discover if it has another breath of fresh air remaining.

Photo credit: ABC news

Millennial Socialism™ has its deepest roots in the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, Air America/Ring of Fire Radio and Occupy Wall Street, and subsequently more salient cultural signifiers in the various Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns as well as historically the cohort of podcasts and independent media involving Chapo Trap House, CumTown, The Majority Report, and somewhat the David Pakman show and the Jimmy Dore Show (pre-covid).

The existence of the Millennial left as a political cohort owes most of its life to the Obama era, ironically where Paul Ryan summed it up succinctly as “College graduates should not have to live out their twenties in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.”

There are two primary cohorts of Millennials which define their political reaction to this era - some for which the choice was to get up and leave the bedroom for work, and others for activism, passive activism, or Facebook-bound slacktivism.

It is important to understand firstly that the median millennial is in their mid-30s and essentially only now achieving family formation or otherwise with no prospects for growth, 15 years on from the Great Recession, while elder millennials are in particular the most cowed, cow-towy, politically correct and lacking in argumentative ability of a onetime “youth” cohort since the 1950s. This is a generation that is basically at sea and has, through various means of “giving up” (e.g. two failed Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, various small-left parties in Canada and Europe with no real economic perspective) come to expect “Daddy Government” to save them. I personally can still remember Sam Seder and Chapo Trap House acting like it was obvious that Bernie Sanders would lose - once it happened of course - while on the Republican side Trump essentially threatened to detonate his own party if they formed allegiance against him.

The reality may or may not be that “Mommy Government” has gotten in the way, whether may be best referred to as “Nanny State”, the “Bedroom State”, the “Bedpan State” or the “Dominatrix State” depending on how involved you think it should be in personal life. Extensive regulations, taxation and spending that has led to the gradual diffusion of responsibility out of individuals hands - the increased use of government-secured credit products, the decreased propensity to save and invest, the increased expectation to be bailed out (especially if you’re like, a bank or whatever) - to the point where total government expenditure is now 50% more of the economy than it was in 1960, consistently approaching 40% of total economic activity in the United States since 2010.

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ

With not the littlest scintilla of irony, as government has gradually taken on an increased role in society, trust has declined. Indeed, the more you see it, the more you may recoil in its presence.

source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/americans-views-of-government-decades-of-distrust-enduring-support-for-its-role/

And yet, by that same token, Millennial Socialism™ continues to inhabit the main-line of the Democratic Party, a Party which uncoincidentally has a constituency that believes that laws exist to protect people from themselves.

Not only does this take place in the absence of individual autonomy, but it is also symptomatic of an increasingly paternalistic society in decline. The cultural trends in the United States - deference to authority, dislike of change, discomfort with growth, aversion to risk - are more similar to the cultural traits of the British Commonwealth and Continental Europe than they are to the historical (and perhaps apocryphal) United States with which many are more familiar today.

Mamdani seems like a fairly generous and earnest candidate. There is nothing wrong with him on a personal level, and for that he is most likely to win. But it is important to understand that the constituency he represents is essentially indolent, and that is their most defining quality, and the generation which is carrying his representation to higher office is among the most indolent in decades, and most indolent in one of the most indolent places on Earth - New York City, baby.

The aspect of Millennial indolence is proven not simply by the actual politics that the generation practices, but also the actual attitudes towards things like entrepreneurship. Indeed, much of the commentary on business formation since the Great Recession was that it was essentially flat and, as a proportion of all businesses, much smaller than what it had been in previous decades. As it happens, business formation has spiked since the entrance of Gen Z into the work force - coincidental or not - with perhaps also a COVID-induced high of businesses being formed to take advantage of fraudulent PPP loans (Father Government never too far out of the picture).

source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BABATOTALSAUS

As for the indolence of New York itself, well, New York is a world-center for performative work: Private Equity associates pretending to need to work long hours through the night to forecast the P&L of midwestern father-son HVAC acquisitions (on fictitious excel sheets), equities traders pretending they wouldn’t be better off simply buying the S&P, performative-tech coffee-shop-types and social-enterprise-hangers-on who cannot survive an office space without Shakshuka for breakfast and 8 lattes a day.

@jasmineandteaa time stamped day in my life at google in nyc! 🤓

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Yes, we can all be jealous, and yes the above person may not actually work at Google (probably because many actual employees who post videos like this get fired). But the point remains: even if jealousy applies, when one achieves luxury - as Thorstein Veblen might observe - indolence is the point.

And so, as circuses come to New York (the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final, though technically in New Jersey), so must bread. New York is the richest city in the world, the seat of its most powerful empire, in fact the new Rome. And so as Caesar had to promise grain to the plebs to maintain their compliance, Government must promise more to people who expect more from government because they have lost the instinct to get things for themselves, to travail, to collaborate, to invent, and they have done so not necessarily as an effect of government in the first place, but an effect of a culture which has taught us to look to others to solve our problems, to take our self-ownership away from ourselves - to live on tracks and narrow paths and never take risks or express an intrusive thought. This is essentially the lingua franca of Millennial Socialism™ - hey, I took the bargain, I went after the American Dream and didn’t get it, now Government owes me the difference.

It’s clear inasmuch that the working and middle classes have been betrayed, it’s clear that elites want to suppress revolution, but the type of revolution that poses a real risk to them is not the one where they’re signing the cheques, in fact - it never is.

Such is the growth, prosperity, height and decline of empires that the generations which create the success of a society are also the harbingers of its eventual doom. This was obvious in various stages of Greek civilization, in Roman history by the Crisis of the Third Century (where many of the ancestral elites of Rome had already been culled by Emperors) and through the Middle Age and Enlightenment Empires of Europe through to the United States today.

A more popular notion in contemporary conservative discourse is a kind of reversal of identity politics - a rediscovery or redefinition of “whiteness” as a means to recover the ethos of protestant working class settlers from England and repressed progressive-socialist, mostly Lutheran Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, Swiss and the like. This sort of indulgence in an imagined past where these people were the “same” ethnically disregards, firstly, the cultural politics that were required to incorporate these ethnicities into the “white” majority, and secondly, the inability of alternative orders and cultural mores to form on a continent that was essentially isolated from global trade except on the coasts where materials were exported and some components of the continent’s machine tools were brought in.

Much as Rome ruled the broader Mediterranean, the United States strides the seas, having incorporated many of its allies in imbalanced defense and security arrangements while extracting foreign tribute through foreign direct investment or broader, high-performing corporate profits, enriching domestic elites while the middle class is eroded and turned over by waves of demographic transition.

In this context, the “ancestral whiteness” of the United States no longer exists - Americans of English descent number 46 million, and German Americans - marginally “white” by ancestral American definitions, compose 45 million. Even a century ago, there were concerns of dual-loyalty for German Americans, many having gone off to fight for the Kaiser before direct US involvement in World War I, while when World War II followed, the increased in integration of German, Italian and Eastern European populations was only by then encouraged by the restrictions brought forth in the 1924 Immigration Act.

The mythology of the settler foundations of the United States and Canada, along with the traditional European attitudes towards the leap forward that was represented by the Enlightenment, were seen as powerful and compelling until about the mid-2010s, as so-called “wokeness” became trendy and Ricoeur-style “Master of Suspicion” narratives became pervasive to undermine traditional notions about “whiteness”, “Settler Colonialism”, “Freedom and Liberty” and broader liberal-bourgeois hegemony.

Many in the conservative sphere simply view the shift away from these perspectives as the consequence of the “browning” of America, decaying liberal ideology, mass migration from war-torn countries in Europe and elsewhere, however the idea that some sort of “pre-woke” American or Western identity can be recovered in the modern social, economic, and political context is in fact a cargo cult - an attribution of certain characteristics to outcomes that are not directly correlated - and while the coincident success of both settler colonial and European empires was fostered by both cultural and historical forces, the historical forces which laid the groundwork for this (wars of religion, bifurcation of Europe along North-South axes, the development of financial capitalism in North Europe as a part of ocean-going exports rather than Venice-centric trade through the silk road), the center of this “world-system” has shifted irrevocably East, which means the pre-existing populations of North America and Europe must come to a political and cultural concord with their new collaborators if they have any hope to survive.

And the outcomes are very obvious: what is even the possibility of 130 million white identitarian Americans (at most) and their cohort throughout Canada and Europe to face down the “hordes” of Asia and the Middle East, who are now equipped with most of the modern technology that the West, by comparison, was able to develop and monopolize for centuries? What is the actual expected outcome there except total extermination?

And, by contrast, what is the liberal answer to this same dichotomy? To throw open one’s doors endlessly to every passer by? To imagine peace of love in the hearts of all men? Even Christ himself advised his disciples to carry swords when they travel. There is no limit to the possibility of others willing to do us harm - it is not always the case - but to leave a culture defenseless by default is a liberal cargo cult which imagines that it is simply always more openness, always more generosity, always more newcomers which will somehow infuse life and heal the cultural morass and dislocation that takes cyclical residence at the heart of Western Civilization.

So, just as ancient Empires sought new political consensus to avoid inevitable suffering - but also realize greater prosperity - the old divisions in our culture are gradually falling away to give birth to a new cultural politics. Likely not one racked by identitarianism, likely not one obsessed with individual liberty, likely a compromise, ideologically inconsistent but functional for a time in practice. And what should this be composed of? Firstly, no cargo cults, but some reconciliation of Roosevelt and Reagan - Four Freedoms meets Free Enterprise - the engines of prosperity fueled by the brightest minds, but with respect and equality for the “common” man.

If we look back at the 20th century, this isn’t really a cargo cult, but a sort of “conservative” view of “conservatism” - one that took the new roles of government and used them to affirm the fixed nature of faith, family, community and good works. Even if good works aren’t necessarily a Protestant concept, that’s hardly a harsh compromise for the white identitarians longing for an imagined past - one which they often lack the ruggedness to embody.

The current de facto gold revaluation taking place on global markets indicates a few transitory characteristics in the global order, including 1) regionalization, 2) broader reindustrialization and 3) increased competition for hard assets.

These factors underly a fundamentally more productive global economy that is also more fair, more equitable and more desirable for the everyday citizen. In the long term, this may or may not produce a re-ordering global conflict, presuming effective redistribution drives population growth which, as growth and profitability decline, often leads to population pressure that culminates in strongly externalized global conflicts (Germany 1914 & 39, France through the 19th century, Britain following the plague and so on). This is a longer run boundary to whatever the new global economic system generates, but that is a 40-50 year+ problem for another time.

Within the context of regionalization, reindustrialization and hard assets, central banks (primarily in Asia) have increased gold buying both officially and “unofficially” since 2008 as a response to macroeconomic concerns and the long-term unsustainability of US deficits. This is not necessarily a negative revaluation of the United States, since the United States still owns 4 times the amount of global financial assets that China does, and this ratio has actually increased in comparison to Japan, which was the next closest asset-holder in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

What the US has accumulated in the last 35 years as a matter of both net profitability, net asset leverage, net total government debt (at a relatively low rate) and stable gold and FX reserves has come at the cost of its population, which has seen relative declines in employment, median real productivity, effective disposable income, fertility rates and other measures of prosperity.

This is unsustainable politically, not simply because of the risk of socialism, but also stochastic violence in the avatar of Luigi Mangione, Shane Tamura, Tyler Robinson and certainly others to come. In a system like that in the United States, disorganized political violence is almost more of a threat than the organized form - the organized form often gets targeted and channeled into the political concensus, while disorganized not only persists in an unincorporated manner, but also resembles the ethos of individual liberty which the supporting (necessary) mythology of the country perpetuates.

Stochastic incidents like those that were common in the 1890s at the height of the Gilded Age (read: Progressive Era) or the various radical bombings of the 1970s makes elites unsafe at almost all places and all times, which hinders their ability to use their elite status in society (quite obviously). This implies a need to renegotiate the social contract that exists and redistribute what exists in the financial sector as assets, profit and limited real growth into a better proportion of asset appreciation, corporate profitability and increased wages, prosperity and standards of living for the middle and lower classes.

At the current time, dissatisfaction with the “social contract” isn’t something to be understood only as an American phenomenon. In Europe there is a crisis of low wages, limited demographic growth, unintegrated migrants. In China, youth unemployment is at an ever-increasing high, and in the face of “9-9-6” many young people are opting instead to “lie flat”. India, with the best demographics of any major global economic zone, has limited capital formation that drives 2.5 million young people (mostly men) to emigrate yearly. None of these environments hold promise for existing political elites or their future prospects, which means that the regime of globalization that has persisted since the end of the Cold War.

Pure globalization leads to supplier concentration, which along with supply chain “brittleness”, also favors workers local to the concentrated supplier while undermining the wages and negotiating power of workers in all other places. Even as workers in a concentrated supplier context perform well, they actually feel diminished both by global competition and by the fact that their own employment is so concentrated - they become aware of their own status as a captive labor force. As we see nationalism & nihilism pick up globally in both democratic and authoritarian contexts, we can understand that this is the “revolt of the governed”, which implies that there is a lot more status risk for local elites than what has been perceived in the last 30 years of the globalization regime.

Interestingly, in this context, is the transition in US foreign policy. The 2000s to 2020 was effectively an effort to maintain the security of the US consumer, through 9/11, through liquid energy markets, through air travel, through cybersecurity, through combatting “sleeper cells” and the FBI’s 6-week cycle. There’s the Wesley Clark 7 - the implicit effort to eliminate or substitute the regimes of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran - in time to solidify global preeminence before “the next superpower comes around”. And this is counterpointed by President Trump’s recent visit to the Middle East in which he promised reduced interventionism and greater economic integration as a “Dawn of a bright new day for the great people of the Middle East”.

The current transition in American Foreign Policy is thus not only an effort to sequester some of the more unsettled energies domestically, but also increase economic integration with the periphery which it has previously abused - it may be considered a “love/hate” relationship, but it offers more economic opportunity to those foreign audiences than would be available otherwise. America as a mercantilist power is still less mercantilist and more broadly liberal than any other Empire in history - look at the last 80 years - whilst alternatives in China and Russia still lack the domestic political openness (or at least sufficiently managed democracies) necessary to sustain a comparatively more attractive openness abroad.

The current transition to “multipolar” global order is limited in its scope primarily because there is no means by which the international system can fundamentally change. The United Nations was at its birth an energetic institution which is now given to feckless bureaucracy and “consensus building”, while institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, or even regional associations like the European Union, lack the centralized power and cultural coherence necessary to institute changes in global regimes.

Only individual states of sufficient power can mold and shape global affairs. China and Russia are beginning to influence them on a larger scale, but not to the extent of the United States, and the attempt to suggest an alternative order has taken a hit by the institution of extensive export controls on rare earth metals, not only requesting approval of what they are used for, but also who the end-product of their usage is exported to.

This is unprecedented because, historically, export controls have only applied to discrete goods, not to an extensive supply chain. The United States limited the export of semiconductors to the Soviet Union in the early days of the technology, and while workarounds were found, the Soviets never restricted - for instance - the entire titanium supply chain which, through CIA cutouts, was used to develop and mass produce the F-14 (the most advanced fighter jet of its time).

Vladimir Putin, last year, suggested restrictions on the export of uranium, titanium and nickel in order to pressure the West into sanctions relief, but this was never pursued further (at least not in an obvious manner), presumably because commodities markets are quit responsive to supply shortages and inflation. Put more simply, you don’t necessarily want to raise the price of something that’s replaceable (e.g. requiring limited technical expertise), because the cure for high prices is typically high prices - markets and capital respond to extract or substitute goods that have been restricted without much hesitation, as there are likely a slew of guaranteed buyers.

That is not to say rare earths do not require technical expertise and lead time to extract and refine, but it is hardly as complex as the lithography and manufacturing processes which go into advanced chips - something which China has worked hard to substitute since the US imposed export controls there in 2018.

And therein lies “the rub”. If China persists in this policy, it can impose short term pain on the United States and its Western consiglieres, but in that short term it will have also encouraged the development of parallel supply chains. One could say that the United States already had an intention of building these supply chains - the Pentagon took a strategic stake in MP Materials (a North American rare earths producer) earlier this year and just announced a new $1 billion stockpile of critical minerals - but while it is likely that China’s recent actions have only encourage the inevitable, the issue is that they have also accelerated it, which undermines their strategic position more rapidly than is otherwise necessary.

Hence, this policy is a failure, both upon announcement as well as if it’s ever rescinded. Few expected China to be this outwardly aggressive, and it shows that China’s soft talk towards a more collaborative and mutually beneficial international system is not meant simply to exclude the United States, but actually vests them with the power (in their view) to withhold critical minerals from anyone they disagree with as well as anyone producing goods for consumption by those they disagree with - hardly a “collaborative” international trade regime.

Now, hot of the heels of an apparent coup de grace in the “restoring of Peace in the Middle East”, Trump is in a historic position to punish China, which with its partner Russia was not effective in generating a peace (hint: they do not have enough influence over Israel), while Russia has resisted ovations for peace (despite their often impractical nature), and while Trump can now impose export restrictions on critical discrete goods like Boeing parts, where China has no meaningful substitute (as the Reuters article points out) because China’s parallel to Boeing - COMAC - has struggled to deliver 5 of the 32 expected production passenger jets it planned this year.

In this circumstance, there are more things that sound too good to be true - firstly that China can produce any meaningful number of its vaunted 6th generation fighters when it cannot, after decades of investment, produce a meaningful number of passenger jets, and secondly, that because of their efforts to substitute Boeing, fewer than 5% of Boeing’s order book tracks back to China, meaning that Trump can impose new restriction at effectively no cost.

Whether nations should be committed to international trade or not is something which can be debated, but what nations should not do is claim to be committed to international trade when they only enjoy its more mercantilist habits and indulgences. This is where the US under Trump has become less hypocritical as an international actor than China - Trump is honest about his intentions. He seeks Autarky, he wants everything that can be produced domestically to be produced domestically. This imposes broader costs and inefficiencies within the international system, but worse yet for China, Autarky is fantastic, until other people start doing it.

Generational theory and Fourth Turning’s may lack “falsifiability” in the scientific sense, but they are useful as descriptors in terms of social movements throughout history - both in the United States and elsewhere. As a matter of behavioral differentiation between generations, social attitudes evolve and differ over time - there should be no clearer example of this than the Baby Boomers. What is the descriptive framework that functions today, and where should we expect it to guide both markets and geopolitical events for the foreseeable future? This article attempts to answer some of those questions.

Each system has within it the seeds of its own destruction. This was true of the British Empire, the Chinese Dynastic System, Ancient Rome, Greece and everything in between. In modern history, the United States is the most distinct nation among equals - both from its peers and in broader historical context. It is not unprecedented for a more liberal republican system to express economic and military advantages - particularly when it comes to general morale - throughout history, however the degree to which American cultural influence and political institutional structure has spread globally is unprecedented, and for a nation that has never accounted for more than 6% of the world’s population, it is far more diverse, divided and discordant in every generation than what we would expect a global center of power to be.

Hence what we see happening today: the emergence of a sense of “National Libertarianism” which will drive the social consensus of the United States for the next 60-80 years, not because freedom is any underlying principle of existence in the United States - indeed there are many examples of freedom being egregiously repressed in US history - but instead that the expansion of freedom is the only means to alleviate the generational accumulation of social tension and discord that marks the country’s deepest and most fraught social conflicts. Indeed, the expansion of freedom - both in the sense of positive and negative liberties - is the only guarantor of stability in the United States, because it is essentially the only practice which buys an extended term of peace and quiet for the elites to do as they wish.

So, what should we expect National Libertarianism to look like, and how does it follow previous cultural shifts in American History?

1. An emphasis on borders and national sovereignty, clear cultural and religious boundaries, and resistance to globalism and suspicion of sovereignty being devolved to international institutions or foreign corporate entities

2. Emphasis on deregulation, innovation, and the economic rights of the individual over that of the collective

3. Amidst a shrinking of the state and the applicability of the legal system, an emphasis on the rule of law, rule-following, and obedience to civic authority (police, first responders, etc)

4. Emphasis on a basic standard of living and guarantees that support it, which limits the disruptiveness of smaller social and economic transitions (ones that essentially now happen with every economic recession)

5. The expansion of economic benefits in a manner that accentuates the liberty with which individuals act in daily life - whether it is the pursuit of jobs, entrepreneurship, or charitable social causes, to the extent where this particular attitude contradicts the principles of small or limited government

Indeed, there is no foreseeable future version of the United States in which small government predominates. The most meagre attempts of the Trump administration, and even back to Reagan, to shrink the role and relevance of government in everyday life, had either none or the opposite effect. The only hope for the United States government is to deliver more services in a more efficient manner that is ultimately more deflationary as a matter of both cost-of-living and debt-accumulation.

What will be the characteristics of the American federal system in response to this? A few may be more prominent:

1. Limited immigration until wages begin to rise substantially, driving increased capital accumulation in the lower tier of the middle class, until employment limitations become so severe that immigration becomes acceptable again (this may be a 30 or 40-year process, similar to the intervening period between the 1920s quota system and the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act).

2. The substitution of social security and Medicare with the provision of basic shelter, sustenance and care - not simply because the direct disbursement system is both inflationary and too expensive to maintain - but because the standard of care which most Americans receive from medical institutions is declining, and life expectancy has stalled or otherwise followed that trend.

3. Austerity in the Defense Department, not simply because its historical largesse as an employment program has made it unsustainable, but also because that same largesse has actually made it ineffective as a deterrent mechanism, producing expensive and complex weapons systems that are difficult to use effectively in decentralized battlefield scenarios.

4. The introduction of consistent “helicopter money”, once understood as “stimmies” in the pandemic or “Universal Basic Income” by the Andrew Yang crowd, will exist to subsidize the demand function in the US economy and maintain consumption status-quo - while alleviating economic anxiety - as technological deflation reduces real incomes and employment in the medium to long term.

5. The substitution of both public and private insurance benefit schemes with a universal, profit-targeted, national insurance scheme likely similar to the Dutch model - only because single-payer and alternative systems are so rigid as to be perceived as inherently un-American.

6. The nationalization of educational bureaucracy or the otherwise outright decimation of the for-profit college system in favor of quotas, restrictions, increased regulations which focus on the translation of educational attainment to income.

7. The introduction of new social policies, primarily targeting housing, urban development, universal childcare and expanded social and community policing through block-grant methodologies that limit the direct involvement of the federal government, but otherwise increase the size of state and local government and its orientation towards “maintaining social cohesion”.

A lot of the above may seem like the “Bernie Sanders agenda”, and in truth much of that agenda is achievable, as Max Weber observed that corruption, graft and machine politics was only sustainable in an America that saw abundant surplus. Ultimately, US Bureaucracy will have to reorganize around the efficient provision of services than the imposition of rules and regulations - which is true for many local and state governments - with more extensive “snitching” and whistleblower mechanisms to limit Waste, Fraud and Abuse. If there’s any element of this scenario which seems impossible, it’s because it is, but the alternative is simple: no government, no country, pack up and go back to Europe (or wherever else).

This sort of left-consensus libertarianism is not without its forerunners in the history of the United States, and ultimately the “Fourth Turning” Saeculum theory (80 year cycles) can be homogenously applied to the expansion of liberty throughout the population, namely:

1. 1780s: Revolutionary period, “no taxation without representation”, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the purpose of government (in lieu of service to the sovereign)

2. 1860s: Transition from slavery to free-labor, universalization of wage-labor system which enabled industrial expansion at the cost of a decimated South

3. 1940s: culmination of New Deal into “Four Freedoms”, substituted effect of “Arsenal of Democracy”, US global preeminence enabling increased government largesse, hence extending greater guarantees to citizens (Housing, Social Security, Medicare, GI Bill)

In each age, this social contract serves effectively as a new means to capture the labor force, and as was well understood by the Roosevelt Administration, to stave off revolution and disintegration. Today is no different, except that the labor force is more mobile, more upset, and more aware of its exclusion from the profit-generating mechanisms of the country at large. Even as the US Empire retrenches, as a supposed China Gold Revaluation is incoming, as debt and inflation wreak havoc on the middle class, US structural forces can be reined in with sufficient monetization of debt, and sufficient efficiency in the delivery of services. If the American Social Contract shifts in that manner, even if it is no longer the singular world-power, both its cultural influence will continue, and it can be a successful source of innovation for generations to come. Much the same way China came to Capitalism, the United States must understand that “you judge a cat by whether it catches mice”.