Beyond the Waste Land: Geopolitics, Macroeconomics and Theory
Joined June 2020
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Trump's overriding objective, if he wants to retain the presidency through a proxy in 2029, has to be getting inflation down. One relatively straightforward way to do that would be to reach an accommodation with both Iran and Russia. If both wars come to an end, who will care very much whether the US can claim victory or has effectively lost? The US defeat in Afghanistan was quickly consigned to the memory hole. Losing Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz could result in the same path.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have a powerful political incentive to see both conflicts drag on. Continued instability means sustained pressure on energy prices and inflation, with Trump carrying much of the political blame. By 2028, voters are unlikely to be enthusiastic about giving the Republicans four more years to pump up inflation. The Democrats could consequently walk into the White House with control of both the House and Senate.
Of course, the Dems may squander that legislative opportunity, just as they did between 2008 and 2010 under Obama. One thing they might pursue with considerably more determination, however, is the prosecution of Trump, his family and his inner circle.
So, if Trump wants to avoid the prospect of prison once his term ends, he has two options: flee to Tel Aviv when his presidency is over, or bring both wars to an end as quickly as possible and get the economy back into shape ahead of the 2028 election. The latter would seem to offer the more promising political strategy.
I agree with the distinction being made here. We should be careful to distinguish peoples from the ideological projects pursued in their name. Yet I think we're missing something important if we leave ideology out of the explanation. During the Cold War, it was perfectly obvious that conflicts were driven by competing ideological visions of history and political destiny. The same analytical framework is needed here.
Three ideological traditions are pushing this conflict, each in a different way: Jewish nationalism in its Revisionist Zionist form, Twelver Shiism as articulated by the Iranian revolutionary state, and American providential nationalism.
Twelver Shiism provides Iran with a powerful theological and historical framework for resistance. Its traditions of martyrdom, endurance, injustice and eventual vindication give the Islamic Republic a remarkable capacity to absorb punishment and sustain a prolonged struggle. This helps explain how Iran can continue to resist a militarily superior adversary through asymmetric means.
On the Israeli side, a particular form of Jewish nationalism, shaped by the historical experience of persecution and existential insecurity, has developed into a security doctrine increasingly organised around the elimination of perceived threats. That politics of permanent vulnerability, and the conviction that security requires strategic pre-emption and regional military supremacy, supplies much of the conflict's combustible energy. It is the spark.
The American dimension is the theology of the Redeemer Nation. American providential nationalism casts the United States as a chosen power with a special responsibility to defend freedom, confront evil and shape the political destiny of other nations. In its more militant expression, this becomes a quasi-religious justification for the exercise of American power. It supplies the vehicle through which the conflict is projected and sustained.
These three traditions have different histories, different understandings of justice and radically different conceptions of political destiny. Their interaction is what makes the present confrontation so dangerous. We should be able to examine those ideologies critically while judging individuals and communities on their own actions, rather than attributing collective responsibility to Jews, Muslims or Christians.
REMINDER: As the world approaches the decision time for a potential return to all-out war against Iran, I would issue this one reminder:
Israel’s significant role in lead us to this point of potential catastrophe does not make “the Jews” the problem.
If Iran retaliates in a severe way as many expect them to, this is because they are defending their sovereignty from a foreign aggressor. It’s not because of “the radical Muslims”.
And if the United States decides to recklessly resume this war, it’s not because of “the Christians” because Hegseth is cosplaying the Crusades.
Judge people based on who THEY ARE, not on the religion they ascribe to alone.
Braudel Marx retweeted
Fascinating @BraudelMarx
It's important to remember that Mark Rutte recently boasted that roughly 5,000 US sorties had been launched from European airbases in support of the US-Israeli war against Iran, describing Europe as a "platform of power projection." Iran has a legitimate grievance against those particular bases. With its new ICBM capability, it may now have the means to put them out of action.
Any serious Iranian campaign against European airbases would begin with SEAD: take out the Patriot and SAM positions, then go after the airfields. That's standard military doctrine, and Iran has recently demonstrated that it understands the sequence, destroying radar and THAAD installations across the Gulf region.
There's an interesting synergy here with Russian strategic objectives that seems to be getting overlooked. The Aegis Ashore sites in Poland and Romania — installations Russia spent years protesting in the run-up to the Ukraine war — were presented to the public nearly two decades ago as Europe's shield against Iranian missiles. Many in Moscow regarded this as a convenient cover story. Russian suspicions have long centred on the possibility that the installations could serve as a forward-deployed platform for US nuclear-armed missiles.
Iran now has the range and the motive to threaten these targets. Russia would have every incentive to provide satellite imagery and targeting data on the sites. The US and Europe are actively helping Ukraine strike Russian refineries and infrastructure. Moscow will see that for what it is: direct participation in the war. When the opportunity arises to help a partner strike US military assets on NATO soil, I doubt Russia will feel any obligation to hold back.
Meanwhile, US interceptor stockpiles intended to protect these installations are, at best, severely depleted after the war with Iran. Whether the SM-3s at Deveselu and Redzikowo were moved or redeployed to Israel during the conflict is almost certainly classified. Russia, however, has eyes and ears throughout the region.
The real story here isn't simply that Iran has become stronger. It's that Russia may have found a proxy through which to pursue its own objectives in Europe, while NATO has no obvious legal or political mechanism for responding short of a direct confrontation with Russia and Iran — a prospect that, at this point, seems highly unlikely.
It's important to remember that Mark Rutte recently boasted that roughly 5,000 US sorties had been launched from European airbases in support of the US-Israeli war against Iran, describing Europe as a "platform of power projection." Iran has a legitimate grievance against those particular bases. With its new ICBM capability, it may now have the means to put them out of action.
Any serious Iranian campaign against European airbases would begin with SEAD: take out the Patriot and SAM positions, then go after the airfields. That's standard military doctrine, and Iran has recently demonstrated that it understands the sequence, destroying radar and THAAD installations across the Gulf region.
There's an interesting synergy here with Russian strategic objectives that seems to be getting overlooked. The Aegis Ashore sites in Poland and Romania — installations Russia spent years protesting in the run-up to the Ukraine war — were presented to the public nearly two decades ago as Europe's shield against Iranian missiles. Many in Moscow regarded this as a convenient cover story. Russian suspicions have long centred on the possibility that the installations could serve as a forward-deployed platform for US nuclear-armed missiles.
Iran now has the range and the motive to threaten these targets. Russia would have every incentive to provide satellite imagery and targeting data on the sites. The US and Europe are actively helping Ukraine strike Russian refineries and infrastructure. Moscow will see that for what it is: direct participation in the war. When the opportunity arises to help a partner strike US military assets on NATO soil, I doubt Russia will feel any obligation to hold back.
Meanwhile, US interceptor stockpiles intended to protect these installations are, at best, severely depleted after the war with Iran. Whether the SM-3s at Deveselu and Redzikowo were moved or redeployed to Israel during the conflict is almost certainly classified. Russia, however, has eyes and ears throughout the region.
The real story here isn't simply that Iran has become stronger. It's that Russia may have found a proxy through which to pursue its own objectives in Europe, while NATO has no obvious legal or political mechanism for responding short of a direct confrontation with Russia and Iran — a prospect that, at this point, seems highly unlikely.
The new weaponry referenced in recent statements tied to the Supreme Leader (now Mojtaba Khamenei) and his circle is almost certainly intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), in the 3,000–5,500 km class. This raises the stakes in a whole new way.
The map shared by @policytensor (standard ballistic range rings centered on Tehran) shows exactly this: the outer IRBM band reaches large parts of Europe, North Africa, and deep into Central Asia.
For years Iran publicly maintained a self-imposed ~2,000 km ceiling (MRBM territory, sufficient for Israel and regional U.S. bases). That political limit now appears to have been lifted, per statements from senior parliamentarians and IRGC figures in late 2025.
In March 2026 Iran conducted its first operational IRBM use, launching two missiles toward the U.S.-UK base at Diego Garcia (~3,700–4,000 km away). One failed in flight; the other was intercepted by a U.S. Navy SM-3. Independent analysis (including Israeli assessments) indicates two-stage systems, possibly space-launch-vehicle-derived or advanced Khorramshahr variants.
Recent directives from Mojtaba Khamenei emphasize “geographically unrestricted” responses and updating the target bank to put “all material and non-material assets” of the U.S. and Israel within reach.This is not abstract. Combined with a surviving stockpile of ~440 kg of 60% highly enriched uranium (IAEA figure pre-June 2025 strikes; enough for multiple warheads if further enriched, and still unverified due to lack of inspector access), it creates the first realistic prospect of a nuclear-capable delivery system able to strike European capitals from Iranian territory. Iran remains a threshold nuclear state rather than a declared one -no confirmed assembled weapons - but the technical pieces (enriched material, warhead research legacy, and now longer-range missiles) are closer than before the recent wars.
The JCPOA (2015) was abandoned by the U.S. in 2018. Iran responded by expanding enrichment well beyond the deal’s limits. European attempts at snapback and pressure produced no real results.
Israeli and U.S. strikes in June 2025 and the larger campaign beginning February 2026 killed senior figures, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Ali Larijani, Ali Shamkhani, and other security and nuclear-policy principals. More moderate or pragmatic voices inside the system have been further marginalized.
The regime’s public doctrine has shifted toward “permanent and absolute deterrence”, with IRGC statements about improved range, accuracy, and an offensive as well as defensive posture. Missile production appears to be reconstituting (often underground or from stockpiled components), possibly with material flows from Russia and China.
Limited airstrikes that now degrade but do not eliminate the enrichment stockpile, warhead-related work, or missile production lines have the predictable effect of accelerating the remaining programs. Each attack that does not achieve its strategic objective raises the political cost of restraint inside Tehran and lowers the threshold for further escalation or weaponization decisions.
Europe now faces a concrete risk it has not previously confronted: a theocratic Islamic republic that defines itself in opposition to the West, in possession of both a nuclear threshold capability and IRBMs that can reach major European cities. Over time, continued space-launch-vehicle work and solid-fuel development point toward eventual ICBM options that could reach the United States.
No other nuclear-armed or near-nuclear state has combined this specific ideological orientation with continental reach in the same way.
There is no low-cost exit. Further rounds of limited strikes are unlikely to dismantle the residual nuclear material or the industrial base for missiles; they are more likely to drive deeper hardening and faster range extension. A campaign large enough to destroy the remaining capability or force regime change would require sustained air supremacy, extensive special operations, and almost certainly a major ground component across difficult terrain - implying very high casualties, long duration, and uncertain outcomes, with a very high risk of outright failure.
Diplomatic re-engagement faces the opposite problem: the regime’s post-strike posture treats concessions on missiles or the nuclear file as existential risks.
The map’s IRBM ring is not theoretical. It is the geographic expression of a threshold nuclear state that has already demonstrated longer-range launches, has unaccounted-for highly enriched uranium, and has adopted an explicitly unrestricted response doctrine after two major military campaigns failed to any meaningful strategic objective.
Braudel Marx retweeted
escribimos esto con @BraudelMarx !! la soberanía como control o negación del pasaje entre dominios de lo real: revistasupernova.com/nota/la…
Braudel Marx retweeted
`` ... restraint was a security failure.``
One advantage Stubb has is familiarity with the specific peace process Putin is demanding. During the Winter War, Finland sued for peace and negotiated under fire - the war did not end until the Moscow Peace Treaty was signed, at which point Helsinki ceded roughly 10% of its territory. The process was: negotiate while the war is still active, accept the terms, sign, and only then does the fighting stop.
Ukraine and the West are currently demanding the opposite: a ceasefire first, then negotiations, all while rearming in the interim. Finland spun the outcome as a national victory - the "Miracle of the Kalevala" - and Ukraine will likely try to do the same.
By March 1940, Finland was militarily defeated. Stalin could have annexed the country or made it a Soviet satellite, as he did with the Baltics that same year. Instead, he only modestly escalated his pre-war territorial demands - taking Vyborg and the Karelian Isthmus in full rather than a 30 km buffer, and dropping the land swap Finland would have received in return - while preserving Finnish sovereignty. The terms were punitive but not maximalist.
That restraint was a security failure. By preserving Finnish sovereignty rather than neutralizing the country, Stalin created the condition for Finland to ally with Nazi Germany in 1941 and fight alongside Hitler's armies. Collaborationist Finnish forces advanced to the 1939 border, severed the last rail line into Leningrad, and proposed joint naval operations on Lake Ladoga to strangle the city's supply routes. The result was the starvation of up to a million Soviet civilians.
The same logic applies now: a sovereign Ukraine embedded in NATO's security architecture does not permanently end the war - it converts a ceasefire into the staging ground for the next one, with a NATO-backed army on Russia's western border and with once again a Finnish northern flank. From Moscow's perspective, the 1940 lesson is unambiguous: failure to neuter a defeated enemy on your border is an invitation to further death and destruction.
So Stubb's best-case scenario is a repeat of the Treaty of Moscow: Ukraine maintains the sovereignty needed to fight another day in exchange for territorial concessions, and the outcome is spun domestically as a Ukrainian victory.
On the other hand, Putin's job is to impose the Ukrainian version of the post-WW2 policy of "Finlandization" - permanent geopolitical neutering, with limited economic sovereignty as the concession that keeps the population from rebelling. The two outcomes may look similar on the map. The primary difference being whether the defeated country can one day soon remerge as a military threat.
One advantage Stubb has is familiarity with the specific peace process Putin is demanding. During the Winter War, Finland sued for peace and negotiated under fire - the war did not end until the Moscow Peace Treaty was signed, at which point Helsinki ceded roughly 10% of its territory. The process was: negotiate while the war is still active, accept the terms, sign, and only then does the fighting stop.
Ukraine and the West are currently demanding the opposite: a ceasefire first, then negotiations, all while rearming in the interim. Finland spun the outcome as a national victory - the "Miracle of the Kalevala" - and Ukraine will likely try to do the same.
By March 1940, Finland was militarily defeated. Stalin could have annexed the country or made it a Soviet satellite, as he did with the Baltics that same year. Instead, he only modestly escalated his pre-war territorial demands - taking Vyborg and the Karelian Isthmus in full rather than a 30 km buffer, and dropping the land swap Finland would have received in return - while preserving Finnish sovereignty. The terms were punitive but not maximalist.
That restraint was a security failure. By preserving Finnish sovereignty rather than neutralizing the country, Stalin created the condition for Finland to ally with Nazi Germany in 1941 and fight alongside Hitler's armies. Collaborationist Finnish forces advanced to the 1939 border, severed the last rail line into Leningrad, and proposed joint naval operations on Lake Ladoga to strangle the city's supply routes. The result was the starvation of up to a million Soviet civilians.
The same logic applies now: a sovereign Ukraine embedded in NATO's security architecture does not permanently end the war - it converts a ceasefire into the staging ground for the next one, with a NATO-backed army on Russia's western border and with once again a Finnish northern flank. From Moscow's perspective, the 1940 lesson is unambiguous: failure to neuter a defeated enemy on your border is an invitation to further death and destruction.
So Stubb's best-case scenario is a repeat of the Treaty of Moscow: Ukraine maintains the sovereignty needed to fight another day in exchange for territorial concessions, and the outcome is spun domestically as a Ukrainian victory.
On the other hand, Putin's job is to impose the Ukrainian version of the post-WW2 policy of "Finlandization" - permanent geopolitical neutering, with limited economic sovereignty as the concession that keeps the population from rebelling. The two outcomes may look similar on the map. The primary difference being whether the defeated country can one day soon remerge as a military threat.
The President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, is the most likely candidate to be the EU's representative in potential negotiations with Russia regarding the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, according to "Berliner Zeitung."
"His advantage over other candidates is that he has good relations with the President of the United States, Donald Trump, which is why it is believed that his participation in the negotiations would reduce the risk of conflict between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky," the article states.
Braudel Marx retweeted
Tercer salida del especial #Territorios en @RevSupernova_
La ciénaga: IA y soberanía en el territorio del lenguaje, por Kevin Batcho y Pio Torroja (@BraudelMarx y @piotorroja)
revistasupernova.com/nota/la…
Una geopolítica de lo planetario, por Emmanuel Biset (@ebiset1)
revistasupernova.com/nota/un…
Poder, vida y territorio: la coca en Colombia, por Isabel Naranjo
revistasupernova.com/nota/po…
El corazón de las tinieblas, por Esmeralda Avellaneda
revistasupernova.com/nota/el…
My latest article in collaboration with @piotorroja "The Morass: AI and Sovereignty in the Territory of Language" is online via the Argentina journal Supernova and is available in English, French and of course Spanish:
LA CIÉNAGA: IA Y SOBERANÍA EN EL TERRITORIO DEL LENGUAJE
Los mapas ya no solo representan el mundo: también intervienen en su transformación. Una nueva disputa por el poder, el lenguaje y la soberanía.
Por Kevin Batcho y Pio Torroja
revistasupernova.com/nota/la…
To fight Russia, European elites would have to overturn forty years of neoliberal atomisation. They have intentionally alienated the indigenous working class and rural men - the demographic that has always supplied foot soldiers - and systemically emasculated them. They have rooted out every trace of blood-and-soil nationalism. The result is that Europeans have been socially engineered toward pacifism, far from any formation into warriors.
It is no coincidence that the nations that can fight - Ukraine, Israel, Yemen - are patriarchal and ruthlessly ethnocentric. Instead, our girlboss leaders (male and female) perform their war dances on stage while declaring that drones and AI will stop the Russians.
Since no one will ever fight and die for a faceless EU bureaucracy, EU elites would be forced to allow toxic masculinity and nationalist fury to flourish if they ever wanted to field a large army against Putin.
Joining the Euro performed a double movement for Germany. Externally, it set the exchange rate weaker than the D-Mark had been trading, effectively devaluing German exports against the dollar and the yen without the political cost of a unilateral devaluation. Internally, the same act locked the peripheral currencies at par, eliminating the peripheral countries' ability to devalue and forcing their adjustment through internal wage suppression instead. The result was a simultaneous competitive advantage: German goods became cheaper for non-EU buyers and relatively more expensive for EU buyers, both at once, by a single policy decision.
That logic is now eroding. Germany's manufacturing base - the primary beneficiary of that Euro export subsidy - is in structural decline, falling from roughly a quarter of GDP in 1991 to under one-fifth today. The economy that remains is increasingly services and financial activity, and that economy draws its advantage from currency strength and capital inflows. The export subsidy that made Euro membership advantageous for the industrial Germany of the 1990s is a diminishing asset for the Germany of the 2020s.
Every day that Germany stays in the Euro, it writes a blank cheque to the high-debt South. The high-debt South - no surprise - cashes that cheque with great enthusiasm. Germany's political center is too "posh" to acknowledge this. But the AfD isn't...
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…
The incomprehensibility that Iran's and China's approach produces in Western observers is real, and I think François Jullien's "A Treatise on Efficacy" gives a structural explanation for it without requiring one to take sides.
Jullien's core contrast is between two different metaphysical commitments about what reality is, and how each generates a different logic of action. The Western model, inherited from the Aristotelian tradition, is teleological: define a predetermined goal, construct a plan that projects that goal onto the current situation, act assertively to close the gap, and measure efficacy as the degree to which the outcome matches the goal.
The Chinese model, drawn from the strategic tradition (Sun Tzu, the Zhouyi, the Daoist concept of shi), is process-oriented: evaluate the situation as it stands at this moment, identify what can be exploited in the relation of forces, and then nudge or break off - not attack or oppose - so that the result comes about as a consequence rather than being aimed at directly. The ideal is not a discrete act of destruction but a transformation that erodes the opponent's position so gradually that "no one longer seems to make any intervention."
Jullien is careful not to make this a cultural binary. He's identifying two different logics of efficacy, each optimized for a different kind of situation. The teleological model works well for discrete, bounded problems with a clear end-state. The process model works better for open-ended situations where the opponent is also adapting and the cost of assertive action is high. Neither is "correct." But the teleological model has a structural blind spot: it is looking for discrete actions aimed at a goal, and when it doesn't find them, it registers the absence as incoherence or irrationality.
That's the frame I'd apply here. If Iran or China is operating in the shi framework - managing the flow, eroding position over time, allowing the result to come about as a consequence rather than aiming for it directly - then the Western observer is evaluating the wrong thing. There is no "war being conducted" in the teleological sense. There is a situation being managed, and the "result" is not a goal to be achieved but a transformation to be allowed.
I have no idea if he has read Jullien, but Joe Kent, the former CIA deputy director, made this contrast explicit in an interview a few months ago. He stated the US model was to set a goal, calculate the resources required, and execute. What Kent described as Israel's approach to Iran was structurally different: the goal is the induction of a particular condition - chaos - and only once that condition is established does the next moves get decided. The first phase is aimed at creating a situation or process from which later results can then be extracted. So even within the Western alliance, two different logics of efficacy are already in play, and the one that looks "rational" depends entirely on which framework you're using to evaluate it.
Braudel Marx retweeted
According to Jungian psychology, everyone has something of a psychic mask called the “persona.”
When we start off very naive we can be shocked by the presence of the persona, and treat it as evidence of inauthenticity. But the persona is actually a needed part of your psyche. It’s your costume and protection. Our actual psychic material is too soft and squishy and chaotic to be outwards-facing.
The important thing is for your persona to be a pretty-good approximation of who you are underneath and to clearly communicate the role you intend to play. When people put on a persona that doesn’t fit them it reeks of insecurity and attracts ridicule, like a kid trying to walk in daddy’s shoes but not cute. But an appropriate persona commands respect and often helps ppl do their jobs. Think about a doctor’s clean robes.
Why am I talking about all this? I think the world feels chaotic because we do (still) live in an American-led world and the persona that America has adopted since the end of the 2nd world war of a superhero fighting for justice and the greater good just does not fit anymore.
The persona was never the literal truth. America always had some ugly warts to hide under the mask. But that was acceptable. Nobody is perfect. Then we went through something of an anti-hero arc where we really come to see the moral ambiguity of America, but even that is acceptable with enough storytelling.
But now, we see America increasingly disempowered and beclowned. This is unacceptable. This is embarrassing. You can’t be a superpower if you are not super.
This is not the end of America, which will go on, maybe catch a second wind. It is young, optimistic and lucky. No reason why it shouldn’t be great again.
But it has to find a different role. The old persona is no longer fitting.
It is very bad when a person can no longer tell where their psyche ends and their persona begins. Trying to conform too rigidly to a persona that no longer fits robs your consciousness of the suppleness it needs to absorb the shocks of life. A brittle ego doesn’t flex, it cracks, unleashing the primordial megafauna long repressed in the unconscious.
The saintly king breaks down into the cruel tyrant. The hyper-rational sage who denies all emotion becomes possessed by the most fanatic dogma. The stoic parent becomes the helpless child.
Braudel Marx retweeted
There's a scene in Doctor Zhivago, the David Lean film, which depicts a wretched and exhausted division of First World War Russian soldiers moving away from the front. They come into contact with a brigade moving the other direction, led by supercilious and stereotypically imperious officers. Those retreating tell those advancing to turn around -- the war is slaughter, they say.
An officer then stands atop a wagon, intending to motivate them.
"Ten miles up that road are THE GERMANS. And it's YOU who've let them in. Now they're coming for your country!"
"YOUR country," one of the bedraggled soldiers heckles.
Before he can respond, the officer trips and is shot by another soldier. The other officers are quickly pulled off their horses and beaten to death by what is by now a rampaging and uncontrollable mob.
I could not help but think of that scene as I listened to Giga-Posho Jacob Rees-Mogg tell the working-class lads of Britain that they were going to have to fight. Of course, the difference now is that the Germans really were coming for the Russians in 1917, and eventually disembowelled the country. This time, though, the call is to fight for somebody else's borders even as our elites won't defend ours, and to fight for Our Values (the possessive in that phrase being much more personal and particular to a small subset of Britons than Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove perhaps realise).
Yet the similarities remain. A working class that hasn't had a pay increase for almost two decades. Whose political views have been acknowledged in every election manifesto of the 21st century, and then ignored once the voting is through. Whose culture is being denied and atomised. Whose wives and daughters feel increasingly unsafe on their own streets. Whose ruling class has become unmoored from both the values of those they govern and, it often seems, reality itself.
Now these people are being asked to offer themselves to be slain for values to which they do not hold true, against an opponent with whom many of them have no real quarrel. (Really, who cares which set of corrupt oligarchs controls the refuse collection in Donetsk, many would no doubt ask.)
I do not think many people know how bad a civil war or a revolution would be. There's an annoyingly glib assumption among many of those who post in (righteous) dissatisfaction here that a revolution is just what we need, based on the assumption that their preferred political system and policies would rise from the ashes and take control. No. That's not what would happen. Revolution and civil war are the moment you lose control and open the gates for all the turpitude and iniquity of hell to flood into Britain. The groups and ideologies given power by the chaos and horror of civil wars and revolutions are not pleasant (read anything about the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks by way of proof).
Real revolutions (unlike those of 1668 and 1776, which were as much a restorations) thus almost always leave countries much less civilised, much less kind, much less gentle places, leaving multigenerational scars of distrust, violence and penury. The ballot box and persuasion are the only ways to get the change you want. We must try everything in our power to avoid the alternative.
But sometimes I worry, I really do.
Listening to JRM demanding that the ignored, put upon average Brit goes to fight for the psychodrama in which the Yookay Elite seem to have become involved with Vladimir Putin makes me worry that our ruling class simply won't get their act together in time, this time.
As a far greater aristocratic figure is supposed once to have said:
"Good God, why should they mock poor fellows
thus?
The man that once did sell the lion’s skin
While the beast lived was killed with hunting him.
A many of our bodies shall no doubt
Find native graves, upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work."
What we have here is a problem of sequencing on an overextension of US security commitments. The US had always depended on its adversaries attacking it one-by-one, like the Kung Fu movie trope.
From my piece Geopolitical Bank Run:
"Never expecting depositors to all simultaneously withdraw their funds, a bank only holds cash-on-hand to cover a small percentage of its deposits. In the rare event that sudden depositor demand exceeds cash-on-hand, a bank must hastily sell assets to reinforce its cash position to keep from going under. These desperate moves by a troubled bank only reinforce the aura of collapse. What follows is a bank run where crowds of depositors rush to the bank to withdraw their savings. The once powerful institution limps meekly into bankruptcy.
In geopolitics, a global hegemon, particularly in its declining stages, will naturally overextend her security commitments far beyond her military-on-hand’s capabilities. The great power relies on strategies of deterrence to stop several theatres of war from erupting all at once. Just like the Romans did in ancient times, an overextended hegemon promises to launch wars of annihilation against any opponent who dares attack. But once belief in the hegemon’s power to decisively punish an adversary is diminished, as happened after the US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, opponents become much more emboldened."
beyondwasteland.net/p/geopol…
I read this article 🔽 in this morning's New York Times.
The US designates Saudi Arabia a Major Non-NATO Ally. Last year it entered into what is apparently the largest arms deal in US history with Saudi Arabia. Yet, if you read the article, it becomes apparent that the US is materially unable to defend Saudi Arabia against Ansarallah - at least in the context of how the war is currently shaped.
Yesterday I watched Robert Fico say that there is no supranational power – meaning in effect NATO – that would be able to defeat Russia in a conventional war. I wondered about the accuracy of his view; the Russians are certainly not having it all their own way in Ukraine. But then I look at the situation in the Middle East and, if the US is unable to effectively defend Saudi Arabia against Ansarallah, what is the situation going to be in an all-out war with Russia – bearing in mind that Russia has not yet anything close to mobilised its economy and people fully for a war? Of course neither have Europe or the US – but still.
Perhaps the most striking thing to me is that Robert Fico referred to 1938 and said that despite the guarantees that had been given to Czechoslovakia, they were "served up like a roasted chicken". If you take the time to go through the actual documents, you will see that the 1925 Franco-Czechoslovak Treaty of Mutual Assistance guaranteed that France would immediately lend to Czechoslovakia "aid and assistance" in the event of it being attacked and pursuant to Article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant, which in its turn reads very much like NATO Article 5 - "be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League". In short, the message is that a NATO member has little or no faith in NATO. People decry - with justification - the '1938 again' thinking that pervades much of the current discourse. Yet there is no avoiding the fact that it resonates.
nytimes.com/2026/09/20/us/po…
Braudel Marx retweeted
Question of my HOI4 players out there. I'm stuck in this playthrough & need help.
I need to take all of the territory in red. The mod I'm using doesn't let me use ground troops. How can I overcome this dilemma by using only a few standoff munitions from the green dots.
My good friend @j2parman wrote this piece on Taiwan and what a peaceful resolution might actually look like. He's been thinking about this longer and harder than most, and the argument is sharper than the usual "one China / two Chinas" noise:
theastyanax.com/essays/apply…
Braudel Marx retweeted
''Every single "game-changing" wonder weapon the West sent was, within a month or two, rendered next to useless by Russian innovation.''
Schmidt seems confused or inconsistent in applying the trusty old David vs. Goliath trope to this war. Is it really Ukraine as David against the Russian Goliath? Or is it not NATO + Ukraine that is the Goliath against Russia's David? Certainly by most measures - GDP, population, defense spending - NATO + Ukraine is the Goliath. Only in manpower does Russia hold an advantage.
His comment about "total war" does have some justification. Obviously there is no such thing as total war, only a tendency toward it and away from limited war. After four years of a frustratingly limited warfare strategy — which, among other things, allowed NATO to ship arms by sea into Odesa — Russia has finally woken up. Over the past few months, Russia has launched an offensive total air war against Ukraine: ports shut down, grain exports halted, weapons shipments stopped, and food logistics infrastructure systematically destroyed. This is the double catastrophe — no weapons in, no grain out, and the internal supply system under attack. An increasingly broke Ukraine is fast becoming a growing fiscal burden on Europe.
Schmidt's tired trope of Russia's "lumbering military bureaucracy" was no doubt true as Russia entered the war, but the setbacks in the fall of 2022 woke up the slumbering bear. Every single "game-changing" wonder weapon the West sent was, within a month or two, rendered next to useless by Russian innovation. And let's not forget the Western propaganda about the ruble being rubble and Russian missile production being halted to the point that the Russians were supposedly scrounging microchips from washing machines. Even the Geran drones were innovated from the original Iranian model.
The truth is that it is the decadent and financialized West that has failed not only to innovate, but to produce such simple items as artillery shells. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte himself described the sorry state of Western industrial capacity: Russia produces in three months what all of NATO produces from Los Angeles to Ankara in a full year. To an outside observer, Russia has been slow-walking the war for years, but the result is a West that has been either demilitarized or had its latest weapons rendered meek by Russian innovation.
Now as the total war phase intensifies, the West will try to cut its losses and abandon Ukraine. But there is no fury like a scorned proxy. We have seen this before: the OAS, once abandoned by France after Algerian independence, turned against its former patron. Ukraine may follow the same path - and the West may find that casting away that Ukrainian millstone invites blowback of its own.