I am not naive about what Russia is, and neither should you be. Putin’s eventual demise - whenever it comes, and in whatever form - will not deliver a more democratic, less violent country in his place. That is not how the Russian system works. (I have written elsewhere about the ideological software that runs underneath it.)

In the following lines, I will describe the operating structure of the Russian Federation as it actually functions - not as a modern state with authoritarian features, but as something closer to a medieval feudal estate that happens to possess nuclear weapons and a seat at the United Nations (for reasons that still bewilder me).

Let’s begin.

On 21 February 2022, Vladimir Putin held a televised meeting of the Russian Security Council. The choreography was meant to look like a deliberation with each man stepping to the microphone, asked his view on recognising the breakaway “republics” in eastern Ukraine. It was all theatre, because the decision had already been made. The point of the performance was not to debate, but to implicate every person standing in that room - to bind the Russian elite to a war they could not backtrack. Ever.

The Kremlin is not just ideology, strategy, and doctrine. There’s something more primitive in its foundation - it operates as organised crime syndicate : shared guilt as a guarantee of loyalty. Russians have a word for it - круговая порука (krugovaya poruka), circular responsibility. It is the same logic that holds a mafia family together - once everyone’s hands are dirty, no one can walk away clean.

If you want to understand why Russia behaves the way it does - why elites do not defect, why the war keeps being financed, why no obvious successor is allowed to emerge - you have to stop reading the Kremlin like a government and start reading it like a system operating rules. So here they are.

Part I The Model: Russia as Putin’s Estate

Putin does not preside over the Russian state in the way a prime minister presides over Britain or a chancellor over Germany. He treats it as personal property. Resources, ministries, industries, even people are assets in a portfolio he manages.

Because no one can run a country of 144 million people alone, he leases pieces of it out - a trusted friend gets the energy sector, a loyal lieutenant gets defence procurement, an useful technocrat gets the central bank. Each of them then extracts wealth from their territory - part of which flows back to Putin in the form of palaces he doesn’t officially own, apartments bought for people in his circle, salaries paid to relatives who don’t actually work, and money quietly moved into jurisdictions outside Russia.

THE CORE BARGAIN

Putin gives his inner circle the right to enrich themselves from the state.

In return, they pay tribute, demonstrate loyalty, and absorb personal risk on his behalf.

Officially, Putin owns very little. In practice, he is the largest beneficiary of an economy organised around his protection.

Once you accept this frame - Russia as an estate, not a federation - everything else falls into place. The clans are not factions in a normal political sense, but franchisees. The bureaucracy is not a neutral apparatus, but the staff that runs the estate. And the war in Ukraine is not, primarily, a foreign policy. It is the most expensive thing the estate has ever done, and the rules of the estate are bending under the weight of it.

Part II The Pyramid: Who Actually Holds Power

If you picture a pyramid, Putin is at the top. Below him, the system splits into four layers. Each layer has a specific function, and each is structured to ensure that no single layer can act against him without the others noticing.

Layer 1: The Clans

There are roughly five major clans, each one is built around a patron - a man with decades of personal access to Putin - who acts as the head of an extended client network. Clans control the strategically critical pieces of the Russian economy: defence, agriculture, transport, energy. They place their people in ministries, push laws favourable to their assets, and lobby Putin on personnel decisions.

The single most valuable currency in the system is not money, but access. A clan boss who can still get a meeting with Putin is powerful. One who cannot, no matter how rich, is a bottom feeder.

Layer 2: The Independent Putinists

Below and slightly to the side of the clans sit a smaller group of figures who do not belong to any particular network but who serve Putin directly. They are technocrats, managers, useful specialists. Dmitry Medvedev - the vodka marinated brain that cosplayed as president at one time (he blocked me on Twitter for calling him that, btw). Mikhail Mishustin - the prime minister and tax-system technocrat. Ramzan Kadyrov - the Chechen warlord who provides Islamist fighters for Putin’s wars in exchange for federal money. Alexei Miller at Gazprom, etc.

And then there is Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the central bank - arguably the single most operationally important person in the system not named Putin. She is the reason the rouble did not collapse in 2022. She is the the financial sorceress behind Russia’s ability to finance the war in Ukraine without getting crushed by the numerous sanctions.

Layer 3: The Security Services

Beneath the clans and the technocrats sits the apparatus that actually enforces loyalty: the FSB, the Investigative Committee, the Prosecutor General’s office, and the various other security organs. Their job is not to defend Russia from external enemies. Their job is to keep dossiers on every member of the Russian elite - every affair, every offshore account, every corrupt deal - and to remind those elites that the dossier exists, in case they get funny ideas.

Layer 4: The Family

And then there is the crime family. Putin’s daughters, Maria and Katerina, both work in suspiciously interesting fields. Maria, the elder, is in personalised medicine and diagnostics. Katerina, the younger, is in biotechnology and technical innovation. The official explanation is national security - Russia must, after all, defend itself from the genetic weapons the West is supposedly designing to kill ethnic Russians. The actual explanation is more mundane and more revealing. Putin is 73. He wants to live longer and his daughters are working on it. Remember that hot mic moment in Beijing, when Putin eagerly expressed his desire to live until 150?

The wider family network spreads further. Anna Tsivilyova, the daughter of Putin’s cousin, was made deputy minister of defence in 2024 - with responsibility for the social welfare of war veterans. Her husband, Sergey Tsivilyov, was made minister of energy at the same time. These appointments are not coincidences, but the eyes and ears in two of the most consequential ministries in the country. They are also, almost certainly, figureheads holding assets that belong, in everything but name, to Putin himself.

THE PYRAMID, IN ONE SENTENCE

Putin sits alone at the top, surrounded by clans that compete for his favour, technocrats who keep the machine running, security services that watch everyone including the clans, and family members who hold his real wealth - and no one in the structure can act independently without being seen by at least two of the others. Круговая порука.

Part III The New Elite: Manufacturing a Wartime Aristocracy

Here is where the system stops being static.

Putin is in the middle of an explicit project to build a new ruling class. He calls them the veterans - the patriotic elite forged in the war - and he contrasts them with what he describes as the cosmopolitan, unpatriotic elite of the 1990s. The oligarchs who got rich during the post-Soviet privatisations. The people who, in his telling, sold Russia out.

This rhetorical move does several things at once:

• It manufactures heroes. Returning soldiers are paraded as the moral backbone of the new Russia, useful for propaganda and useful for legitimising the war.

• It disciplines the existing elite. The implicit message: behave, or you will be replaced by men who fought while you stayed comfortable.

• It propagandises social mobility. Russians from poor regions are shown that combat is a path upward - even if the actual path tends to lead to an early grave.

• It locks in the war. People who lost limbs and brothers at the front have a powerful interest in not seeing that war declared a mistake.

In practice, the new elite project is - like most things in Russia - mostly theatre. Veterans who actually served on the front line are slotted into junior positions in regional administrations and lower-tier elected bodies, where there is little real money and even less real power. The old elites are not letting newcomers anywhere near the actual assets. What veterans get instead are propaganda functions: speaking in schools, teaching children to operate drones, leading patriotic-education programmes, etc.

And there is a darker subplot. Some of the most prominent “veterans” rising through the system never saw real combat at all. They held positions in the bureaucracy, took a brief tour through a special unit, and returned with the prestige of front-line service and a fast-track to promotion. The system is producing the appearance of a meritocratic warrior class while continuing to reward the same people it always rewarded.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR THE WEST

If the war ends, the propaganda value of the new elite collapses with it. The Kremlin needs the war to keep the project alive. This is one of the structural reasons - separate from the question of territory or ideology - that any negotiated settlement is harder than it looks. A peace deal does not just end a conflict, but dismantles a domestic political construction that Putin has spent three years building.

Part IV: The Succession Question

Every member of the Russian elite knows that Putin will eventually be gone. Despite his daughters’ best efforts, he is mortal. The system around him is built on his personal authority. So, quietly and without public acknowledgement, the elite is preparing for two things at once: surviving inside the current system, and positioning themselves for the moment after.

This is the contradiction at the heart of Russian high politics today. To be useful to Putin now, you must show no ambition. To be useful to yourself later, you must accumulate exactly the kind of power Putin punishes. So everyone walks the line.

The Names to Watch

Below are several names worth keeping an eye on:

Nikolai Patrushev - for years considered the de facto number two, with hardline security-services credentials. Dismissed as Secretary of the Security Council in 2024. Whether this was a quiet retirement or a quiet warning depends on whom you ask.

Yury Kovalchuk - the leader of one of the most powerful Kremlin clans, and reportedly one of the figures whose isolation with Putin during COVID influenced the decision to invade Ukraine. Ideologically aligned with the most militaristic faction of the elite.

Mikhail Mishustin - the prime minister, who is constitutionally next in line. He is also a competent technocrat with no political base and no clan. In other words, exactly the kind of placeholder Putin trusts because he cannot threaten.

Dmitry Patrushev, Alexei Dyumin, Sergei Sobyanin - the long-listed names. Sobyanin runs Moscow, the most administratively powerful sub-national post in the country. Dyumin is a former Putin bodyguard and now occupies senior security posts. Patrushev junior is the son of Patrushev senior - Russian-style dynastic politics.

Sergei Kiriyenko - the most interesting name on the list, and the one I would watch most carefully. Briefly prime minister in the 1990s. He spent years running Rosatom, and is now deputy head of the presidential administration, where he has quietly taken control of domestic political management, online propaganda, the occupied Ukrainian territories, and elements of foreign policy in the post-Soviet space - South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria. He organised the annexation referendums of autumn 2022.

It’s worth remembering that Russian high politics under Putin does not reward overt ambition. The moment a player rises too visibly above his station, someone is dispatched to clip his wings. Whether this happens to Kiriyenko - and how - will tell us a great deal about whether the post-Putin transition is being planned or simply being postponed.

Part V: How the System Disciplines Its Own

The most useful question to ask about any authoritarian regime is not why people support it, but why people who privately oppose it do not act on that opposition. In Russia, the answer has three parts.

1. Money

Despite what the sanctions optics suggest, the Russian elite is still making a great deal of money. The war economy means swollen defence contracts, federal budget grants, and lucrative roles in the now-nationalised industries. Members of the elite have learned how to dip in these flows and route the proceeds into private accounts. Sanctions have hurt some of them, but most have adapted.

And the West has been, at best, inconsistent. Valentina Matviyenko, chair of the Federation Council and a sanctioned individual, was permitted into Switzerland last year for a UN meeting where she spread Kremlin talking points uncontested. The lesson the Russian elite draws from this is straightforward: Putin is still effective enough as a patron that the costs of staying loyal are bearable.

2. Fear

The FSB has a file on every one of them. I guarantee you that much. Every affair, offshore vehicle, every conversation that should not have happened, there is a paper trail of it somewhere. The threat is not that the file will be made public, but that the file exists at all - and that the rules for when it gets used are deliberately unwritten.

Members of the elite do not trust each other. The post-Soviet ruling class is, in its bones, a Darwinian environment where everyone has spent 30 years watching peers be destroyed for stepping out of line. Solidarity among them is structurally impossible to organise.

3. Property Rights

This is the change that has accelerated since 2022, and it is the most important development inside the Russian system that almost no one outside it is paying attention to.

Under cover of an “anti-corruption” campaign, the Russian state has begun confiscating private assets at an unprecedented scale. Companies privatised in the chaotic 1990s are being investigated 30 years later. The prosecutor’s office declares the original privatisation invalid, the asset is taken from its current owner and either nationalised or transferred to a Kremlin-aligned clan. 805 Russian companies have been nationalised through the courts, according to the Federal Agency for State Property Management.

The legal pretext is fighting corruption, but the actual function is two-fold. First, it generates revenue for a federal budget that is straining under the cost of the war. Second, and more importantly, it is a tool of discipline. Every member of the elite now understands that their property rights are conditional, that the rules can be reinterpreted retroactively, and that the only protection is active, visible, ostentatious loyalty.

THE NEW RULE

The old deal was: be loyal, steal within agreed limits, stay out of politics, and your wealth is safe.

The new deal is: there is no agreed limit, the line moves without warning, and only zealous demonstrations of loyalty buy temporary protection.

Part VI: What Happens When the Music Stops

The Russian system is currently held together by three things: the war, the propaganda of besieged-fortress nationalism, and the personal authority of Vladimir Putin. Subtract any of them and the structure becomes unstable.

If the war ends - through negotiation, exhaustion, or any other route - the rationale for the wartime mobilisation evaporates. The cuts to social spending become visible. The questions about what the war actually achieved become unavoidable. The new “veteran elite” loses its political function. The disciplinary tools sharpened during the war - asset seizures, retroactive privatisation reviews, the FSB dossiers - start to feel less like wartime measures and more like the way the country now works in peacetime, which is a much harder thing to justify.

When a severe economic crisis arrives - driven by sanctions, burning oil refineries, the loss of access to African gold and uranium mines, or the simple reality that you cannot run a war economy indefinitely - the assets the elite have been fighting over begin to shrink. Internal competition among the clans, currently moderated by the prospect of continued growth in the war pie, becomes a zero-sum game.

And if Putin loses the physical capacity to govern - the question that nobody at the top of the Russian system is allowed to ask out loud - the absence of an agreed successor means a power struggle. Each clan has its own armed assets. The Wagner mutiny in 2023 was a warning shot, badly handled and quickly resolved, but it confirmed something important: the men around Putin can, in extremis, mobilise force.

None of this is a prediction of imminent collapse. The Russian system has survived shocks that should have broken it. It is more durable than its critics tend to believe. But it is also more fragile than its supporters tend to admit, because the things that hold it together are increasingly the same things that are wearing it out.

My Balkan Candor

People in the West keep asking the wrong question about Russia. They ask why the elite does not stop Putin. The question assumes the elite is something separate from Putin. It is not. It is the staff of a privately-held estate. Their wealth, their families’ wealth, their personal safety, and their freedom from prosecution are all functions of his survival.

The Russian system is not a government with a strongman attached. It is a strongman with a government attached. And the most important thing happening inside it right now is not the war - it is the slow, deliberate, increasingly arbitrary rewriting of the rules that hold the structure together. Putin is using the war to discipline his own ruling class, and he is succeeding. He is also burning through the trust and the property rights that made the system functional in the first place.

The interesting question is not whether the Russian system collapses. It is whether what comes after it is more dangerous, less dangerous, or simply different in ways we have not yet imagined.

If you find yourself in conversation with someone who tells you confidently what post-Putin Russia will look like, ask them which of the five clans they think wins. If they cannot name one, they are not actually answering the question.

DISCLAIMER: in this analysis, I will focus on the Republican Party of the United States of America, because since 2026, the Republican Party (GOP) holds a "trifecta" in the United States federal government, controlling the presidency (Executive) and majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (Legislative). While they do not directly control the independent Supreme Court (Judicial), a majority of its justices were appointed by Republican presidents. I have my own opinions about the Democratic party, which - for now - I will keep to myself since they are not the focus on this analysis, and the Democratic party doesn’t hold the trifecta.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

- Benjamin Franklin’s response to the question of what kind of government the delegates had given the country.

That is what Benjamin Franklin reportedly replied to as he walked out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Franklin knew exactly what he was saying - republics are conditional, they require maintenance. The whole sentence is a conditional, actually - a great big “if” sitting at the centre of the American experiment for over two centuries.

I have been wrestling with the question of whether America can keep its republic for a very long time now. Longer, honestly, than I have been writing publicly. Anyone who has read me knows I am not a declinist by temperament. After all, the American system has surprised the world before - it has more antifragility in its bones than the doomers give it credit for.

But antifragility is not a magic pill, but a function of design. And the question I cannot put down is whether the design itself - the actual constitutional architecture the Founders built in 1787 - is antifragile enough to survive the specific kind of shock it is now absorbing.

So earlier this year, I went back to the source.

The Federalist Paper Trail

When I want to understand a system, I rarely read commentary about the system, I read what the people who built it actually wrote. This is a habit I picked up in my early 20s, when I realised that most analysts and tenured professors have the tendency of layering so many of their own preoccupations on top of the original material that the original material had effectively disappeared.

So I read the Federalist Papers. And then, because you cannot understand a debate by reading one side of it, I read the Anti-Federalists papers as well. Brutus, the Federal Farmer, Centinel, Cato. Read them in succession for better clarity. They are not always elegant - some of the Anti-Federalist essays are grouchy and provincial in a way - but together they give you something a modern writer has yet to give me: a clear, unfiltered view of how the United States came to be and how it was meant to function. The arguments are all there, so are the fears, the compromises, all of it. You don’t need anything else, but a cup of tea and an in-depth dive to comprehend the inception and evolution of the American republic.

Earlier this year, I re-read the Federalist Papers cover to cover. I wanted to know whether what I was watching unfold was a pathology the system was designed to handle, or a pathology the system was specifically not designed to handle. There is a difference, and it is the most important difference in American politics right now.

I want to focus on one essay, because in my humble view - it contains the entire bet the Founders made. Federalist 51.

Federalist 51 by James Madison: An Analysis

Federalist 51 was written by James Madison and published in February 1788. It is a short essay, and also one of the most important pieces of political philosophy ever written by an American, and I am willing to die on that hill. Below, I have done a deep-dive analysis:

Section 1

The problem: how do you keep power divided in practice?

"TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments… the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places."

Madison opens with a candid admission: the Constitution's stated separation of powers is not self-enforcing. Parchment isn’t enough, the real solution must come from structural design: building rivalry and mutual dependence directly into how the government works. This sets the stage for everything that follows.

Section 2

Principle 1: each branch should choose its own members

"Each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others."

Each branch must derive its authority independently - ideally from the people directly, through separate channels. Madison admits the judiciary is a partial exception (lifetime tenure plus specialised qualifications), but the principle holds: a branch picked by another branch is a branch owned by it. Today, this is formally intact but practically eroded - Republican members of Congress aren't appointed by the president, but their political survival depends on his endorsement, which produces the same loss of independent will Madison feared.

Section 3

Principle 2: pay each branch independently

“Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal.“

If one branch can starve another, formal independence is meaningless. Money is, after all, leverage. The Constitution prevents Congress from cutting presidential or judicial salaries mid-term for exactly this reason. The modern parallel: campaign finance and party infrastructure now do what salary manipulation once did. A senator who crosses the party leader doesn’t get his pay cut - he gets primaried. Different mechanism, same coercive effect on independence.

Section 4

The central mechanism: “Ambition must counteract ambition.”

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place… If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Madison doesn’t trust officials to be virtuous - he trusts them to be selfish, and designs the government so that selfishness produces accountability. A senator should personally want to defend the Senate’s prerogatives because his own power, prestige, and identity are tied to that institution. The system breaks when the most relevant ambition shifts from institutional to partisan. When a senator’s career depends more on the party leader’s approval than on the Senate’s authority, the rivalry Madison engineered collapses. This is the precise diagnostic for the GOP question - the constitutional means still exist, but the personal motives have been rewired.

Section 5

Government must control itself

“You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Two layers of control: elections (the people) and internal checks (the auxiliary precautions). Madison is explicit that elections alone are insufficient - you can’t wait every two or four years to discover whether the system is working. The auxiliary precautions are what operate between elections. When defenders of executive overreach say “the next election will sort it out,” they’re discarding exactly the layer Madison thought was indispensable.

Section 6

Realism about human nature: self-interest as a public sentinel

“The constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other - that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.“

Madison’s most cynical and most brilliant move: stop hoping for civic virtue, harness selfishness instead. Each official’s private interest becomes the guard on public rights. The flaw exposed today: Madison assumed the most relevant private interest would be institutional. He didn’t anticipate a media and primary system that would make partisan loyalty more career-determining than institutional defense.

Section 7

Congress split

“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches…”

Madison expected Congress to be so dominant that splitting it into House and Senate was necessary to prevent legislative tyranny. However, Congress is now structurally the weakest branch, having delegated war powers, trade authority, emergency powers, and rule-making to the executive over decades. The branch Madison feared would crush the others has been crushed by the one he thought needed fortifying. This isn’t the system working as designed. but the design being progressively dismantled.

Section 8

Veto power as a form of executive fortification

“As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.“

Madison gave the president the veto because he worried the executive was the weak branch needing protection from legislative encroachment. Imagine telling him that 235 years later, presidents would set tariff policy by proclamation, redirect funds via emergency declarations, and conduct wars without authorisation. The fortified-weak branch became dominant, and the dominant branch became dependent.

Section 9

Vertical division of power: federalism stacks on separation

“The power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people.“

Power is split horizontally (between branches) and vertically (between federal and state governments). If one layer fails, the other still operates. This is the part of Madison’s design currently doing the most visible work - state attorneys general suing the federal government, governors refusing to cooperate with federal policy, states acting as policy laboratories and legal counterweights. Whether you see this as healthy double-security or as fragmentation depends on which administration is being resisted, but the mechanism is functioning.

Section 10

Protecting the minority from the majority

“The society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.“

The crux of Madison’s bet: a large, diverse republic is harder to capture than a small homogeneous one because no single faction can assemble a stable majority. Diversity itself becomes a structural protection. The challenge today: America is plenty diverse, but the political system compresses that diversity into two coalitions. Madison expected shifting issue-based coalitions; we have stable identity-based coalitions. A 51-49 partisan majority can act with far more cohesion than the messy issue-by-issue alliances Madison anticipated, weakening the protective effect of multiplicity.

The Conditions Madison Did Not Imagine

Madison helped design the American system for productive friction, and not for paralysis. He believed the architecture would channel conflict into legitimate political competition - that the various ambitions, factions, and institutional interests would all be pushing against each other in roughly the same arena, under roughly the same rules, with roughly the same understanding of what the game was.

The bet collapses when those conditions break, and several of them are breaking at the same time.

The first condition is institutional self-respect. Madison’s mechanism only works if a senator actually wants to defend the Senate’s power against a co-partisan president. If the senator’s primary loyalty is to the president rather than to the institution, the entire ambition-counteracts-ambition machinery shorts out. There is nothing in the constitutional text that prevents this, because the text assumed it could not happen. It assumed institutional pride was so deeply baked into the political class that no senator would willingly surrender his own power to make a president happy.

That assumption no longer holds. Today’s Republican Senate is not defending its institutional turf against the executive. It is, with very few exceptions, actively assisting the executive in dismantling congressional authority (angry tweets don’t count as action, sorry). Madison expected fear, ambition, and self-interest to point senators towards defending their branch.

The second condition is congressional jealousy of its own delegated powers. This is perhaps the most under-discussed structural problem in the United States. Since the New Deal, and especially since the Second World War, Congress has handed enormous swaths of authority to the executive - emergency powers, tariff authority, regulatory rule-making, war powers in practice if not in law. The National Emergencies Act, IEEPA, Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, the 2001 AUMF - these statutes give a president powers Madison would have found genuinely terrifying. A president can now impose tariffs, freeze assets, sanction entire countries, deploy military force, and declare emergencies that unlock dozens of dormant authorities, all without meaningful congressional input.

Congress could claw these back, since there is no constitutional barrier. But repealing them requires a majority willing to constrain its own party’s president, and that is precisely the kind of behaviour the current incentive structure punishes.

The third condition is the absence of a faction so large and so coordinated that it captures multiple branches at once. Madison thought factions would be many and small, especially in a large republic. He did not foresee a national media environment, social media, or a partisan ecosystem capable of producing the kind of disciplined, ideologically homogeneous coalition that modern American society has become (on both the Republican and the Democrat side). A single faction now controls the executive, dominates the Supreme Court for at least a generation, holds the Senate, and exerts gravitational pull on the House. The federalist double-security is also weakening as state-level Republican parties align themselves with the national movement rather than acting as independent power centres.

This is the precise scenario his architecture was meant to prevent.

Why the Republicans Will Not Stop Trump

I want to spend some time on this because I think it is poorly understood in Europe, and even in parts of the American commentariat. The standard European take is that surely, surely, the institutional Republican Party will at some point stand up. The adult in the room will reassert themselves, the McCains will quietly do what needs doing.

This is wishful thinking (and yes, I have been guilty of it too, don’t get me wrong), because the reasons the GOP will not constrain Trump are structural.

Primary politics

This is the most important factor by a wide margin. Republican members in safe red districts - which is most of them - fear a primary challenger far more than a general election opponent. Trump’s hold on the Republican base means crossing him is career-ending for almost all of them.

Take Liz Cheney for example - she was the third-ranking House Republican going into 2021. Daughter of Dick Cheney, one of the most conservative members of Congress by voting record. She voted to impeach Trump after January 6th and served as vice chair of the Select Committee. House Republicans removed her from leadership in May 2021, and in her August 2022 Wyoming primary, she lost to a Trump-endorsed challenger by roughly 37 points. The state she had previously won easily.

Another example is Adam Kinzinger - an Air Force veteran, six-term congressman, and the other Republican on the January 6th Committee. He did not even get to face a primary. He announced in October 2021 he would not seek re-election, citing the political environment and a redrawn district that made winning effectively impossible.

Of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6th, only two were still in Congress by the 2022 midterms. The rest retired, lost primaries, or were pushed out. The message was received: voting against Trump on a matter of conscience ends your career, regardless of your conservative credentials, family name, military service, or seniority. Both Cheney and Kinzinger have remained publicly critical. Neither has found a path back into Republican politics, which is itself part of the lesson - the party has no off-ramp for dissent.

The party apparatus is now Trump’s

The RNC, state parties, and major donor networks have been reshaped around Trump personally. There is no longer an institutional GOP that exists independently of him. The traditional power centres - Chamber of Commerce types, neoconservative foreign policy hands, fiscal hawks - have been purged, retired, or gone quiet. The infrastructure needed to coordinate dissent simply does not exist anymore.

The collective action problem

Even Republicans privately critical face a coordination trap. One senator pushing back gets crushed alone. Twenty acting together could matter, but no one wants to be first, and there is no trusted mechanism to organise dissent.

Filibuster mechanics and thin margins

Senate Democrats can block legislation but cannot compel action. The House Republican majority is narrow enough that a handful of holdouts can stop almost anything, which empowers the most Trump-aligned members rather than the moderates.

Add it all up and you have a Congress that has functionally ceased to function as a check on the executive. Madison’s machinery requires both branches to want to push back. Only one is pushing.

Can the Republic Survive?

I want to land somewhere real honest.

I find the “America is finished” take to be lazy and self-indulgent, mostly written by people who have never seen an actual collapse and do not understand what one looks like. The “the institutions will hold” take is also lazy, mostly written by people whose entire careers have been built inside said institutions and who therefore cannot afford to imagine them failing.

The honest answer is that the American constitutional system has more reserves than its doomers like to think, and less than its admirers like to believe. The federal structure is real, and several states - California, New York, Illinois, the Northeast governors more broadly - are quietly but seriously building the kind of sub-national capacity that would matter in a more federalised future. The judiciary is still mostly populated by judges who take their oaths seriously. The military retains a deep institutional commitment to constitutional rather than personal loyalty. The civil service is being attacked but has not yet been destroyed. There are millions of competent, decent Americans going to work every day trying to make their corner of the system function.

But Madison’s bet - the actual bet, the one in Federalist 51 - is under more strain than at any point in American history except possibly 1860. The ambition-counteracts-ambition mechanism requires that ambition still align with institutional defence, which - as the time of this writing - it does not appear to be the case. The federalist double security requires that states retain genuine independence from national party machines. That is partially intact, partially not. The expectation that no faction would grow large enough to capture multiple branches simultaneously has already failed.

Whether the republic can survive is no longer a theoretical question, but an operational one. And the answer, in the most candid Balkan formulation I can offer, is this: probably yes, but not without damage, not without decades of repair, and not without the United States looking quite different on the other side. The country that emerges from the next decades will not be the country that entered it. The institutions will be remade - either by people defending them or by people dismantling them, but remade either way.

The question Franklin posed in 1787 was never answered, but deferred. Every generation deferred it too. Every generation kept the republic by doing the work the previous generation had done. That deferral is now ending, and the American political class is being asked, for the first time in a long time, to actually answer the question. In votes, in resignations, in legal filings, in personal career risk.

What I know is this: republics, like marriages, are not preserved by their founding documents. They are preserved by the daily decisions of the people inside them. Madison built one of the best-designed political marriages in human history. But he could not, and did not pretend to, guarantee that it would last forever. He gave you a republic. Whether you can keep it is, still, your problem.

Pick an object in the room you are sitting in. Any object. The chair beneath you, the mug on your desk, the phone in your hand. Now try to trace its supply chain of the given object. Where was the raw material mined? In which country was it smelted, separated, refined? On which ship did it cross which ocean, and under which flag? Which port did it pass through, which customs union, which subcontractor’s subcontractor soldered which component onto which board? Who built the machines that built the machines?

I guarantee you will almost certainly fail within three steps.

The gap between the life we live and the system that produces it has become so vast that almost no one - not the consumer, not the politician, not the CEO - can hold the whole picture in mind at once. We have built a civilisation on a machine whose workings we no longer understand, and now the machine is starting to break.

The breakdown is not a single event. It is a sequence, and the sequence is accelerating.

A Short History of the Breaking

In early 2020, COVID-19 did something that decades of academic warnings about “lean manufacturing” and “just-in-time inventory” had failed to do: it made supply chain fragility legible to ordinary people. Suddenly everyone understood that the reason one could not buy a given item in London had something to do with a factory outside Milan, a shipping container stuck in Los Angeles, and the closure of a Chinese port. The world discovered - or rather, rediscovered - that the global economy is not an abstraction - it is ships and roads and people and parts, and when any one of those breaks, everything downstream breaks with it.

Then came February 2022, and with it the war in Ukraine. Energy markets, grain markets, fertiliser markets - all of them felt the shock. The interconnections that had been flagged as “vulnerabilities” in consulting reports for a decade suddenly became self-evident. Europe, which had spent twenty years convincing itself that cheap Russian gas was a commercial relationship rather than a strategic one, learned a different lesson rather quickly. Germany’s industrial model - the crown jewel of European economics - was revealed to have been partially subsidised, all along, by a country that now wanted to redraw borders with tanks.

In the background, something quieter but arguably more consequential was happening with rare earth elements. China had been telegraphing its intentions for years, while the West had been looking away. Then, in April 2025, in response to Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs, Beijing imposed export licensing on seven heavy rare earth elements. In October 2025, it escalated - dramatically. The new rules, announced under the Chinese Ministry of Commerce’s Announcement No. 61, applied, for the first time, China’s own version of the Foreign Direct Product Rule: any foreign-made product containing even 0.1 percent Chinese-origin rare earths, or manufactured using Chinese rare earth technology, would now require an export licence from Beijing. Starting 1 December 2025, firms with any affiliation to foreign militaries - explicitly including the United States - would be largely denied licences altogether.

Consider what rare earths actually do. They are the magnets in an F-35 fighter jet, the components in Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines, the guidance systems in Tomahawk missiles, the radar in air defence batteries, the permanent magnets that allow wind turbines to generate electricity and electric vehicles to move. China currently produces roughly 70% of the world’s rare earths and processes approximately 90% of global rare earth ore. For sintered permanent magnets - the kind that go into nearly every serious electric motor in the world - China’s share is 94%. Two decades ago, that number was about 50%. We did not arrive at this position by accident, but because it was cheaper to let someone else do the dirty, environmentally costly work, and because we told ourselves the arrangement was commercial rather than strategic.

We told ourselves a lot of things that time proved wrong.

The Quiet Part, Said Out Loud

In June 2023, Greg Hayes, then chief executive of Raytheon - one of the three or four most consequential defence contractors in the Western world - sat for an interview with the Financial Times and said something that, if you were paying attention, should have permanently recalibrated your view of the Cold War between the West and the emerging Russia–China–Iran bloc. Raytheon, Hayes explained, had “several thousand suppliers in China.” Decoupling from China, he said flatly, “is impossible.” The best the company could do was “de-risk.”

His reasoning was straightforward: more than 95% of rare earth materials and metals come from or are processed in China. “There is no alternative,” he said. To pull out would take “many, many years” to rebuild comparable capability, either domestically or in friendly countries.

Read that again. The CEO of one of the primary manufacturers of American strategic weaponry said, in public, that his company cannot be separated from the Chinese supply chain without a reconstruction effort that would take years he did not promise to deliver.

It got worse. In 2023 and 2024, Lockheed Martin - the prime contractor on the F-35 programme, the most expensive weapons system in human history - identified prohibited Chinese magnets inside the F-35 supply chain and notified the Department of Defence. Pentagon manufacturing paused for several months while alternatives were sought. By July 2025, a Government Accountability Office report was warning Congress in plain language that the U.S. naval shipbuilding industry, including submarine production, was being constrained by its reliance on foreign suppliers, and that the United States currently lacks the domestic capacity to cast the titanium required for critical submarine components. A parallel study by the analytics firm Govini, which holds a multi-year Pentagon contract specifically to map this terrain, found that between 2005 and 2020 the number of Chinese suppliers in U.S. defence supply chains quadrupled from roughly 10,000 to over 40,000. U.S. dependence on China for electronics increased by 600 percent between 2014 and 2022. As of 2024 data, nearly one in ten “Tier 1” subcontractors to American defence prime contractors were Chinese firms. For missile defence, over 11 percent. For the nuclear arsenal, nearly 8 percent.

“Defense supply chains today are incredibly brittle,” the Govini CEO told reporters in 2025. “They’re not resilient. They’re very, very intricately tied to foreign suppliers.”

This is not a secret, nor a conspiracy, but a public record.

Which Brings Us to the Missiles That Are Not Coming

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel began air strikes against Iran. Seven weeks later, a Reuters scoop citing five sources confirmed what some of us had already begun to suspect. The United States was informing European allies, in bilateral messages, that previously contracted weapons deliveries under the Foreign Military Sales programme would be delayed. Not cancelled - delayed, with no firm timeline, and with the justification that the Iran war was drawing down U.S. stockpiles. The Baltic states were among the first to be told. Estonia, which had already received six HIMARS launchers and placed an order for three more with deliveries scheduled for 2027, was informed that ammunition for its HIMARS system was on hold. Javelin anti-tank missiles too. The value of the affected deliveries, by Estonian Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur’s own accounting, runs into the tens of millions of euros - and that is only Estonia.

Pevkur’s remark, after his phone call with U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on 20 April 2026, was diplomatic but unambiguous. The pause, he said, would “certainly last longer than weeks, more likely months.” Estonia would begin exploring alternatives - South Korea’s Hanwha Aerospace, with its K239 Chunmoo systems; Turkey and Israel for shorter-range platforms; even, he hinted, direct cooperation with Ukraine.

And here is the part that I keep returning to. American officials, Reuters reported, privately expressed frustration that European nations were “not helping the U.S. and Israel open the Strait of Hormuz.” In other words: deliver troops to our war, or your ammunition does not ship. Earlier in the month, Trump had already threatened to halt weapons supplies to Ukraine under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List programme unless European allies joined the Hormuz operation. NATO partners were being squeezed on weapons they had already paid for.

It is tempting, and in Brussels and Vilnius and Tallinn it has been tempting for many, to interpret this as pure politics - as a Trump-era coercion strategy, unworthy of America, a betrayal of alliance logic. And it is that. But it is not only that. Because here is the uncomfortable second-order reading: even if Washington wanted to deliver every shell and every missile it has sold to Europe on time, it may not be able to. The American military-industrial complex is not refusing to make money. It is running into the hard ceiling of its own supply chain. The Patriot interceptors now being fired to shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles over Gulf states are the same interceptors Ukraine uses to defend its energy grid. There are not enough of them. There have not been enough of them for some time.

Meanwhile, in the factories that are meant to be building the replacements, the rare earth magnets still come from China - or used to - and the Tier 1 subcontractors still include several thousand Chinese firms that, under Beijing’s December 2025 rules, can no longer legally supply any part of a product destined for military end use in the West.

This is the shape of the current Cold War - not two blocs of roughly equivalent industrial capacity glowering at each other across a line on the map. One bloc, increasingly, controls the physical materials and manufacturing capacity; the other bloc has the financial capital, the software, and a paper architecture of alliances that - as the Baltic states are discovering - can be rescinded with a phone call.

Stockpiles are finite. Factories take years to build. Mines take longer. Nothing, and I mean nothing, grows on trees.

The Exercise

I want to return to the exercise at the top of this essay.

Pick one object, trace its supply chain. The bauxite mine in Guinea, the aluminium smelter in Iceland, the rolling mill in Germany, the anodising line in Vietnam, the fastener forged in Taiwan, the assembly plant in Shenzhen, the container ship flagged in Liberia, the port crane manufactured in Shanghai, the trucking company in Rotterdam, the distribution centre in Leipzig, the retail platform incorporated in Ireland for tax purposes and hosted on servers physically located in Virginia. And the machines that make all of those machines, and the software that runs those machines, and the rare earth magnets in the motors of those machines, and the lithography tools that made the chips that run that software.

You will fail within three steps. So will I. So will the CEO of many major companies. So would, I promise you, the national security advisor of most countries on earth.

That failure is not a personal shortcoming, but a structural property of the world we built between roughly 1990 and 2020, when the triumphalist consensus held that frictionless global trade was not only the most efficient arrangement possible but also a permanent one. We optimised every link in the chain for cost, then we optimised the chain itself for length, and then we forgot that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and that, in a war, an adversary gets to pick which link to snap.

We are now living inside the consequences of that forgetting.

What Europe Understands That America Does Not

In 2015, France did something that, at the time, seemed either quaint or vaguely ridiculous to most commentators outside the country. It made obsolescence programmée - planned obsolescence - a criminal offence. Any manufacturer caught deliberately designing a product to fail prematurely or to become unusable through hardware flaws, software updates that degrade performance, or other engineered limitations now faced up to two years in prison and fines of up to €300,000, or up to 5% of average annual turnover in the most serious cases. The law was strengthened and refined over the following decade, most notably after the batterygate scandal of 2017–2018, when Apple was caught - and eventually fined €25 million by French regulators - for pushing software updates that slowed older iPhones.

In isolation, you can read this law as an eccentric Gallic consumer-protection measure.

But it is not that. Not anymore. And especially not in the light of the European Union’s June 2025 Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which extended and systematised the logic of the French law across the entire single market. As of 20 June 2025, any smartphone, feature phone, cordless phone, or tablet placed on the EU market must meet a set of binding requirements. Batteries must retain at least 80% of their initial capacity after 800 full charge cycles - roughly four years of ordinary use. Manufacturers must supply fifteen types of spare parts to professional repairers within 5–10 working days, and continue supplying them for at least seven years after a model is taken off the market. Operating system updates must be available for at least five years after the last unit is sold. Devices must survive 45 accidental drops without losing function. Repairability scores must appear on the energy label at point of sale. This is the law now, across 27 countries and roughly 450 million consumers.

The contrast with the American regulatory posture is almost parodic. In Washington, the conversation about consumer electronics remains largely about speed of innovation, novelty cycles, and the god-given right of a Silicon Valley firm to brick your three-year-old device with a software update. In Brussels, the conversation has moved to: how long must this object be designed to last, under what conditions must it be repairable, and who bears the cost of the waste stream when it dies?

I know what the objection is, because I have heard it for years. The objection is that this is europoor behaviour - the delicious American slur for people who drive small cars, live in smaller houses, pay €2 per litre for petrol. The objection is that European regulators are strangling innovation, that Europe, having failed to produce its own Google or Facebook, has reduced itself to nitpicking the ones America did produce. That a continent which cannot build rockets has no business telling the continent that builds rockets how to design telephones.

I will grant, for the sake of argument, that the accusation of relative technological stagnation has some merit. Europe has genuinely under-built in several categories of hard technology, despite providing the intellectual backbone on which many of these innovations were built. This is a real problem that I have written about before and will write about again - Europe can produce the Nobel laureates that develop the theories which enable Elon Musk’s to make billions in satellite communications and space engineering.

But here is what the europoor framing misses, and what the age of scarcity is going to make impossible to ignore. Living within one’s means is not a vice, nor is driving a car sized for the roads it drives on, nor is paying the real price of fuel rather than a subsidised one. Buying an appliance that is designed to last fifteen years rather than five - and being able to replace its components when they fail - is not a vice either. These are, it turns out, the adaptations of a civilisation that understands something about resource constraints that the United States, insulated by two oceans and a century of cheap energy abundance, has not yet been forced to learn.

Europe is not legislating durability because European regulators enjoy writing regulations (although they do). Europe is legislating durability because the age of shortages has arrived, and the people drafting those regulations can read the same supply chain reports I have cited above. The smartphone rule is not about smartphones. The planned obsolescence law is not about printer cartridges. These are the opening moves in a strategic reorientation of the European economy around the assumption that raw materials, components, and finished goods are no longer going to arrive on time, in the quantities required, at the prices we have become accustomed to paying.

Why This Actually Works

There is a serious question as to whether any single jurisdiction, even one the size of the EU, can force durability onto a globalised consumer electronics industry that has spent thirty years optimising against it.

The answer, in brief, is yes. And the answer is yes for a reason that political commentators who are ideologically hostile to the European project consistently fail to appreciate. The EU is still the largest single market of solvent paying customers on earth. Every major manufacturer - Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Bosch, Whirlpool, Dyson, everyone - wants to sell into it. And the moment a manufacturer redesigns a product to meet EU rules, the economic logic of producing a separate, shorter-lived version for the rest of the world collapses. Apple has already extended its part availability commitment to seven years globally. Apple has already redesigned its battery attachment system, replacing adhesive with a process that enables easier removal. This did not happen because Tim Cook is an advocate for the right-to-repair, but because Brussels told him it was either that or the European market.

This is the Brussels Effect in its most concrete form. Europe sets the floor, the rest of the world, reluctantly, complies, because the alternative is losing access to 450 million wallets.

And it is deploying it, I want to stress, at precisely the moment in history when the disposable economy is running out of the raw materials required to remain disposable. This is not coincidence, but a strategic calculation in Brussels - whether it is articulated in these words or not - is that Europe cannot afford to remain structurally dependent on a consumption model predicated on infinite replenishment from Chinese factories that may or may not be willing to replenish us, via rare earth magnets and lithium batteries that may or may not be licensed for export, through shipping lanes that may or may not be open.

At that point, durability is not a lifestyle preference, but a national security measure.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

Let me try to braid all of this together, because I think the threads are clearer from a distance than they are up close.

The COVID pandemic showed us that the global supply chain is fragile. Russia’s war against Ukraine showed us that economic interdependence is also strategic dependence. The Chinese rare earth embargo showed us that the dependency runs in one direction more than the other. The Iran war is showing us that even the most powerful military-industrial complex in human history cannot replenish its own munitions faster than it fires them, because the factories that would have to do the replenishing are themselves strung through a web of Chinese subcontractors that can be severed by a decree in Beijing.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, the European Union is quietly doing the one thing that actually responds to the situation, which is to legislate a new material culture - longer product lives, mandatory repairability, penalties for designed fragility, incentives for domestic component production. It is not a complete solution. No single jurisdiction can produce a complete solution. But it is a more honest response to the facts on the ground than anything currently coming out of Washington, where the answer to the rare earth crisis appears to be a $400 million equity stake in one mining company in California. (For context: MP Materials, fully operational, will produce roughly 1,000 tons of neodymium-iron-boron magnets per year. China produces approximately 138,000 tons.)

We are entering an age in which you will not be able to buy a new phone every year, a new car every few years, a new major appliance every five. Not because anyone is legislating your consumption - although Europe is lowkey beginning to - but because the supply chain that made that consumption possible is fraying faster than it is being rebuilt, and the geopolitical alignment required to rebuild it no longer exists. The great de-globalisation has begun. It began, depending on how you count, in Wuhan in late 2019, or at the Ukrainian border in 2014, or in a Chinese cabinet meeting at some point in the early 2010s when it was first decided that rare earths were worth weaponising. Take your pick of origin myths. The point is that we are in it now.

Big businesses will not suddenly decide to make durable products out of goodwill. The incentive structures of a publicly listed corporation in a growth economy forbid it. They can only be compelled to it by regulation, and only one regulator on earth has currently demonstrated both the will and the market leverage to make that compulsion stick.

Pick up that object in your room again. The one whose supply chain you failed to trace three paragraphs ago. Look at it. Ask yourself how long it was designed to last, and what happens when the chain that produced it stops delivering.

Then ask yourself which political order is actually preparing for that question.

I grew up in Bulgaria - a country that spent half a century behind the Iron Curtain, not because Bulgarians chose communism, but because the Red Army decided our geography was strategically convenient. Despite that, or maybe because of it, many of my generation were aggressively, almost irrationally pro-American. We consumed American movies, American music, American ideals - not because someone told us to, but because America represented everything that the system we just crawled out of wasn’t. Freedom, competence, meritocracy. The idea that you could build something and keep it, and that institutions existed to serve citizens, not the other way around.

I mention this because I need you to understand the lens through which I’m watching what’s happening to the United States right now. It’s not the lens of a European sneering at the Americans from a café in Paris. It’s the lens of someone who spent a lifetime looking up to the most formidable institutional architecture in human history - and who refuses to accept that the entire American state apparatus is made up of the incompetent figures that the current administration keeps parading in front of cameras.

Which means either the United States of America - the country that built the Marshall Plan, managed nuclear deterrence for 80 years, patrolled the trade routes to ensure decades of prosperity, constructed the most sophisticated alliance system in history, and put men on the Moon - has genuinely been overtaken by idiots, or something else is going on.

I’m going with “something else.”

The Anatomy of American Bolshevism

Before I make the argument I came here to make, I need to dissect the pathology that created the conditions for it. And that means talking about the thing nobody wants to talk about honestly: both sides of America’s political extremes are running on the same psychological software. They just branded it differently.

A disclaimer, because I know what’s coming: when I use the word “Bolshevik,” I do not mean it in the narrow historical sense of communist revolutionaries plotting to overthrow the tsarist regime. I’m talking about the archetype - the psychological template that Bolshevism perfected and that keeps resurfacing in different costumes across different time periods. That archetype is: destruction of the existing order driven by ressentiment, with no coherent vision for what replaces it once the fire burns out.

Nietzsche saw this coming a century before any of us were born. In the Genealogy of Morals, he identified a specific psychological mechanism - ressentiment - that he argued was the engine of what he called “slave morality.” Not slavery in the literal sense, but a particular orientation toward the world: the inability to create value from within oneself, compensated by the compulsive need to negate, devalue, and destroy the values of others. The man of ressentiment doesn’t say “I am good.” He says “You are evil - therefore I must be good.” His entire identity is constructed in opposition. He is not for anything. He is against everything that reminds him of his own impotence.

Master morality, by contrast - and Nietzsche was not endorsing aristocratic brutality here, despite what people who’ve never read him love to claim - is affirmative. It says “yes” to life, to strength, to creation, to the fullness of experience. It defines “good” from the inside out. The man of ressentiment defines “good” as whatever the strong are not. Weakness becomes virtue. Failure becomes authenticity. Mediocrity becomes moral superiority. The entire value system gets inverted - not because the new values are truer, but because the inversion is the only way for the ressentiment-poisoned mind to tolerate its own existence.

Sound familiar? It should.

The American woke left perfected this inversion over the past fifteen years. Success became suspicious. Competence was reframed as privilege. Excellence was evidence of systemic unfairness. Beauty, fitness, wealth, education, ambition - all recast as symptoms of an oppressive order rather than outcomes of effort, talent, or discipline. The fit body was “fatphobic.” The successful career was “proximity to whiteness.” The stable family was a “heteronormative construct.” You could not be good and successful - because in the world of ressentiment, success itself was the original sin.

This was not politics, but a secular religion built on the Nietzschean slave revolt, with critical theory as its scripture and social media as its pulpit. And it drove millions of ordinary people - people who were watching their grocery bills climb and their purchasing power collapse while someone on a university salary lectured them about pronouns - absolutely out of their minds.

And here’s where the horseshoe bends.

Because MAGA didn’t emerge as an antidote to this madness. MAGA emerged as its mirror image. The fringe radical left didn’t just radicalise its own base - it gave birth to the fringe radical right by creating a vacuum of such spectacular absurdity that an entirely new form of populism rushed in to fill it. While coastal progressives were debating whether mathematics was a tool of white supremacy, working-class Americans were watching their paychecks buy less food every month. The gap between what the educated class was talking about and what ordinary people were living through became so grotesque that anyone - literally anyone - who said “this is insane and I’m going to fight it” could build a political movement overnight.

Enter Donald Trump, the man who intuited - whether by cunning or by accident, and I genuinely cannot tell which - that the fastest path to power ran straight through the wreckage left by progressive overreach.

But here’s what MAGA never understood, and what I’m arguing here: they are not the cure. They are the same disease in a different host. MAGA operates on the identical Bolshevik psychology as the woke left. Different targets, same engine. Same ressentiment. Same negation. Same absence of a positive, constructive, life-affirming vision.

Watch how MAGA defines itself. Not by what it builds, but by what it destroys. Not by a vision for American greatness, but by the people it wants to see humiliated. The entire emotional architecture of the movement is reactive: it exists against the media, against the institutions, against the elites, against the experts, against the allies, against the “deep state”, and “owning the libs” as its’ entire governing philosophy.

Strip away the targets of negation and what’s left? What is MAGA actually for? What does it want to build? What’s the positive vision? What happens after the fire burns out?

Nothing. There is nothing. Because ressentiment movements don’t have day-after plans. The Bolsheviks didn’t. And MAGA doesn’t.

The logic of these two horseshoe political movements is identical: competence is illegitimate, success is evidence of corruption, expertise is the enemy, and institutions must be gutted not because you have better ones to replace them with, but because their mere existence is an affront to those who couldn’t build or sustain them.

Nietzsche’s slave doesn’t want to become the master. Nietzsche’s slave wants to drag the master down into the mud and call it justice.

That is MAGA’s entire programme. That is also the woke left’s entire programme. The horseshoe is a diagnostic.

Two Wars, One Battlefield

Now that I’ve laid out the pathology, let me lay out the strategic picture as I have come to see it, to some extend thanks to the work of who connected the final dots for me (I highly recommend you subscribe to his Substack).

There are actually two conflicts happening simultaneously, and most people can only see one of them at a time.

The first is invisible and domestic. It’s the cold civil war between the American institutional state - Congress, the military, the intelligence community, the professional political class, the judiciary, the permanent bureaucracy (call it the “deep state” if you want, I don’t care about the label) - and MAGA. These two cannot coexist. One must destroy the other politically in order to survive. MAGA’s explicit project is the dismantlement of the institutional architecture that the professional governing class built and depends on. The institutional state’s survival depends on MAGA being discredited so thoroughly that no future president can attempt what Trump is attempting.

The second is global and very much visible. It’s Cold War 2.0 - the escalating confrontation between the Western alliance system and the Russia-China-Iran axis that has been building since 2014 and is now entering its most dangerous phase. The war in Ukraine. The war in Iran. The attempts at economic decoupling from China. The remilitarisation of Europe. The collapse of the post-1945 rules-based order. These aren’t isolated events, but theatres in a single, interconnected conflict over who writes the rules for the next century.

And here’s where the two wars converge into something genuinely terrifying: Trump and his inner circle - whether for money, ideology, kompromat, or sheer civilisational-scale stupidity - are actively, provably, and repeatedly aligning with the very powers that the United States is locked in existential competition with. Russia and China.

MAGA is the Axis’s Trojan horse inside the Western alliance.

I don’t say this for rhetorical effect, I say it because the evidence is overwhelming and the pattern is unmistakable. Weakening NATO, alienating European allies, gutting the intelligence agencies that monitor Russian and Chinese operations, attacking the very supply chains that American economic dominance depends on. Praising Putin. Parroting Kremlin talking points about Ukraine. Floating the idea of withdrawing from NATO and calling it a “paper tiger” on live TV. Imposing tariffs that accelerate the very de-dollarisation that Beijing has been working toward, while undermining allies ability to re-industrialise and ream in these heart attack inducing timelines.

This is not incompetence, you simply don’t accidentally do everything your adversary’s intelligence services would pay billions to achieve. MAGA is systematically dismantling the foundations of American power - its alliance system, its supply chains, the dollar’s reserve currency status, and the global trust in its institutions - which is the very infrastructure that made America the dominant power of the last 80 years.

This makes MAGA’s political destruction not just desirable, but necessary - necessary for the survival of not just the institutional state, but the Republic itself and, by extension, the entire Western order that has depended on American structural integrity.

The Problem With Democracy’s Safety Valves

So why not just remove him? Let the institutions do what institutions are supposed to do? We, in Europe, have a long history of overthrowing our governments over much smaller infringements (ask the French). I myself have helped topple 3 governments via mass protests.

So why not in the U.S.? Because it doesn’t work like that across the Atlantic, especially not in this environment.

In the United States, a democratically elected leader - even one who is erratic, compromised, and demonstrably incompetent - cannot simply be removed without triggering a crisis worse than the one you’re trying to solve. Impeachment was tried. Twice. It failed both times. Openly going after Trump - especially in this age of information warfare, algorithmic radicalisation, and media ecosystems that function as parallel realities - would send his base into genuine revolt.

The last resort - and I believe the one that’s actually being deployed - is engineered failure.

Let Trump destroy himself by ensuring that the consequences of his own policies become so catastrophic, so personally felt by his own voters, that the movement collapses under the weight of its own promises.

The Iran Card

This is where the Iran war comes into focus - not just as a Middle Eastern conflict, but as a piece on a much larger strategic chessboard.

A war with Iran - regardless of whatever justification the administration offers this week, which changes approximately every 48 hours - serves three strategic purposes that have nothing to do with Iranian nuclear weapons and everything to do with the two wars I described above.

First: it disrupts China’s supply chains. The Strait of Hormuz closure - which has already happened, traffic down from 150 vessels a day to barely 20 — cuts off Gulf oil, LNG, and fertilisers to China, which imports roughly 60% of its oil through that chokepoint. This doesn’t just inconvenience Beijing. It forces a structural rewiring of global energy supply chains that, once completed, permanently reduces Chinese energy security. The West will hurt too — badly, for at least a decade — but that’s the cost of the global economic divorce from China that has been building since 2018.

Second: it bleeds China financially. Beijing depends on Iranian oil (discounted, sanctions-busting, off-the-books Iranian oil) to fuel its domestic economy. Iran depends on Chinese purchases to survive sanctions. A war that damages Iran’s export infrastructure forces Beijing to choose between funding Iran’s defence and reconstruction or watching its most important sanctions-busting energy partner collapse. Either way, it drains resources from China’s domestic economy at precisely the moment that economy is already staggering under deflation, a real estate crisis, and demographic collapse.

Third - and this is the one that matters most for the domestic war - it triggers deliberate inflation inside the United States.

Oil is a globally traded commodity and right now it sits above $100 a barrel - everyone, including oil-producing countries, will feel it. Jet fuel prices doubling. Shipping costs spiking. Fertiliser shortages feeding into food prices. Gas at the pump climbing every week. The inflationary shock and second order effects from a Gulf war ripples through every single household budget in America within weeks.

Trump promised no inflation. Trump promised no new wars. Trump promised a booming economy on Day 1.

What Americans are getting - right now, as I write this, 35 days into a war that has shut down one of the most critical shipping lanes on Earth - is crushing inflation, a new war with no exit strategy, higher military spending, and compounding economic misery.

He promised everything to everyone. And the only strategy left on the table is to weaponise those promises against him.

The midterm elections in 2026 will turn into a referendum on economic pain. A 2028 presidential race where “Trump’s war” is the Democratic attack ad that writes itself. The independents who gave him his margin - the ones who don’t watch Fox, who don’t wear the hat, who just wanted cheaper groceries and a functioning economy - peel off. And MAGA, deprived of electoral viability, begins its collapse into irrelevance.

The Calculus

I want to be honest about what I’m arguing here, because intellectual dishonesty is the one thing I refuse to practice in this publication.

I’m arguing that the institutional resistance to MAGA is not coming through impeachment, prosecution, or any of the mechanisms that democratic theory says should work. It’s coming through engineered consequences - economic and geopolitical conditions that turn Trump’s own promises into the instruments of his political destruction.

I’m also arguing that the rest of the world will suffer collateral damage from this. That’s unavoidable. The Strait of Hormuz closure is already hitting Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe. Oil prices are crushing emerging markets. Airlines are grounding planes. Supply chains that were already fragile from COVID and the Ukraine war are snapping under new pressure.

The calculus is brutal, yes. And I think in 20 to 30 years, when the archives open and the memoirs are published and the strategic logic becomes visible in hindsight, we will realise it might have been the least worst option. Why am I saying this? I spent many years of my life blaming the democratic movement in Bulgaria for not being more radical towards the communists back in the 90s. But in a recent interview, the then-president of the republic shared that Bulgaria was in fact on the brink of civil war at the time, and they had to make very quick decisions and painful compromises to prevent that from happening. The alternative? Civil war that could go either way, no EU, no NATO, no monetary board to peg the Bulgarian lev to the Deutsche mark (and then the euro) and stabilise the hyperinflation. So, in hindsight, despite its’ long-term ramifications, maybe that was the least worst option.

Bottom line is - MAGA is not just a populist overcorrection anymore, but it has become an existential threat to the Western order - to the alliance architecture, the economic infrastructure, the institutional integrity, and the global trust framework that has prevented great-power war for 80 years. History taught us - taught my part of the world especially - that this is how empires fall. Not from external invasion, but from internal rot. Not from the barbarians at the gates, but from the citizens who opened the gates because they were convinced the barbarians were their friends.

Unless MAGA is irreversibly destroyed as a political force - and unless deep structural reforms prevent another rogue president from ever wielding this kind of destructive power again - I fear, there is no path back. The damage compounds, alliances don’t rebuild, and trust doesn’t return. The dollar doesn’t reassert itself. And the next aspiring autocrat learns from Trump’s mistakes instead of repeating them.

Dying on That Hill

The people who chose to die on the MAGA hill - for whatever personal, financial, or ideological reason - will have a very tough life regardless of the outcome. If MAGA is destroyed, they’ll be remembered the way history remembers every movement that bet against its own civilisation: with a mixture of contempt and pity. If MAGA somehow prevails, they’ll inherit the ruins of the very system that gave them the freedom to be this stupid in the first place. Their lives will be miserable either way. The ressentiment that fuels them guarantees it - because Nietzsche was right about this much: the man consumed by ressentiment cannot be happy. He can only be less unhappy than the people he hates, and that is a psychological prison that no election result can unlock.

MAGA doesn’t seem to grasp what’s happening to them. Their movement is being led, step by step, into a trap made entirely of the promises their own leader made. Every broken promise is a nail.

And the coffin is being built in plain sight.

That’s my personal read on the situation. I could be wrong - the fog of war and the fog of domestic politics are equally thick, and anyone who claims certainty in this environment is either lying or delusional. But I’d rather be honestly wrong than dishonestly comfortable.

If this made you think - even if you disagree violently - share it with someone who needs the perspective.

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Every empire in history has followed the same basic economic logic: the metropole is richer, more developed, and more industrialised than its colonies. The British Empire extracted raw materials from India and Africa to feed the factories of Manchester and Birmingham. The Spanish Empire drained silver from the Americas to fund the courts of Madrid. The French Empire turned North African agriculture into feedstock for the French economy. The center was wealthy, while the periphery was poor. The wealth, as a rule, always flowed inward.

The Soviet Union broke this pattern so completely that most Western analysts still haven’t fully absorbed the implications.

Sarah Paine, the Naval War College historian whose work on great-power competition has become essential reading in strategic circles, coined a term for what the USSR actually was: a “donut empire.” The productive core wasn’t at the center. It was at the edges. Russia itself - the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the RSFSR, the supposed heart of the Soviet project - was the hole in the middle. It provided the bureaucracy, the army, the KGB, and some raw materials. The republics and satellites provided everything else: the industry, the engineering, the agriculture, the technology, the human capital that made the system function.

Understanding the donut empire is the single most important analytical key to understanding why Russia behaves the way it does today - why it invaded Ukraine, why it cannot let go of its former periphery, why Putin’s imperial nostalgia is not only sentimental and ideological, but also structural. Russia didn’t lose an empire in 1991, it lost its manufacturing base, its engineering talent, its agricultural surplus, its technological capacity, and its economic raison d’être. What remained was a raw materials exporter with nuclear weapons and an identity crisis.

Let me walk you through this map.

Ukraine: The Loss That Broke Everything

Let’s start with Ukraine, because Moscow always does.

The Ukrainian SSR was not just the most important Soviet republic outside Russia. It was, by many measures, more industrially productive than Russia itself on a per-capita basis. Ukraine hosted roughly a quarter of total Soviet industrial output. Its farms produced more than 1/5 of Soviet agricultural output - the famous chernozem black soil that made Ukraine the breadbasket of the empire and, before that, one of the great agricultural zones of the ancient world. The Donbas coal-metallurgical complex was the beating heart of Soviet heavy industry. Ukrainian steel mills, chemical plants, and machine-building factories formed an interconnected industrial ecosystem that Russia could use but never replicate.

But the real strategic loss wasn’t coal or wheat. It was the engineering talent.

In Dnipro - a city so militarily sensitive that it was closed to foreigners and at one point erased from English-language maps - sat Yuzhnoye Design Bureau and its manufacturing partner Yuzhmash. Together, they constituted the single most important missile production complex in the Soviet Union. Yuzhmash built the R-5M, the USSR’s first nuclear-armed rocket. It built the R-16, the first widely deployed Soviet ICBM. It built the R-36M - the SS-18 “Satan,” the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever deployed. At its peak, the plant was producing up to 120 ICBMs per year. Khrushchev reportedly boasted that it churned out rockets “like sausages.”

Kharkiv built the T-34, the tank that broke the Wehrmacht, and later the T-64. The nuclear physics talent that underpinned the Soviet weapons program drew heavily from Ukrainian universities and research institutes. When the centrally directed transfer of wealth from Ukraine flowed outward - amounting, by some estimates, to one-fifth of Ukrainian national income - it was financing the development of other parts of the Soviet Union, notably Russia and Kazakhstan.

When Ukraine declared independence in 1991, Russia didn’t just lose territory, but a manufacturing civilization that it never recovered.

The Baltic Window: Where the USSR Pretended to Be European

If Ukraine was the engine, the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania - were the showroom.

The Baltics had the highest living standards in the Soviet Union. They had the most sophisticated consumer goods, the strongest design culture, the most advanced electronics manufacturing. Tallinn and Riga were where Moscow went when it needed something that looked like it belonged in Europe. The precision engineering, radio technology, and electronics production that came out of the Baltic republics represented a qualitative tier of output that the RSFSR simply could not match.

The Baltics had been the eastern edge of the European industrial and cultural world for centuries - first under the Teutonic Order, then the Swedish Empire, then as some of the most developed provinces of the Russian Empire. Soviet occupation didn’t erase that industrial heritage, but exploited it. The Soviets needed a “western” manufacturing base, and the Baltics were conscripted into the role.

The speed with which the Baltic states reoriented toward Europe after 1991 - and the ferocity with which they have resisted any Russian reconquest - becomes completely legible through the donut lens. They were the most European part of the empire, they knew it, and they experienced Soviet rule as an occupation that extracted their productive capacity for the benefit of a less developed imperial center. That memory shapes Baltic security policy to this day.

Bulgaria: The 16th Republic and the Communist Silicon Valley

I’m going to spend more time on Bulgaria than a Western reader might expect, because this is a story I know from the inside and because it illustrates the donut thesis more dramatically.

Bulgaria was nicknamed “the 16th republic” - not quite formally part of the USSR but so tightly integrated that the distinction was often academic. And what Bulgaria provided to the Soviet system was, in proportion to its size, astonishing.

At its peak in the 1980s, Bulgaria supplied around 40 to 47% of all computer hardware produced within the COMECON economic bloc - from Berlin to Vladivostok. The electronics industry employed some 300,000 workers in a country of eight million and generated roughly 8 billion rubles per year. The IZOT brand - Computing, Recording and Organizational Technology - became synonymous with Soviet-bloc computing. Bulgarian factories produced mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers, disk drives, tape storage, and peripherals. The Pravetz personal computers, Apple II clones engineered in the town of Pravetz (named, with characteristic communist modesty, after the hometown of party leader Todor Zhivkov), became the standard educational computer across the Eastern Bloc.

How did a small Balkan country become the Communist Silicon Valley? A cocktail of Soviet central planning, Japanese licensing, and a remarkably effective espionage programme. In the 1960s, Bulgaria obtained Japanese licenses from Fujitsu and began manufacturing computers. Within COMECON’s division-of-labour framework, computing was designated as Bulgaria’s speciality. Heavy state investment followed. Zhivkov visited Japan in 1978, returned astonished by microelectronics advances, and accelerated investment further. New factories were built across the country. Covert partnerships - espionage, essentially - brought in Western components and designs.

By the late 1980s, Bulgarian-made computers flew on the Soviet space station Mir, equipped nuclear research facilities in India, and ran statistical offices in Mozambique. The electronics sector became the second-largest industrial workforce in the country. Bulgaria ranked third in the world in computer production per capita.

And then 1989 happened, and all of it collapsed almost overnight. The guaranteed COMECON market vanished, Western competition arrived. The factories that had supplied nearly half the computing power of the socialist world were allowed to disintegrate in the chaos of transition. The knowledge didn’t entirely disappear - it migrated West and seeded Bulgaria’s modern IT industry, and today Sofia is a strong tech hub - but the scale of what was lost remains staggering.

Add to the computers: canned goods, wine, tobacco, rose oil (Bulgaria held a near-monopoly on attar of roses, the essential ingredient in high-end perfumery), and a growing pharmaceutical sector. A country of eight million was punching at a weight class far above its size - all of it flowing into the Soviet system.

The Crown Jewels: East Germany and Czechoslovakia

East Germany was the technological pinnacle of the Soviet bloc, and it wasn’t even close. Zeiss optics in Jena, precision instruments from Dresden, chemical production built on the legacy of BASF and the pre-war German industrial base. The GDR manufactured the highest-quality goods in the entire system - and the Stasi’s relationship with the KGB was genuinely symbiotic in ways that went beyond intelligence sharing. East German organisational methods and technical tradecraft were things the KGB studied and adopted, not the other way around.

Czechoslovakia was equally indispensable if less flashy. Škoda heavy industry, aircraft engines, arms exports that generated hard currency for the bloc. And critically, nuclear reactor engineering - the Soviet VVER reactor designs were built in Czechoslovakia, a legacy of the engineering culture that dated back to the Austro-Hungarian industrial core. Prague and Brno were manufacturing centres with centuries of accumulated expertise that Moscow could direct but never duplicate.

Poland contributed Silesian coal, Gdańsk shipbuilding, copper, machinery, and the rolling stock that kept Soviet railways running. Hungary provided pharmaceuticals through Gedeon Richter, Ikarus buses that appeared in cities across the Soviet Union, and food processing capacity. Romania, the most independent-minded of the satellites, still supplied Ploiești oil - from Europe’s oldest oil fields - along with grain, timber, and chemicals.

Every one of these countries was, on average, more educated and more economically developed than Russia proper. That is the inversion Paine identifies - the colonies were richer than the coloniser.

Kazakhstan: The Most Exploited Republic

Kazakhstan is arguably the most dramatic case of imperial extraction in the entire Soviet system.

Start with Semipalatinsk. For four decades, from 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear weapons tests at a site in the Kazakh steppe - an area of 18,500 sq. km. that Moscow’s security chief Beria declared “uninhabited,” though it was not. The total explosive yield was 250 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Over a million Kazakh citizens are now officially recognised as victims of radiation exposure. The contamination spans over 18,000 sq. km. Children in the area continue to be born with genetic mutations, the full health data from the early decades of testing remains classified to this day.

Kazakhstan also hosted the Baikonur cosmodrome - the launchpad for Sputnik, for Gagarin, for the entire Soviet space programme. It provided uranium for the nuclear arsenal, grain for the Soviet breadbasket, coal for the industrial base, and oil for the economy. In return, it received a Russian-speaking settler population that was systematically used to dilute Kazakh identity - a demographic strategy that Putin’s rhetoric about “protecting Russian speakers” makes chillingly familiar.

When Kazakhstan finally shut the Semipalatinsk test site in 1991 - one of newly independent President Nazarbayev’s first acts - Russian scientists departed without leaving information about the locations of many tunnels and boreholes. The environmental and human legacy was simply abandoned.

What Russia Actually Was

So what did the center of this empire actually contribute?

Oil and gas - which became the main hard currency earner from the 1970s onward. Timber. Raw minerals. All extractive industries, not manufactured goods. The industrial capacity Russia did possess was either transplanted from elsewhere - Ukrainian factories physically evacuated east of the Urals during the Second World War - or built by German engineers imported after 1945. The nuclear weapons programme itself was constructed on the backs of Ukrainian physics talent, tested on Kazakh soil, and enabled in its early stages by captured German V-2 rocket technology.

The one thing Russia genuinely ran from the center was the coercive apparatus. The Communist Party. The KGB. The Red Army officer corps. The planning bureaucracy that directed the allocation of resources from periphery to center. This is exactly what a parasitic imperial center requires to sustain extraction from more productive colonies - and it is exactly what collapsed between 1989 and 1991 when the coercive glue weakened.

When the coercive apparatus could no longer hold the system together, the productive periphery walked. Every single one of them. The Baltics walked first and fastest. Ukraine walked with a referendum in which more than 90% voted for independence. The Central Asian republics walked with varying degrees of enthusiasm but universal finality. And what was left - what Russia “inherited” from the Soviet collapse - was not the core of a great empire, but the hollow center of a donut: a raw materials exporter with nuclear weapons, a massive army with a shrinking industrial base to support it, and an identity crisis that has not been resolved in three decades.

Why This Matters Now

The donut empire a useful analytical framework for understanding Russian strategic behaviour in the 21st century.

Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is not just sentimental, but also structural. Ukraine was the republic without which the Soviet system - and any successor Russian empire - simply cannot function as a major industrial power. Without Ukrainian engineering, manufacturing, agriculture, and human capital, Russia is Saudi Arabia with permafrost: a petrostate with delusions of grandeur. Putin knows this. The entire Russian strategic elite knows this. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was not a security operation against NATO expansion, but an attempt to recapture the productive periphery that the donut empire lost in 1991.

The same logic explains Russia’s behaviour toward the Baltics, its pressure on Kazakhstan, its de facto occupation of Belarus, its constant meddling with the domestic affairs of Bulgaria, and its desperate efforts to maintain influence across the entire former Warsaw pact space. Russia is not trying to rebuild the Soviet Union out of nostalgia, it is trying to rebuild the economic base that it never possessed independently and cannot generate on its own.

And here is the part that Western policymakers consistently miss: this is not a problem that sanctions alone can solve. Russia’s economic weakness is not a temporary condition caused by Western pressure. It is a permanent structural feature of a country that was always the administrative shell of someone else’s productive capacity. The sanctions hurt, certainly. But Russia was economically hollowed out long before 2022. It was hollowed out in 1991. Everything since has been an attempt - through energy leverage, through military coercion, through political manipulation - to compensate for the loss of the periphery that did the actual work.

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The Balkan Candor

I am writing this demystification for a specific reason: to sober up the many people in the West who still assume that Russia was a powerful, sophisticated empire, and that the rest of us - Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Balts, Georgians, Kazakhs - were poor peasants who just happened to be part of it. Grateful subjects of a civilising force.

Let me be blunt: the opposite is true. Every single nation I have discussed in this piece - its language, its culture, its identity - existed for centuries before the Principality of Muscovy even appeared on the map. Bulgaria had an regional empire that decapitated Byzantium emperors and a written alphabet when Moscow was a forest clearing. Ukraine’s Kyivan Rus’ was a European civilisation while Russia’s future capital was a trading post on a swamp. The Baltic peoples, the Georgians, the Armenians, the Poles, the Czechs - all of them built literate, complex societies long before Russia coalesced into anything resembling a state. Russia did not civilise its periphery, it fed off it.

Russia is, by every meaningful developmental metric outside of raw military tonnage and hydrocarbon extraction, a third-world country. It has been one for most of its history. The nations it occupied and exploited still suffer from the scars of that historic oppression - stunted institutions, broken trust, economic distortions that take generations to unwind. But here is what makes me genuinely furious: when Western commentators lazily brand all “Slavs” or all “Eastern Europeans” as backward, as corrupt, as culturally inferior, they are thinking of Russia specifically - and smearing the rest of us with a reputation we did not earn and do not deserve. The countries Russia colonised were, in most cases, more developed than Russia itself. That is the entire point of the donut.

There is a framework from military strategy that I keep coming back to when I try to make sense of the current political landscape: the distinction between tactical, operational, and strategic levels of thinking.

Tactical is the immediate move - the press conference, the tweet, the manufactured outrage cycle. Operational is the campaign - the policies designed to win the next election, to hold power for one more cycle. Strategic is the why - the long-term purpose, the end-state, the world you are actually trying to build for the next generation.

The uncomfortable truth - and I say this with all the diplomatic restraint I can muster as someone from a region where diplomatic restraint is not exactly our national sport - is that our leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are stuck at the operational level. They are thinking about staying in power, not about what comes after. They have no strategic vision, just operational one. Not because they are stupid (some of them are, but that’s a separate issue), but because they lack the mental equipment for the challenges we face today, and - more fundamentally - because they have no skin in that particular game.

Roman Emperors Rarely Died of Old Age

Let me start with the most basic problem, because everything else flows from it.

In the Roman Empire, leadership came with a very tangible form of accountability: most emperors did not die peacefully in their beds. They died in battle, by assassination, or through the consequences of their own catastrophic decisions. The feedback loop between bad leadership and personal ruin was short and brutal. You could not afford to be complacent, because complacency got you killed.

Now look at our current crop of leaders. They enjoy the comfort and insulation of mid-level corporate managers in a large bureaucracy - good salary, excellent benefits, zero exposure to the consequences of their own decisions. They preside over policies that will shape the lives of billions for at least the next generation, but they themselves will be comfortably retired, giving speeches at €200,000 a pop and writing memoirs nobody reads, long before the bills come due. Also, has any - ANY - leader in the past several decades been held accountable for his bad leadership? Apart from the Romanians that (rightfully) executed Ceaușescu?

That is exactly what we have built. A system where the people making the most consequential decisions are the ones least likely to suffer from getting them wrong.

Here is the thing that took me a while to understand, and that I think most people still don’t: systems do not learn because individuals inside them learn. That is the great myth of modernity. Systems learn by removing those who are not fit for purpose. Evolution does it through death. Markets do it through bankruptcy. Democracies are supposed to do it through elections. But what happens when the democratic mechanism itself gets captured?

Taleb has a line that could have been written specifically about our transatlantic political class: that the curse of modernity is the proliferation of people who are better at explaining than doing. Our leaders are superb at explaining why things went wrong after the fact. They are constitutionally incapable of understanding what is happening in real time, let alone acting on it. They are what Taleb calls “Bob Rubin traders” - they collect the upside when things go well and pass the downside to the rest of us when they don’t.

When your time horizon is “will I win the next election?” or “can I hold my coalition together for two more years?” you are structurally incapable of strategic thinking. Strategy requires accepting short-term costs for long-term gains. It requires investment, patience, and - yes - personal sacrifice. But if you are 75 years old and your political legacy is already written in your own mind, why would you sacrifice anything? You lived through the good times. You will not be around for the reckoning.

Trained for a World That No Longer Exists

The skin-in-the-game problem is compounded by something equally serious: the current generation of leaders was mentally formed in a world that has ceased to exist, and they do not have the cognitive flexibility to adapt to the one that replaced it.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong articulated it well: we are living through a period where the old rules no longer apply, but the new rules have not been written yet. This is a period of profound transition - geopolitical, technological, economic - and it demands a kind of mental agility that is simply not available in many of our current leaders who built their entire worldview during the Cold War or its immediate aftermath.

Consider what they internalised:

• American hegemony as a permanent feature of international life.

• NATO as the unquestioned backbone of European security.

• Economic interdependence as an unalloyed force for peace.

• The inevitability of liberal democratic convergence.

• Free trade as a near-theological good.

Every single one of these assumptions is now being stress-tested to the point of fracture, and the people who were shaped by them are the last ones capable of imagining what comes next.

This is not an insult, but a structural observation. Asking leaders who spent 40 years operating within a particular paradigm to suddenly think outside it is like asking a cavalry officer to command a drone squadron. The discipline is real, the experience is genuine - but the battlefield has changed so fundamentally that the old expertise becomes more of a liability than an asset.

The skills are different, so are the reflexes. And more importantly, accepting the new reality would require them to question the value of everything they spent their careers defending. Most people, understandably, cannot do that. That’s just human nature. So instead they double down. They cling to operational objectives - staying in office, maintaining the appearance of competence - while the strategic ground shifts beneath them.

The challenges we face - China’s industrial-military expansion, Russia’s war of attrition against the European security order, rising instability in the Middle East, the weaponisation of supply chains and economic interdependence - require rapid adaptation, institutional innovation, and the willingness to break with decades of established practice. Our current leadership class is trying to fight a 21st century strategic competition with a 20th century operating manual.

Eastern Europe: The Weight of Inherited Systems

Nowhere is the generational problem more visible than in the former Warsaw Pact countries, and I can speak to this with some authority because I grew up inside it.

Too many leaders in this region were formed by the Soviet system - not necessarily as ideological communists, but as people who learned how politics works under conditions of authoritarianism. They absorbed the logic of extractive governance: the state as something to be captured, networks of patronage as the natural order, public resources as private entitlements. These habits do not disappear simply because you adopt a new constitution and join the European Union. I have watched them operate my entire life.

Václav Havel understood this when he took over what was called Czechoslovakia at the time. When he came to power after the Velvet Revolution, he faced intense pressure to keep experienced administrators in place - people who “knew how the system worked.” Havel refused. He argued, memorably, that he would rather have honest amateurs than experienced collaborators. They knew how to navigate a corrupt system, not how to build a functional one.

Ukraine offers a compelling case study in real time. Look at Kyrylo Budanov, born in 1986, raised entirely in independent Ukraine - no Soviet baggage, no muscle memory of navigating authoritarian systems, only the clarity that comes from knowing exactly what you are fighting for. Or Mykhailo Fedorov, the new defence minister, born in 1991 - Ukraine’s youngest-ever minister, who came up not through the military establishment but through digital transformation, built the state’s drone procurement infrastructure, and now brings a technology-first mindset to a ministry that most countries still run like it is 1985.

These are not products of the old system, they are products of the transition itself. And they bring a level of mental agility and situational adaptability that their predecessors simply cannot replicate. That is not ageism, but an operational reality - and in Ukraine’s case, it is happening at an accelerated pace, because their very survival as a nation depends on it.

Anyone who has paid close attention to the war knows that one of Kyiv’s biggest domestic hurdles was purging the Soviet-mindset political apparatchiks from positions of authority. That is not something you can switch off with a policy change or a reform programme. It only happens by removing the people who still operate on the old logic and replacing them with people who don’t carry it. You can put the best hardware in the world, but it will not perform if it is running on legacy software.

Western Europe: When Process Becomes Purpose

Western Europe has a different version of the same disease. Here, the problem is not the legacy of authoritarianism but the legacy of unprecedented success.

The leaders who dominate European politics today came of age during the most peaceful, prosperous period in the continent’s history. They internalised the idea that this was the natural order of things. European integration was inevitable. The arc of history bent toward cooperation. Economic interdependence would make war impossible. They were wrong, and yet - they are still in charge. And they still cannot (or will not) fully process the return of hard power politics to European soil.

So they optimise process instead of outcomes. They debate regulatory frameworks while Russia mass-produces artillery shells, convene working groups while China cements its control of upstream supply chains. They manage electoral cycles while long-term strategic threats compound.

The European Union, for all its genuine achievements in pooled sovereignty and cooperative governance, has become a machine that is better at producing procedures than tangible results. It has the wealth, the industrial base, and the human capital to meet every challenge it faces - but what it lacks are leaders who understand that institutions are tools, not temples, and that sometimes you have to act with uncomfortable speed, even if the process isn’t perfect or fully compliant with your endless list of regulatory requirements.

Friedrich Merz, to his credit, put it bluntly at Davos in January: Germany and Europe have wasted incredible potential for growth by dragging their feet on reforms and excessively curtailing entrepreneurial freedoms. The single market, he said, was supposed to be the most competitive economic area in the world. Instead, Europe became the world champion of over-regulation.

The diagnosis is correct. But look at who is delivering it: a 70-year-old career politician from the CDU, a man formed entirely by the system he is now criticising. The question is whether anyone shaped by the old paradigm can actually dismantle it, or whether they will simply optimise it - tweak the regulations, rebrand the bureaucracy, hold another summit - and call it reform.

Where are Europe’s Budanovs? Where are the leaders who grew up after the Cold War, who understand digital-age conflict, who do not reflexively defer to Washington, who grasp that European strategic autonomy is not a seminar topic but an existential necessity? They exist. But they are blocked by a layer of political incumbents who view any challenge to their authority as a personal affront rather than as precisely the kind of renewal the moment demands.

Germany’s Starlink Problem: When Legacy Eats Strategy for Breakfast

If you want a perfect, concrete illustration of how the old guard operates even when it claims to be building for the future, look no further than SatcomBw-4 - Germany’s plan for a sovereign military satellite communications constellation.

The project itself makes total strategic sense - a network of around 100 satellites in low Earth orbit, designed to provide the Bundeswehr with secure, jam-resistant communications independent of American providers. Think of it as Germany’s answer to Starlink, except for military use. Target operational date: 2029. Price tag: around €8–10 billion. It is the largest space contract in German history, part of a broader €35 billion Bundeswehr space investment package.

All good so far, right? Here is where it gets interesting.

The Bundeswehr’s procurement office, the BAAINBw, sent out tender invitations and asked three companies to submit individual bids: Rheinmetall, OHB (a satellite manufacturer), and Airbus Defence and Space. The idea, presumably, was competitive bidding. Let the best proposal win. Let the market work!

Instead, the three companies looked at each other and decided to form a single consortium. One bid. Zero competition. Rheinmetall handles military systems integration, OHB builds the satellites, Airbus provides manufacturing capacity. According to reporting by Spiegel and Bloomberg, the BAAINBw received the news that instead of three competing proposals, it would be getting one joint offer. Take it or leave it.

The consortium argues this is about efficiency - only together can they handle the project’s scale and timeline. And to be fair, there is some logic to that. It also conveniently eliminates the legal disputes that would inevitably follow if one company won and the others sued. Very tidy. Very German.

But here is what nobody seems to want to say out loud: a direct award without competitive tender almost certainly means higher prices. And more importantly, it means that the same legacy giants who have been building European defence systems for decades - the Airbuses, the Thaleses, the Leonardos - get to keep their lock on the biggest contracts, regardless of whether they are the most innovative, the fastest, or the best value for money.

Think about what this looks like from the perspective of a European defence tech startup. You have spent years developing cutting-edge satellite technology, autonomous systems, or software-defined communications. You have venture funding. You have engineers who actually understand proliferated LEO architectures because they grew up with them, not because they read a McKinsey report about them. And you cannot get through the door, not because your technology isn’t good enough, but because the door is not designed to open for you.

A recent Bruegel policy brief put the numbers on it: in selected European countries, defence procurement is primarily directed at the top-ten companies, with typically less than 30% of total order volume going to everyone else. McKinsey’s research on European defence tech startups documents what founders have been saying for years: government procurement processes are complicated, country-specific, and administration-heavy, placing enormous costs and requirements on young companies that lack the resources to navigate them. The system, as the EU Commission itself acknowledged in its Defence Industry Transformation Roadmap, has a “very slow and cumbersome” innovation cycle.

Meanwhile, Ukraine - you know, the country actually fighting the largest land war since WWII - is running containerised 3D printing facilities near the front lines, designing and deploying drone countermeasures within hours. Their defence minister came from digital transformation, not from the military-industrial establishment. The contrast could not be starker.

This is not just a procurement problem, but a generational problem showing up in industry. The same mentality that keeps 75-year-old leaders in political office keeps 50-year-old defence conglomerates at the top of every tender list. The same instinct that says “we need experienced hands” in politics says “we need proven primes” in defence contracting. And the result is the same: systems optimised for the last war, not the next one.

Merz stands at Davos and declares that Europe has become the world champion of over-regulation. Then his own government’s procurement office prepares to hand a €10 billion no-competition contract to a consortium of legacy players. The irony is so thick you could spread it on bread. But nobody laughs, because the strategic consequences are not funny at all.

We are supposed to be re-arming and re-industrialising on an accelerated timeline. We are supposed to be building defence capacity that can deter Russia, reduce dependence on America, and compete with China. And we are doing it by handing the keys to the same companies that optimised for peacetime margins, returned capital to shareholders through buybacks instead of investing in R&D, and treated surge capacity as waste for two decades. By 2025, European defence primes were still prioritising dividends and buybacks to the tune of $5 billion, at a time when we need to turbocharge innovation and production.

It is time for the old to give space for the young to demonstrate their abilities. Not because the old are not good - Airbus builds perfectly fine satellites - but because the battlefield has changed, the technology has changed, and the timeline has changed. We do not have the luxury of 15-year procurement cycles anymore. We do not have the luxury of consortium comfort deals. We have, at best, a few years to build what we should have been building for the last twenty.

America: Tactical Brilliance, Strategic Bankruptcy

And then there is the United States, which has managed the remarkable feat of going from global hegemon to something that increasingly resembles a continentalist power in retreat - torching alliances, hollowing out scientific institutions, and conducting foreign policy as though it were a real estate transaction. And yes, I do understand that this is just the current Trump administration, but that administration currently governs from the Oval Office with a mandate of around 80 million votes.

The current American leadership exemplifies the problem in its purest form. Tactically, the moves are often brilliant - dominating the news cycle, energising political bases, wrong-footing opponents. Operationally, everything is subordinated to the goal of maintaining power. But strategically? There is nothing. Slogans do not constitute strategy, and policies that actively destroy American soft power, undermine the global alliance system, and threaten the dollar’s reserve currency status are not “America First” - they are America stabbing itself in the back (and ironically, calling it a victory! Go figure).

The United States is blowing its greatest strengths: its global alliance system, its scientific capability, its soft power. These are not recoverable assets. Once you make errors of this magnitude, future decisions will be made from a worse position than what was previously available. These are own goals, and they are being scored by people who will not live long enough to play the next match.

The American political class, like its European counterpart, skews elderly. The gerontocracy is transatlantic. And these leaders - whether consciously or not - are optimising for their own legacies and their own remaining years, not for the security of the generations that will inherit the consequences.

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The Rent-Seekers’ Last Stand

There is a distinction in economics between those who take risks and those who seek rents.

Our current leadership class, in both politics and industry, is dominated by rent-seekers. They did not build the post-1945 liberal order - that was the achievement of a much greater generation. They did not fight for the freedoms and institutions they now claim to defend. They inherited all of it and grew up enjoying it as a default setting. And now they are extracting the last remaining value from those institutions - burning through accumulated strategic capital, running down defence-industrial capacity, hollowing out the very structures that made Western prosperity possible - while positioning themselves to exit before the collapse becomes undeniable.

I am not saying this as an exercise in my Balkan cynicism, although God knows the region provides ample training. I was raised to respect elders and seek their wisdom. It gives me no pleasure to write these words. But the observable reality is the observable reality. When I look at an 80-year-old leader dismantling alliances that took decades to build, I see someone whose time horizon is simply too short to care about the long-term, whose mental models were formed in a different era, and whose personal incentives are entirely disconnected from the collective interest. When I see a consortium of legacy defence contractors stitch up a €10 billion contract without competition, I see the industrial equivalent of the same problem.

That is the definition of a system without skin in the game.

The Case for Generational Renewal

Let me be clear about what I am arguing and what I am not.

This is not a case for age discrimination! There are brilliant strategic minds at every age, and accumulated wisdom matters. Nor is it an argument that youth automatically equals competence - history is littered with young leaders who were spectacularly terrible.

What I am arguing is something more specific and, I think, more urgent.

The current generation of leaders - in politics and in the industrial establishment - is not equipped, as a class, for the challenges we face. They were trained for a different world. Their cognitive reflexes are calibrated to a set of conditions that no longer exist. And they have no personal stake in the long-term consequences of their decisions.

Sometimes you need new people, not because the old ones are incompetent in some abstract sense, but because their competence is tuned to the wrong frequency. A person who knows how to navigate the old system brilliantly may be precisely the wrong person to build the new one. Churchill was an excellent wartime leader - but he lost the 1945 election because the public understood, even if he didn’t, that winning the peace required different skills than winning the war.

In Eastern Europe, this means completing the generational transition that began in 1989 but was never fully carried through - replacing the remnants of extractive, Soviet-era political culture with leaders who view the state as something to build, not to loot.

In Western Europe, it means elevating leaders who understand that the post-Cold War peace dividend is over, that defence is not optional but existential, and that European strategic autonomy must move from academic aspiration to operational reality. It also means opening defence procurement to companies that can actually innovate at the speed the threat demands, not just the ones with the largest lobbying budgets and the longest relationship with the procurement office.

In America, it means breaking the stranglehold of a generation that benefited more than any in human history from the liberal international order and is now, through a combination of short-termism and strategic illiteracy, dismantling it.

The Clock Is Ticking

History does not end, and every generation must eventually step up.

The question is whether we allow the current leadership class - and the industrial incumbents that serve them - to sleepwalk us into catastrophe, or whether we force a changing of the guard while there is still time and still enough institutional capital left to build with.

Not through revolution. Through relentless democratic pressure. Through insisting that the people who will live with the consequences get a seat at the table where the decisions are made.

The old rules no longer apply, and the new ones are not yet written. The people currently in charge - not necessarily through fault of character, but through the simple mathematics of age, incentive, and cognitive formation - are constitutionally incapable of writing them.

Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. They will eventually pay for things using your money.

We are paying. It is time to make room for those who will have to live with the bill.

Four years ago, Russians woke up to state television telling them their army was conducting a “special military operation” to “denazify” a country led by a Jewish comedian. Ukrainians woke up to cruise missiles, and the rest of Europe woke up to the uncomfortable realisation that all those Eastern European diplomats they’d been politely ignoring for two decades had been right about everything.

Since then, tens of thousands of people have died, millions have been displaced, and a generation of young men have been sacrificed in a land war that Europeans swore after 1945 they’d never happen again. Entire cities have been turned into rubble, children have been kidnapped and deported for Russification, the international rules-based order has revealed itself to be less of a system and more of a…vibe, really.

But four years is long enough to start sorting through the wreckage with some analytical clarity. So let’s do the good, the bad, and the ugly - not as a scorecard, but as a strategic audit.

The Good

Ukraine didn’t fall!

This sounds so obvious now that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it is. When Russian armour rolled toward Kyiv in February 2022, the consensus among Western intelligence agencies - to say nothing of the Kremlin - was that this would be over in days, if not a few weeks. It’s a sentiment that was echoed through international media, geopolitical analysts and pretty much everyone else…but Ukraine.

The Americans offered Zelensky an evacuation flight, he asked for ammunition, and the Ukrainians did what no one outside of Eastern Europe expected them to do: they fought, and they fought bravely and effectively.

The failure of Russia’s decapitation strike against Kyiv was one of the most consequential military outcomes of the 21st century. It shattered the mythology of Russian military might that Moscow had spent two decades carefully cultivating through information operations, staged military parades, and the selective deployment of force in places like Syria. When Russia’s vaunted VDV airborne forces got slaughtered on the tarmac at Hostomel Airport - an elite unit, wasted in a suburban parking lot - the entire Russian theory of war was invalidated in real time.

Ukraine’s defence industry became a case study in wartime innovation

This is arguably the most underappreciated story of the war. Out of sheer necessity, Ukraine built a domestic weapons production ecosystem almost from scratch. Ukrainian companies and volunteer networks began producing drones - surveillance drones, strike drones, FPV drones - at a pace and scale that stunned Western defence analysts who’d spent years writing procurement memos about how you can’t possibly field a new weapons system without a 15-year development cycle and multiple rounds of congressional or parliamentary hearings.

Ukrainian engineers iterated on drone designs the way a Silicon Valley startup iterates on software: fast, cheap, and ruthlessly focused on the user (the user in this case being a soldier who needs to drop a grenade on a Russian trench from a $500 quadcopter). They developed long-range strike drones capable of hitting targets deep inside Russia - oil refineries, ammunition depots, airbases - at a fraction of the cost of a cruise missile. They turned commercial off-the-shelf components into battlefield systems, pioneered electronic warfare countermeasures, and built automated production lines in dispersed facilities to survive Russian targeting.

The result is that Ukraine now has one of the most battle-tested and innovative defence technology sectors on the planet. It has proven concepts that Western militaries are still writing white papers about. When this war ends, Ukrainian defence firms will be globally competitive - and every NATO country should be lining up to buy from them, invest in them, or partner with them. This is a genuine strategic asset that didn’t exist 4 years ago.

The Russian theory of victory was proven wrong

Moscow’s entire strategic calculus rested on a chain of assumptions: Ukraine wasn’t a real country, Ukrainians wouldn’t fight, the government would collapse, and the West would issue a strongly worded statement and move on. Every single one of these assumptions was wrong, and four years in, Russia still hasn’t developed a substitute theory of victory that accounts for reality. They can’t take major cities, can’t break Ukrainian morale through terror bombing, can’t outlast a country that is fighting for its survival on its own soil.

The longer this goes on, the more the Kremlin’s position erodes. Russia is burning through its Soviet-era equipment inheritance, its sovereign wealth fund, its demographic future, and its relationship with every country that isn’t actively sanctioned or run by a dictator. Time is not on Russia’s side the way the armchair strategists believe, and the evidence is accumulating.

Europe started to wake up

Slowly, yes. Painfully, even more so. With much bureaucratic foot-dragging and inter-ministerial squabbling, but it happened. Defence budgets across Europe have increased meaningfully for the first time since the Cold War. Countries that spent decades treating their militaries as jobs programmes for civil servants began actually thinking about what their armed forces are for. Poland emerged as a serious military power. The Nordics joined NATO. Germany - Germany! - began talking about defence in terms that would have been politically suicidal five years ago.

Is it enough? No. Is it fast enough? Also no. But the trajectory has shifted, and that shift is structural, not cyclical. The political consensus in Europe that defence spending is wasteful and NATO is an anachronism has been shattered, probably forever. You can’t put that genie back in that bottle. Even politicians who personally couldn’t care less about Ukraine understand that their voters now expect them to take defence seriously - we are talking about a political equilibrium change, and those are durable and unlikely to die out in the next election cycle.

The Bad

The West’s strategy of “enough to survive, never enough to win.”

From the beginning, Western aid to Ukraine was calibrated not to help Ukraine achieve its war objectives, but to prevent the worst-case scenario while avoiding the West’s own worst-case scenario of direct confrontation with Russia. Every weapons system was delivered late, in insufficient quantities, with restrictions on use that made military planners tear their hair out. Washington sent HIMARS but agonised for months about ATACMS, they sent air defence systems but rationed them.

The underlying problem is that the American military, for all its staggering expenditure, is optimised for a very specific kind of war: one in which the US provides air superiority, intelligence, and logistics while some local partner provides the ground troops. This is a perfectly fine model if you’re fighting insurgents in the Middle East, and it’s far less useful when your partner needs the kind of mid-tier conventional equipment - self-propelled artillery, counter-battery radars, short-range ballistic missiles - that the US simply doesn’t produce in large quantities because it doesn’t need them for its own doctrine. The Pentagon was caught between not wanting to give away equipment it might need and not having the industrial base to produce more quickly, especially since China has been choking them on materials and components (which the U.S. military industrial complex is very dependent on) since 2015.

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The 2023 counteroffensive was a strategic disaster - not so much militarily, but politically

In terms of the actual balance of forces, the failed southern offensive didn’t dramatically change the equation on the battlefield, but its effect on Western public opinion was catastrophic. Within a month of the offensive stalling, support for Ukraine aid in the US dropped by double digits. The offensive had been over-hyped by people who should have known better, and when it didn’t produce a dramatic breakthrough, it created a narrative of futility that Russia’s information warriors exploited mercilessly.

The blame game that followed made things worse. Zelensky blamed the West for delivering aid too slowly, his supporters in Western media amplified this message, creating a doom loop in which every new weapons system was described as game-changing until it arrived, at which point it was retroactively declared too late. This was effective as a lobbying strategy for securing more military support out of a cautious White House, but it had devastating second-order effects. The Russians immediately activated their highly-sophisticated propaganda machine to convince the already skeptical part of the public that this was just another American proxy war, and I would argue in good faith - the Kremlin are still hoping that the war could be won by outlasting Western political will to support Ukraine.

The “European freeloader” narrative took hold in Washington

The companion argument - that Europe was too decadent and welfare-dependent to defend itself - became conventional wisdom in American foreign policy circles with alarming speed. The argument was always overstated (as I have explained in detail in another article). It relied on the dubious premise that the war in Ukraine, fought with last-generation aircraft and current-generation air defences, was a template for what a NATO-Russia war would look like. It isn’t. Europe has modern stealth-capable air forces, not Soviet-era hand-me-downs. Italy alone has a more powerful navy than Russia. The problem was never capability - it was political will and industrial readiness, both of which are solvable given sufficient motivation.

But the narrative stuck because it was useful to too many people. American hawks used it to justify demanding more burden-sharing. American isolationists used it to justify abandoning Europe entirely. And European politicians, rather than forcefully rebutting it, mostly shuffled their feet and mumbled about how they were working on it, which reinforced the wrongful impression that they were, in fact, freeloading.

The Ugly

The Istanbul “peace deal” mythology became a weapon against Ukraine

In 2023, Putin casually mentioned that Ukraine had nearly signed a peace deal in the early weeks of the war but walked away under Western pressure. This was picked up and amplified by a remarkable coalition of Russian propagandists, Western isolationists, and credulous foreign policy commentators who were desperate to believe that the war was unnecessary and could have been avoided if only Jake Sullivan weren’t such a bloodthirsty warmonger.

The reality, of course, was rather different. Read the actual terms Russia was offering, particularly the security guarantee clause, and you discover that Ukraine’s security partners would only be able to intervene on Ukraine’s behalf with the consent of the UN Security Council - where Russia hold veto power. Russia was, in effect, offering Ukraine a security guarantee that Russia itself could nullify at will. Do you call this a peace deal or a trap? But because the myth served the interests of everyone who wanted to believe the war was America’s fault, it became entrenched in the discourse, and it has distorted policy debates ever since.

The Trump card

Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 was, in many ways, the culmination of every dysfunctional trend in the US-Ukraine policy. His campaign rhetoric was a masterclass in strategic ambiguity - promising peace within 24 hours, toughness to the hawks, and above all, the blessed relief of not having to think about Ukraine anymore. His actual policy has been a contradictory mess: simultaneously trying to extort Ukraine for mineral rights, pressure Ukraine into capitulation to Russia, all while demanding that Europe pay America back for aid that Congress had already authorised.

The result has been a policy that applies pressure in three directions at once and therefore achieves nothing in any of them. Russia, seeing American commitment waver, has no incentive to make concessions. Ukraine, being publicly humiliated by its most important ally, can’t make concessions without jeopardizing political stability at home. And Europe is left trying to fill the gap while simultaneously wondering whether the transatlantic alliance still means anything at all.

But here’s the perverse silver lining here (if you can stomach calling it that), and it’s always been one of the hills I am willing to die on, and that is - Trump’s unreliability may finally force Europe to do what it should have done years ago - build an independent capacity to support Ukraine and deter Russia without relying on the United States. The American security guarantee was always a crutch that allowed European politicians to avoid making hard choices. Now the crutch has been yanked away, and Europe has to either stand on its own feet or fall over. History suggests that Europeans find reserves of determination they didn’t know they had once the alternative is genuinely unacceptable.

Russia’s war economy is a ticking time bomb - but the fuse is longer than people hoped

The Western expectation that sanctions would quickly cripple the Russian economy was, to put it charitably, optimistic. Russia’s deep structural inequality turned out to be a wartime asset. There was a massive reservoir of underemployed provincial workers who could be redirected into the military and the arms factories without cannibalising productive sectors of the economy. The money to pay them came from squeezing the oligarchs and inflating away the savings of the middle class - in effect, a wartime wealth redistribution that may have actually improved life for the median Russian in the short term.

But this is not sustainable. Russia is burning through its sovereign wealth fund. It needs hard currency to buy weapons components, stabilise the ruble, and maintain what’s left of the welfare state, and it can’t do all three simultaneously from oil revenues alone. The sources of long-term economic growth - human capital, foreign investment, technological transfer - are being systematically destroyed. Transitioning back to a peacetime economy will be orders of magnitude harder than transitioning to a war footing, because people’s expectations are higher in peace than in war. Putin will need all sanctions lifted to normalise, and that’s not something Trump can deliver unilaterally even if he wanted to, because European sanctions are Europe’s to control.

The human cost

This is the thing that gets lost in every strategic analysis, including this one. Behind all the talk of attrition rates and weapons systems and diplomatic manoeuvring are real people - Ukrainian civilians living under daily drone attacks, Ukrainian soldiers holding positions in frozen trenches, Ukrainian workers that work 24hr shifts trying to keep the flickering lights on and ending up with frostbites or collapsing from exhaustion. Children who have spent a quarter of their lives under bombardment. Families separated by front lines that didn’t exist four years ago. An entire generation traumatised in ways that will shape Ukrainian society for decades.

The war has settled into a grim equilibrium: Russia can’t advance meaningfully, Ukraine can’t expel Russia without more support than the West is currently willing to provide, and neither side can afford to stop fighting because the political costs of admitting failure are too high. It is, in the most clinical sense, a stalemate - and stalemates in wars of attrition are measured not in territory but in bodies.

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Where Does This Leave Us?

Four years in, the fundamental dynamics of this war have not changed as much as the headlines suggest. Ukraine is still fighting a defensive war on its own soil, which gives it structural advantages in attrition. Russia is still fighting a war of conquest that requires it to occupy and administer hostile territory, which bleeds resources at a rate Moscow can’t sustain indefinitely. The West is still torn between wanting Ukraine to win and not wanting to pay the price of victory.

What has changed is the political landscape. America’s commitment is now unreliable. Europe is being forced into a more independent posture. Russia’s initial war aims have been permanently foreclosed - there will be no puppet government in Kyiv, no “denazification,” no quick absorption of Ukraine into Russia’s sphere. What Russia is left fighting for is, essentially, the right to not admit that it lost, which is a remarkably thin justification for the continued sacrifice of its young men.

The Russian theory of victory - that this was really an American proxy project and that once American will collapsed, Ukraine would fold - is being tested in real time. And so far, Ukraine hasn’t folded. If the Ukrainians can hold the line without American aid, it won’t just be a military achievement. It will be the definitive refutation of the idea that the only thing standing between Russia and regional hegemony was American coercion. It will prove that Ukraine is, in fact, a real country with a real national will and strong agency - the one thing Russia could never bring itself to believe, let alone admit.

That would require an enormous sacrifice from the Ukrainian people. Bigger, perhaps, than what they’ve already endured. But then again, what choice do they have?

I write these final words with actual tears in my eyes. I wish this wasn’t the case. I wish the price of breaking free from the “Russian world” was lower for Ukraine. I wish there were more I could do than donate to fundraisers and write these lines. But reality is not what we wish it to be. It just is.

An amusing thought crossed my mind a while back, when I was trying to explain what Westerners assume to be Eastern European pessimism - what I call realism. When you compare how we grew up, the gaps are immeasurable. Westerners grew up on fairy tales where the good always wins and the hero gets a happy ever after. Slavic folklore, in contrast, teaches us that for the good to win, the hero must sacrifice to a point that someone raised on a Disneyfied version of the world, would consider futile.

But it is not futile. On a long enough time scale, Ukrainian integration into Europe and a final break with the Russian sphere of influence - a sphere that is itself dwindling because of this war, as Russia slides into the role of a de facto vassal state of China - will be worth it.

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

Every empire tells itself a story about the costs it bears. Rome’s senators complained about defending ungrateful provincials. British parliamentarians grumbled about the white man’s burden. And today, American politicians rage about subsidizing European defense while their constituents struggle with healthcare costs and crumbling infrastructure.

The narrative is seductive precisely because it contains a kernel of truth wrapped in layers of motivated reasoning. Yes, the United States maintains the world’s largest military. Yes, some (not all!) European allies spend less on defense than Washington would prefer (and yes, they had every right to push them to up their spending). But the conclusion drawn from these facts - that America generously defends freeloading Europeans - inverts the actual economic and strategic logic of U.S. military spending.

What’s actually happening is that the United States has built a globe-spanning security architecture that serves American economic interests first, generates substantial returns for American defense contractors, and functions as the enforcement mechanism for dollar hegemony. European territory provides the real estate. European purchases provide the customers. And if/when the shooting starts, European soldiers provide the ground soldiers (while the U.S. controls the skies and intelligence).

The “freeloading Europe” myth persists because it serves powerful interests: it justifies continued defense spending to voters, obscures the transparent accounting of the spending, and prevents serious examination of whether American security commitments serve American citizens as opposed to American elites.

The Economic Returns of Primacy

Start with a basic question: if maintaining global military primacy were purely a cost with no return, why would American elites - who are generally quite good at protecting their economic interests (that’s literally how the United States was incepted and earned its independence) - continue supporting it?

The answer is that primacy generates substantial, measurable economic returns, just not ones that flow to ordinary Americans. The U.S. defense budget of $916 billion in 2023 - representing 39% of global military spending according to SIPRI - isn’t charity. It’s the overhead cost of running the global system.

That system delivers concrete benefits to Americans. The dollar’s role as the global reserve currency - approximately 59% of central bank reserves according to the IMF’s COFER data - exists because international transactions occur under the implicit guarantee of American military power. When China needs to import oil from the Persian Gulf, it does so in dollars, on ships traversing sea lanes the U.S. Navy patrols, under a security architecture Washington maintains. The tribute isn’t paid in gold; it’s paid in seigniorage, transaction fees, and the ability to finance deficits that would break other countries.

Economists Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler have estimated that dollar dominance allows the United States to borrow at interest rates roughly 50-60 basis points lower than would otherwise be possible - a savings of tens of billions annually on the national debt. Barry Eichengreen’s work on Exorbitant Privilege documents how this translates into sustained current account deficits that would be unsustainable for countries without reserve currency status.

Put simply: military primacy enables financial primacy, which enables the United States to consume more than it produces, year after year, with the difference financed by the rest of the world. Don’t be fooled by believing that this is a bug in the system invented by greedy bankers; it’s the core feature.

The Real Estate Transaction: Bases as Commercial Infrastructure

Now examine what Americans actually buy with that $916 billion, particularly the portion devoted to overseas presence.

The conventional framing treats U.S. bases in Europe as defensive installations protecting European territory from threats. This is technically true but analytically backwards. These installations primarily serve as logistical infrastructure for power projection elsewhere. They’re closer to distribution hubs in a commercial supply chain than to medieval fortifications.

Consider Ramstein Air Base in Germany, which the Pentagon identifies as the largest U.S. Air Force base outside American territory. During the peak of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ramstein served as the primary logistics hub for moving personnel, equipment, and wounded soldiers between the continental United States and multiple Middle Eastern theatres. According to the Defense Health Agency, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center - located near Ramstein - treated more than 75,000 patients from combat zones between 2001 and 2014.

The base’s value to the United States has nothing to do with defending Kaiserslautern from Russian tanks. Its value lies in geography: positioned roughly equidistant from Washington and Baghdad, Ramstein makes it possible to sustain operations in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia without the logistical nightmare of deploying everything from Fort Bragg or Travis Air Force Base.

The same logic applies across the European theatre. U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily provides access to North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom serves as a forward operating location for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. The Romania and Poland installations developed after 2014 position U.S. forces closer to the Black Sea and the Baltics - useful for contingencies ranging from Russia to the Middle East.

The Pentagon’s own Base Structure Report for FY 2023 lists over 60,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Europe, supported by extensive infrastructure including airfields, communications nodes, medical facilities, and ammunition depots. Replicating this infrastructure elsewhere - particularly in politically unstable regions or at greater distance from key theatres - would cost substantially more and deliver worse operational results.

RAND Corporation studies on forward basing have repeatedly found that maintaining rotational forces from CONUS costs significantly more than forward stationing equivalent capabilities, once you account for transportation, temporary facilities, and the operational limitations of not having permanent infrastructure. Forward presence isn’t charity; it’s cost-effective power projection.

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The Client State Model: Defense Procurement as Industrial Policy

Here’s where the economics become particularly interesting: NATO functions as a captive market for American defense manufacturers.

Alliance interoperability requirements - technically necessary for combined operations - create de facto procurement preferences for U.S. systems. If your air force needs to integrate with American command and control networks, you’re buying American fighters. If your army needs ammunition compatible with American artillery, you’re buying American shells. If your navy needs to operate alongside U.S. carrier strike groups, you’re buying American data links and weapons systems.

The numbers are remarkable. SIPRI’s arms transfer database shows European NATO members more than doubled their weapons imports between 2014 and 2023, with the United States capturing over 50% of this market. In 2023 alone, U.S. defense exports to Europe exceeded $60 billion - representing a substantial share of total American arms sales globally.

Poland exemplifies this dynamic. Warsaw has committed over $30 billion to U.S. defense purchases in recent years, including M1 Abrams tanks, M142 HIMARS rocket systems, F-35 fighters, and AH-64 Apache helicopters. Germany - despite maintaining a significant domestic defense industry - is purchasing F-35s, precisely because NATO nuclear sharing requires American aircraft. Finland and Sweden, newly integrated into NATO, were also considering buying American F-35s rather than European alternatives up until the Trump administration began its foreign policy of antagonism of allies.

Even France, which jealously guards its defense industrial independence, imports American aerial refuelling aircraft (KC-135), intelligence systems, and increasingly finds itself buying American munitions for sustained operations.

Follow the money. These contracts flow to Lockheed Martin in Texas, Raytheon in Arizona, General Dynamics in Michigan, Northrop Grumman in Virginia - corporations employing tens of thousands of workers in congressional districts across the United States. The political economy is straightforward: defense spending that flows to European NATO forces significantly benefits American manufacturers, while the security guarantees that encourage this procurement cost the U.S. military relatively little in peacetime.

There’s an additional net benefit: the more Europe increases defense spending while relying on American systems, the more dependent it becomes on U.S. supply chains, maintenance contracts, and technology transfers. This dependence is strategic. The moment European states develop truly independent defense industrial capacity - joint European fighter programs, indigenous missile production, sovereign satellite constellations - American leverage, including soft power over an entire continent, diminishes.

The optimal outcome for U.S. defense contractors is precisely what we’re seeing: Europeans spending more on defense, but remaining structurally dependent on American systems. Hence the paradox that American politicians simultaneously demand European allies spend more on defense while American defense lobbyists work to prevent European defense industrial consolidation that might compete with U.S. manufacturers.

Reverse Subsidy: What Host Nations Actually Provide

The “freeloading Europe” narrative systematically ignores substantial European contributions to maintaining U.S. military infrastructure (we all know the benefits for local cities and towns, and had this been an article about how Europe benefits from U.S. security guarantees, you bet I’d be talking about it).

Host nation support encompasses both direct financial transfers and indirect subsidies that reduce the cost of overseas basing for the United States. Germany provides over $1 billion annually in direct support - funding that covers base security, utilities, local employment, and infrastructure maintenance that would otherwise fall on the U.S. military budget.

• The indirect subsidies are larger and less visible. European host nations provide:

• Land worth billions in commercial real estate markets, provided rent-free under basing agreements

• Tax exemptions on fuel, equipment purchases, and contractor services that would add hundreds of millions to annual operating costs

• Waived customs duties and import restrictions for military cargo and equipment

• Co-funded infrastructure development, including airfield improvements, communication systems, and training facilities

• Simplified legal frameworks that exempt U.S. personnel from certain local regulations and taxation

For comparison, Japan contributes approximately $2 billion annually to support roughly 54,000 U.S. military personnel stationed there - covering nearly 75% of the total stationing costs according to the U.S. Forces Japan. South Korea provides over $1 billion per year under its Special Measures Agreement, funding that covers Korean national employee salaries, construction costs, and logistics support.

Congressional Research Service analyses have repeatedly found that when you account for both direct host nation funding and indirect subsidies through land provision and tax exemptions, forward-deployed forces often cost less than equivalent forces stationed in the United States - particularly when you factor in the costs of building comparable facilities on American soil and the operational limitations of not having forward-positioned forces.

This isn’t charity from either direction, but a negotiated arrangement where host nations provide tangible economic support for infrastructure that serves both American strategic interests and - to varying degrees - their own security concerns.

Blood Debts: The Asymmetry of Article 5

NATO’s collective defense provision - Article 5 - has been invoked only once in the Alliance’s 75-year history. Not to defend a European ally from Soviet aggression. To support the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

What followed was a 20-year military campaign in Afghanistan in which allies contributed forces, took casualties, and supported operations that served primarily American security interests.

British forces fought in Helmand Province - one of the deadliest theatres of the war -conducting counterinsurgency operations alongside U.S. Marines. Canadian forces took responsibility for Kandahar, suffering sustained casualties in heavy combat. French, German, and other European forces operated in northern Afghanistan, conducting combat operations, training Afghan forces, and building infrastructure.

For countries like Germany and Japan, which had largely avoided combat operations since World War II, Afghanistan represented a fundamental shift. German soldiers died in combat for the first time since 1945. The political and social cost of deploying forces to a war zone - particularly one with unclear strategic objectives - was substantial for democratic governments facing skeptical publics.

Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that allied contributions to Afghanistan and Iraq operations exceeded $100 billion in direct military expenditure, not counting the long-term costs of veterans’ care, reconstruction aid, and diplomatic resources devoted to sustaining these operations.

The strategic logic was clear: these deployments served American interests far more than European ones. The Taliban did not threaten Paris or Berlin. Al-Qaeda cells in Hamburg were a police matter, not a military one. European allies participated because Washington invoked Article 5 and expected support, not because Kandahar held strategic value for European security.

If the accounting of “who subsidizes whom” includes blood as well as treasure, the ledger looks rather different than certain members of the American political class suggest. Allied soldiers died supporting U.S. security priorities in a war that achieved dubious strategic outcomes.

Share Bianka @ Waronomics

The Migration Red Herring: Shared Consequences of Shared Interventions

A recurring claim in the “freeloading Europe” narrative holds that Europeans squander money on social welfare - particularly housing migrants - that should go to defense spending.

This reasoning fails at multiple levels. First, there’s no mechanism by which U.S. defense spending converts into European migration budgets. These are entirely separate fiscal streams funded by different tax bases. The claim confuses opportunity cost with causation.

Second, the refugee flows that generated Europe’s migration crisis stem substantially from wars and state failures in which Western powers - including the United States - played direct causal roles.

The 2003 Iraq invasion, launched primarily by the United States with British support, destabilized the entire region. The subsequent civil war and rise of ISIS displaced millions. According to UNHCR data, Iraq generated over 4 million refugees and internally displaced persons. The Syrian civil war - which escalated partly due to spillover from Iraq and evolved into a proxy conflict involving multiple external powers - displaced over 13 million people.

The 2011 Libya intervention - enthusiastically supported by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States - converted an authoritarian state into a failed one, opening Mediterranean migration routes and contributing to instability across the Sahel. NATO aircraft enforced a no-fly zone ostensibly to prevent civilian casualties; the resulting power vacuum produced far more casualties and created conditions for sustained refugee flows.

Afghanistan produced approximately 2.7 million refugees over two decades of Western military operations, according to UNHCR. The rapid collapse of the Afghan government in 2021 generated an additional humanitarian crisis, with European states scrambling to evacuate personnel and vulnerable Afghans who had supported NATO operations.

The pattern is consistent: Western military interventions - whether justified or not - created conditions that displaced millions of people. European states now bear fiscal costs for managing these refugee flows, just as they bore military costs for participating in the interventions that helped create them.

This is not to argue that European states bear no responsibility for their own migration policies or that all refugees result from Western interventions. But to claim that European migration spending represents a diversion of defense resources ignores the causal chain connecting military operations that both the United States and European allies supported to the humanitarian consequences those operations produced.

If anything, this represents shared consequences of shared policy choices, not one-sided freeloading.

The Accountability Gap: What the Myth Obscures

The persistence of the “freeloading Europe” narrative is interesting precisely because it’s so easily debunked. Why does it survive?

Because it serves multiple constituencies. For American politicians, it provides convenient cover for defense budgets that might otherwise face scrutiny. For defense contractors, it justifies continued procurement spending while obscuring how much of that spending returns to their shareholders. For foreign policy elites committed to U.S. primacy, it frames expensive commitments as burdens rather than strategic choices.

Most importantly, the narrative prevents Americans from asking harder questions: Why does the United States maintain a military budget larger than the next 10 countries combined? Whose interests does this spending serve? What would a defense posture focused on actual defense of American territory cost? And if the current spending level is necessary for sustaining global primacy, shouldn’t we acknowledge that this is an imperial project rather than a defensive one?

As an Eastern European, I never minded and actually did support U.S. military hegemony, because if the alternative was Russia and China devouring my home - no, thank you. As I’ve always said - whoever doesn’t like the American world order will really dislike the Russo-Chinese one.

What I do mind, however, is the hypocrisy of this narrative.

And yes - European states absolutely under-invested in defense relative to their wealth and threat perceptions for decades. This is analytically true. Germany’s military readiness problems are real. Years of procurement failures across European NATO wasted billions. These are legitimate criticisms.

But the response to European under-investment shouldn’t be the false claim that the United States has been subsidizing European security out of generosity, while Europeans have been blowing their wealth on migrants and social welfare. It should be honest acknowledgment that American defense spending primarily serves American interests, and while European allies do benefit from it, they also provide substantial support for this infrastructure, and that when allies have been asked to contribute blood alongside treasure, they’ve done so.

The burden-sharing debate would be more productive if both sides started from reality, not fiction. Europeans should acknowledge that they sheepishly relied on American security guarantees when it was convenient and are now scrambling to rebuild capabilities they allowed to atrophy for the decades following the end of the Cold War. Americans should acknowledge that their defense spending buys them strategic advantages they value and economic returns that benefit specific constituencies, not just costs that burden taxpayers.

In 2024, 23 of 32 NATO members met the 2% GDP spending target - up from just four countries in 2014. European NATO members collectively increased defense budgets by over $100 billion in the past decade. Poland now spends over 4% of GDP on defense. The Baltic states consistently exceed 2.5%. This rebalancing is happening, just not in the moralistic frame American politicians prefer.

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Conclusion: Empires and Their Accounting Tricks

Every empire in history has complained about the costs of maintaining its dominance while obscuring the returns that dominance generates. Roman senators grumbled about financing legions on the Rhine while conveniently ignoring the grain shipments from Egypt. British parliamentarians fretted about the cost of the Royal Navy while enjoying cheap raw materials from colonies.

The United States follows this pattern. American defense spending sustains a global architecture that delivers measurable economic benefits - dollar dominance, highly favourable terms of trade, access to markets and resources, and the ability to enforce rules that advantage American firms. The infrastructure for this system requires military bases on foreign soil, which those foreign states subsidise. The hardware for this system generates profits for American defense contractors, which European procurement amplifies.

When Washington has asked allies to support American military operations - in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in various smaller interventions - those allies have contributed both money and blood.

None of this is charity. None of it is freeloading. It’s the ordinary economics of hegemony: expensive to maintain, profitable to those who run it, and structured to obscure who actually pays what costs.

If Americans want to have a serious debate about burden-sharing within NATO - excellent. That debate should address European underinvestment in capabilities, inefficient procurement, and riding on American logistics and enablers. But it should start from honest premises: U.S. defense spending primarily serves U.S. interests, forward basing saves money while enabling power projection, allied procurement helps American manufacturers, and when allies have been asked to pay in blood as well as treasure, they have.

The alternative - continuing to pretend that the United States altruistically defends ungrateful Europeans - perpetuates comfortable myths that prevent both sides from addressing actual strategic challenges. It prevents Americans from examining whether their defense spending is optimised and serves their interests. And it prevents Europeans from confronting their own strategic dependence and the hard choices required to reduce it.

Empires are costly. They’re also profitable, at least for certain constituencies. What they aren’t is charities. The sooner both sides of the Atlantic acknowledge this, the sooner we might have productive conversations about what kind of security architecture actually serves both American and European citizens in the decades ahead.

Sources

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) - Military Expenditure Database - Global military spending data showing U.S. expenditure at $916 billion (39% of global total) in 2023.

International Monetary Fund - Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER) - Data on dollar’s share of global reserves (~59% as of 2024).

NATO - Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014-2024) - Official data showing 23 of 32 members meeting 2% target in 2024, up from 4 in 2014.

Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar (Oxford University Press, 2011) - Analysis of economic benefits from dollar’s reserve currency status.

Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler, “The Renminbi Bloc is Here: Asia Down, Rest of the World to Go?” Peterson Institute Working Paper (2012) - Estimates 50-60 basis point borrowing advantage from reserve currency status.

U.S. Department of Defense - Base Structure Report (FY 2023) - Official documentation of 750+ overseas bases, 60,000+ personnel in Europe.

RAND Corporation - Costs and Benefits of Forward Basing - Cost-effectiveness analysis of forward vs. CONUS-based forces.

Defense Health Agency - Landstuhl Regional Medical Center History - Data on 75,000+ patients treated from combat zones 2001-2014.

SIPRI Arms Transfers Database - Tracking European NATO doubling of imports 2014-2023, 50%+ from U.S.

U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency - Foreign Military Sales - Official data on $60+ billion U.S. defense exports to Europe (2023).

Congressional Research Service - U.S. Military Bases and Facilities in Europe - Analysis of host nation support arrangements and cost comparisons.

German Federal Ministry of Finance - Host Nation Support Documentation - Germany’s $1+ billion annual contribution.

U.S. Forces Japan - Host Nation Support Information - Japan’s ~$2 billion annual support package.

iCasualties.org - Coalition Casualties in Afghanistan

Brown University Costs of War Project - Comprehensive research on casualties and costs, including allied contributions exceeding $100 billion.

UNHCR - Syria Emergency - Data on 13+ million displaced Syrians.

UNHCR - Iraq Situation - Documentation of 4+ million Iraqi refugees and IDPs.

European Commission - Migration and Asylum Statistics - Official EU asylum application and refugee flow data.

Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press, 2014) - Analysis of U.S. overseas military posture costs and benefits.

Michael Beckley, “The Myth of Entangling Alliances,” International Security 39:4 (2015) - Examination of alliance burden-sharing dynamics.

Emma Ashford and Joshua Shifrinson, “Correspondence: Debating the Free-Riding Myth,” International Security 41:3 (2017) - Scholarly debate on whether allies free ride on U.S. security provision.

Stephen Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security 37:3 (2012-13) - Defense of U.S. forward presence as serving American interests.

The word itself sounds like an insult - kakistocracy. Derived from the Greek kákistos (κάκιστος) = worst + krátos (κράτος) = rule, it means, quite literally, government by the worst people. It’s a term that should belong to the dustbin of history, alongside other archaic political curiosities. Yet here we are, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, watching this ancient pathology reassert itself across both hemispheres of the Western world.

We are living through an age where incompetence is not merely tolerated but elevated, where corruption masquerades as pragmatism, where the most inept dominate our institutions while genuine expertise is met with suspicion, if not outright contempt. This is the unfortunate observable reality, and its consequences reach far beyond the corridors of power into the fabric of society itself.

The Communist Rehearsal: A Lesson from the East

Those of us from Eastern Europe recognize this pattern with an uncomfortable familiarity. We’ve seen this play before.

Under communist rule, mediocrity wasn’t just accepted - it was systematically elevated as a virtue. The party apparatus didn’t seek the most talented engineers, the most innovative thinkers, or the most skilled administrators. It sought the most loyal. Competence was secondary, often tertiary, to ideological purity and party connections.

The mechanic who could barely fix an engine but attended every party meeting reliably rose above the engineer with a brilliant mind but insufficient enthusiasm for dialectical materialism. The factory manager was selected not for his understanding of production efficiency but for his willingness to falsify reports and parrot slogans. The academic who produced groundbreaking research but questioned official orthodoxy found himself relegated to provincial obscurity, while the mediocre scholar who praised the General Secretary’s latest speech received prestigious appointments.

This inversion of merit had profound psychological consequences across society. It wasn’t merely that society operated inefficiently - though the bread lines and crumbling infrastructure testified to that. The deeper damage was spiritual, a corrosion of the collective will. When citizens watched incompetents rewarded and talent punished, when they saw that hard work and skill mattered less than connections and compliance, something fundamental broke in the social contract.

Why strive for excellence when excellence guarantees nothing? Why develop expertise when expertise earns suspicion? Why speak truth when lies are what advance careers?

The result was a society-wide demoralization that persisted long after the regimes themselves collapsed. Standards deteriorated across every dimension - in craftsmanship, in public discourse, in manners and speech, in the basic expectation that things should work and people should do their jobs competently. When the worst rise to the top, they don’t merely occupy positions of power. They redefine what is acceptable, dragging everything and everyone downward.

Kakistocracy’s Western Migration

What Eastern Europe experienced under communist party rule, the West now experiences through different mechanisms but with eerily similar results. The ideology may have changed, but the pattern remains: positions of influence are being increasingly occupied not by the most qualified but by the most connected, the most politically aligned, the most willing to perform the required rituals of the day.

Look around. In both public and private sectors, we witness a disturbing proliferation of leaders whose primary qualification seems to be their ability to navigate bureaucratic politics rather than to actually lead, innovate, or manage. Board appointments go to those who check the right boxes rather than those who understand the business. Government positions are filled based on political loyalty rather than relevant expertise. Media platforms elevate voices that confirm preferred narratives rather than those with genuine insight.

The consequences, as Thomas Love Peacock identified more than two centuries ago, remain devastatingly accurate:

The answer reveals itself in the chaos surrounding us - the bungled policy responses, the diplomatic catastrophes, the institutions that no longer function as intended, the growing poverty and insecurity despite nominal prosperity, the internal strife that seems to intensify rather than resolve. These are not random failures. They are the predictable outcomes when the incompetent govern.

The Information Kakistocracy: When Fools Think They’re Wise

Perhaps nowhere is kakistocracy’s triumph more complete than in the information space. We live in an age where genuine expertise has become suspect, where credentials are dismissed as “establishment bias,” where the phrase “do your own research” has become a rallying cry for those who confuse Groking with scholarly inquiry.

The cruel genius of modern kakistocracy is that it has convinced legions of fools that they are uniquely intelligent, that they alone can “connect the dots” and “see the truth” that experts allegedly hide. The epidemiologist who spent decades studying infectious disease is dismissed by someone who watched YouTube videos. The climate scientist’s research is contradicted by a blogger who “questions everything.” The historian’s careful analysis is overruled by someone who “read about it on Twitter.”

This isn’t healthy skepticism, but the Dunning-Kruger effect weaponized at scale - a condition where those with the least knowledge possess the most confidence, drowning out those who actually understand the complexity of the issues at hand.

Social media platforms have accelerated this dynamic, creating echo chambers where the algorithmically amplified voice of the confident incompetent reaches millions while careful, nuanced expertise languishes in obscurity. The information environment now actively rewards simplistic thinking, emotional manipulation, and conspiratorial pattern-matching while punishing the acknowledgment of uncertainty, the weighing of evidence, and the admission that some questions are genuinely difficult.

The Erosion of Truth and the Paralysis of Society

Hannah Arendt understood the endpoint of this trajectory with chilling clarity:

This is kakistocracy’s most dangerous effect - not merely that the incompetent rule, but that they create conditions where citizens lose the ability to distinguish competence from incompetence, truth from falsehood, genuine expertise from confident charlatanism. When everything is potentially a lie, when all authorities are equally suspect, when expertise itself is just another “narrative,” then the population becomes intellectually paralyzed, unable to make informed judgments about anything.

In such an environment, kakistocracy - just like a virus that has found the perfect immunocompromised carrier - it thrives. The incompetent multiply while talent withers on the vine. There is little room left for experts and dedicated citizens to contribute meaningfully toward building anything of value, because their contributions are negated, drowned out in the loud voices of the confidently incompetent, or actively opposed by those who have ascended through connections rather than capability.

When constitutional rights become negotiable, when institutions serve the interests of the incompetent few rather than the capable many, when merit is systematically devalued in favor of loyalty and connections, society doesn’t merely stagnate, but begins to crack. Reactions and counter-reactions spiral, not toward resolution but toward increasingly chaotic confrontation. The explosive potential builds, threatening not just political stability but the basic peace necessary for any functional society.

The Historical Ledger

Yet there is one consolation, cold comfort though it may be: history records everything with merciless accuracy. It has applauded benevolent leaders and condemned the kleptocrats. It has analyzed in granular detail the rises and falls of empires, the eras of enlightenment and the dark ages of decline. And it will record our era too - how we permitted kakistocracy to flourish, what we did or failed to do in response, and what became of societies that allowed the worst to rule.

Where kakistocracy takes root, the adverse effects ripple through every dimension of national life. Economies underperform as resources flow to the connected rather than the productive. Politics degenerates into tribal warfare rather than substantive debate about policy. Civil rights erode as institutions prioritize control over justice. And perhaps most tragically, the national character itself deteriorates - standards fall, cynicism spreads, and the very idea that things could be better begins to seem naive.

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What Is to Be Done?

This brings us to the question every thinking person in a kakistocratic society must confront: What should I do?

The instinct might be to fight the system, to rage against the incompetents in power, to exhaustively document every failure and demand accountability. These impulses are understandable but often futile. Kakistocracy is antifragile - it feeds on the frustration of those who expect better, wearing them down through endless cycles of disappointment until they either give up or become cynical themselves.

The Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat İldan offers wiser counsel:

This is not a call to abandon civic responsibility or to retreat into selfish individualism. It is a recognition of a fundamental truth: you cannot save a society in free fall, but you can prepare yourself to rebuild it when it finally hits the basement of the rock bottom.

Toward a New Nobility

What we need, urgently, is a new age of nobility - not the hereditary aristocracy of bloodlines and titles, but an aristocracy of character, competence, and commitment to something beyond mere self-interest.

This new nobility would consist of those who:

Maintain standards when all around them standards are falling. They continue to do excellent work even when mediocrity is rewarded. They speak with clarity of mind and thought when public discourse degrades into slogans and emotional manipulation. They think carefully when others react reflexively.

Cultivate genuine expertise rather than the performance of expertise. People that read deeply rather than skimming headlines and social media hot takes, they acknowledge the limits of their knowledge rather than pretending to universal insight. People that understand that “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” is the very definition of wisdom.

Resist the demoralization. They refuse to let the triumph of kakistocracy convince them that striving for excellence is pointless, that expertise doesn’t matter, that competence is just another scam. They understand that maintaining one’s own standards in the face of general decline is not futile - it is essential.

Prepare to rebuild. They acquire skills, develop judgment, build networks of other capable people, and position themselves to be useful when the current system’s failures become undeniable and change becomes inevitable.

This new nobility will not be universally recognized in their own time. The kakistocrats and their followers will mock them as elitists, as out of touch, as unwilling to “connect with ordinary people.” But history has a way of sorting these things out. When societies need to rebuild after collapse, they do not turn to the incompetent who led them to ruin. They turn to those who preserved competence, who maintained standards, who continued to grow even while everything around them deteriorated.

The Long View

We are in for a difficult period. Kakistocracy, once established, does not voluntarily relinquish power. It must run its course, exhaust its possibilities, demonstrate through lived experience the folly of elevating the worst over the best. This process is painful to watch and worse to live through.

But it is not permanent. No kakistocracy has ever endured indefinitely. Reality eventually asserts itself. Bridges built by the incompetent collapse. Economies managed by the unqualified contract. Policies crafted by the foolish fail. And eventually, even the most propagandized population begins to notice that things don’t work, that promises are not kept, that the confident charlatans cannot actually deliver.

When that moment comes - and it will come - society will need people who remember what competence looks like, who maintained their skills and judgment through the dark years, who can step forward and begin the work of reconstruction.

Until then, we must cultivate the new nobility. Not noble by birth or title, but noble by choice - choosing excellence over mediocrity, expertise over ignorance, truth over ideological falsehood, the long-term over the immediate, the difficult right over the easy wrong.

This is how we survive the fools and the rise of kakistocracy. Not by defeating it directly - that is often impossible - but by refusing to be defeated by it, by maintaining ourselves as living proof that there is another way, by becoming the foundation upon which a better society can eventually be rebuilt.

The age of kakistocracy may be upon us, but it need not define us. Let it define itself through its failures. We will define ourselves through what we preserve, what we build, and who we become in the struggle.

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If

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes structurally.

The third century nearly killed Rome - not through military defeat, but through the indifference the senatorial class that had grown too comfortable, wealthy and complacent to care about the survival of the empire. The hard work of preserving the empire - administrative reforms, military modernization, painful fiscal restructuring - fell to men the Senate would have once considered beneath them.

Diocletian from Dalmatia, Constantine Moesia, Justinian from Thrace. Provincial soldiers, not Romans. They imposed the reforms the Senate refused to contemplate - price controls to combat inflation, administrative reorganization to restore governance, military professionalization to secure borders. A new religious foundation to replace the exhausted civic cult. As Kris explained in a recent Substack video - Rome didn’t survive because the Romans saved it. It survived because outsiders did the work insiders wouldn’t.

The parallel to contemporary America is unavoidable. The American elites treat the nation as nothing but an ATM - most have little to no interest in saving the empire, they’d rather cooperate with other empires to keep and grow their wealth. They are insulated by their wealth. Tech oligarchs pursue Mars colonies while infrastructure crumbles. The political class treats governance as performance art, and when someone proposes serious reform - be it industrial policy to rebuild manufacturing, antitrust enforcement to contain monopolies, labor protections to share prosperity - they’re dismissed as naive or dangerous.

Only two American institutions still seem to care about preserving American power: the U.S. Senate and the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the real work of sustaining the Western alliance is happening abroad. Friedrich Merz in Berlin is pushing Europe toward strategic autonomy and military modernization. Shigeru Ishiba in Tokyo is coordinating with the Pentagon to secure Indo-Pacific supply chains. Trade relationships are being restructured, defense cooperation deepened, technological partnerships expanded - all with minimal input from a White House that views allies as marks to be extorted.

Just as provincial soldiers saved Rome when Roman elites abdicated responsibility, European and Asian leaders must now save the Western alliance from an American administration actively trying to destroy it.

The Greenland Extortion and What It Taught Europe

On January 17, 2026, Trump threatened eight NATO allies - Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland - with 10% tariffs, escalating to 25% by June 1, unless they supported “the complete and total purchase of Greenland.”

These aren’t adversaries. These are America’s closest allies. Countries that stood with the United States through the Cold War, Afghanistan, Iraq, and every security crisis of the past seventy years. The tariff threat came after these nations sent troops to Greenland for joint military exercises - exercises Trump called “a very dangerous situation for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Planet.” Not Russian aggression. Not Chinese expansionism. NATO allies conducting defensive exercises.

European leaders responded with (surprisingly) unprecedented unity. The eight targeted nations issued a joint statement warning that “tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral.”

Then Europe showed teeth. According to reporting, France pushed for deploying the EU’s “anti-coercion instrument” - essentially a trade bazooka that could restrict U.S. suppliers’ access to EU markets, exclude them from public tenders, and impose limits on foreign direct investment. The European Parliament suspended work on the U.S.-EU trade deal that had been reached last summer. European Commission officials began drafting plans for nearly $110 billion in retaliatory tariffs targeting Boeing aircraft, Kentucky bourbon, and American soybeans.

And critically, as analysts noted, bond markets began pricing in the risk of a U.S.-European trade war. Global bond yields spiked. Trump, whose administration had already been watching market reactions nervously, blinked.

Four days later, after arriving in Davos and meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Trump announced a “framework of a future deal” and canceled the tariffs. He publicly ruled out using force to seize Greenland for the first time.

The “deal”? According to NATO spokesperson Allison Hart, Rutte “did not propose any compromise to sovereignty.” The framework focused on “collective efforts” to uphold Arctic security - which is precisely what the United States already had access to under the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement. Trump got nothing he didn’t already have. Europe got him to back down from threatening America’s closest allies with economic warfare.

As Ole Wæver, a professor at the University of Copenhagen said: Trump’s framework would be nothing more than a face-saving “pretend” deal. What Europe learned from this spectacle is that when faced with unified resistance and credible economic countermeasures, Trump folds.

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MAGA’s Systematic Interference in European Democracy

Europe’s enemy is not America. It is Trump, JD Vance, Musk, Pete Hegseth, the tech oligarchy, and MAGA.

According to extensive reporting, since Trump took office in January 2025, dozens of AfD officials have traveled to the United States for meetings with lawmakers and administration officials. In Germany’s February 2025 election, Elon Musk tweeted that “only AfD can save Germany.” Vice President JD Vance met with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel while in Munich, then criticized German politicians at the Munich Security Conference for maintaining democratic “firewalls” against the AfD.

In Romania, when the pro-Russian candidate Călin Georgescu unexpectedly led the first round of the presidential election in November 2024 ended up getting barred from the re-run after Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the results citing evidence of Russian interference via TikTok, Musk called it “crazy” and accused George Soros of orchestrating the ban. Vance criticized Romania at the Munich Security Conference, arguing the decision was “based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency” and suggesting Romania’s democracy “wasn’t very strong” if Russia could “destroy it with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising.”

When the centrist Nicușor Dan won Romania’s May 2025 presidential election, defeating George Simion of the hard-right AUR party, both Musk and David Sacks cast doubt on the election’s legitimacy, directly contradicting the U.S. ambassador to Romania who praised the democratic process.

In the United Kingdom, Musk initially backed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, with reports of a potential $100 million donation. Research by Cavendish Consulting found that Reform UK’s five MPs received 50% of total engagement on X despite making up just 3.5% of Parliament, with their posts drastically boosted through Musk’s algorithmic manipulation and direct retweets. When Farage distanced himself from far-right activist Tommy Robinson, Musk turned on him, declaring “Farage doesn’t have what it takes” and backing the even more extreme Advance UK party instead.

This is not accidental engagement with European politics. This is systematic interference designed to destabilize European democracies by supporting dangerous Euroskeptic movements that align with MAGA’s worldview. And Musk has been explicit about his goals.

In December 2025, after the European Commission fined X €120 million for violating transparency rules under the Digital Services Act, Musk called for “the EU to be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries.” He described the EU as a “tyrannical, unelected bureaucracy oppressing the people of Europe” and compared it to the Third Reich. Secretary of State Rubio called the fine “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.” The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned of “the prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe because of immigration and called for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

None of this implies alliance. None of this is how you treat partners. This is how you treat targets for regime change.

The Bolshevik Psychology of MAGA

I’ve argued before that MAGA operates on Bolshevik political psychology. Both are rooted in ressentiment - that particular species of resentment where success, education, expertise, or institutional authority are treated as inherently illegitimate. Competence itself becomes evidence of conspiracy. Institutions become enemies of the people.

Many people objected to this comparison. But every time a MAGA figure opens their mouth, they prove it.

Success of your ideological enemies equals default guilt. Expertise equals conspiracy. Institutions equal tyranny.

When Vance tells European leaders there’s “no room for firewalls” against the AfD, he’s not making a policy argument. He’s demanding that democratic norms be abandoned because the “elites” who believe in those norms - the politicians, judges, civil servants who staff democratic institutions - are inherently illegitimate.

When Musk declares that “only AfD can save Germany,” he’s saying the entire German political establishment - the mainstream conservatives who rebuilt Germany after the war, the social democrats who created the Wirtschaftswunder, the institutions that made Germany the economic engine of Europe - are the problem.

Tear down the institutions. Delegitimize expertise. Replace governance with strongman rule.

The Strategic Pivot Europe Must Make

Europe needs to stop trying to negotiate with Trump. Stop sending delegations to Mar-a-Lago. Stop treating every unhinged tariff threat as a serious policy proposal requiring diplomatic engagement. Stop appeasing, complimenting, and keeping your mouths shut when he speaks Kremlinite or says things that are factually incorrect.

Ignore Trump. Do business with the parts of America that still operate rationally.

Just as MAGA engages directly with AfD while bypassing the legitimate German government, Europe should engage directly with consensus U.S. politicians - governors, senators, business leaders - while bypassing the White House.

Build relationships with the governors of California, New York and other states that are global economies engines. Strengthen ties with Senate leaders who still believe in NATO. Partner with American companies that understand they need stable trading partners.

Prepare diplomatic relationships to push a consensus president in 2029, and as a contingency plan, maintain strong relationships with state governors who will remain committed to transatlantic cooperation even if 2029 don’t deliver a consensus president or worst case scenario - the American federalism fractures.

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What Merz Understands

Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz gets it. Elected in May 2025, Merz declared:

Unlike his colleague in France - Macron - who is historically more inclined to outright cut the umbilical cord with the U.S., Merz is more measured. He’s not talking about abandoning the transatlantic alliance, but recognizing that the current American administration is unreliable, hostile, and actively working against European interests.

Merz came into office declaring Germany must transform from “a sleeping to a leading middle power.” He’s creating a National Security Council. He secured a €500 billion special fund for infrastructure and lifted the debt brake on defense spending. He’s working with Macron, Starmer, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to rebuild European security architecture.

When asked about the AfD, Merz was blunt: “We do not work with a party that is hostile to foreigners, that is antisemitic, that harbors right-wing extremists and criminals in its ranks, that flirts with Russia and that wants to withdraw from NATO and the European Union.”

The Individual State Strategy

While Trump alienates allies, Europe should build relationships with American states and cities that understand what’s at stake.

California’s economy alone would be the world’s fifth-largest. New York is the financial capital of the planet. Washington State is home to Boeing and Microsoft. These states have governors, legislatures, and business communities horrified by what’s happening in D.C.

Trade agreements can be structured at the state level. Research partnerships can be established with American universities. Defense cooperation can continue through military-to-military relationships that bypass political interference.

If Trump wants to treat allies like adversaries, Europe can treat American states like the rational actors they are - independent of the chaos in Washington D.C.

The Pentagon Still Matters. A Lot!

The professional military understands what’s happening. They know NATO is essential. They know abandoning allies creates power vacuums adversaries will fill. They know Greenland extortion schemes damage American credibility.

Europe should maintain and deepen military-to-military relationships. Joint exercises. Intelligence sharing. Defense procurement that keeps American companies invested in European security.

The Pentagon will outlast Trump. The question is whether European relationships with the Pentagon remain strong enough to rebuild transatlantic cooperation when MAGA inevitably collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Preparing for 2029 - Or Worse

Trump won’t be president forever, but Europe needs to be ready for a better, consensus president in 2029, or worse. Much worse.

If a consensus president wins in 2029, European relationships with American governors, senators, and business leaders will matter enormously. Those relationships will determine whether the transatlantic alliance can be rebuilt quickly.

If a worse version of the MAGA movement occurs and even more hostile and isolationist president wins in 2029, Europe will need these partnerships already in place even more, since there will be states that would like to retain their trade and cooperation with allies.

This isn’t alarmism. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, American importers and consumers bore 96% of the tariff burden under Trump’s first eleven months back in office, paying $277 billion in import taxes while foreign exporters paid only $11.5 billion. The economic pain Trump is inflicting on his own population is unsustainable. And as we all know, economic hardships can make or break a country. Europe needs to be prepared for the good, the bad and the ugly.

What Happens If Europe Gets This Wrong

If Europe continues trying to appease Trump, it will fail. Trump doesn’t operate in good faith. He makes threats, backs down when faced with resistance, then makes new threats. This isn’t negotiation. It’s abuse.

Meanwhile, MAGA will continue supporting far-right movements across Europe. They’ll keep funding AfD. They’ll keep legitimizing Le Pen’s National Rally in France. They’ll keep working to fracture European unity.

And when the next crisis hits - when Russia makes another move, when China tests Taiwan, when a pandemic emerges - America won’t be there.

Europe will be alone because it wasted years trying to maintain a relationship with people who fundamentally don’t believe in alliances.

Conclusion: Strength Over Appeasement

Rome survived because outsiders stepped in when insiders failed. Diocletian wasn’t born in Rome, but he saved the empire. Constantine wasn’t raised in the Senate, but he gave Rome new foundations.

Europe shouldn’t wait for America to fix itself. It should build the relationships, institutions, and capabilities needed to preserve the Western alliance despite the current American administration.

Stop negotiating with MAGA. Start building relationships with consensus America. Strengthen ties with California, New York, Washington, etc. Work with senators and governors who still believe in alliances. Partner with the Pentagon. Prepare for 2029.

And above all: recognize that MAGA is not America. It’s a hostile faction that will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and the economic pain it inflicts on American citizens.

Europe’s enemy is not the American people. Europe’s enemy is Trump, JD Vance, Musk, Hegseth, and the Bolshevik-style ressentiment politics that treats competence as conspiracy and institutions as enemies.

The West will survive this. But only if Europe stops trying to appease the unappeaseble and starts building the future with Americans who actually care about preserving it.

Deal from strength, not appeasement. That’s the lesson Greenland taught. That’s what Rome teaches. That’s what survival requires.

Everything - from nature to human action to industry - needed to make logical, rational, and scientific sense. It came attached with a cost-benefit analysis and ROI. But what is more, atheism left a vacuum that was filled by false idols = post-modernist French philosophy, popular culture, and markets. Dear God, the goddamn markets!

Markets became the new God. The invisible hand of the market will fix everything and anything. The markets are supreme.

Disclaimer: The following lines are written by a child of the post-communist world order of Eastern Europe, a free market capitalist (which we no longer have) and a Hayekian (which we never truly implemented, because Keynes).

And even I, who loathe government interventionism in free market enterprise, recognize that in rare instances - especially related to national security, where the market hasn’t gotten it right in its pursuit of profit - a case can be made for government intervention.

Industry IS National Security

People fall for the idea that industrial policy is about making your own t-shirts or bicycles. No. Industrial policy is necessary in matters of national security. When the markets fail to make an investment in a critical industry, government and taxpayer money need to fill the gap.

Take rare earth minerals and semiconductors as an example. Forty or fifty years ago, the United States led the world in semiconductor manufacturing. Americans made components, printed circuit boards, mined rare earth minerals - all domestically. Then the magical market prioritized profit, margins, and efficiency. America took its eye off the ball.

The result? The United States one day woke up and realized that 100% of every AI chip is made in Taiwan.

Try to find a printed circuit board, substrate, chemical, or packaging material made in America - you can’t. So in cases like that, where national security is at stake, governments should intervene and the U.S. did just that with the CHIPS Act under Secretary Raimondo.

The Market’s Catastrophic Blind Spots

But America intervened too late. The CHIPS Act’s $100 billion (direct spending plus tax credits) is a band-aid on a decades-long hemorrhage. The United States is now spending taxpayer money to rebuild capabilities it once dominated - capabilities it voluntarily surrendered in pursuit of quarterly earnings reports.

The problem isn’t limited to semiconductors. It’s systemic:

1. Pharmaceuticals: When COVID-19 hit, Americans discovered that 90% of their antibiotics and 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients came from China and India. According to a 2025 study, China accounts for 62.6% of antibiotic API imports to the United States, with that figure reaching 70.1% in 2024. Secretary Raimondo warned bluntly: if China “decided no Tylenol, Penicillin, or various antibiotics in America, there wouldn’t be any.” The market had efficiently relocated production to wherever labor was cheapest. The result? A national security vulnerability disguised as supply chain efficiency.
   

2. Steel and Aluminum: The United States is down to just four operating aluminum smelters with a combined capacity of 650,000 metric tonnes per year—a collapse from approximately 30 smelters in 1980. In 2024, one major smelter accounting for nearly 30% of U.S. primary aluminum production shut down, reducing American capacity by nearly one-third. The U.S. steel industry faces similar decline. As Raimondo noted, “Back to national security”—you need domestic capacity for wartime production.
   

3. Shipbuilding: China controls approximately 50-57% of global shipbuilding capacity, delivering 972 commercial ships in 2023. South Korea accounts for roughly 17-29% depending on vessel type. The U.S.? The United States accounts for just 0.13-0.2% of global commercial vessel production, delivering only 7 ships in 2023. According to U.S. Naval Intelligence, China’s shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times that of the United States. When you can’t build ships, you can’t project naval power. When you can’t project naval power, your security guarantees to allies become increasingly hollow promises.
   

4. Biotechnology: Perhaps most alarming is what’s happening right now with biotech. In 2020, the U.S. led biotech patents with 39% of the global share, while China held only 10%. By 2023-2024, the situation had dramatically shifted. China now accounts for 38-41% of global biotech patent applications and grants, while in targeted protein degradation specifically, China received 400 granted patents in 2024 compared to just 187 for the United States.
   
   The United States used to just do contract manufacturing with China; now American companies are contracting out R&D itself. China’s share of outlicensing biotech deals jumped from 8% in 2021 to 32% in early 2025 - a four-fold increase in just four years. As America finally weans itself from Taiwan on chips, it’s going the other direction with biotech - becoming more dependent on China for medicine, research, and the next generation of pharmaceutical innovation.
   

5. Critical Equipment Dependencies: There’s a company in the Netherlands called ASML. They make gigantic semiconductor lithography equipment—machines as big as a room. They’re essentially the only company in the world that can make the most advanced versions. You need these machines to make leading-edge AI chips. As Raimondo said: “That is a problem. That is a vulnerability.”

Even Europe, with its advanced manufacturing base, faces this single-point-of-failure risk

The False God of Comparative Advantage

The economic priesthood will invoke David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage: let each nation specialize in what it does best, and everyone benefits through trade. Beautiful in theory. Catastrophic when your comparative advantage is “writing software” while your strategic competitor’s comparative advantage is “making everything software runs on.”

Comparative advantage assumes benign trading partners. It assumes access to global markets remains open during crises. It assumes that other nations won’t weaponize supply chain dependencies. These assumptions aren’t just naive—they’re dangerous.

Even more problematic: comparative advantage assumes fair competition. If it were a fair fight with China, we probably could compete. But China cheats and doesn’t play by the rules.

China massively subsidizes solar panels, the inputs for solar panels, critical minerals that go into batteries, and the entire supply chain for Chinese EV companies. That is not free trade.

Look at BYD cars - direct result of massive Chinese subsidies. Look at Huawei. People thought sanctions would hobble them. They came back stronger than ever, making chips - all because it’s a champion company backed by unlimited government resources.

This isn’t market competition. It’s industrial warfare.

What Industrial Policy Should - and Shouldn’t - Look Like

Here’s where nuance matters. Not all manufacturing is created equal, and not everything deserves government support.

There’s no competitive advantage in re-shoring production for bicycles and car seats for babies. But certain industries that are critical critical to national survival cannot be left entirely to market forces:

1. Semiconductor manufacturing – Not just final assembly, but the entire supply chain

2. Rare earth mineral extraction and processing – Currently 80% controlled by China

3. Pharmaceutical APIs and critical medicines – Basic antibiotics shouldn’t require Chinese cooperation

4. Advanced biotechnology and biotech R&D – The West is losing this race right now

5. Shipbuilding and maritime industrial base – Naval power requires industrial capacity

6. Steel and aluminum production – You can’t build ships, tanks, or infrastructure without it

7. Battery technology and production – The future of defense mobility depends on it

8. Advanced manufacturing equipment – Can’t be dependent on a single foreign source

The goal here is resilience - ensuring that no single nation can hold critical capabilities hostage.

How to Execute Industrial Policy (Without Destroying Value)

The Biden administration’s approach to the CHIPS Act offers important lessons - both in what worked and what didn’t.

What Worked:

The administration recruited investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, KKR, and McKinsey to negotiate with semiconductor companies. This generated backlash from senators asking why Commerce was hiring from Wall Street.

Former Secretary Raimondo’s response was: “I’m investing money. I need investors.” These companies have tough negotiators, and if you just have typical Washington policy people, “we’d lose our shirts.”

More importantly, they structured grants with accountability:

• Companies get X dollars upfront

• Once they build the fab, they get more

• Once they get their first customer, they get more

The goal was to avoid giving Intel $10 billion upfront, having them build a beautiful shell of a fab with no customers, and being out of money. The tranched structure ensured deliverables.

The mission was clear: purchase a national security outcome. There is only one company in the world - TSMC -0 that can make the most advanced semiconductors. If Commerce had just given everybody a standard 25% tax credit and didn’t get TSMC to build six fabs in Arizona, they would have failed the mission.

What Didn’t Work:

The pure R&D portion of the CHIPS Act - $6-7 billion designated not for company grants but to invest in research, startup companies, incubators, and the next wave of technology - was completely undone by the subsequent administration.

The Workforce Crisis No One’s Talking About

Here’s something China is doing well that the West is ignoring: workforce strategy.

China recently rolled out thousands of career and technical vocational schools. Meanwhile, the average age of a pharmaceutical worker in America is 55. The average age of a plumber, welder, or electrician is 50.

The United States doesn’t have an effective workforce system. American policy incentivizes attendance - Pell grants and the GI Bill incentivize college attendance. The system sends everybody to college. Many don’t graduate, or they graduate without skills for an actual job.

China is incredibly intentional about workforce strategy. The United States doesn’t even teach molecular biology in most high schools, yet America wants to lead the world in biotech.

Europe faces similar challenges. If the West is serious about industrial policy, it needs to be serious about workforce development. Otherwise, nations are building fabs with no one qualified to operate them.

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The China Question: Strength vs. Arrogance

Managing the relationship with China requires something the West is currently lacking: nuance.

The world can’t handle a heated conflict with China. The United States has almost a trillion dollars - $700 billion - of trade with China, 99% in commodity goods. That’s actually a good thing, as long as the critical 1% doesn’t include things that can kill you.

What should the approach be?

Make the West stronger so it can go toe-to-toe with China. Don’t deal with China from a position of arrogance. Deal from a position of strength. Take them at their word and operate in a more nuanced way, so there isn’t constant tit-for-tat escalation.

Right now, America is operating from a position of weakness disguised as strength. The U.S. throws out 100% tariffs, except till tomorrow when it says “not really.” Meanwhile, if China wanted to play hardball - no Tylenol, no Penicillin, no antibiotics; or if they decided to take over Taiwan - they have a lot of cards to play.

The better approach: Get to the business of strengthening Western capabilities, including transatlantic relationships, and deal with China from a much stronger position. Stop trying to boss them around. Develop a better sense of nuance.

The Alliance Question: America First vs. America Alone

One of the biggest strategic mistakes America is making: alienating all its allies.

America First is one thing. America Alone is a disastrous policy.

An America that’s not a good friend or partner to Europe, Japan, Korea, India - that’s a weak America. The United States cannot be effective without strong relationships with Europe and Southeast Asia.

Consider what could be accomplished with deeper partnerships:

• Europe: ASML in the Netherlands. Deeper commercial relationships. Joint R&D initiatives.

• Japan and Korea: Advanced manufacturing. Semiconductor partnerships.

• India: Massive mistake not developing this relationship more strategically.

• Southeast Asia: Critical position in supply chains.

What is America’s competitive advantage? The United States has a culture of risk-taking that’s unique. It has entrepreneurship that’s unique. It has rich, deep capital markets better than the rest of the world.

America is at its best when it’s leading and drawing the world to it as friends, not dictating as “we’re in charge.”

What the United States is doing right now is giving the Heisman to the rest of the world. If Americans think everyone is going to sit around and wait for them to come back, they’re delusional.

Meanwhile, China is right there every day in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. It’s hubris by America to think it’s the only option.

As a European observing this, I can say: if America pisses off Europe enough and it helps Europe get its act together with its own economy and industrial policy, that might be the one silver lining. Because a strong European economy is good for the world - and necessary for our own security.

The Cost of Inaction

Some will argue that maintaining domestic industrial capacity is expensive. They’re right. It costs more than outsourcing to the cheapest global bidder.

But what’s the cost of dependence?

Ask Europe about depending on Russian natural gas. Ask Taiwan about its semiconductor leverage being its only deterrent against Chinese invasion. Ask any nation that discovered during COVID that masks, ventilators, and basic medical supplies all came from a single country that could—and did—restrict exports.

During COVID, massive problems with packaging plants in Malaysia ground supply chains to a halt. Geographic concentration is a vulnerability, even when it’s not in an adversarial nation.

The market optimizes for efficiency. National security requires redundancy. These goals are fundamentally in tension.

Where Government Should and Shouldn’t Intervene

The key question: What is the purpose of industrial policy? Then design a policy that allows you to achieve that purpose.

Government Should:

• Fund basic research (quantum, biotech, next-gen semiconductors)

• Invest in infrastructure

• Develop workforce training aligned with strategic needs

• Support industries where market failure meets national security imperatives

• Maintain bipartisan or cross-party focus on national security issues

Government Should Not:

• Pick winners and losers in commodity manufacturing

• Subsidize industries with no national security rationale

• Replace private capital in areas where markets function

• Make equity investments in individual companies

• Implement blanket tariffs that just tax consumers

There are about 100 times more people who work in industries that use steel than in industries that produce steel. The manicure industry is about six times as large as the steel industry in the United States. When you raise the price of steel, you’re not just protecting steel jobs - you’re potentially destroying more manufacturing jobs downstream.

The difference between manufacturing and service jobs - and this matters - is that manufacturing leads to R&D, which leads to more manufacturing, which leads to more innovation. There are compound benefits.

But that’s an argument for strategic industrial policy, not blanket protectionism.

Conclusion: Remembering What Markets Are For

Markets are tools - powerful, productive tools for organizing economic activity and creating prosperity. But like any tool, they’re suited for specific purposes. You don’t use a screwdriver to hammer nails, and you don’t use market optimization to ensure national survival.

The atheism I described at the beginning removed any sense that some things transcend cost-benefit analysis. Some things - national sovereignty, security, the ability to defend yourself and your allies - cannot be reduced to profit margins and ROI calculations.

Industrial policy isn’t about rejecting markets. It’s about remembering that markets serve nations, not the other way around. And when markets fail to preserve the industrial capacity needed for national survival, government intervention isn’t just justified - it’s necessary.

It is essential that these issues remain bipartisan. When industrial policy becomes purely partisan, it becomes vulnerable to political winds rather than strategic necessity.

The invisible hand is powerful, but it’s not omniscient. And it certainly doesn’t give a damn about whether a country can defend itself, whether it can manufacture antibiotics during a pandemic, or whether it will have access to the advanced chips that power AI when geopolitical tensions flare.

The West needs to stop worshiping at the altar of market efficiency and remember that some things are too important to outsource. Our security depends on it. Our prosperity depends on it. Our sovereignty depends on it.

The markets won’t save us from strategic dependence on adversaries. Only deliberate, focused, accountable industrial policy will.

And we’d better get it right, because as Secretary Raimondo warned: “It’s much easier to get industrial policy wrong than to get it right.”

The question isn’t whether to have industrial policy. China has already answered that question for us. The question is whether the West will execute it competently—with the right focus, the right accountability, and the right understanding that this isn’t about making everything domestically.

It’s about making sure nations can make the things that matter when it matters most.

The European defense industry is undergoing its most profound transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the growing uncertainty about transatlantic security commitments, the old continent - arguably late, but as the saying goes…better late than never - has embarked on a new rearmament program.

The Report: The State of European Defense 2025

After extensive research, I have assembled a strategic analysis titled The State of European Defense 2025 (download below)

The report examines the European defense ecosystem as of 2025, including:

• Legacy prime contractors scaling production at speeds unseen in peacetime

• Venture-backed defense startups in software, AI, and space

• Ammunition factories rising across Eastern Europe

• Satellite constellations designed to secure European autonomy in space and communications

• The policy architecture now underpinning this industrial shift

The report aims to present a systems-level analysis of how Europe is rebuilding hard power after decades of underinvestment in its defense sector.

Defence Spending: The Numbers Finally Matter

European Union defense expenditure has increased 62.8% in four years.

Germany has committed to more than doubling its defense budget, reaching €153 billion by 2029. Poland now leads NATO at 4.7% of GDP, while at the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, allies agreed to a new target of 5% of GDP by 2035.

That commitment matters - not because all states will hit it immediately, but because it formalizes a new baseline. The era of underfunded deterrence is over.

Venture Capital Enters the Battlefield

According to Dealroom data, venture capital investment in European defense startups reached $1.5 billion through September 2025 - representing continued growth in the sector. Since 2019, investment has increased dramatically, with 2024 reaching a record $5.2 billion.

This is opportunistic capital responding to demand, urgency, and state-backed buyers.

Europe’s New Defense Unicorns

That capital has produced a new generation of defense companies.

• Helsing, the Munich-based AI defense firm, reached a €12 billion valuation after raising €600 million in June 2025 - the largest defense funding round in European history. Its AI agent flew a Swedish Gripen E fighter jet in May 2025, and the company is developing the Europa autonomous combat drone for deployment by 2029.

• Quantum Systems (≈€3 billion valuation) specializes in reconnaissance drones.

• Tekever (£1 billion+ valuation) operates combat-proven UAVs with 10,000+ flight hours in Ukraine.

• ICEYE (≈$2.5 billion valuation) operates the world’s largest synthetic aperture radar satellite constellation.

This is Europe’s defense-tech moment - and it is no longer hypothetical.

Legacy Primes Are Moving Faster than Ever Before

Europe’s traditional defense giants are not standing still either.

• Rheinmetall’s stock is up roughly 2,000% since February 2022. The company opened Europe’s largest ammunition factory in Unterlüß, Germany - a €500 million investment completed in just 15 months.

• KNDS is producing the Leopard 2A8, Germany’s first newly built main battle tank since 1992, with 350+ units ordered by six NATO countries.

• Leonardo’s order backlog has reached €44 billion.

• BAE Systems secured selection for Norway’s £10 billion+ Type 26 frigate program.

Policy Has Finally Caught Up

Industrial momentum is now matched by policy.

The ReArm Europe Plan, launched in March 2025, unlocks up to €800 billion in additional defense spending through 2030.

The €150 billion Security Action for Europe (SAFE) instrument — adopted in May 2025 - provides loans for joint procurement, with 19 member states already requesting funding.

The European Investment Bank has expanded eligibility to include military equipment and tripled financing for defense SMEs. This would have been politically unthinkable five years ago.

The Hard Problems Remain

The report does not pretend Europe has solved everything. Not by a long shot - there’s still a long way to go, challenges to face and bottlenecks to resolve.

Industrial fragmentation persists. Europe still fields six to eight frigate classes and multiple competing tank programs.

The Future Combat Air System (FCAS) - a €100 billion+ Franco-German-Spanish fighter program - remains stuck in workshare disputes that threaten its survival.

And despite all progress, 64% of European NATO procurement still comes from the United States.

Rearmament is real - but coherence is not guaranteed. Arguably, Europe’s biggest weakness - lack of unified foreign and defense policy. Something which I have argued in the past, needs to be federalized on an EU level. The war in Ukraine is not just a threat to Ukraine, but the rest of Europe as well.

Why This Report Exists

The State of European Defense 2025 is designed to provide some actionable intelligence on how the European defense ecosystem has evovled and what it’s current state in 2025.

It covers:

• Legacy manufacturers

• Emerging startups

• Ammunition and production capacity

• Air and missile defense

• Naval shipbuilding

• Aerospace and fighter programs

• Space and satellite infrastructure

• The evolving EU and NATO policy framework

The question is no longer whether Europe will rearm.

The question is whether it can do so fast enough, efficiently enough, and cooperatively enough to meet the threats already forming on its horizon.

The full strategic report is available for download and includes detailed analysis of over 50 companies, major defense programs, investment trends, and policy frameworks shaping the European defense industry.

The State Of European Defense Report 2025

589KB ∙ PDF file

Download

This report details the historic transformation and rearmament of Europe's military capabilities, driven by a record €381 billion in annual spending and the emergence of high-tech defense startups.

Download

But the data suggests we are analyzing the wrong problem. We aren’t living in an era of rising powers anymore, instead we are entering the age of stagnation and decline of where the defining feature of the Great Powers is not their dynamism, but their inevitable entropy.

We did ourselves a massive disservice by not remembering history in its entirety and instead picked the 25 best years humanity has ever experienced and decided that’s the default setting.

The Industrial Revolution broke humanity out of the Malthusian trap, creating a brief, 200-year anomaly of explosive growth. That window is now closing as productivity flatlines and demographics collapse across both the developed and the developing world, the Great Powers are realizing that organic growth is no longer possible. When a state can no longer grow by creating wealth, it must grow by taking it.

What we are essentially witnessing is not a fight between Great Powers, but a knife fight between geriatrics in a lifeboat. And that makes the world infinitely more dangerous.

The End of the Economic Miracle

To understand the desperation of Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, you have to look at the ledger. The era of easy growth is over.

For nearly all of human history (year 1 to 1820), global income per person rose by barely 0.017% annually. Poverty was the norm. The Industrial Revolution shattered that ceiling, allowing populations and wealth to explode simultaneously. But the tailwinds that drove that era - coal, steam, oil, and a surplus of young workers - are turning into headwinds.

The modern tech sector loves to promise that AI will save us, adding trillions to the global GDP. But the reality on the ground is grim. Productivity growth in advanced economies has fallen close to zero. We have traded the steam engine for the algorithm, but an algorithm cannot physically care for an aging population. Hospitals need nurses more than they need AI-powered, blockchain-first solutions. Digital efficiency does not solve physical bottlenecks.

The result? A world drowning in debt. In the U.S., debt edged down slightly post-2015, but in China, it has topped 300% of GDP. We are leveraging the future to pay for a present that isn’t growing.

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The Demographic Winter

The economic stagnation is compounded by a biological reality: the world is not reproducing at the rate we have gotten accustomed to especially in the last 50+ years.

We are witnessing a demographic crash - in the next 25 years, China will lose roughly 240 million working-age adults - a decline of 24.5 percent. To put that in perspective, that is more than the entire labor force of the European Union vanishing.

Russia is already on its death bed. Europe is shedding workers by the millions. Even the United States, usually buoyed by immigration, faces a drag on growth as boomers retire.

The only outlier is India, which many hope will be the “next China.” But India suffers from a crippling lack of human capital. As of 2020, nearly a quarter of its working-age adults had never attended school. It has the bodies, but it lacks the skilled industrial base to replace China as the world’s factory (for the time being).

Expansion as a Survival Strategy

This brings us to the terrifying conclusion. If you are a leader in Beijing, Moscow, or Washington, and you look at these trend lines, you see a closing window.

In a growing world, commerce is a positive-sum game. In a stagnant world, geopolitics becomes zero-sum. If you cannot grow your economy through innovation and demographics, the only way to increase your national power - or secure the resources needed to maintain your standard of living - is territorial expansion.

This is the strategic logic behind the current flashpoints.

1. Russia and Ukraine: While Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is highly ideologically driven, it didn’t happen solely out of Soviet nostalgia. He invaded because Russia is a “dying nation” in the Lord Salisbury sense. With a shrinking population and an economy entirely dependent on resource extraction, capturing Ukraine - the crown jewel and intellectual powerhouse of its last decaying empire- was a bid to secure a massive industrial and agricultural base and a demographic buffer. Essentially, a looting expedition disguised as a crusade. As Dugin said - there’s no Russia without Ukraine.

2. China and Taiwan: China’s “rise” is over. Its GDP relative to the U.S. has actually fallen from 70% to 64% between 2020 and 2024. Xi Jinping knows that China will get old before it gets rich. The obsession with Taiwan is not just about nationalism (albeit, that is a huge part of it - similar to Russia); it is about seizing the crown jewel of the semiconductor industry - the one asset that could theoretically jumpstart their stalling productivity - before the demographic collapse renders the PLA incapable of fighting.

3. The United States and the Periphery: Even the United States is not immune to this logic. While currently positioned better than its rivals (thanks to energy independence and the dollar), the U.S. is increasingly protectionist. The occasional floating of ideas like “buying Greenland” or the aggressive posturing in the Arctic isn’t madness; it’s a rational recognition that in a resource-constrained future, strategic geography matters more than “free trade.” The U.S. is pivoting from being the global guarantor of trade to the aggressive guardian of its own hemisphere.

The Last Gamble

History shows that “dying” empires are often more aggressive than rising ones. Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941 both feared their windows of opportunity were closing. They chose war not because they were confident of easy victory, but because they feared the certainty of future decline.

We are seeing the same dynamic today. Conquest is arguably harder than ever - nuclear weapons, precision drones, and energized insurgencies make holding territory a nightmare (just ask Russia). But for nations facing the slow strangulation of debt and depopulation, the high-risk gamble of expansion looks preferable to the certainty of fading into irrelevance.

The 21st century won’t be defined by the peaceful transition of power. It will be defined by the violent thrashing of empires refusing to go gently into that good night.

The global maritime domain is currently undergoing a structural transformation of historical magnitude, characterized by two simultaneous and colliding forces:

1. A rapid intensification of economic activity and infrastructure development;

2. A deterioration of the geopolitical security order that has governed the oceans since the end of the WWII.

The problem? We forgot to secure it.

This is the state of play in the maritime domain today: there’s widening gap between the exploding economic value of our oceans and our ability to protect it. And whenever there is a gap between value and security, there is an opportunity for asymmetric warfare.

Subsea Infrastructure: The Invisible Backbone of Today’s Economy

As of today, a network of approximately 1.6 million kilometers of fiber-optic cables rests on the ocean floor, facilitating 99% of all international digital traffic, including an estimated $10 trillion in daily financial transactions.

This infrastructure has become the central nervous system of our modern civilization. Unlike the decentralized nature of the internet’s logical layer, the physical layer is geographically concentrated and surprisingly fragile.

Between 2016 and 2022, international bandwidth usage essentially doubled every two years. This growth is not merely linear but exponential, driven by the data appetites of AI models and the globalization of digital services.

However, this expansion has created a paradox: as the global economy becomes more dependent on these cables, they become more attractive targets for adversaries seeking asymmetric leverage. Recent cable-cutting incidents in the Baltic and Red Seas, demonstrated that subsea infrastructure is a prime target for “gray zone” warfare - attacks that inflict significant economic damage but remain below the threshold of armed conflict that would trigger collective defense treaties like NATO’s Article 5.

The Industrialization of the Seabed: Energy and Resources

Parallel to the digital expansion is the physical industrialization of the ocean for energy and resources. The offshore oil and gas industry has pushed into deep waters, requiring complex subsea architecture including pipelines, risers, and monitoring systems. There are now over tens of thousands of kilometers of subsea pipelines operating worldwide, a complex vascular system that transports the lifeblood of the global energy market.

Simultaneously, the renewable energy transition has driven a massive buildout of offshore wind, that will transform coastal seas into dense grids of turbines and substations by 2030, according to Global Wind Energy Council projections.

Furthermore, deep-sea mining is transitioning from speculation to reality. With the International Seabed Authority (ISA) licensing over 1.5 million square kilometers of seabed for exploration, the extraction of polymetallic nodules - critical for the batteries powering the green transition - is imminent. Additionally, the recent Chinese embargo on rare earth minerals is accelerating deep-sea mining for these vital materials.

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific alone contains more nickel, manganese, and cobalt than all terrestrial reserves combined. This creates a new geopolitical point of tension, as nation states compete for access to strategic minerals in areas beyond national jurisdiction, effectively extending terrestrial resource wars.

Oceanic Global Supply Chains

Over 80% of global trade by volume now moves by sea, but this efficiency has come at the cost of resilience. The global supply chain relies on a “just-in-time” delivery model that assumes open sea lines of communication and secure chokepoints. That, unfortunately, is no longer the case as we have seen with the Red Sea lanes today, and previous blockades of the Suez canal.

The modern maritime economy is characterized by extreme concentration. Traffic is funnelled through a handful of narrow waterways - the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Panama Canal. These chokepoints are the single points of failure for the global economy. When these arteries are threatened, the economic consequences are immediate and global, manifesting in inflation, delayed production, and increased insurance premiums.

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The Expansion of Asymmetric Risks

The increase of economic value of the ocean has been met with an equal expansion in threats and risks. The maritime domain, once permissive for Western naval powers following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has become highly contested again. The threat landscape has bifurcated into acute geopolitical confrontations and systemic risks, both of which exploit the vastness of the ocean and the limitations of traditional naval policing.

The Red Sea Crisis: A Case Study in Asymmetry

The Houthi campaign in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, beginning in late 2023 and extending through 2025, serves as the definitive case study for this new era. Utilizing Iranian-supplied anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs) and one-way attack drones (OWA-UAVs) costing as little as $2,000 to $20,000, the Houthis successfully disrupted a trade route carrying 12-15% of global commerce.

The strategic victory for the Houthis was not necessarily in sinking ships - though they achieved this - but in imposing a “war risk premium” on the global economy. Insurance rates for transiting the Red Sea surged from 0.07% to over 1%, forcing major carriers like Maersk to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. This detour adds approximately 10-14 days and 4,000 miles to a voyage, burning significantly more fuel and tying up container capacity, which in turn spikes global freight rates.

This conflict demonstrated that a non-state actor, with no navy, could effectively close a global chokepoint by leveraging cost asymmetry. Navies operating traditional multi-billion-dollar destroyers found themselves on the wrong side of the cost curve, firing scarce, multi-million-dollar interceptors at cheap drones - a sustainment model that is mathematically impossible to maintain over the long term.

The South China Sea and Gray Zone Tactics

In the Indo-Pacific, the threat is less about kinetic destruction and more about coercive “gray zone” operations. China has pioneered the use of a maritime militia - civilian fishing vessels that operate under military direction to enforce territorial claims without triggering open war.

These tactics represent a sophisticated integration of civilian and military capabilities:

• Swarming: Deploying hundreds of vessels to surround disputed features or harass foreign oil and gas operations, creating a physical blockade that is difficult to break without lethal force.

• Electronic Warfare: Spoofing AIS signals (making vessels appear where they are not) or jamming GPS to disrupt rival operations. This creates confusion and operational hazards for commercial and military vessels alike.

• Dual-Use Research: Utilizing scientific research vessels to map seabed terrain and test subsea communications. This data has direct military application for submarine warfare, allowing the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to understand the acoustic properties of potential battlegrounds.

China’s strategy exploits the legal and operational gaps of Western navies. A US Navy destroyer is ill-suited to engage a swarm of fishing boats; using lethal force would be a diplomatic disaster, while non-lethal maneuvering is dangerous and ineffective against mass numbers. This “salami slicing” tactic gradually changes the status quo, effectively annexing territory through persistent civilian-military presence.

The European Theatre: Seabed Warfare

In Europe, the war in Ukraine has spilled into the maritime domain, turning the Black Sea into an active naval warzone and the Baltic Sea into a theatre of hybrid tension. Russia has demonstrated a capability and willingness to target subsea infrastructure. The presence of Russian “research” vessels like the Yantar, known to carry mini-submarines capable of cutting cables, has forced NATO to launch initiatives like “Operation Baltic Sentry” to monitor critical seabed assets. The threat here is existential for the digital economy: a coordinated severance of transatlantic cables could induce a financial crisis comparable to the 2008 meltdown, but within hours rather than weeks.

Latent Threats and Institutional Strain

Beyond state-sponsored aggression, there’s been a rise of latent criminal threats. Illegal fishing is responsible for global economic losses estimated at $20–25 billion annually. Industrial-scale IUU fleets, often distant-water fleets from nations like China, strip resources from the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of developing nations, causing food insecurity and instability.

Smuggling and narco-trafficking have also evolved too. The use of “narco-subs” (semi-submersibles) has transitioned into the deployment of fully autonomous or remote-controlled low-profile vessels (LPVs) that are nearly invisible to radar. These vessels can transit vast distances without crew, reducing the risk to the criminal organizations operating them.

These threats place an immense strain on Coast Guards and maritime law enforcement agencies, which are typically underfunded and under-equipped compared to their naval counterparts. The gap between the scale of maritime activity and the capacity of the state to police it is widening - a gap that current innovations in autonomous technology is poised to fill.

The Solution? A New Era of Defense Tech

The ongoing convergence of threat, technology, and funding creates a wide range of opportunities for government and industry to redefine maritime security for the 21st century.

The truth is that the ocean is an unforgiving environment - worse than space in many ways. Salt water corrodes everything. Pressure crushes hulls. Radio waves (GPS) don’t travel through water. For decades, this physics problem kept maritime autonomy stuck. If you wanted a UUV, you bought a $2 million bespoke system from a prime defense contractor. It was too expensive to lose, which meant you rarely used it.

Two distinct technological advancements have finally unlocked the physics of this market:

1. LEO Satellite Connectivity: The proliferation of Low Earth Orbit satellites (like Starlink) has brought reliable, low-latency broadband to the open ocean. This allows surface drones (USVs) to be piloted like aerial drones, solving the “over-the-horizon” command and control problem.

2. Edge Computing: Advances in high-efficiency GPUs mean we can now run complex sonar processing and decision-making locally on the device, rather than trying to pipe massive datasets back to a central data center.

This convergence is redefining the maritime domain from a platform-heavy Cold War theater into a software-defined battlefield.

Startups are now fielding UUVs for $10,000–$20,000 - a 90% cost reduction compared to legacy systems. This is a pivotal moment in the warfare domain - when the cost of a sensor platform drops to the price of a used car, you don’t just buy one; you buy a thousand. You stop worrying about losing them and start worrying about how to deploy them effectively.

The Waronomics Opportunity

This brings us to the money. The U.S. has a well-documented shipbuilding crisis (China’s capacity is estimated at 250x that of the U.S.). We are not going to solve this problem simply by trying to build more destroyers faster than Beijing. The math isn’t mathing anymore.

The solution - and the investment opportunity - lies in the asymmetric offset.

A rise in Security-as-a-Service defense companies is inevitable. Your average maritime customer - whether shipping giants or wind farm operator - doesn’t want to buy and operate robot swarms. They want outcomes. A security layer that provides persistent monitoring and defense of their incredibly expensive infrastructure and assets.

Conclusion: The Ocean as the Next Economic and Military Frontier

The structural transformation of the maritime domain has irreversibly tied the future of the global economy to the ocean floor and the surface above it. The oceans are no longer a “global commons” in the sense of a free, unpoliced space; they are becoming a crowded, industrial domain where economic competition and military confrontation are inevitable.

The risks are profound. The current model of naval prestige - big ships, expensive missiles - is economically unsustainable against cheap, networked threats. The “gray zone” tactics in the South China Sea prove that legal norms are insufficient without persistent enforcement capacity.

However, the opportunities are equally significant. By leveraging the technology stack of the 21st century, we can build a new maritime security architecture. This architecture will be defined not by the tonnage of steel in the water, but by the density of sensors, the intelligence of algorithms, and the resilience of the networks that connect them.

The technology exists. The challenge now is doctrinal and operational: integrating these new tools to secure the oceanic frontier before the “latent” threats of today become the catastrophic failures of tomorrow.

Appendix

1. The Blue Acceleration: The Trajectory of Human Expansion into the Ocean

2. Cost and Value in Air and Missile Defense Intercepts - CSIS

3. Subsea Infrastructure Failures: Market Risks, Costs, and Opportunities

4. Global Offshore Wind Report 2025 - Tethys

5. Development of deep-sea mining and its environmental impacts: a review - Frontiers

6. The Impacts of the Red Sea Shipping Crisis | J.P. Morgan

7. Red Sea Attacks Hike Up Shipping Insurance Rates

8. After Red Sea attack, shipping firm says it will send its vessels around Africa | CBC News

9. Red Sea shipping insurance costs soar after new attacks

10. David vs. Goliath: Cost Asymmetry in Warfare - RAND

11. Signals in the Swarm: The Data Behind China’s Maritime Gray Zone Campaign Near Taiwan - CSIS

12. International day against illegal fishing - the United Nations

13. Starlink Maritime Cybersecurity - Globetech

14. Starlink terminals give Navy ‘game-changing’ flexibility - DefenseScoop

15. Revolutionizing Naval Fleets: A Conversation with Blue Water Autonomy founder Rylan Hamilton - YouTube

16. The Future of Autonomous Ships with Blue Water Autonomy’s Austin Gray - Infinite Frontiers

17. Anduril Opens Factory to Build Unmanned Submarines for Australia

18. Navy ramping up production of autonomous GARC vessels - DefenseScoop

19. Subsea telecommunications cables: resilience and crisis preparedness - Parliament UK

In a previous post, I talked about ideology as the mother of all that is irrational. If you want to understand the power dynamics of the world, start with the operating systems that run its actors. The irrational decisions that are made will cause a chain-reaction that will ripple through the rest of the domains.

People are the hardware; ideology is the software. Anyone who’s ever maintained a 30-year-old COBOL stack knows the paradox: legacy systems are both durable - still running banks and nuclear arsenals, yet one bad patch away from collapse. The same lock-in happens to people’s minds. Once you’re habituated to a particular UX, switching hurts. Hand an Android to a lifelong Apple user and watch him sweat.

The secular, post-Enlightenment Western mind often assumes ideology is a relic of the past; then it’s shocked when a Pakistani, Russian, Chinese, or Iraqi neighbor spends decades in Europe or America and doesn’t refactor its code into Western default settings.

Windows can boot on a Mac, sure - but it won’t work very well. Ideology, like faith, is irrational, yet deeply intuitive. Or as Žižek - our over-caffeinated Balkan Hegelian -likes to remind us: everything is ideology.

With that in mind, let’s examine the operating system of the Russian ideology: Russism.

Russia’s Origin Story: Muscovy learned to rule like the Horde, then claimed to have always been Rus’.

Russia conducted one of the most successful rebranding exercises in human history (anyone in marketing should study it extensively!) - it rewrote its origin story, shrouded its reality in opaque mysticism, and managed to convince the outside world that this 11-timezones landmass is an empire of superior Slavinism, Orthodox family values, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and ballet.

Pure ideology.

The historical reality is that Moscow rose under Golden Horde suzerainty and absorbed Horde institutions (fiscal, administrative, military) while rebranding itself as the legitimate successor to Kyivan Rus’ through church politics, titles, and myth (“Third Rome”).

From the Mongol conquest of the 1230s-40s through two long, formative centuries, Muscovy made itself indispensable to the khans as tax-farmer and broker. That apprenticeship left deep marks: censuses and tax-farming, the yam courier network, hostage politics, collective punishments, service nobility, steppe-style mobilization. It’s an administrative download from empire to vassal.

When the balance of power finally tilted, Muscovy didn’t discard those modules - it weaponized them. The state that would later rename itself “Russia” married Horde rule-tech to a new, sacralized identity project - the Kyivan Rus. And this is the trick that matters for everything that follows: having learned to rule like the Horde, Moscow claimed it had always been Rus’.

How the rebranding happened

Russia had ambitions to become a world empire, and a world power cannot market itself as born of steppe subjugation. So Moscow looted the symbolic heritage of Kyivan Rus’ (modern day Ukraine) - names, saints, chronicles, and the prestige of the metropolitan seat - to launder the stigma of a Mongol inception.

First came church geography. The metropolitan of “Kyiv and all Rus’” moved north - a simple bureaucratic migration gave Muscovy the authority it needed to speak as heir of the Rus.

Second, state symbolism and titles. Under Ivan III (1462–1505), Muscovy took Novgorod (1478), absorbed Tver (1485), married into Byzantine pedigree via Sophia Palaiologina, adopted the double-headed eagle, and began styling its ruler “sovereign of all Rus’.” In the early 1500s, the monk Filofei supplied the slogan that would frame the mythology: “Moscow is the Third Rome.”

This ideology echoed into modern narratives of Putin’s 2021 essay (“On the Historical Unity…”), where the Ukrainians and Belarusians were folded into a single “Ancient Rus” people to legitimize control of Moscow over both.

From land-grab to land-empire

Once the rebrand stuck, expansion accelerated - Moscow conducted colonialism without oceans. The template was overland and multiethnic: Kazan (1552), Astrakhan (1556), Siberia by the century’s end; then the Caucasus, steppe, and beyond. The empire that emerges is not a tidy “nation-state” but a machine for absorbing peoples - Finnic, Turkic, Caucasian, steppe - while extracting grain, furs, oil, and men. The governing logic stays familiar: enumerate and tax; move populations when needed; reward service with land; crush and “pacify” when challenged; Russify, and build obedience on the ashes of what can only be classified as an ethnic cleansing.

Why this story matters now?

Why would this medieval ideology matter now, you might ask? It matters, because it still works, and because that is the true reasoning behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - ideology. You don’t kill 1M+ of your own men, destroy your reputation on the world stage, plunge into a war economy, kneel in front of your Sino masters (China) because you are rational. You do it because you are an ideologue.

The NATO expansion sob story, the CIA, Nuland, protection of “russian speakers” and everything else is just narratives for the masses.

Unfortunately, those narratives work, and what is more - even some Westerners still fall for it. Why? Because the narratives are rational, but the reality is ideological (irrational by default).

Every few generations, the regime refreshes the myth that “all Rus’ is one people”. The script converts expansion into “gathering of Slavic/Orthodox brothers,” annexation into “protection,” and punitive war into “security.”

You can see the contemporary update in plain sight: the insistence that Kyiv is a part of an “ancient whole,” that language and baptism define political destiny, that borders are negotiable because history is editable. That’s why Putin spent the first 3.5 hours of his interview with Tucker Carlson talking about what can only be described as revisionist history. And why he gave a history lecture to Trump at Alaska. Moscow wants to convince the world that Ukraine is a fake country, one that has always belonged to Russia.

The point of this article is not to litigate medieval theology - that will take days. It’s to help you understand the operating system of Russia: a state incubated under steppe empire that later baptized itself in Kyivan memory to legitimize permanent expansion. If you grasp that ideology, Russia’s modern policy and propaganda stop looking “irrational.” They’re entirely rational - for an empire whose origin story had to be rewritten to justify its growth.

Bottomline: Russia cannot exist without its Jerusalem, a.k.a. Kyiv.

The Next Ideological Target: Bulgaria

When people talk about the possible next target of the Russian federation, nobody ever mentions the Balkans - it’s either the Baltics or Poland. But Bulgaria has something that Russia needs - a historic memory.

If Russism runs on myth and memory, Bulgaria is a strategic asset—not for territory, but for origin control. The Cyrillic script and Slavic Orthodoxy that Moscow packages as “civilizational glue” were forged on Bulgarian soil.

What we call Cyrillic developed in the First Bulgarian Empire. Old Church Slavonic – standardized in Bulgaria – became the liturgical language for the region. When Kyivan Rus’ Christianized, the books, clergy, and templates arriving north were incepted there. Moscow wasn’t even on the map yet.

For an ideology that sells Russia as the natural “heart” of Slavic Orthodoxy, this is awkward. You can’t convincingly pose as civilizational big brother if the little Balkan cousin wrote the alphabet and compiled the first manuals. So you have two options:

1. admit the truth, or

2. slowly smear, blur, and rebrand the origin until people just vaguely feel that “Cyrillic = Russian” and Bulgaria was somewhere in the choir.

Guess which option Russism picked.

Over time, the narrative does a quiet shuffle: Cyril and Methodius become pan-Slavic mascots under a Russian civilizational umbrella; Bulgarian literary centers are reduced to a warm-up act for “the Russian millennium”; the fact that your average priest in medieval Rus’ prayed from books produced in Bulgarian script, language, and tradition is treated as a technicality. The goal isn’t historical accuracy. The goal is origin control: if Moscow can package Cyrillic and Orthodoxy as fundamentally “theirs,” then every nation using that script and tradition becomes, in their ideological framework, a wayward branch of the same tree.

That’s why Bulgaria isn’t just another small Balkan state in this worldview. It’s a wellhead. Control the wellhead and you can sell “Slavic civilization” with a Moscowite label.

And Russia has been working that angle for decades via means of hybrid warfare.

You see it in the information space: media projects, “patriotic” outlets, and influencers pushing the same tired narratives – the eternal Russian “liberators,” the sacred Slavic brotherhood, the wicked decadent West, Brussels as occupation, Washington as puppet-master.

You see it in the Church: attempts to pull Bulgarian Orthodoxy into a tighter orbit around Moscow, to present the Russian Church as the senior partner, the natural center of a mythical “Orthodox civilization.”

You see it in politics: money, business interests, energy dependency, security services, and plain old blackmail used to capture slices of the political class and bureaucracy.

It’s been a long-term, violent hybrid information warfare aimed at bending institutions, media, and parties until Bulgaria’s own elites start repeating Kremlin talking points as if they were defending “national interest.” The slogans are about faith, language, and shared history.

So when we talk about future ideological targets, Bulgaria isn’t on the list because of its size or its army. It’s there because if Bulgaria keeps its own receipts – Cyrillic, Old Church Slavonic, the early Church, the literary tradition – a whole chunk of Russia’s civilizational branding starts to look like what it actually is: looted heritage.

From the Russist perspective, that cannot stand. A small country at the edge of Europe that can calmly say “Actually, we built the script and the liturgy you’re using” is dangerous. Not militarily. Narratively. And for an empire built on mythology, that’s the one front they can’t afford to lose.

Hence, Bulgaria is being Belarussed since the 2000s, right under Brussel’s nose.

Conclusion: Ideology is Irrational, Narratives are Rational

In the end, none of this is “rational” in the way technocrats like to pretend the world works. Ideology is closer to faith: pre-rational and emotional. It answers the question “who are we?” and once that identity layer is in place, people will happily burn resources, territories, and generations to protect it, even if its ridden with falsehoods.

That’s where narratives come in. Narratives are the rational skin on top of the irrational core. They turn raw impulse into something that sounds coherent: security, tradition, unity, brotherhood, anti-colonial struggle, civilizational mission.

If you don’t understand the ideology, the decisions will look insane. If you buy into the narratives, the insanity will look reasonable.

Your only defense is to see both at once: the operating system (ideology) and the user interface (narrative). One is not logical, the other is. Together they explain why a state will keep marching into disaster and calling it destiny.

Context: Who’s Behind Waronomics?

A bit of background, if only for authenticity’s sake. My interest in geopolitics began absurdly early - around age 11-12 - but if you grew up in the Balkans (especially in a family like mine), that’s not that unusual. The breakup of Yugoslavia was unfolding while I was still in kindergarten, so even as a child, I knew what war looked like, if only through the TV and the anxious talks between my parents.

When I was 12, I stumbled upon a photograph by James Nachtwey: a child wandering through the ruins of Grozny during the first Chechen war. In retrospect, that’s what set me on this journey - a lifelong attempt to answer this one haunting question of my childhood: why was that child in Grozny walking alone through a ruined city?

Not long after came 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Crimea…looking back, there wasn’t a time in my life where a war was not occurring either next door, across the Black Sea (my home), or in the Near East.

My curiosity deepened into a passion - I wanted to understand the world, not just watch it burn on the screen.

Very soon I learned that geopolitics isn’t a single field - it’s an ecosystem. To grasp it, you must learn history, which ties to geography and resources (fertile lands, cotton, silk, gold, oil, gas, copper, etc.), which ties to trade, which ties to economics. Layer on philosophy and theology - because they shape nations, values, and institutions - and you begin to see the world as a living system made up of dynamic processes, not static silos.

That’s how a childhood curiosity turned into a 20-year passion project: studying history, religion, philosophy, economics, languages, and everything in between. Never professionally - I work in tech - but as a private pursuit of understanding.

Why am I telling you all this? Because my analysis doesn’t appear out of thin air. It comes from two decades of obsessive reading, observation, pattern recognition, and extensive travel across 4 continents.

When you study the world that way for long enough, your brain rewires itself for systems thinking. You begin to see patterns others - including and especially experts - oftentimes overlook.

I have no grand titles, no degrees in geopolitics, and no credentials to prove I’m right or wrong. Like Socrates, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. But out of that “nothing,” a picture has slowly emerged - and I’d like to share it with you.

The World is a Dynamic System of Shifting Polarity

The post–WWII world - or, as I like to call it, the sequel to WWI, the war that just keeps on giving - was multipolar. On one side stood the United States, Western Europe, and their East Asian allies; on the other, the Sino-Soviet bloc. When that bloc finally collapsed - a controlled demolition orchestrated by the very people who had built those failing systems - the world shifted into a new phase: unipolarity, with the United States at the center.

Whether we like it or not, there’s a reason we all speak (or try to speak) English, use American products, and consume American culture, music, and politics. I’m writing this on an American laptop, on an American writer’s platform, to be shared on American social media. That level of influence - linguistic, cultural, technological, commercial - has never before existed in human history.

But as the 21st century unfolded, the balance began to shift. The Dragon of the East slowly lifted its head - the same head that had been bowed through what the Chinese themselves call “the century of humiliation.” Meanwhile, the West - comfortable, complacent, and untested since the Industrial Revolution - was unprepared to meet a serious adversary.

China plays the long game like no one else. It’s a civilization that has mastered the art of waiting. Couldn’t defeat the Mongols militarily? Fine - they would absorb and Sinify them over time. Couldn’t defeat the United States during the Cold War because communism was economically delusional? No problem - reform just enough to lure Western capital, offering cheap labor (and irresistible profits!) in exchange for technology and trade secrets. Then, through state-directed conglomeration and cross-subsidization, they would build industries large enough to dominate global supply chains.

You Can’t Build Anything with 99% of the Components

Today, the U.S. still designs the world’s most advanced weapons systems - but it can’t build them without China. A single F-35 jet contains nearly half a ton of rare earth minerals, all of which are processed under Chinese monopoly.

A recent Harvard study exposed an uncomfortable truth: strip out AI, and U.S. real GDP growth for the first half of 2025 drops to just 0.1%. America leads in AI software - but the chips that run it depend on materials like neodymium, praseodymium, and terbium. The West has them - Greenland alone holds massive reserves - but we refuse to mine or process them because our industries live and die by profitability and ROI. China’s don’t. Their industries operate on a different logic: power and control. Beijing will fund a company that loses money, as long as it gives the state leverage over the global system. The West will not (unless it’s some too-big-to-fail useless whale in tech or finance, of course).

What we’re witnessing is the clash of two advanced economies: one service-based, one production-based. Neither strong enough to conquer, neither weak enough to submit. The result? A bifurcated world - two poles, one planet.

Dual-Hegemony: How the World Will (Likely) Split

If neither side can win outright and neither is willing to kneel, the only logical outcome is a split - two spheres of influence, East and West. That’s what we’re watching right now. Every war (trade, hybrid, kinetic), every “sudden” foreign policy pivot by a mid-sized country, every realignment the Middle East - it’s all part of states choosing where they’ll land in this new structure. Don’t look at these events in isolation. They’re nodes in the same network.

The Ideology of Big Powers vs The Survival Pragmatism of Small Nations

Not every country can afford ideology. Most can’t. Only two categories really can.

1. Tier I powers: the U.S., China, and yes, Russia.
Yes, Russia is economically weak compared to the U.S. and China. Yes, it’s demographically aging, socially underdeveloped, and many of the republics within the federation have standards of living of the 18th century. None of that cancels out the fact that it’s vast, resource-rich, nuclear, and extremely good at information warfare, subversion, and destabilization. That alone keeps it in the big-league table, even if it has to sit on an ottoman, next to its Sino master (China).

2. Tier II actors: smaller states that punch above their weight because of geography or a crucial resource.
Think Qatar: tiny, but sitting on oil, gas, financing proxies, and able to influence the entire Red Sea / Levant security picture by where it channels money. One Gulf state funding the right (or wrong) group can slow down or threaten 80% of Europe’s trade flow through the Red Sea. That’s leverage.

Everyone else? They don’t have the luxury of ideology. They have the burden of survival.

For small and medium states, especially those sitting on fault lines - Taiwan, Baltic states, Balkan states, Central Asian republics - there often isn’t a real menu of options. Geography chooses for them. You align with the power that can actually reach you, protect you, or punish you. Everything else is theory.

Big powers want to rule. Small nations want to outlive big powers.
And if you open a history book, you’ll notice: the small ones are often the ones still standing after empires burn out.

The ideology of Russia

Historically, Moscow rose under the suzerainty of the Golden Horde. It didn’t overthrow the Mongols - it inherited them. Russia absorbed their fiscal, administrative, and military systems wholesale, then repackaged itself as the rightful heir of Kyivan Rus’ (modern-day Ukraine) through a mix of historical looting, church manipulation, and imperial mythmaking. Thus emerged the concept of Moscow as the “Third Rome.”

At its core, Russian state ideology rests on a kind of Holy Trinity: Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kyiv. Kyiv, to them, is not a foreign capital - it’s their Jerusalem, the cradle of “Ancient Rus’.”

In Putin’s 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” he folded Ukrainians and Belarusians into one people - a deliberate historical fabrication designed to justify Moscow’s dominion over both. Without Kyiv, Russia’s imperial narrative collapses. Hence, Ukraine must be “brought back” - where manipulation failed (the Yanukovych model), kinetic war followed.

Russia’s ideological engine is pan-Slavic expansionism, cloaked in nostalgia and sanctified by Orthodoxy. Its objective is not prosperity - it’s restoration. Restoration of empire, of influence, of the illusion that history owes them something.

The ideology of China

China’s worldview is not Western. It never has been. It’s civilizational, not ideological in the Western sense. Where Russia builds identity on myth, China builds it on continuity - a 5,000-year-old narrative of centrality, order, and hierarchy. The “Middle Kingdom” doesn’t see itself as a nation-state among equals; it sees itself as the axis around which the world should revolve.

In that worldview, Taiwan is not a foreign territory - it’s a lost province, a rogue offspring. The Western framing of “invasion” or “annexation” doesn’t compute inside the Chinese ideological lens. In Beijing’s mind, it’s reunification, a moral duty to restore wholeness. That’s why the rhetoric around Taiwan mirrors Russia’s rhetoric around Kyiv - both are sacred absences that make the empire feel incomplete.

But China’s ideology goes deeper than territorial obsession. It’s built on a philosophical scaffold: Confucian order, Legalist pragmatism, and the Mandate of Heaven - the belief that legitimacy flows from competence and harmony. When Mao’s communism shattered Confucianism, Deng Xiaoping quietly re-stitched it.

The result is a state that doesn’t worship Marx - it worships stability and control. Communism is merely the outer shell. Beneath it lies something far older: the imperial doctrine of harmony through hierarchy.

This is why Beijing can operate on a 100-year timeline while the West can’t plan past the next election cycle. It’s not about short-term gain - it’s about restoring the cosmic balance in which China sits at the center, surrounded by tributaries rather than allies. To them, history isn’t linear - it’s circular. What was lost must return.

The ideology of the United States

This is the messy one.

Because the U.S. is young (249 years is nothing compared to Russia’s imperial myth or China’s 5,000-year civilizational memory), and because it was founded as a commercial and constitutional project - not as an ethno-civilizational one - it doesn’t have a single, sacred, unbroken story about itself. No “Third Rome,” no “Middle Kingdom.” What it has instead is a set of operating assumptions. And right now, two of them are colliding.

1. The pragmatic / institutional ideology
This is the worldview of most of the U.S. classical political class, the Pentagon, and frankly, most normal Americans who follow world affairs. It says: we lead the liberal-democratic world, we trade with Europe and our East Asian allies, we integrate supply chains, we keep sea lanes open, we contain rogues, we keep the dollar dominant, we maintain alliances (NATO, Japan, ROK, Australia) because that’s what keeps the global system stable - and us prosperous. It’s outward-facing, cooperative, and very 1990s–2010s in spirit.

2. The Trump (or post-Trump) ideology
This one is inward-facing and hemispheric. It says: the era of being the world’s security provider is over. Protect the Anglosphere + Western Hemisphere first, everything else is optional. Keep Latin America from drifting toward China (hence pressure on Panama, and now Venezuela). Treat Canada like the 51st state. Treat the U.K. as the offshore cousin - which is why Brexit was so attractive to U.S. nationalist strategists like Bannon: pull London out of Brussels, bolt it tighter to Washington. And Greenland? That wasn’t a joke - that was resource strategy in the coming economic war with China. Hence, why talks about “purchasing” or outright annexing Greenland even made it to the mainstream.

In that frame, Taiwan is not a hill to die on. The Indo-Pacific is not worth a major war. Ukraine is viewed as a money pit and villianized, and continental Europe - especially the bureaucratic, moralizing, slow-moving EU - is outright loathed.

So, unlike Russia and China, which run on one core myth, the U.S. right now runs on two competing foreign-policy software packages:

• one globalized and partnership-based,

• one nationalist and hemispheric.

Which one wins will define the shape of the 21st century. And no, it’s not settled yet.

Share Bianka @ Waronomics

A Chessboard of Moving Pieces

The board is set - whether you imagine it as chess or Go depends on which side of the world you’re from - and the pieces are already in motion. Some move with precision, others stumble forward by inertia. Realignments are happening in real time, visible only to those who know how to read the quiet part out loud.

Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lawrence Wong, put it best in a recent interview with the Financial Times:

The United States, he noted, is stepping back from its role as global insurer, yet no one else is capable - or willing - to fill the vacuum. We now live in that uncomfortable space between eras: where the old rules no longer apply, and the new ones haven’t yet been written.

Across the world, every actor is improvising. In Taipei, the KMT flirts with “reunification talks” as a survival strategy, echoing Beijing/Moscow rhetoric on the war in Ukraine, in the hope of negotiating its own safety.

In Europe, Ukraine bleeds daily to finalize its divorce from the Russian world, while the continent dithers between being at the table or on the menu.

In Washington, the Pentagon operates almost as a sovereign entity - shoring up alliances with Seoul and Tokyo, trying to revive American shipbuilding, while Beijing sabotages those attempts and tries to pull South Korea in its own growing sphere of influence.

And in the Western Hemisphere, Trump is isolating Canada diplomatically as an attempt to weaken them to subversion, while pushing China out of Latin America through the Venezuelan front.

It’s a world of collision and contradiction: democracies that trade with autocracies while condemning them, nations that pledge loyalty to one bloc while buying energy from another. The global system is no longer a table of allies - it’s a theater of transactions.

What happens next will be a downstream of irrational ideology, but ultimately decided by endurance - who can hold their nerve longest while the rules are being rewritten. Because history, as always, rewards not the loudest players, but the ones who understand that power is not seized in noise and spectacle, but in silence - one quiet, calculated move at a time.

Dear readers, I’m writing this on a chilly autumn evening in Switzerland, from a 2025 MacBook Air, wearing Bose noise-canceling headphones, while my Siemens dishwasher does the dishes and my English evening tea brews. All of these physical products - the laptop, the headphones, the dishwasher, the tea - exist because of an insanely complex web of supply chains and trade routes.

Let’s use the MacBook Air as the example. I’ll keep it simple enough not to bore you to death: this is what a real-world supply chain looks like.

A MacBook is not just a product - it’s a choreography of mines, smelters, fabs, chemical plants, cleanrooms, CNC mills, and freight corridors.

1. A MacBook starts with rocks and sand. Bauxite from Australia or Guinea is refined in Quebec or the Persian Gulf, then milled and anodized in China to make the aluminum body.

2. Sand from the U.S. or Malaysia becomes glass; films and polarizers are coated in Japan and Korea.

3. Indium - often a zinc by-product from China or Canada - becomes transparent electrodes.

4. Display backplanes are patterned in Korea, Japan, and China, then bonded into full panels in Guangdong or Bac Ninh.

5. Chips begin as quartz. Wafers are made in Taiwan and South Korea. Apple’s SoC is etched at TSMC in Hsinchu.

6. Memory comes from Korea (Samsung, SK hynix), Japan (Kioxia), and the U.S. (Micron).

7. Batteries pull lithium from Chile/Argentina or Western Australia, cobalt from the DRC, nickel from Indonesia, and graphite mostly from China - then cathodes, anodes, and cells are built in China or Korea and packed with a BMS in China/Vietnam.

8. The smallest parts have the biggest footprints. Neodymium magnets trace to Inner Mongolia (Bayan Obo) or Australia (Lynas ore, processed in Malaysia) before they become speakers and haptics.

9. Tantalum capacitors draw on Rwanda and Brazil. Palladium and gold plating lean on Russia/South Africa and global refiners.

10. Final assembly runs through EMS plants in Chengdu, Shanghai, and northern Vietnam. Boxes move to Yantian or Haiphong, fly to Louisville or Leipzig, or sail to Rotterdam and Los Angeles.

11. Behind the scenes: Taiwanese fabs drinking ultra-pure water, Japanese photoresists, U.S./EU industrial gases, Brussels and Washington for compliance, London for insurance, and customs codes everywhere.

Bottom line: the MacBook on my desk is a chain stretched across Australia, the Andes, the Congo, Inner Mongolia, Hsinchu, Osaka, Seoul, Shenzhen, Hanoi - and plenty more. The supply chains behind a single product are mind-boggling in complexity, scale, and reach.

And now those chains are being weaponized, trade corridors and chokepoints are under attack (e.g. the Red Sea), and the prosperity we took for granted is gradually evaporating.

History as Context: The Post-WWII Order

After 1945, the U.S. built the operating system for global trade - Bretton Woods, IMF/World Bank, GATT→WTO - and paired it with hard power: a Navy keeping sea lanes open, freedom-of-navigation, and the Carter Doctrine guarding oil chokepoints.

The deal was simple: allies got access and security; America kept the commons safe so containers moved through Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, and the Taiwan Strait.

And yes, the U.S. profited tremendously - everyone acts first and foremost in their own interest. They understood that steering the lanes, keeping the naughty ones in line (via means soft or hard power), and keeping trade open meant more prosperity for them and, by extension, others.

It worked - until the consensus cracked. Back in the late 2000s, war-weary voters, cheered Obama’s line - “America is not the world’s policeman” - which signaled a pullback in ambition even as ships still sailed. The Navy didn’t quit, but the political will did: fewer resources, more cuts, and a new era of American isolationism.

The result: the postwar bargain began to crack. Premiums rose at every chokepoint, and supply chains took the hit, because when the guarantor hesitates, logistics pay. And your cost of living didn’t catch with with your wages.

Those signals echoed through Trump 1 (not fully), Biden, and Trump 2 administrations. Voters and much of the political class are drifting away from policing global supply chains, while the Pentagon tries to hold the line (e.g. military operations against Iran, the Houthis, etc.).

The Xi Doctrine: Capturing the Supply Chain

China didn’t “join” global supply chains - it captured the upstream and midstream. Under Xi, Beijing set out to own mines, refineries, converters, and the tooling everyone else outsourced. The Made in China 2025 doctrine (launched in 2015) spelled out the climb up the value chain; production and supply chains must be controlled for national security.

The results are visible: rare-earth processing and magnets concentrated in China; solar PV dominated end-to-end; batteries routed through Chinese graphite, cathode precursors, and cell lines; PCB, packaging, and components clustered in the PRC. When leverage is needed, Beijing uses export controls - gallium, germanium, graphite - to remind rivals their “global” chains run through Chinese permits.

The world still trades; but Beijing sets the tempo.

EaaS: Economy-as-a-Service

For decades, the West shifted from a production-based economy to a service-based economy. This wasn’t an accident; it was engineered. We offshored the hard, low-margin, politically messy parts of capitalism - factories, mines, processing plans - to cheaper jurisdictions. Boards closed plants and kept the brand, IP, and billing. Shareholders got margins; consumers got cheap everything; and the industrial muscle of the Western world atrophied quietly because ships kept arriving with cheap goods.

The dollar did the true magic here. As the reserve currency, it let us run deficits at low rates and buy the world’s output. Every crisis (‘08, Eurocrisis, COVID) got the same medicine with new branding: QE, zero rates, backstops. Asset prices got as ripped as a gym bro on illegal steroids - houses, stocks, startups, you name it.

Services bloomed because profits moved to intangibles: finance, consulting, SaaS, marketing, law, administration. Strong currency + import deflation meant desk jobs paid more than making real things, as in actual physical products. We told kids to chase credentials, not apprenticeships.

Cheap money sealed the deal. Refinance the assets, lever the portfolio, hire another layer of compliance and product managers. Hospitals, universities, big tech, they all hired armies of well-paid office roles. Comfortable, yes. Also fragile.

The unfortunate reality is that the white-collar premium exists only if ships carrying cheap goods arrive, the dollar clears, and central banks keep inflating assets.

Break any link in that web of dependencies and the comfort premium evaporates - and it evaporates fast.

Prosperity Is Dead? Or a New Age of Work?

If the West wants to reverse the slide, it has to make hard choices. Very, very hard choices.

First, accept that power and only power, protects trade. There’s an old saying: if goods stop crossing borders, soldiers will. Where soft power fails, hard power fills the vacuum. Which means that any current wars (Ukraine, Israel/Iran) or upcoming ones (e.g. Venezuela) are not “warmongering”, they are necessary. Soldiers will fight, and soldiers will die.

Second, rebuild domestic and allied supply chains. Neither bloc - China/Russia/Iran/NK/BRICS nor US/EU/AUKUS/APJ allies - controls the full upstream. Both sides depend on each other. Decoupling will be slow and very, very painful. But it’s still necessary (in my opinion), because as we demonstrated - trade didn’t liberalize autocracies.

Third, everyone pays - Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z - for at least two decades to rebuild capacity so the next centuries can be peaceful and prosperous. No, French boomers don’t get to have higher pensions than the average French full-time employed adult; no, Gen Z doesn’t get to make a career out of being a TikTok influencer.

This is the reality, dear readers.
I don’t like it either, but that’s where we are, and the choices are both limited and unpleasant.

And for anyone that doesn’t like the American world order we had until yesterday, I can guarantee you with 1000% certainty - you will loathe the one that the CCP would impose if given the chance.

Dear friends and (un)fortunate readers, I’ll preemptively not apologize for any discomfort caused by my Balkan candor. This Substack exists because people kept asking for it - friends, acquaintances, and social media followers. If you want polished lingo, you can find it elsewhere.

Here, we deal with the world as it is - not the world we wish we lived in, not the product being sold by snake-oil salesmen in politics and business, and not the soothing fiction of “everything is / will be fine.”

The reality is simple: the world is at war.

The Bear Awakening: The First Signs of a World at War

If two Balkan people sit for drinks and cigarettes, they will inevitably talk about politics. It’s just how the universe works. It was late spring of 2015, and I was debating the war in Eastern Ukraine with a dear (and vastly more knowledgable) friend of mine over…drinks and cigarettes. On the topic of Russia, he said something that encapsulated the entirety of the Russian “mysterious soul”:

Between 1990 and 2000, Russia endured one of the worst decades in its modern history after the USSR collapsed: inflation crisis, parliamentary crisis, street crime, organized crime, systemic corruption, alcoholism (their default setting), banking collapse, sovereign default, war in Chechnya - the full set. And instead of reflecting and addressing the systematic issues which caused this decade of hell, what did they do? They blamed the West and indulged in antisemitic conspiracies.

Meanwhile, many former colonies finally exhaled, joined NATO and the EU, and began securing their economies and defenses. Not all made it in time. Georgia and Ukraine were left on the doorstep. When Russia finished its preparation phase, it attacked - first Georgia, then Ukraine.

That’s when the new world war unofficially began. Not in 2025, not in 2022 - in 2014.

The Cassandra’s of the East

The Ukraine full-scale invasion was no surprise to anyone that’s been paying attention. On August 12, 2008, following the Russian war on Georgia, the Polish president - Lech Kaczyński - joined a rally in Tbilisi where he said:

Oh, how prophetic his words echoed trough history!1

Lech Kaczyński wasn’t the only one that tried to warn the world about the dangers of the Russian imperial mindset. The fate of Ukraine was prophecized back in 1995 by Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.

Dudayev’s prophecy was chillingly accurate. Less than two decades later, Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and set the stage for 2022. The ideology of Russism does not stop at Chechnya, Georgia, or Crimea. Ukraine - core to the story Russia tells about itself - was always the next target.

The ideology of Russism necessitates perpetual conquest, and Ukraine, as the crown jewel of the former USSR and the core of the russian looted identity, was always destined to be its next victim.

Ideology: The Mother of Irrationality

I could argue in good faith (pun intended) that atheism did a huge disservice to the world, and I don’t mean this in any spiritual or theological sense. It created entire generations obsessed with rationality and logic. The world, human nature, people’s actions - all needed to make sense, to follow a logical pattern.

Western, secular minds internalized a fatal fallacy: ideology doesn’t matter.

“Why would Russia wage war? Just trade, get rich, modernize. Live like us.”
“Why would China weaponize manufacturing? We helped lift 800 million out of poverty. Just trade, get rich, modernize. Live like us.”

Sounds rational. But ideology isn’t.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is not about NATO expansion or mythical protection of “Russian speakers.” It’s Russism. Without Ukraine - especially without Kyiv - Russia’s imperial narrative collapses. After Peter the Great, Moscow appropriated the Kyivan Rus legacy to launder the shame of a steppe-empire origin. Russia has a European face and two showpiece cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg), but its institutions and statecraft are heirs to the Golden Horde, not to Europe. That’s why Westerners cannot comprehend neither the barbarity nor the irrational logic of this war.

Russia (as an idea) = Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a claim on Kyiv (they wish).
The Russian Federation (as a fact) = hundreds of conquered nations and peoples, kept poor and pliable, sent to die in colonial wars.

Conquer. Kidnap. Deport. Russify. Keep destitute. Mobilize for the next war. Rinse and repeat.

Ukraine is targeted first for ideology, second for people (the same ones who fed and built Russia’s science and culture), and third for land - one of the world’s great breadbaskets.

Geopolitical power isn’t GDP per capita. If that was the case, Liechtenstein would be shaping the world today. Power flows from control of water, food, energy, metals, and materials - oil, gas, timber, rare earths, aluminum, steel - not from your next AI slop app and vanity metrics. That’s why both the Gulf states and Russia punch above their GDP weight.

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World War III: Same Objectives, Different Means

People imagine world war as tanks on the Champs-Élysées. Outdated picture.

The choice isn’t “war vs. peace.” It’s whether we recognize the war we’re in. If a world war defined as a sustained, multi-theater struggle among great-power blocs to coerce outcomes and reshape the world order, then we’re living in it.

The tools have changed - chips, cables, sanctions, drones, ransomware, and narratives - but the aims and stakes haven’t. Front lines now run through supply chains, fiber routes, capital markets, and your social media apps.

What WW3 ACTUALLY looks like now:

1. Hybrid war is the operating system: NATO doctrine treats “hybrid threats” as cyber, covert action, economic coercion, lawfare, proxies, and information ops - kept below the Article 5 threshold. That’s not prep; that’s the war itself.

2. Energy, cables, and chokepoints are battlefields: Pipelines and undersea cables - your heat, payments, cloud, SWIFT - are soft targets. Balticconnector and other incidents triggered NATO patrols and criminal probes. Whether negligence, deniable proxies, or hostile states, the pattern is pressure on connective tissue. Strategy by other means.

3. Sea lanes are contested by non-state actors armed with state-grade weapons: Houthi attacks in the Red Sea forced rerouting around the Cape, spiking costs and idling European factories (see Tesla, Berlin). Economic warfare via drones and missiles on civilian shipping, answered by multinational navies. War effects, no declaration.

4. Finance and trade are weaponized like blockade and strategic bombing once were: Roughly $300B of Russian sovereign reserves are immobilized; SWIFT restrictions, diamond bans, REE embargo from China, and dual-use export lists are long-horizon tools to degrade war capacity - blockade by modern means.

5. Tech controls and IP battles are the new arms race: The U.S. and allies keep tightening semiconductor export controls (2022 → 2023 → 2024 → 2025), even rescinding fast-track waivers for giants like TSMC. In parallel, governments and courts are pursuing industrial espionage tied to chips and AI. China is literally sending beautiful women to seduce tech bros and steal trade secrets. This is strategic denial of capability - yesterday’s uranium is today’s EUV lithography, AI accelerators, and EDA stacks.

6. Cyber is strategic fires against the home front: Colonial Pipeline (2021) showed that a ransomware crew can trigger panic buying and fuel shortages across the U.S. East Coast. The point isn’t the incident - it’s the lever: attackers can impose immediate societal costs far from the front line. That’s strategic effect without crossing a border.

7. Information is terrain: Disinformation, narrative warfare, and influence ops are continuous. NATO labels these as core hybrid instruments; private platforms and satellite constellations are now quasi-combatants. It’s not PSYOPs as garnish; it’s the main course that shapes diplomacy, supply chains, and elections.

Conclusion

Denial is human. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to look away. Secular, post-Enlightenment brains trained to expect rationality crash when confronted with ideology. But reality doesn’t care.

The world is at war - a world war. The fact your home hasn’t been droned does not make it less real. Kinetic fronts in Ukraine and the Middle East- and soon, perhaps, Latin America - are not siloed. It’s the U.S., Europe, and allies versus China, its vassal state Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a rotating cast of BRICS-adjacent bettors.

Supply chains, access to goods and services, and your prosperity are in play. This war is multi-front, multi-domain, and it will take years - maybe decades - to resolve. When it does, the world will not look the same.

Buckle up!

[Next week on Waronomics Substack —> The ideological operating systems of the East: Russism and Chinese monocivilizational ideology]