One month in and the United States finds itself fighting two incompatible wars in Iran. The first war is economic: defending the global flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The second is kinetic: bombing Iranian military assets, attempting to interdict weapons shipments, preparing for a potential ground invasion. The first war requires keeping oil moving. The second war, by its nature, stops it. The US cannot win both. It may not be able to win either.

Iran sits in an exceedingly powerful position because it has collapsed these two wars into a single strategy. Tehran placed a tollbooth on the Strait of Hormuz, allowing its own tankers and those of its allies to pass free while the rest of the world’s cargo either pays or is blocked. By modulating the grip of that stranglehold, Iran fights a limited guerrilla war against the global economy while holding the strategic defensive. Iranian victory requires only that they maintain the ability to step out of hiding, hit tankers that attempt to run the strait, and vanish. They have the drones and missiles--fired from multiple distances, from multiple platforms--to make that threat credible.

Capitalism’s deepest axiom is that commodities must flow, that all barriers must be overcome. Through the Strait of Hormuz pass the densest forms of energy first—crude oil in vast, slow-moving volumes, followed by refined fuels that keep engines, aircraft, and armies in motion. Then comes liquefied natural gas, supercooled and pressurized, feeding power grids an ocean away. Behind it move the quieter enablers of survival: fertilizers that sustain global harvests, the chemical substrate of future food supply. And at the far, almost invisible edge, helium—weightless, irreplaceable—drifting outward to cool MRI machines, stabilize semiconductor fabrication, and sustain the most delicate instruments of advanced economies. To clot such a maritime artery is to induce a stroke in global prosperity, a cascading failure that begins with energy, spreads through food, and reaches into the nervous system of modern technological life.

Bombing Iran deeper into poverty will not break the stranglehold. Iran has endured sanctions for forty-seven years, a long apprenticeship in scarcity. As Bob Dylan once put it, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Centuries ago, Ibn Khaldun traced this dynamic in his account of asabiyyah: cohesion grows strongest in harsh conditions, where survival binds a society together, while abundance slowly dissolves that bond.

Had the US really wanted to destroy and corrode Iran, they should have helped them get rich. Wealth invites comfort, comfort invites fragmentation, and fragmentation invites dependence. Across Europe, East Asia, and the Gulf, American-aligned states reveal the long arc of this process--prosperous, stable, and totally useless and dependent vassals in a system they no longer have the will nor wherewithal to defend.

Physically eradicating well-entrenched Iranian guerrillas enforcing the Hormuz blockade would be an immense challenge for US invasion forces. Bases and staging areas within a thousand kilometres of Iran would operate under constant threat of withering counterfire, compressing timelines and constraining freedom of action.

Across the region, the strategic environment is tightening: U.S. positions in Iraq, Kuwait, and the Gulf face mounting pressure, while Hezbollah exterminates invading Israeli occupation armour in Lebanon as the Houthis extend the battlespace toward the Bab el-Mandeb, the southern gateway to the Red Sea. The geography of the conflict is expanding even as the operational space for a US invasion contracts, leaving the question of how such a campaign would be staged increasingly difficult to answer.

Worse still, every move the Americans make is being watched and reported in real time by Russian and Chinese ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance). There will be no surprises as US special forces approach Iran, Iraq, Yemen or even Lebanon thanks to the watchful eyes of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. Not to mention that as Iran looks increasingly likely to prevail, Russian and Chinese arms shipments will only increase in both quantity and quality.

The contradiction between economic and kinetic war is already visible in American policy. The US lifted sanctions on Iranian oil—a necessary move to keep at least some commodities flowing through the strait and therefore tamping down the price of oil. But this provides Iran with larger cash flows than before the war. The US is funding its enemy while preparing to fight it. This is what fighting two incompatible wars looks like.

As the ground war approaches, Washington can constrict Iran’s revenue by interdicting its tankers, a step that would be relatively straightforward to execute. The economic consequences would ripple outward immediately, amplifying an already rising tide of global contraction. Restricting Iranian fossil fuel exports addresses one side of the equation; restoring open passage through the strait presents a far more complex challenge. Replacing Tehran’s tollbooth with a hard barrier risks hardening the closure itself, as missiles, mines, and persistent harassment transform the waterway into a denied zone. Oil flows would contract further, driving prices upward and transmitting shock across energy-dependent economies.

Tehran faces its own modulation. It sustains a grinding campaign against US and Israeli air defenses while holding in reserve the capacity to widen the economic choke. Escalation toward a full closure would intensify the global economic crisis and increase pressure for a rapid settlement, potentially before US/Israeli interceptor stocks are exhausted and before Iran’s leverage fully matures. The pace and scale of disruption therefore become instruments of strategy, adjusted to preserve bargaining power over time. Trump talking the markets down while Iran leaves an opening for at least a trickle of commodity flows allows the war to ripen.

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Trick or Retreat

Truth must naturally perish in war. Between fact and fabrication lies a liminal field where perception ricochets and certainty dissolves. In such terrain, a leader fluent in distortion--a trickster--may appear well suited to command: a master of rhetorical mirrors, seeking to disorient the enemy through falsehood and reshape the field of the real.

Yet deception runs in two directions. One turns outward, toward adversaries, keeping them off balance. The other turns inward, shielding the self from unwelcome truths. The figure of the trickster stands at this crossroads.

The trickster’s power is shape-shifting, the refusal to hold a fixed form. Trump’s schizophrenic twists and reversals—today negotiating with imaginary Iranians, tomorrow decapitating its leadership, yesterday ending the war with a deal, next week launching a land invasion--are the behaviour of a trickster who has lost the distinction between strategic deception and internal disorientation. He can no longer choose which mask to wear because there is no stable self left to do the choosing. A form of internal schizophrenia fragments simultaneously as his narcissism rebuilds the fragments into whichever assemblage seems most useful in the moment. The trickster becomes not a strategy but a symptom. The trickster is playing him as much as he is playing the trickster.

In its higher form, deception requires a stable core. The classic trickster manipulates appearances while remaining anchored in reality; illusion serves strategy. Without that inner anchor, the distinction erodes. Fabrication ceases to be a tool and becomes a refuge. What follows resembles a child’s evasion of shame more than a strategist’s manipulation. Such shame-induced falsehoods rarely mislead the enemy. They bind instead the speaker and his audience to a make-believe world of their own convenience.

From Trojan Horse to Hormuz Tankers

The Trojan Horse endures as the archetype of successful deception—a single, unprecedented act: a gift that concealed destruction, made plausible by a world the Trojans recognized: the absent fleet, the ritual offering, the convincing witness. Its power lay in its singularity.

The United States has been wheeling this same horse before Iran for decades, offering negotiations that end in drone strikes, talks that culminate in decapitation, a diplomatic process that turns out to be cover for something else. The pattern is so familiar that Iran’s refusal to take the latest offer seriously is less a strategic choice than a conditioned reflex. They have learned to count the Greeks before opening the gates.

On the other hand, Trump’s Hormuz Tankers grift is an example of self-delusion. Claiming that Iran paid him a generous “tribute” of ten tankers, later exaggerated to twenty, is a case of a trickster reversing his craftiness to dampen the internal shame of a looming defeat.

Deception obeys a law of diminishing returns. Each success educates the external adversary. By the second Trojan horse, the gates remain shut. Suspicion becomes the default; every gesture invites scrutiny. When the trickster’s pattern is recognized, the illusion loses force and becomes a signal—a sign that something else is underway.

The decisive failure comes when the deceiver does not perceive this shift. He repeats the gesture, convinced of its power, while the audience has already turned its attention elsewhere. At that point, deception no longer operates outward. It folds inward. The lies told to others become a ritual of self-soothing for the shame engulfed self.

Strait Outta Options

To actually reopen the strait, the US would need to launch a massive land invasion to wrest control of the coastline from Iranian forces. Regaining that ground, if it is even possible, would take years of counterinsurgency work and would demand anywhere from several hundred thousands of troops up to a million. By the time any of this is remotely underway, the global economy would be in a deep depression. Capitalism has a powerful veto over any such prolonged adventure. Trump’s presidency would come crashing down long before the first beachhead was secured—the bond market, that quiet executioner, would display its awesome power well in advance.

Iran does not need to win the war. It only needs to make winning too expensive for anyone else to try.

Despite Trump’s uncanny ability to move markets with a single post, Brent crude has remained stubbornly above $100 a barrel. His market whisperer act has limits. The price of oil is no longer listening.

After 10,000 airstrikes on Iranian territory, the regime still hits US bases and aviation in the region with deadly force, and continues to pummel Israel and the Gulf Arabs. The precision with which Iran has targeted US radar installations has astonished even its critics. A degraded enemy does not fight like this.

President Trump’s latest missive continues his imaginary negotiations and over-the-top threats to obliterate Iran. What is implied here is that US military officials have advised against any land invasions, although that conclusion is only as firm as Trump’s next tweet. But any move on his part to execute these threats will result in the annihilation of the Gulf Arab states, as their power stations, oil refineries and wells, and desalination plants will end up just as destroyed as Iran’s, setting in motion the worst global economic crisis since the 1930’s.

One counter argument would be that the Iranian regime is too unpopular to stay cohesive enough to impose a strategic defeat on the United States. That any day now it will collapse like a house of cards. Yet the growing specter of Iran defeating the greatest military power in world history works in the opposite direction and has already drawn former critics to line up behind the regime. Victory, it has been said, has a hundred fathers while defeat is an orphan.

You can already see this shift in the language of national security insiders who once made their careers fighting America’s wars. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, now speaks of Iran with something approaching professional and even racial respect:

The Iranians have been learning, they’ve certainly been paying attention to modern drone warfare, and have implemented FPV’s down to the squad level, I mean you see videos of the Israelis in southern Lebanon, losing tanks, losing armoured personal carriers to the same FPV’s that the Russians have been using to great effect in Ukraine.

Again, it’s a fight against Iran—they are not Arabs—they’re Aryans, they are highly intelligent, highly skilled war-fighters and they will not be the pushovers by comparison that you saw with the Iraqi Army.

The grudging admiration is not limited to former special operators. Even Iran's AI propaganda campaign has found its audience: Lego figures mocking American officials, repeated references to Epstein Island, the Statue of Liberty reimagined with the head of the pagan god Baal. The message is designed for Western eyes, and it is landing.

If this conflict does indeed turn into a strategic defeat for the US, its orange orphan will be not go down easily. This practiced trickster is as elusive as mercury and will forever try to slip away from the weight of consequence his impulsive decision will have wrought.

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As Iranian state media announced that the son of Ayatollah Khamenei had been named to succeed his father, it became clear that the decapitation strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader has spawned something far more dangerous than the man it removed. The son who now assumes power lost his parents, his wife, and two of his children in the American and Israeli attack. His more “liberal” father who negotiated with Obama, who reopened talks with Trump in 2026 despite Israel’s 2025 Twelve-Day War betrayal, who publicly forbade nuclear weapons and kept Chinese and Russian influence at arm’s length—that father is dead. His son inherits not only his position but the memory of his humiliation and the obligation to avenge it.

Sigmund Freud derived the concept of the Oedipus complex partly from his own childhood. He recalled his father Jacob walking in the street when a gentile knocked his new fur cap into the mud and shouted, “Jew, get off the pavement!” When young Sigmund asked what his father did, Jacob replied, “I went into the roadway and picked up my cap.” The future founder of psychoanalysis was devastated. His father had accepted insult without resistance. He had displayed weakness rather than strength. This moment planted the seed for Freud’s later theory: the son must surpass the father, must become what the father failed to be, must restore the family name through his own more aggressive assertion of power.

The new Supreme Leader of Iran now occupies that Oedipal position with an intensity Freud never imagined. His father’s cap was not merely knocked into the mud. His father’s, mother’s, wife’s, son’s and daughter’s bodies were torn apart by American and Israeli missiles as Iranian elite naively discussed American peace proposals. Vengeance is not now a choice. It is the new Ayatollah’s filial and fatherly destiny.

But there is another more nuanced inheritance. The elder Khamenei’s death has bequeathed to his son a geopolitical unicorn: Iran now commands the strongest position it has ever held in its war against Israel and the United States. Operation Epic Fail Fury may turn out to be the greatest strategic miscalculation in centuries. The father’s death has united Iranians far tighter than his internal security forces ever could. The Russians and Chinese, held at arm’s length for more than a decade by the old mullahs’ caution, were finally welcomed as partners after last year’s Twelve-Day War. The result is visible across the Gulf: American radar and air defense systems obliterated with laser precision, the great American hegemon now staggers half-blind in a region it once ruled without question.

Best of all for the new Ayatollah, Iran has succeeded in “gating” the Strait of Hormuz. American officials insist, correctly, that the strait is not totally closed. Yes, indeed, a few Chinese and Iranian tankers are allowed to exit. But oil prices have soared past one hundred dollars a barrel. Trump may fear the Israeli lobby, but once the financial oligarchs—BlackRock’s Larry Fink and his peers—begin pounding the table demanding an end to this war, Trump will find himself in a sticky situation.

With US naval assets prudently keeping a thousand-kilometer distance from Iranian drone and missile launches, with American bases throughout the region in tatters, there is no military solution to releasing the commodity flows from their the penitentiary that is the Persian Gulf. Capitalism despises barriers. An important portion of global trade now stagnates in a watery prison, behind the bars of Iranian power, and the Ayatollah is the new warden in town.

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Bombing to Lose

A quarter century after its publication, Robert Pape’s Bombing to Win remains the most systematic study of what airpower can and cannot achieve. Examining every major strategic bombing campaign from World War II through the Gulf War, Pape reached a conclusion that should haunt every planner who greenlit the strikes against Tehran: airpower is no magic bullet. Strategic bombing has never coerced an enemy regime into capitulation. Denial can work, but only when airpower is integrated with ground forces capable of imposing political control on the battlefield. Decapitation strikes, however satisfying in the moment, do not break regimes. They redistribute authority under conditions of emotional mobilization. The target dies. The cause metastasizes.

The new Supreme Leader of Iran now embodies that metastasis with a clarity Pape’s case studies could only approximate. History shows that when leaders are killed at the start of conflicts, their successors often escalate to prove authority—a pattern Pape calls the “Harder Successor Problem.” Leadership assassination does not simply remove authority; it redistributes it under emotional mobilization. The successor inherits a political problem: they must prove they are strong enough to rule. Backing down early can look like weakness inside the regime and to rivals watching closely. New leaders especially face pressure from military elites, revolutionary factions, and rivals inside the regime, all watching to see if the successor is strong or weak. Early escalation becomes a tool to secure authority. This is why leadership decapitation at the start of wars often fails to shorten conflicts. Instead it can lock both sides into longer, more dangerous escalation cycles.

Pape points to the 1996 Russian killing of Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev as instructive: the strike succeeded tactically but triggered greater nationalism and violence that fuelled years of bloody war. Power shifted toward commanders less constrained by negotiation, and the emotional intensity widened. The pattern recurs: martyrdom transfers legitimacy. The successor must demonstrate resolve, not flexibility. The political market rewards maximalist positions. Moderation becomes disloyalty. The Americans and Israelis killed the father. They have now empowered a son whose every incentive points toward proving himself harder, crueller, more absolute than the man who died.

Symbolic Castration

The material losses from this war to the US are staggering enough. The first week of the war cost the United States roughly $6 billion, with $4 billion of that total consumed by munitions and advanced interceptors designed to shoot down Iranian missiles

Four THAAD radars are confirmed destroyed at sites across the region, each costing half a billion dollars and requiring years to replace. The AN/FPS-132 radar at Al Udeid, valued at $1.1 billion, struck and damaged on opening day. Nearly $2 billion in destroyed equipment, and that is just the hardware.

The calculus only grows more punishing when one considers what it takes to rebuild. The AN/TPY-2 radar at the heart of the THAAD system relies on advanced Gallium Nitride semiconductors for its superior detection capabilities. China controls 98 percent of global gallium production and has imposed export controls that restrict American access to this critical material. The same nation tracking every US naval movement in the Gulf, the same nation feeding real-time targeting data to Iranian commanders, holds the keys to rebuilding the very radar systems now lying in charred ruins across the Middle East. Five years to rebuild, the experts say. That assumes the materials are available. That assumes China is willing to sell. That assumes a great deal—beginning with the assumption that China has any interest in restoring the very power it is now helping Iran dismantle.

But these figures, however staggering, measure only the material. The greater loss is psychological. American bases across the Middle East have been pounded in a manner not seen since Pearl Harbor--fourteen installations targeted in the first week, six confirmed destroyed by satellite imagery, with Iranian officials claiming some will take at least five years to rebuild . The US Navy has withdrawn all vessels from its Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, pulling back to the Indian Ocean, where the USS Abraham Lincoln now lurks a thousand kilometres from Iranian shores. Ground troop invasions are impossible given the sheer scale of Iran’s ninety million people not to mention its mountainous geography. Special forces raids remain highly risky and strategically negligible. The empire that once projected power into every corner of the globe now dares not approach the Iranian coastline.

This is where the phallus concept of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan steps in. For Lacan, the phallus is not the organ but the signifier of power, the semblance that organizes the symbolic order, the image of invincibility that sustains authority. It is not enough to be powerful; one must be seen as powerful. The phallus must be exhibited, performed, believed. It is Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth’s job to brandish the phallus in each and every speech or interview he gives. American power in the Middle East was always such a performance—the aircraft carriers, the stealth bombers, the THAAD batteries, the rhetoric of full-spectrum dominance. Each element signified invulnerability. Each element contributed to the aura.

Despite Trump and Hegseth’s rock hard word salads and gaslit flourishes, Iran has systematically destroyed that American phallic aura. US radars are obliterated. The US fleet has fled. The bases burn. The interceptors are soon depleted. The American phallus has been neutered, and what remains is not power but its absence--the lack that was always there but carefully masked. Iran has not only symbolically castrated the image of American invincibility, but their barrage of ballistic missiles is creating an aura of their own phallus symbol. The war is not only military but on a higher plane psychoanalytic: the revelation that the emperor had no armour against the challenger’s cluster ballistics. The material losses can be tallied in billions. The symbolic loss is beyond calculation.

For Whom the TACO Bell Tolls

The tale of the Tar-Baby, drawn from African-American folklore and popularized in the nineteenth-century Uncle Remus stories, tells of Br'er Rabbit who, enraged by a silent tar figure he mistakes for a snubbing stranger, strikes it—only to become stuck, limb by limb, in the sticky trap. The more he struggles, the deeper he is caught.

The story has long served as a metaphor for entrapment: a situation that tempts retaliation but punishes it with irreversible commitment. In military terms, this is a pinning-down operation—where one party lures another into a fight it cannot easily escape.

The key to this conflict is the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Currently the United States has no military or other means to reopen commodity flows through this critical chokepoint. Trump will come under mounting pressure to toll the TACO bell. With talk of instituting a military draft, not to mention the coming tsunami of inflation, his domestic political situation will soon turn critical.

But there are no unilateral timeouts in war. The more Trump engages with Iran, the more he gets pulled into the Tar-Baby quagmire. It is not enough for Trump to cut and run, to call off military strikes—there is no guarantee that the new Ayatollah will reopen the strait, certain in the knowledge that the Grimmer Twins of Trump and Netanyahu will launch an even more massive attack six months down the road.

So the Twelve-Day War model of a white peace, where everything returns to the status quo ante bellum, is highly unlikely now. Most of eastern Iran remains untouched by American and Israeli bombs. Iran is more than capable of keeping the strait closed indefinitely. Russia and China see this war as a colossal blunder by Trump and will push Iran to extract maximum concessions in return for peace.

As of today, the only road to an American / Israeli victory runs through fantasy: perhaps the new Ayatollah will tomorrow rip off his hardliner mask, out himself as a Mossad asset, and order his military to surrender before the awesome specter of American and Israeli might? Never say never, but let’s agree this is a longshot.

And so the discussion will inevitably turn towards Iran's terms for peace. A complete American withdrawal from Persian Gulf military bases? The cancellation of all US sanctions? Perhaps the new Ayatollah, taking a cue from Europe's demands on Putin, will insist on massive war reparations, war crime trials for Trump and Netanyahu, or maybe just settle for a formal apology? Here is where the new Ayatollah might seek council from his father’s more moderate ways.

What Iran/Hezbollah will demand from Israel remains unimaginable. Iran cannot end the war until Hezbollah is given protection in the final deal.

Thus the United States finds itself in an unprecedented position. Trump has promised to decide with Netanyahu when the war ends. What he didn’t realize was that this will be a group decision--including a new Ayatollah along with China and Russia. The more the US struggles with Iran, the deeper they sink in the quagmire. No one can deny that Trump is a master alchemist of narrative victory, he can remould the reality of any disaster and make it the greatest triumph, perhaps ever, in human history. Be that as it may, at this point, Iran has the final say as to when Trump gets to toll the TACO bell.

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Narcissists always betray those closest to them. Anti-war MAGA voters who believed Donald Trump would keep them out of foreign entanglements are learning this lesson in real time as their champion plunges America into a regional regime change war with Iran. And yet no one has been closer to Trump than Team Israel. May they not be next on the betrayal train?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu operates from a different mental pathology. Back when Sigmund Freud mapped the unconscious drives that shape human behaviour and Carl Jung charted the collective symbols that haunt entire peoples, it was Alfred Adler who offered the most useful lens for understanding what drives Netanyahu. Adler’s star has risen in recent decades as his emphasis on the fictional goals that guide human striving found new relevance. He wrote that “the neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction,” trapped by imagined threats and self-generated anxieties that become more real than reality itself.

Netanyahu is nailed to the fiction of Iran as existential threat, a framing that has for decades justified endless escalation while blinding him to the consequences of his actions. The paradox is that Netanyahu’s obsession forced Iran to arm itself to the point that it might now constitute a genuine challenge to Israeli regional dominance. The neurotic’s defining feature is that no resolution can ever satisfy him or allow him to climb down from his cross. Remove one threat and another materializes to take its place. In the most unlikely event that Iran were ever tamed, reduced to a compliant client state, Israeli propagandists are already framing Turkey as the next great existential danger to the Jewish people. The one thing a neurotic cannot withstand is the yawning void of banal security.

Narcissist and neurotic are now bound together in their failing war. The conflict has become a race: can Iran, with the clandestine aid of Russia and China, dismantle the global economy quicker than American and Israeli forces can annihilate Tehran into the second coming of Gaza?

As billion-dollar American air defense radars are systematically destroyed, as military bases across the Persian Gulf are pummelled by cheap Iranian drones, as Tel Aviv reels under ballistic missiles carrying massive cluster munitions, the aura of invincibility that once surrounded American power evaporates with each strike. A revitalized Hezbollah threatens an invasion of northern Israel. The titans of Western wealth watch their energy prices soar and their markets shudder. Russia and China pray for a US ground invasion so that they can implement a “reverse Ukraine” scenario where they arm Iranian ground forces against an American army that has supply lines that stretch halfway around the world.

Meanwhile in the White House, when will the highly distractible Trump, once his attention span gets frayed by failure, begin searching for new geopolitical squirrels to chase? Perhaps in Cuba where victory might come easier? Under all this accumulating weight, the alliance between two mentally damaged men may soon crack. It may only be a matter of when.

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Iranian Fighters Bullying the GCC Effete

The unlikely alliance of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Lloyd’s of London has imposed a de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Only China-bound shipping, carefully selected, is allowed to pass. When Trump boasted that he would open the strait, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group approached within four hundred kilometres of Iran in the Sea of Oman. The IRGC Navy responded by targeting the carrier group with drones, a demonstration of reach and intent that convinced American commanders to pull back to a safer distance. The United States Navy is now entirely absent from the Persian Gulf and is unlikely to return during this war.

Oil and liquefied natural gas leave through the Strait of Hormuz. Food for the desert nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) enters the same way. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain depend almost entirely on imports to feed their populations. Reports are already surfacing of supermarket shelves stripped bare in Dubai. The GCC nations watched Gaza starve without lifting a finger. If this war lasts long enough, they may find themselves facing similar struggles to put food on their own tables.

The Red Sea remains open as a possible corridor for essential supplies. But on its southern edge, straddling the Bab al-Mandab Strait, stand Yemen’s Houthis, ready in reserve. America’s Operation Rough Rider in 2025 failed to bring them to heel. The Houthis have now announced that if Saudi Arabia or the UAE attack Iran, they will respond with immediate strikes on GCC oil installations. Implicit in this threat is another critical choke point closure, this time of the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

The northern entrance offers no relief. The Suez Canal presents an easy target for Iranian special forces, who could block it by sinking large vessels as they pass through. Failing that, missile and drone attacks may be enough to convince insurers to stop shipping into the Red Sea.

The Gulf monarchies may soon face a Berlin Airlift situation with no aircraft and no airlift. Their stocks of interceptor missiles are dwindling, and the United States will prioritize restocking Israeli defenses before attending to mere Arab needs. Stripped of protection, unable to export their oil, blocked from importing food, the Gulf princes may soon find themselves naked, hungry and vulnerable before Iranian power.

From Pro-Wrestling to a Street Fight

Before launching America into its current quagmire in Iran, President Donald Trump’s geopolitical actions followed the logic of professional wrestling. In Venezuela, in the previous shadow clashes with Iran, the script was written in advance, the ending agreed upon, the audience sent home satisfied within the allotted timeframe.

Saturday morning, February 28th, arrived under a different set of rules. As Ayatollah Khamenei called a leadership council to discuss America’s latest peace offer, the opening bell sounded for something far less rehearsed. Trump, together with Israel, seized the moment to decapitate Iran’s ruling elite—a “heel” move in wrestling terms, the bad guy’s cheat, sand thrown in the opponent’s eyes when the referee looks away.

The Israeli assurances had been precise: no worries Donald, the Iranian regime will crumble like a cheap suit, the mopping up finished before markets open Monday. Three days to Tehran, they may have promised. Three days to an unimaginable banquet of geopolitical narcissistic supply for the mad Orange Man.

By the next morning, the political war was already lost. Millions of grief-stricken mourners flooded the squares of Iranian cities, weeping for their religious leader and for the 150 school girls slaughtered in the opening missile barrage. In Iran, many call the attackers the Epstein Regime, a name that captures something of the fusion between American elite power and Israeli intelligence that delivered the strikes. Any fantasy that the Iranian people would side with Zionist and Yankee appeals to overthrow the mullahs vanished the moment the missiles struck. The earthly life extinguished in Khamenei’s body became, in death, the very thing it could never quite be in life: a unifying symbol that transcended faction and discontent.

The Ayatollah is dead. Long live the Ayatollah. The man can die. The office cannot.

Persia and the Jews: 2500 Years of Neurotic Ambivalence

The attack on February 28th fell on the Shabbat before Purim, when Jews read Parshat Zachor—the command to remember Amalek, archetypal enemy of Israel. Purim itself commemorates deliverance from annihilation in ancient Persia. The holiday tells of Haman, an adviser to King Ahasuerus, who plotted genocide, and of Esther and Mordechai who reversed his scheme.

The enemy in the story was Persian. The enemy in the modern narrative is Iran, heir to that ancient power. When Israeli warplanes struck Tehran on the Shabbat of Zachor, they were enacting a story written thousands of years ago.

Before Haman there was Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and issued the decree allowing Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Isaiah called Cyrus “God’s anointed,” a gentile chosen to liberate God’s people. The same empire that produced Haman produced the liberator who made the return to Zion possible. This ambivalence has today vanished from the Israeli imagination, which remembers Haman but has forgotten Cyrus.

The February 28th attack was pure Purim, unshadowed by the memory of liberation. Three days to Tehran, Trump was promised. But Jewish historical time moves differently. The Purim story is 2500 years old and still unfolding. Trump’s three days disappeared into that longue durée the moment the first missile struck.

The Three Archetypes

The Jewish encounter with gentile power has produced three archetypal figures.

Cyrus liberates. He acts on God’s behalf to redeem his people, enabling return and rebuilding. He steps aside when his work in service of Jewish interests is done.

Ahasuerus enables. He grants the Jews permission to slaughter their enemies and asks afterward what more they require. The king who began by banishing his queen on a whim, who staffed his court with sycophants, who signed off on genocide with the same impulse he used to approve a beauty pageant, reveals himself in the end as the pliant sovereign who looks the other way to Jewish violence, who grants to the Jews whatever is requested, who asks only asks in return what more he can do for them.

This is the kind of leader Israel seeks to install in Tehran today, a leader who grants whatever Israel requests, and asks only what more he can do.

Haman destroys. He rises to annihilate the Jews, and his name is cursed in every generation.

These are the masks gentile rulers wear in Jewish memory. Trump has worn two of them already. The third waits in reserve if he TACO’s out on Iran.

The Masks of Trump

Before the war, Trump wore the mask of Cyrus. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He received Third Temple leaders at the White House. He accepted the implicit title because it matched a template already present in Jewish collective memory.

The February 28th strikes moved him into the second role. He became Ahasuerus, placing American power behind Israel’s war, signing off on three days to Tehran, prepared to ask Netanyahu what more slaughter he desired. The king in the Megillah asked Esther after the first day of killing, and she requested another. Trump was ready to do the same.

But the war did not end in three days. As costs mount and victory recedes, TACO Trump may soon begin looking for an exit. This is where the threat emerges. The Jewish Lobby that hailed him as Cyrus and celebrates him as Ahasuerus holds the final category in reserve.

If Trump abandons the war, the mask of Haman will be projected upon him. The Lindsay Grahams and Mark Levins who praised him will strip away the costume and reveal what they will now claim was always underneath: the betrayer who abandoned Israel to Persian wrath. The label is a weapon in being, to be wielded to keep him stuck in the tar pit of Iran, should he ever get wandering ADHD eyes.

Historical Neuroticism

Adler described the neurotic nailed to the cross of his fiction, trapped by imagined threats that become more real than reality itself. On the individual level, this is a clinical observation applied to figures like Netanyahu. On the national level, it becomes something larger: a prophecy of war, a pathology of peoples.

When a state and people become consumed by existential fear, it ceases to act as a rational actor and begins to behave as a collective neurotic, hammering itself to the very cross it has constructed. This is historical neuroticism: a nation so wedded to a particular reading of its past that it can no longer perceive the present clearly. The ancient Persian enemy becomes an eternal archetype. Every Iranian is Haman. Every slaughter is justified in advance. And if a gentile leader is not explicitly Cyrus or Ahasuerus, then the mask of Haman is neurotically projected upon his or her face.

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As a novel stretches on, readers often lose attention and start skipping pages ahead to its climactic conclusion. The war in Ukraine increasingly invites this impatient response. If its origins are traced to the Maidan coup d'état of February 2014, the conflict has persisted for nearly twelve years, advancing in uneven, punctuated phases. Throughout much of this period, Western narratives anticipated a decisive Russian defeat. Yet as the turn, a different endgame is now crystalizing from within the war’s primordial grind: one pointing toward a decisive Russian victory.

Of course, on the ground in Ukraine, the primary concern of the Russians has never been to pace their struggle to tickle the shortened attention spans of Western audiences. But as the fifth year of high-intensity phase of the war approaches, Ukraine confronts a compounding crisis--catastrophic energy shortages, depleted manpower, a strained front, declining arms shipments, and a critical deficit of air defense capability.

Its Western sponsors are scarcely in better shape. A cash-strapped EU hesitates before the endless funding demands of a nation suffering profound demographic and economic wreckage. Meanwhile, an openly impatient United States, crusading around the world desperately trying to hold on to hegemony while rationing precious air defense missiles, pushes for peace, yet remains adamant that the conclusion arrive on American terms: a stalemate that leaves NATO securely anchored within 80% of pre-war Ukraine.

All signs suggest the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, however distant, is finally resolving into a discernible shape--one that will not at all please Western leaders.

To consider how the war in Ukraine might end, we can look to two different historical climaxes: the negotiated, punitive settlement of the Franco-Prussian War, and the total victory and transformative reconstruction of the American Civil War. Each presents a distinct model--a carefully orchestrated armistice imposed after decisive military defeat versus chaotic total collapse.

While every war is its own story, and Ukraine may yet write a surprising final chapter, these precedents frame our imagination for the last pages of this long and painful Ukrainian drama.

History rarely repeats, but it resonates. This occurs because the architects of the present are themselves students of the past, consciously or unconsciously reaching for old playbooks. Vladimir Putin, for instance, is often styled as a modern Bismarck, engineering statecraft through brains, blood, and iron. Many Western leaders, by contrast, seem to wield only one: the playbook of Winston Churchill, with all its language of unwavering defiance and moral certainty. As for Donald Trump, he often appears to fancy himself an earth-bound Yahweh--less a strategist than a transcendent sovereign will.

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Franco-Prussian War: A Negotiated, Punitive Peace

The Franco-Prussian War provides an example in how an imposed peace can be constructed to endure. The conflict concluded through a controlled sequence in which a quick military defeat was converted into performed political submission and then formalized into a new continental order.

The sequence began with decisive military collapse. The encirclement and capture of Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan in September 1870 destroyed the Second Empire and shattered France’s command structure. A provisional Government of National Defense proclaimed the Third Republic and attempted to continue the war, yet the strategic balance had already turned irreversibly.

The siege of Paris forced the new government to seek an armistice in January 1871. This suspension of hostilities was strictly military in character and explicitly conditional upon France’s acceptance of a final peace settlement. Similar armistice-first sequences ended the First World War on the Western Front and the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1940. It is this model—military defeat, provisional political authority, armistice, and dictated treaty—that Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly invoked as the framework he to impose upon Ukraine.

Once France admitted defeat, Bismarck demanded a public act of symbolic submission: a victory parade by Prussian troops through the heart of Paris. France was further subjected to the humiliation of witnessing the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. A national election was then held to produce a government with the legitimacy required to sign a final peace. This newly assembled French National Assembly, after months of internal wrangling, ultimately ratified the Treaty of Frankfurt. Its terms were severe. Alsace-Lorraine was transferred to the new German Reich, and a staggering war indemnity of five billion gold francs was imposed, enforced through a continued German occupation until the debt was discharged.

Paradoxically, this punitive settlement proved politically sustainable for more than four decades. France paid the indemnity ahead of schedule, within three years, securing an early end to occupation. The Third Republic entered a period of economic recovery and cultural dynamism and, like the newly unified Germany, redirected its ambitions toward overseas empire.

On the continent, the settlement produced a stable, if tense, equilibrium. This stability rested on Bismarck’s post-war system: Germany treated France as a contained adversary, maintained strategic alignment with Russia to prevent encirclement, and avoided direct naval rivalry with Britain. His successors, however, abandoned this architecture. After Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890, Germany’s pursuit of Weltpolitik--a more aggressive quest for global power—antagonized Britain and, critically, turned Russia from an ally into a foe. The resulting strategic encirclement of Germany made the 1871 order untenable. Within this deteriorating framework, the settlement endured until the German invasion of France in July 1914. Its collapse was the direct result of discarding Bismarck’s core tenet: friendship with Russia. Had it been upheld, Alsace-Lorraine might still be German territory today.

From Paris to Kiev

The parallels to the conflict in Ukraine are evident. Russia’s stated demands follow a familiar sequence: a military armistice conditioned on Kyiv’s acceptance of the broad outlines of a final settlement; a visible act of submission, such as withdrawal from remaining positions in the Donbas; and political transformation within Ukraine itself. Moscow has consistently linked its stated objective of “denazification” to regime change, with new elections expected to produce an administration acceptable to the Kremlin. As in France after 1870, this successor government would then be tasked with formalizing defeat through signed treaties and constitutional revisions. The aim is a legally sanctioned new order, imposed by the victor and ratified under the pressure of unmistakable military coercion.

The decisive variable, however, is timing. France’s defeat was swift and unambiguous. Ukraine’s has been prolonged and incomplete. For a Bismarckian settlement to become viable, Russian forces would still need to secure a clear and irreversible battlefield victory. On present trajectories, that threshold may lie months ahead, possibly not until late 2026, when Ukraine’s capacity for sustained resistance could fracture. Until such a moment arrives, any punitive settlement remains premature.

The historical warning embedded in this model lies in what followed the Treaty of Frankfurt. In March 1871, Paris erupted in insurrection. The Paris Commune is often remembered, especially through Karl Marx’s writings, as a proto-socialist experiment. Yet its immediate energy came from nationalist and proletarian fury directed against the peace terms and the conservative government that accepted them. These “dead-enders” rejected surrender outright. Their uprising was crushed with extreme violence by the same French army that had just been defeated by Prussia. During the semaine sanglante, roughly 15,000 Communards were killed, as the Third Republic purged those unwilling to accept the new political reality. The repression was brutal, but it also consolidated the post-war order by bring to heal its most intransigent opponents.

A comparable dynamic could follow any negotiated settlement in Ukraine, particularly one involving territorial concessions. Such a deal might provoke violent resistance from committed nationalist formations such as the Azov Brigade for whom compromise is intolerable. The possibility of a “Maidan 2,” driven by these dead-enders and potentially encouraged by foreign intelligence services unwilling to accept the war’s conclusion, cannot be dismissed.

The central question, then, is whether a post-settlement Ukrainian state would respond as the French Third Republic did: using its own security forces to crush internal revolt in order to preserve the externally imposed peace.

US Civil War: The Template of Total Defeat

The American Civil War offers a second, more realist template for how the war in Ukraine may conclude: a conflict resolved through total military defeat. In this analogy, Ukraine resembles the Confederacy—a smaller, ideologically fervent force, tactically capable and sustained by an intense will to fight for its vision of sovereignty. Its commanders were often more resourceful and imaginative than their Union counterparts, yet they could not overcome the North’s overwhelming economic and demographic advantages.

Russia assumes the role of the Union: a demographic and industrial colossus, prosecuting the war with grinding patience, driven less by crusading ideology than by strategic necessity and a sense of historical entitlement. Moscow does not see this as a foreign war of conquest, but as a tragic struggle within a fractured civilizational space—a reluctant war against a “brother nation.” Ukrainians may beg to differ.

Imperial dynamics shaped both conflicts. The American South had never fully integrated economically or psychologically into the federal project, making the Civil War, in part, a war of colonial conquest cloaked in the moral imperative of ending slavery. In a comparable way, Russia’s campaign can be read as an effort to stop NATO’s unquenchable desire for eastern expansion by reincorporating Ukraine into a revived sphere of Greater Russian influence.

Yet there are obvious critical differences between the two conflicts. The Confederacy fought largely in isolation, receiving limited diplomatic recognition and modest material assistance from Europe. Ukraine, by contrast, is sustained by a vast external coalition. NATO operates as a thirty-two-nation industrial, intelligence, and logistical rear echelon. Direct Western involvement is often obscured through “volunteers,” contractors, and unprecedented real-time battlefield integration.

The Union also faced no existential threat from foreign alliances. For Russia, a NATO-aligned Ukraine—bringing with it the potential loss of Crimea and the strategic anchor of Sevastopol—represents an intolerable challenge to core security interests and great-power status.

As the Civil War ground on year after year, proposed peace negotiations inevitably failed. The war aims of the two sides were mutually exclusive: unconditional union versus unconditional independence. With no divisible territory to exchange for a lasting settlement, the conflict admitted only one resolution—the complete military and psychological exhaustion of one side.

In Ukraine, the idea of Kiev retaining full sovereignty within its pre‑2014 borders is irreconcilable with both Russia’s stated aims and the facts on the ground. For now, a negotiated peace remains impossible. Ukraine will only seriously contemplate surrender once its now latent military exhaustion--the internal fatigue hidden within a steel beam--becomes irreversible and undeniable. Yet at that point, why would Russia negotiate across a table what it can grab outright on the battlefield?

The Union ultimately imposed that exhaustion upon the Confederacy through two complementary strategies. In the Eastern Theater, Ulysses S. Grant waged a relentless war of attrition. His campaigns exploited the Union’s overwhelming manpower and industrial advantage, grinding down Confederate armies through costly, continuous engagement—a grim precursor to the industrialized warfare of the twentieth century.

Simultaneously, William Tecumseh Sherman executed a campaign of strategic maneuver and psychological devastation. His march through Georgia and the Carolinas bypassed enemy forces to systematically destroy the economic foundations of resistance: railways, factories, and crops. Civilian suffering was deployed as a deliberate instrument of war, designed to shatter collective morale and make continued resistance unthinkable.

Parallels to these dual methods are evident in Russia’s war in Ukraine. Along a front exceeding 1,600 kilometres, Russian forces wage a war of attrition, systematically exhausting Ukrainian manpower and Western matériel. At the same time, a sustained air and missile campaign targets energy infrastructure and logistics—a drawn-out echo of Sherman’s march. Its aim is to collapse the civilian “back of house,” accelerate demographic flight, and impose long-term economic paralysis, hollowing out the state’s capacity to function.

From the Western perspective, this bombardment campaign has transformed Ukraine. Where once they saw a nubile, resource-rich bride to be wooed with wealth and arms, they now confront a spent spinster—her liabilities and demands far outweighing her fading assets and promise.

As of today, the only power pushing for peace in Ukraine—and only half-heartedly—is the United States. This ambivalence stems from a strategic dilemma. Ukraine has become a black hole for quickly diminishing stocks of American air defense munitions, a critical weak link in maintaining US global reach. A similar impulse to conserve these assets drives Washington’s parallel efforts to curtail Iran’s ballistic missile program, which ties down innumerable resources in the Middle East, especially in Israel.

Yet this pragmatism clashes with an insatiable American drive to display dominance. As one hand extends a wary offer of negotiation; the other launches decapitation strikes as flocks of drones swarm toward Putin’s Valdai residence. This contradiction, combined with Ukraine’s ever-shrinking ability to endure militarily, leaves the current diplomatic dance as mere empty gestures. The conflict’s ultimate resolution will be forged, as it now appears, on the battlefield alone.

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Why did the anticipated US airstrikes on Iran fail to materialize? The explanations seem as convoluted as the crisis itself: a reported Israeli request for delay; refusals from regional allies to permit overflight; Russia’s ominous presence in the background; and President Trump’s own implication that a grim bargain was struck to spare captured agitators. Trump cancelled the attacks only after Iran supposedly agreed to spare 800 potential CIA / Mossad assets from the gallows.

The very next day, the drama shifted towards the frigid Arctic region, as Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers stood firm in the White House against escalating US demands to cede the vast Greenlandic wastelands.

These two events, unfolding in parallel, point to a deeper structural rupture: the post-1945 international order is no longer being reliably upheld by the power that created it. The United States, long the system’s chief enforcer, now treats its own rules as contingent instruments, to be applied, suspended, or discarded according to circumstance. The result is a growing sense that the order itself has become provisional, dependent on domestic struggles within Washington rather than shared expectations among states.

In this environment, states long described by the West as disruptors—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—have begun to converge around a different set of preferences. Their interests increasingly align around stability, predictability, and the formalization of limits on unilateral power. For China, whose economic model depends on large-scale exports and long planning horizons, clear trade rules and respected sovereignty remain essential. Russia and Iran, operating under constant coercive pressure, likewise benefit from an international environment where escalation is bounded and power is negotiated rather than exercised arbitrarily. The emerging dynamic is therefore less a defense of the old order than an attempt to replace its eroding unipolar core with a more rule-constrained multipolar equilibrium.

In a recent example of this strange new world, Canada, a paradigm of status quo sobriety, this week hailed a “new strategic partnership” with China, following trade dispute with the US.

In response to years of geopolitical and economic decline, US seems to be hesitating between two policy choices: retrench towards a Western Hemispheric bastions, which explains recent actions in Venezuela and Greenland, or continue fighting to dominate the Eurasian “world-island” as preached by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his geopolitical cookbook, The Grand Chessboard from 1997. The fact that Brzezinski was a farsighted thinker is highlighted in the following passage:

Add North Korea to the mix, not the mention the many lesser members of the BRICS alliance, and you have a recipe for trouble for continued US hegemony over the world-island. Given Canadian leader Mark Carney’s comments, it would not be such a surprise if in the coming years Canada starts exploring BRICS membership.

Moments of systemic realignment such as this are a recurring feature of the past five centuries of the modern capitalist world, marked by cyclical hegemonic rise, exhaustion, and replacement. During periods of stable and prosperous hegemonic rule, states tend to drift toward two opposite errors. Members of the status quo succumb to a utopian faith that shared norms, institutions, and legal frameworks can transcend power politics altogether, while marginalized or revisionist actors often retreat into a rigid realism that treats sovereignty and coercive force as ends in themselves.

This tension was famously diagnosed by the British historian E.H. Carr on the eve of the Second World War, as the League of Nations collapsed under the weight of its moral aspirations and its refusal to confront the realities of power. Writing in The Twenty Years’ Crisis in 1939, Carr argued that international stability depends on the disciplined synthesis of idealism and realism. Periods of hegemonic retreat and institutional breakdown, he warned, are precisely those in which the pathologies of utopian delusion and realist rigidity become most visible. The present moment, marked by the unravelling of the post-Cold War “rules-based order,” bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the crumbling world Carr sought to understand, as he stood on the precipice of the abyss.

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Syrian Sequel

The most coherent explanation for the recent destabilization campaign against Iran comes from sources within Tehran itself. They perceive the ultimate US/Israeli objective not necessarily as direct regime change toward a friendly, prosperous state, but as the ignition of a Syrian-style civil war designed to shatter the diverse and oil-rich nation. However dysfunctional and oppressive the current Islamic Republic may be, one must remain clear-eyed: the West’s strategic goal is certainly not a gleaming, powerful Shiite counterpart to the UAE. Few regional actors, including many of Iran’s neighbours and rivals, have any interest in a strong, unified Persia resurgent.

A more accurate guide to the intended outcome is the logic of Israel’s old Yinon Plan—a strategic vision, first articulated in the 1980s, that advocates for the perpetual fragmentation of surrounding states into smaller, weaker, ethnically or sectarian-based entities that can be more easily managed or dominated. This is a formula for controlled Balkanized chaos. Look at the current states of Syria or Libya: they are fragmented zones of perpetual conflict, warlordism, and external intervention. The desired end-state for Iran is this same kind of managed disintegration—a permanent sovereign demolition project that neutralizes Iran as a strategic rival.

But if the United States is genuinely preparing to retrench from Eurasia and consolidate behind the ramparts of a hemispheric “Fortress America,” why would it expend its dwindling resources and political capital on a costly confrontation with Iran? The answer exposes a roadblock to the retrenchment thesis: the irreducible demands of Israel and its neocon allies within the American establishment. For this potent constituency, the neutralization of Iran is the foundational sine qua non for any strategic reorientation.

However the risk for the US here is that finality always remains just out of reach, and is replaced by a self-perpetuating sequence. Iran may merely be the first and most prominent domino in a regional order perceived as inherently hostile. The Herculean task of confronting Tehran is just the first labour; its completion would not bring respite, but merely reveal the next set of stables to be cleansed. With Iran’s counterweight removed, the focus of “security imperatives” would inevitably shift to other regional powers—to an ascendant Turkey, a recalcitrant Qatar, or even a Saudi Arabia whose internal power struggle with the UAE (Israel’s sole reliable Gulf partner) could itself become a new source of “instability” for neocons to fixate upon.

Thus, for the “Fortress America” proponents, the dream of a clean retreat would become a mirage. Any withdrawal secured by promising the perpetual harassment of Iran is a pact with Sisyphus. The US would forever be rolling the boulder of Middle Eastern intervention uphill, only to watch it roll back down again as the definition of “security” expands to encompass each new villain. The homeward path vanishes behind the next immediate demand, making the grand strategic retreat an endless rear-guard action fought on an ever-shifting front.

Trump’s cancellation of the Iran strikes, followed immediately by his staged bro-fest with Tucker Carlson—the bête noire of the interventionist right—demonstrates a deliberate oscillation between the two warring souls of American statecraft: the Messianic Globalist camp, committed to perpetual global intervention, and the Hemispheric Realist faction, seeking retrenchment to a Fortress America. Each swing of this pendulum destabilizes the other, leaving allies and adversaries alike guessing—and the coherence of US strategy in doubt.

What matters, however, is not which faction ultimately prevails in Washington, but what the oscillation itself produces in practice. Far from resolving overstretch through disciplined retrenchment, the United States appears to be compounding it. While remaining locked in strategic confrontation with Iran, Russia, and China at the global level, it is simultaneously escalating coercive pressure within its own hemisphere—reviving regime-change politics in Venezuela, issuing threats of blockade against Cuba, and floating unprecedented territorial demands from Denmark over Greenland. At the same time, the domestic sphere is no longer insulated from these imperial stresses, as internal security operations and mass protests signal a widening fracture at home. Rather than choosing between global empire and hemispheric consolidation, the United States is now straining to manage all three arenas at once: global dominance, regional subordination, and internal control. Far from retrenchment, the US is experiencing workload acceleration—an imperial system attempting to do more with diminishing coherence, and thereby hastening the very crisis it seeks to avoid.

Greenlandic Gambit

Trump’s acquisitive demands for Greenland carry a disturbing resonance, reminiscent of an aging predator circling a vulnerable teen on an island paradise. Or, more prosaically, it can be seen a single move designed to kill two strategic birds with one stone. Securing Greenland provides the United States a dominant Arctic foothold, creating a platform to monitor, harass, or even choke off future Russian and Chinese maritime traffic through the thawing polar routes. Simultaneously, it delivers a mortal blow to the NATO alliance, as European members are forced to choose between defending an ally’s sovereignty and appeasing a rapacious patron.

It is a marvel of modern statecraft to observe which historical lessons are enshrined and which are hastily archived. The war party, echoed faithfully by its European vassals, still operates from a dog-eared playbook: any hesitation to fund a foreign war is branded “appeasement,” a cowardly rerun of Munich. Peace with Russia is impossible since once they achieve victory in Ukraine, the domino theory is instantly invoked, after Kiev, Moscow will surely march through the Baltics, Warsaw and then Berlin.

But now Europeans are struggling to find ways to appease Trump. The critical question is one of precedent and appetite. Would Trump be satisfied with Greenland alone? Or does this initiate an Arctic Lebensraum, where Greenland serves as the Czechoslovakia—the initial, tolerated bite preceding a multi-course campaign? If the strategic goal is true Arctic hegemony, why stop there? The domino logic extends irresistibly to Iceland, Norway’s Svalbard, and the Laplandic zones of Finland, Norway and Sweden. A full absorption of the European Arctic rim would place the US in direct territorial confrontation with Russia.

In this maximalist vision, the gambit culminates in total transformation: a US-dominated polar sphere, with a folded-in Canada, controlling the majority of the Arctic coastline. The final victim of this northward expansion would be NATO itself—rendered obsolete and buried by the very power that once founded it. The Greenland demand, from the Fortress America point of view, may be less about the narcissistic pleasure of forbidden conquest and more about overturning the entire trans-Atlantic order.

Utopian Collectivity versus Realist Sovereignty

North Korea’s hermetic autarky demonstrates that extreme sovereignty can be enforced, albeit at a staggering human and strategic cost. Iran, however, exists in a more interconnected and vulnerable geopolitical ecosystem, making the North Korean model both impractical and prohibitively destabilizing. Iran indeed maintains strategic ties, yet its pride prevents the decisive integration with the Fearsome Four that would ensure its survival.

This hesitation is illustrated in the recent crisis: street protests erupted over the collapse of the Iranian rial, a currency China could have stabilized with its reserves. The unrest was ultimately quelled by Russian electronic warfare equipment, which jammed the tens of thousands of Starlink terminals smuggled in by foreign actors. Yet, Tehran continues to balk at purchasing Chinese fighter jets and drags its feet on a formal strategic pact with Moscow.

Simply acquiring Russia’s formidable Oreshnik missile system—a weapon even France’s Macron covets—would likely deter further US or Israeli adventurism without the need to resort to nuclear status. The clearest path to a stable, prosperous Iran lies in pragmatic internal renewal under the protective umbrella of powers like Russia and China, whose interests, however impure, align with preserving Iranian territorial integrity. But neither power will tolerate or sponsor the mullah’s economic incompetence and will demand reform. For now, however, Iran’s defensive suspicion has hardened into a strategic liability.

Europe’s crisis, conversely, stems from the opposite extreme: a deep-seated utopianism that believed security could be permanently outsourced to a benevolent hegemon within a rules-based order. European nations allowed their capacity for realist action—military power, energy independence—to atrophy in the comfort of assumed protection. One sign of their rude awakening is Macron’s urgent call for Europe to develop its own equivalent of Russia’s Oreshnik system.

Thus, both find themselves in a mirror-image trap. Iran, fearing the erosion of its sovereignty through dependency, risks collapse through isolation. Europe, having embraced dependency as a utopian project, now faces the erosion of its sovereignty by a capricious protector. Their pathologies are opposite, but the result is the same: a profound sovereignty crisis, exacerbated by a hegemonic power that no longer feels bound by the rules it once authored.

From the Twenty Years Crisis to the 2026 Year of Crisis

These inverse positions of Brussels and Tehran on the Collective / Sovereign spectrum are profound failures to reconcile the fundamental dialectic of international life: the tension between utopianism and realism. The work of historian E.H. Carr, forged in the collapse of the idealistic League of Nations, provides the essential lens for diagnosis.

For Carr, writing in the shadow of the catastrophic failure of the post-WWI order, mature statecraft is defined by a synthesis of these two facets. Utopianism, the “immature thought” of pure purpose, builds castles of norms like the “rules-based order.” Realism, the “thought of old age,” reduces politics to a sterile analysis of immutable sovereign power. True wisdom lies in the balance: “Mature thought combines purpose with observation and analysis.” A healthy polity needs the purpose provided by utopian vision and the grounding provided by realist power assessments.

This framework reveals the mirrored pathology of Europe and Iran. Europe succumbed to a utopian intoxication, believing its normative, post-sovereign project had transcended power politics, outsourcing its realism to Washington. Iran hardened into a realist sclerosis, fetishizing sovereign purity to the point of self-isolation, rejecting the purposive trust needed for collective security. Each is trapped at a dysfunctional extreme of Carr’s spectrum, and each is now being brutally punished for it by a world that demands the synthesis they lack.

Conversely, the resilience of the Russian and Chinese core of the Fearsome Four bloc stems from their embodiment of this Carrian maturity. They champion a utopian vision of a “multipolar world order”—a purposeful and collective alternative to US sovereign hegemony—while ruthlessly building the realist foundations of military and economic power to propel this dream towards reality. Their grand strategy consciously combines idealist theory with empirical practise.

The chaotic actions of the United States, meanwhile, manifest the violent internal struggle between these two poles within the American polity. The restrained, hemisphere-focused intervention in Venezuela and the cancelled strike on Iran reflect a pragmatic realism seeking retrenchment. Yet the simultaneous, shocking threats against Greenland and the alleged attempted drone assassinations of Russian leadership expose the undiminished force of a messianic utopianism—the neocon impulse for transformative violence and hegemony. US policy is thus less a coherent strategy than a perpetual Tucker Carlson-Mark Levin wrestling match, where these irreconcilable impulses clash, leaving allies and adversaries alike in a state of paralyzing uncertainty.

The path forward for both Brussels and Tehran, therefore, is to correct course toward Carr’s synthesis—a journey that moves in opposite directions. Europe’s sovereign nations, operating through and beyond their EU superstructure, must ingest a bitter dose of realism: they must rebuild autonomous power, recognizing that normative resolve without sovereign strength is merely an invitation to predation.

Iran must swallow its sovereign pride and accept a measure of strategic utopianism. While maintaining its formidable missile arsenal, it must deepen its integration into the collective security framework of the Fearsome Four and the wider BRICS bloc, understanding that independence without deeply integrated allies is a blueprint for invasion.

Their survival depends on this mutual correction. In an era where the hegemon is at war with itself—paralyzed by its own clashing utopian and realist imperatives—the only sovereignty that will endure is that which is both willed and armed, principled and possible. Effective power in the 21st century will be forged in the disciplined synthesis of Carr’s dialectic, not found in the barren purity of either extreme.

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On the surface, the US special military operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro went off without a visible hitch. Surprise was total; the CIA and Delta Force moved like a single machine. The script though was rather unoriginal--a redux of the Osama bin Laden raid, but with a different finale: bring the target back alive for a show trial in New York.

Those slow-flying Chinook helicopters should have been juicy targets, lumbering low over Caracas. Yet the sky stayed quiet--remarkably few (if any) air defense missiles rose to meet them. US drones and jets had already taken out Venezuela’s Russian-made Buk and maybe an S-300 system, but that still leaves all those infantrymen with their shoulder-fired missiles. They could have made easy work of the airborne behemoths. Instead, the only real fight came from Maduro’s Cuban security detail, who were cut down by the dozens. So it begs the question: were the commanders bought off with suitcases of CIA cash, or were they just that spectacularly incompetent? Why not equal portions of both?

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Tragedy or Farce?

When it comes to what happens next--the post-decapitation fate of Venezuela--the first rule of Trump World is to never believe a word he says. The real moves reveal themselves later, in the quiet after the spectacle. And there is no scenario, ever, where he won’t try to exaggerate, embellish, and inflate whatever he seems to have done--then leverage the illusion into something more.

And why wouldn’t he? His geopolitical style swaps “Go Big or Go Home” for a minimalist “Less Is More.” Any action he takes becomes collateral for the next gamble--a kind of geopolitical Ponzi scheme, creating leverage out of thin air. This raid was his twenty-first century version of Israel’s snatch of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, but repurposed as a speculative asset.

As the first photos of a captured Maduro hit the wires, Trump wasted no time. He immediately leveraged the event, threatening Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and especially Iran with the same treatment if they didn’t fall in line. Eurosceptics half-hoped he’d try a similar operation on EU President Ursula von der Leyen. In Moscow and Beijing, they were likely pleased--Trump had just set a handy precedent. The new rule seemed to be: if your own courts issue an indictment, you’re now entitled to kidnap any leader, anywhere.

And as a direct consequence, you can be sure Gavin Newsom is already sketching his own version--should he win in 2028. Early plans for a humanitarian snatch-operation against Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, to free all those tens of thousands of poor gangbangers from their harsh prisons. One can already hear the rationale. He might even repatriate batches of them to US cities--as a form of restitution, compensation for their pain and suffering.

The second rule is to remember that Trump came out of professional wrestling--a world where the spectacle is everything and the finish is agreed upon backstage long before the bodies hit the mat. The jury’s still out on whether Venezuelan officials were truly paid to stand down or were just caught literally napping. But Trump, it seems, has a sharp instinct for avoiding real, unscripted conflict. The one genuine fight he stumbled into was with the Houthis, and a month later the US was dragging its tail out of that mess, quieter and wiser.

So his grandiose pronouncements about America now ruling Venezuela--until we see tanks on every corner--are better understood as pure rage-bait. They’re designed to get opponents fuming, to dominate the cycle, to make everyone seethe over the latest antics. Remember back in June ‘25, when he claimed to have totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program? It was plainly false--his boss, Netanyahu, last week tasked the US with destroying Iran’s 400 kilograms of enriched uranium. Trump’s exuberant boasts are the media narrative force multiplier for what are rather cautious and modest geopolitical interventions.

In that same spirit, this executive decapitation is, for now, only a Potemkin regime change. They removed the villainous figurehead, Maduro, and installed the new Acting President, Delsi Rodríguez--who is, at least publicly, now denouncing Yankee imperialism. It seems a quixotic choice, making the daughter of a martyred Marxist militant the designated Quisling to hand Venezuela’s resources over to American corporations. Her father, Jorge Rodríguez Sr., was tortured to death in 1976 by security forces investigating the kidnapping of the American executive William Niehous. Now she’s meant to open the mineral vaults for the next generation of that very same imperialist world.

Then again, the best corporate Quislings are often those who can credibly wear the mask of the radical. Barack Obama’s largest financial supporter was Goldman Sachs. Finance capitalist Alex Soros celebrated the supposed communist Zohran Mamdani’s victory for New York Mayor. So why not the scion of a revolutionary martyr to oversee the colonial handout?

The key, though, is that none of this is certain. It is far from guaranteed that Rodríguez will play ball, that she will accept Marco Rubio as some new viceroy, or that any of this is more than an elaborate exercise in imperial wishcasting.

Naked Aggression

By far the most impressive part of this neo-colonial adventure was Trump’s Mission Accomplished-style press conference. With the goal of scaring the world into submission, he voiced some of the most naked truths of human depravity since the Athenian envoys told Melos that “the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”

The Athenians, at least, had the grim consistency to follow through--they slaughtered the men of Melos and enslaved the women and children. Trump’s rhetoric now claims the same brutal prerogative. But between the boast and the reality lies the vast terrain of consequence, and it remains an open question whether he possesses the focus, the force, or even the genuine intention to wrought in Venezuela what Athens did to that small island.

Critics kept complaining that his actions breached international law--as if they still believe the liberal interventionist fairy tale that any military action can be “moral” or “just.” There were no long-winded claims of self-defense, no fig leaves of UN mandates, no talk of restoring the rules-based order. Outside some quibbling about drugs and the truly horrific allegation that the Maduro regime possessed “machine guns,” the surface justifications came down to pure power. Venezuela has plenty of oil, and the US is going to take it.

And in that, there is a weary, ancient clarity. It strips away a century’s worth of legalistic varnish to reveal the same old timber beneath--the prerogative of strength. The specific ideology changes costume, but the core melody repeats. Whether it’s a divine right, a civilising mission, or a rules-based order, it all polishes the same brutal axiom. There is nothing new under the sun, as the Biblical verse teaches us--just Trump’s refreshingly raw-dogged rhetoric for that most tired of human impulses.

Yet this reversion brings its own doubt. Marx once quipped that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. What we witnessed felt less like the grim tragedy of past conquests and more like their garish, late-stage simulacrum. The boast lacked the chilling gravity of a true imperial project; it carried the bluster of a performance. One suspects that, under the cover of all that sound and fury, the real outcome will be far more modest: a gradual lifting of sanctions and some quiet deal for limited US investment in Venezuelan infrastructure. Modest transactions to be covered by the rhetoric of callous conquest

This suspicion is hardened by the facts on the ground. Given Venezuela’s sheer size, its mountainous terrain, and the notorious ruthlessness of its criminal syndicates, the place is ripe for insurgency. It is a landscape tailor-made for a long, bloody, invisible war. Any real American occupation—the kind needed to physically secure the vast, scattered oil infrastructure--would demand a massive and permanent garrison.

Worse still, the economics argue against it. Unleashing Venezuela’s full oil potential would take years and colossal investment, and the resulting flood of heavy crude would undercut higher-cost American and Canadian producers. It would be an imperial own-goal--spending blood and treasure to bankrupt your own core industry.

Seen in that cold light, Trump’s Potemkin regime change was the only pragmatic play. It grabs the headline, installs a compliant face, and sidesteps the quagmire. But most important of all, it serves as a stark warning shot for Trump and his controllers’ real priority--Iran.

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By the forest’s edge, a figure stoops to a bone—grasping, parsing, labouring with care. The world is near, close enough to hold, to prise apart, to study in its grain; each detail a truth, each fragment a feast.

Yet this very act of consumption holds a dark reciprocity. The bone it savours was once the limb of another—a creature that, in its own narrow vigilance, saw only the beetle beneath the root, the glint of pattern on a leaf, the small, certain world before its nose. So fixed upon the details, the prey missed the pause in the wind, the silence of the birds, the heavier footfall drawing near.

In turn, the figure eats—but also pauses. Unconsciously a portion of its brain keeps watch; the forest gathers around it like a breath held , a form of prayer. Its awareness loosens from the half-consumed creature to the foreboding thicket at its flank. It prays, not for prey, but for pattern; not for movement, but for meaning—seeking, in that widening stillness, not to become prey itself.

In this double movement—to feast and to avoid becoming feast—are lodged the oldest divisions of mind: the capacity to grasp the particular and the need to sense the whole. Even our language remembers the split: prey and pray, twin syllables sitting cheek by jowl in the human ear, whispering that to live is to attend in two directions at once—to the bone in its immediacy, and to the horizon with a question—an anxious inquiry into what the waiting forest holds in store.

Our minds still bear the imprint of this ancient bifurcation, a lineage from the first animals who had to reconcile two modes of knowing: one that narrows, fixes, and makes the world graspable; another that widens, listens, and feels for its living coherence. Between the two runs the oldest tension in consciousness itself—the need to act, and the need to understand what one’s action belongs to.

The philosopher and neurologist Iain McGilchrist—a thinker who moves between the metaphysical vastness of the humanities and the clinical precision of neuroscience—names these two modes of being the left and right hemispheres. What he describes is not a simple anatomical division, but a living clash of hemispheres: rival forms of attention that coexist, contend, and together shape the world we know.

They are like the sniper and his spotter. The left hemisphere (LH) presses its eye to the scope, isolating the target with lethal clarity; the right hemisphere (RH) sweeps the horizon, reading the wind, the light, and the meaning of the terrain. It is the difference between the emissary who executes and the master who understands, between tactical manoeuvre and strategic vision—each dependent on the other, yet unequally aware of the whole.

McGilchrist’s authority lies in his command of both domains. He moves fluently through the right hemisphere’s world—the realm of metaphor, context, and embodied continuity, long home to poetry, religion, and art—and with equal rigor through the left hemisphere’s world of data, definition, and discrete measurement, the bedrock of modern science. His warning is not moral but structural: the sniper must remain guided by the spotter. Yet our civilization has allowed the emissary to usurp the master, mistaking the bright clarity of his scope for the full field of truth. We have enthroned mechanism over organism, the model over the reality, precision over perspective—a triumph of the LH that risks making us prey to the contexts we have learned to ignore.

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The Neural Counterweight: A System in Balance

To appreciate the high stakes of this cognitive divide, it is essential to move beyond a simplistic caricature. This is not a story of a logical left hemisphere versus an emotional right—a dated notion that belongs in the same basket of errors as the one which held margarine to be healthier than butter.

Instead, McGilchrist presents a more profound and subtle architecture: the brain is an organ of connection, yet it is also profoundly divided. Evidence from split-brain patients reveals two autonomous, parallel streams of consciousness. Intriguingly, this divide is deepening in our evolutionary history; the ratio of brain mass to the corpus callosum—the thick bundle of neural fibres that connects the hemispheres—is getting smaller. Far from being a simple bridge, one of its primary functions is to inhibit the other hemisphere, allowing for specialized, undisturbed processing. It is less a corridor of cooperation and more of a neural firewall.

This functional divide is etched into the brain’s very anatomy. The human skull may be symmetrical, but the brain is not. It is as if the whole structure has been given a sharp, clockwise twist: the right hemisphere is broader in the frontal lobe, the seat of contextual understanding, while the left is broader in the occipital lobe. This physical asymmetry reflects a deep functional one.

The LH’s gift is its narrowly focused attention, akin to a bird pecking food from specific pebbles on a beach. It is optimized to manipulate the world, and to do so, it requires a simplified, utilitarian version of reality—a cognitive map that “works,” even if it is not the territory itself. It operates within a closed, self-consistent system that can achieve a sterile perfection, but at the price of emptiness.

The RH, in contrast, is broadly vigilant, constantly scanning not just the pebbles but the entire beach, the sky, and the horizon for the shadow of a hawk. It is the source of our embodied engagement with a complex, flowing world. It understands individuals, not just categories; it grasps implicit meanings and metaphor. It is, in a sense, the brain’s built-in “devil’s advocate,” seeing everything in its context and challenging the left’s certainties.

The key to a healthy mind—and by extension, a healthy culture—is not choosing one over the other, but achieving a dynamic balance under the rightful guidance of the right hemisphere. We need the LH to manipulate the world, but we need the RH to understand the context well enough to manipulate it effectively. This is the neurobiological foundation of strategic empathy.

Our frontal lobes provide the crucial pause, the distance from the immediate present. This distance is the regulator of this balance. Stand too close to the world, and you simply “bite”—a reactive, LH-loaded state of literalness and impulse. Stand too far back, and you risk the ivory tower—an RH-loaded state of abstract theorizing untethered from practical reality, your head in the clouds. But find the right distance, and the same cognitive space enables both Machiavellian calculation and profound compassion. The ultimate wisdom lies in recognizing that the sniper must always take his cue from the spotter, for the spotter alone sees the true context of the shot.

The Cultural Cortex: East, West, and the Russian Liminal

This neurological hemispheric clash finds a powerful and corroborating echo in the realm of social psychology. While McGilchrist’s primary focus is the Western trajectory, his framework is strikingly illuminated by the work of Richard E. Nisbett in his landmark study, The Geography of Thought. Through decades of empirical work, Nisbett identifies a profound cultural divergence: Eastern Asian societies, shaped by interdependent, agricultural, and Confucian traditions, tend toward holistic thought—perceiving the entire field, valuing context, and accepting contradiction. The Western mind, descended from the individualist, mercantile, and disputatious Greek city-states, leans toward analytic thought—focusing on central objects, categorizing with linear logic, and applying abstract rules.

Though McGilchrist and Nisbett operate from different disciplines, their maps of the mind are strikingly convergent. The holistic thinker, with their attention to the entire field and its relationships, operates in a mode aligned with the right hemisphere’s wide, contextual awareness. The analytic thinker, focusing on decontextualized objects and linear causality, mirrors the left hemisphere’s narrowing, utility-driven focus. It is crucial to stress that this is a matter of cultural emphasis and degree, not a rigid, absolute divide. No society is purely one or the other; rather, cultures cultivate and privilege different balances of these innate human capacities. McGilchrist himself theorizes a civilizational rhythm where nascent cultures lean RH-heavy, but as they consolidate success, the LH inevitably usurps control—often presaging a period of rigidity and decline.

This cultural lens reveals Russia as the world’s quintessential liminal case. Straddling the continents and the cognitive traditions, it has perpetually digested both the holistic, context-laden worldview of the East and the analytic, universalizing impulses of the West. Its history is a long, turbulent negotiation between these two orientations. And in a modern world dominated by a West in thrall to a left-hemisphere worldview, Russia’s own identity has been pushed, in reaction, toward its right-hemispheric pole.

To understand the sputtering diplomatic encounters between a Russian President like Vladimir Putin and a Western leader like Donald Trump is to witness this cognitive liminality crashing against a Western analytic frame. It is precisely at this volatile juncture—where Russia’s deep, contextual time, hardened in reaction, meets the West’s demand for immediate, transactional solutions—that the stage was set for the Alaska summit.

Anchors Away in Anchorage

The Alaska summit between the U.S. and Russia can be read as a clash of hemispheres, both cognitive and temporal. President Putin operates with a distinctly right-hemisphere lens: he situates the war in Ukraine not as a momentary border dispute but as a chapter in a millennium-long narrative. In interviews and speeches, he traces a historical line from the 9th-century founding of Kyivan Rus, through the Mongol invasions, Catherine the Great, and the Soviet period, framing the modern Ukrainian state as a historical anomaly. The present conflict is not an isolated event but a disruption in a long civilizational arc.

This temporal depth was concretized in his June 14, 2024, speech—what can be called Istanbul Plus. The “Istanbul” refers to the tentative agreements reached in 2022, which provided a baseline: Ukrainian neutrality and interim security arrangements. The “Plus” is Putin’s subsequent escalation—the formal annexation of four regions and the hardening of terms into non-negotiable realities. His demands—Ukrainian withdrawal from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson; neutral status; demilitarization; and recognition of Crimea and the new territories as Russian—functioned as a hard anchor, rooted in a coherent historical narrative. The right hemisphere thrives on such temporal and contextual continuity: the anchor is stable, rationalized, and capable of withstanding short-term disruptions.

In contrast, the U.S. approach, particularly under Trump, reflected the left hemisphere’s temporal orientation: compressed, immediate, and transactional. Left-hemisphere thinking seeks resolution in the present, measuring success by rapid, concrete outcomes rather than coherence over time. The West’s task is made more difficult by the fact that its own hard anchor—the strategic defeat of Russia and the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders—is no longer achievable, if it ever was. The best the West can now hope for is a frozen conflict along the current front lines, an outcome that would see roughly 80 percent of Ukraine melt into the NATO fold—not a negligible success by any means.

But to reach even a frozen conflict, Putin’s anchor had to be dislodged. The deployment of Steve Witkoff to Moscow was the left hemisphere’s masterstroke: a tactical, improvisational gambit aimed at reframing the entire engagement. The proposal he carried was a classic re-anchoring manoeuvre. It reportedly required only a Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas, seemingly leaving portions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson under Ukrainian control—seen as a significant retreat from Putin’s “maximalist” demands. Astoundingly, Putin initially accepted this as a new basis for talks. For a fleeting moment, Trump’s left-hemisphere ingenuity had succeeded: present-tense pragmatism had opened a crack in the wall of historical continuity.

Yet at the Alaska summit, the manoeuvre unravelled. When Putin sought confirmation, Trump hesitated, deferred to allies, and then performed a devastating pivot: he recast the Witkoff proposal as Russia’s position, transforming a potential shared baseline into a unilateral ceiling. The negotiations were suddenly cast into an anchorless void. This incoherence culminated weeks later when Trump first announced, then abruptly cancelled, a Budapest summit, blaming Moscow’s return to “maximalist” demands. In this sequence, the fatal limit of the left-hemisphere mode was laid bare: its brilliance in destabilizing the old is unmatched, but its capacity to build and sustain a new reality is brittle. It can pull up an anchor but cannot set a new, durable one.

Meanwhile, Putin’s right-hemisphere cognition is engineered to endure such turbulence. Deprived of his previous anchor by Witkoff, Putin can simply re-anchor the discussion in his own deep time. He can revert to Istanbul Plus or advance to an Istanbul Plus Plus, now invoking the open-ended historical concept of Novorossiya—a move that requires no listing of specific oblasts but implies an endless frontier. The structure is fundamentally fractal: the core demands for neutrality, demilitarization, and territorial acquisition are repeated and enlarged, replicating the same strategic shape at different scales. Like the branching of a tree, the form renews itself while remaining recognizably whole. This recursive self-similarity is the genius of right-hemisphere cognition, which perceives—and weaves—coherence through the chaos of change.

The left hemisphere, by contrast, demands closure—an endpoint, a result, a frozen snapshot. But the right sees time and history as living forms, ramifying like rivers, growing in asymmetry yet retaining order. It is not a linear progress toward resolution but an unfolding of meaning that deepens with each return.

In this light, the fraught dialogue between Washington and Moscow itself functions as a kind of geopolitical corpus callosum—a necessary, if flawed, connection between two irreconcilable cognitive worlds. Its purpose is not to create harmony, but to manage the tension, to transmit signals of threat and opportunity across the divide, and to inhibit one side from fully overwhelming the other. That the talks in Alaska occurred at all is a testament to this imperative. That they failed so spectacularly reveals the weakness of the connection.

In the end, the right hemisphere abhors the very drift the left hemisphere creates; it seeks a coherence across time that the left, in its pursuit of a conclusive present, is blind to. This is the perennial tension—not just of the Alaska summit, but of the mind itself: the need to act and the need to belong to a story that outlasts the action. It is the ultimate lesson of the forest: to see only the immediate target or tree is to miss the pattern of the whole, and to risk, in the final reckoning, becoming a feast for a timeline you never learned to see.

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Amidst the fanfare of a self-proclaimed Nobel Peace Prize quest, a quieter, more troubling truth seeps from Washington: the means for war is running low. This new lexicon of peace-making is merely a superficial script laid over a deepening material deficit. It speaks of a landscape where weapons depots stand as hollow silos, munition assembly lines stutter, and a grim realization dawns: the US cannot feed the forever wars of the future with the depleting dregs of past production.

Ignore the noise; decode the signal. The kerfuffle over Chinese rare earths, the tawdry theatre of a Gaza ceasefire, the geopolitical whiplash where a Tomahawk missile threat today crystalizes into a chummy summit tomorrow—these are not discrete events. They are surface tremors, the inevitable shudders along a single, profound fault line. This is the push-pull of a power straddling a parallax gap, its schizoid diplomacy—lacking all object constancy—turning existential foes into photo-op partners in the blink of an eye.

After decades of the West favouring the spectral world of finance over the solidity of production, a reckoning arrives. The empire’s offshored material base—mines, forges, factories, and circuits—is now in open rebellion against the ideological superstructure that once commanded it. The pipelines of tangible power are fraying, jammed with the geopolitical detritus of a fractured world, even as the torrent of facile finance swells Wall Street vaults.

Behind the high-minded appeal for peace now stands a naked plea for time. Time to salvage the remaining arsenal. Time to jump-start a stalled engine of production. Conciliation covers a calculated retreat, masking a core fear: that the thrum of the factory floor, the definitive catalyst of geopolitical power, is fading to black in the West.

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Gaslighting the Russian Lava Flow

The latest peace gambit from US President Trump coincides not with a stalemate, but with the relentless advance of Russian forces, a viscous flow of men and steel consuming eastern Ukraine. This martial lava, methodical and elementally patient, now threatens to encircle and engulf seven critical Ukrainian strongholds: Volchansk, Kupyansk, Seversk, Liman, Katerinovka, Pokrovsk, and Hulyapole. From the front lines to the energy grid, the assault is total; nightly strikes on Kiev’s infrastructure are a deliberate campaign to plunge the nation into a pre-modern darkness. Even the Dnieper River, a natural barrier, is no longer a limit, as Russian units reportedly established a new bridgehead at Kherson.

To this unfolding reality of blood and steel, the Western response has been, overwhelmingly, a discursive one: a desperate, repeated incantation of a single word—halt!

This is the essence of gaslighting a lava flow: insisting that the desolate landscape is not overrun, that the advancing front is an illusion, that a counteroffensive will turn the tide and that the problem can be resolved with the right turn of a phrase. The performative chaos of the Trump administration is the purest expression of this. His cycle of Tomahawk threats to Budapest summits is a symptom of geopolitical narcissism—an attempt to replace the material battlefield with a psychological one where his will alone should be decisive. Trump is, in effect, psychologizing the old Bolshevik maxim attributed to Lenin: ‘Probe with a bayonet. If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, push.’

Trump’s theatrical probes are designed to manufacture leverage, allowing him to pivot from strongman to peacemaker. The critical question is what Trump’s bayonet is striking? Has Putin turned to mush by lowered his demands as is so often reported in the West? Is he on the verge of accepting a frozen conflict? If so, then by all means Trump should continue playing his mind games.

At the very least, this process is exposing a critical schism within the Russian elite. Kremlin hawks regard Trump’s volatile posturing as an opportunity for Russia to manifest its own strength. In response, they are increasingly demanding their own steel—perhaps in the form of an Oreshnik missile strike on Ukrainian government buildings—to shatter the West’s psychological games and to impose the harsh realities of a battlefield superiority that is too often, in their eyes, kept in reserve.

The recent, acrimonious White House meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky, as reported in the Financial Times, suggests the Russian hawk’s pressure is working on both Putin and Trump:

Donald Trump urged Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept Russia’s terms for ending its war in a volatile White House meeting on Friday, warning that Vladimir Putin had said he would “destroy” Ukraine if it did not agree.

The meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents descended many times into a “shouting match”, with Trump “cursing all the time”, people familiar with the matter said.

They added that the US president tossed aside maps of the frontline in Ukraine, insisted Zelenskyy surrender the entire Donbas region to Putin, and repeatedly echoed talking points the Russian leader had made in their call a day earlier.

Though Ukraine ultimately managed to swing Trump back to endorsing a freeze of the current front lines, the acrimonious meeting appeared to reflect the capricious nature of Trump’s position on the war and his willingness to endorse Putin’s maximalist demands.

That Ukraine temporarily swayed Trump back to a ceasefire does not change the fundamental dynamic: the West is still whispering to the lava flow, wish-casting the term “maximalist” like an incantation against a reality it cannot stop. All the while Russia continues to grind its way forward.

Stages of Peace

Russia’s warfighting strength rests on a living fusion of religious faith and national feeling—a force tempered by an imperial realism that forges diverse peoples into a coherent whole, one capable of both waging war and producing the weapons to sustain it.

The West, in contrast, stands crippled in the realm of collective belief, the disenchantment of wealth leaves in its wake a people bereft of the deeper mythic narrative required to endure the sacrifices of war or the relentless discipline of the factory floor. This fundamental schism—between a culture of material deeds and one of abstract words—is crystallized in the competing architectures for peace, a divergence best understood through the historical lens of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and its critical distinctions between a ceasefire, an armistice, a transition government and a peace treaty.

Stage 0: The Mirage of a Ceasefire (The Western Position)
The immediate goal for Kiev and its Western backers has been a simple, unconditional ceasefire—a strategic gambit to freeze the conflict into a Korean-style stalemate. This would allow a sovereign Ukraine to re-arm and, in time, resume its push for NATO integration. Zelensky has reportedly accepted this ceasefire-only formula. Yet the fatal weakness of such a temporary pause, its inability to resolve the underlying conflict, will be demonstrated in the coming years—not least in the continuing tragedy of Gaza. Against this, Russia insists ad infinitum that the root causes of the war must be disgorged.

However, the Alaska summit explicitly agreed that any ceasefire must await a formal armistice. For Moscow, a mere pause is a non-starter—a cynical replay of the Minsk process, which became a decade-long exercise in “future faking” that Kiev used to build a NATO-grade army. Russia will not again grant its adversaries the time to recover, rearm, retrench, and restart a supposedly frozen conflict. To permit this would be to accept a permanent, NATO-aligned dagger on its border. This Western dream remains a political mirage.

Stage One: The Capitulatory Armistice
What Russia demands as the true first step is not a pause, but a capitulatory armistice—a signed agreement that codifies Ukrainian defeat. The core demand is a physical withdrawal of the Ukrainian military from at least the Donbass, if not all four contested oblasts. This is the modern equivalent of Bismarck’s victory parade through Paris: a humiliating, public ritual of submission.

As commander-in-chief, Zelensky holds the legal authority to order a retreat. What he cannot do—and what Putin, ever the autistic lawyer, knows perfectly well—is legally transfer sovereignty. Yet a withdrawal, paired with public acceptance of Russian terms, would itself be an ironclad admission of defeat, rendering the legal technicalities moot.

The timing of such a move is a matter of life and death. If Zelensky acts too soon, he will be dead at the hands of nationalist factions long before the armistice is signed. If he waits too long, Western support will evaporate, and the Russian lava flow will simply advance towards Odessa.

Stage Two: A New Regime

If Zelensky survives the armistice signing, elections would immediately follow to ratify Kiev’s new political reality. Russia requires a successor government—a legitimate entity, akin to the French Third Republic that replaced Napoleon III’s empire, endowed with the constitutional authority to enact what the current regime cannot. This would not be a classic puppet state, but a government of national salvation, its mandate to legally sanctify the consequences of military defeat. Its first and final tasks would be the legislative formalities of surrender: the official cession of sovereign territory and the constitutional enshrinement of neutrality.

Stage Three: The Final Peace Treaty
Only with a compliant government in Kiev can the final stage begin. This administration’s sole purpose would be to negotiate and ratify a formal peace treaty, codifying the territorial and political concessions as binding under international law. Once Putin is satisfied, the Special Military Operation would formally end. The process is inherently protracted, likely extending to 2028—a timeline the Kremlin will fiercely pursue to lock in terms before a potential shift in the U.S. presidency.

The critical unknown remains the final price. For the time being, Ukraine’s armed forces are not yet broken enough to accept such humiliating terms. But the longer the war grinds on, the higher the price of peace will elevate. The initial demand for four oblasts and Crimea is already giving way to the hawks’ vision: an eight-oblast formula that severs Odessa and Kharkov from Ukraine for a generation. In this grim logic of lava flows, time is not a neutral arbiter. It is Russia’s ultimate ally.

This potential expansion of Russian war aims is more than a regional conflict; it is the most violent expression of a global system that has lost its old certainties. The traditional models of power, which assumed a stable hierarchy, can no longer account for a world where outcomes are not decreed but forged in the unstable interplay of competing realities.

From Hierarchy to Tension: A Simondonian View of Global Power

Traditional realist thinking—from Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue to Bismarck in the halls of Versailles—imagined international relations as a fixed hierarchy. The strong dictated terms; the weak complied or were destroyed. Power, in this classical geometry, was stable, visible, and cyclical: empires rose, overreached, and fell in patterns as predictable as the tides.

But today’s rivalry between the United States and its challengers, China and Russia, no longer fits this model. The world is no longer a finished pyramid of power but a charged field of unresolved tension—crackling with potential energy, perpetually shifting, never at rest.

To grasp this new condition, the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon proves essential. Writing in mid-twentieth-century France, Simondon sought to understand how things come into being—not as static objects, but as processes of perpetual formation. He proposed that individuals—whether a crystal, an organism, or a society—emerge from a metastable state. This is a condition of precarious, charged tension, distinct from both stable equilibrium and chaotic instability. A metastable system holds its shape, like a thundercloud, yet is seething with internal differences that threaten to transform it entirely. It has not yet resolved into a new, stable form; it is a crucible of potential, alive with the tensions that will generate its future.

In this view, geopolitical stability is not the default state of being but a temporary, hard-won resolution. Conflict and tension are not aberrations to be eliminated; they are the very engine of individuation—the creative force from which new realities emerge.

The heart of this creative tension is what Simondon called a disparation—the coexistence of two disparate scales of reality that cannot yet communicate or resolve into a single, coherent whole. This is not a simple conflict of interests, but a fundamental incommensurability. It is this precise dynamic of disparation that now defines the geopolitical condition of the twenty-first century.

On the material scale, the world has entered a new equilibrium that Washington has not yet fully accepted. The United States remains powerful, but its relative dominance is eroding. China’s economy, already larger by some measures, continues to expand its industrial and technological base, while Russia, despite sanctions and isolation, has consolidated military and resource advantages that the West cannot easily replicate. Supply chains, energy networks, and trade corridors now trace increasingly Eurasian routes. In material terms, parity is no longer hypothetical—it has arrived.

Yet on the ideological and moral scale, asymmetry endures. From the American perspective, neither China’s one-party state nor Russia’s civilizational authoritarianism can ever be accepted as legitimate equals to liberal democracy. To grant that recognition would be to renounce the moral architecture of the post-war order itself. Thus, while material parity is an unacknowledged empirical fact, moral parity remains a metaphysical impossibility.

These two logics—the de facto reality of multipolar power and the de jure vision of a U.S.-led moral order—are fundamentally incompatible. They coexist without synthesis, producing what might be called a “dialogue of the deaf”: communication without understanding, signalling without exchange, manifested in both the trade bluster with China and the ceasefire flailings with Russia.

This disparation is not a mere flaw in the system—it is its source of energy. The tension between practical equality and moral exclusion generates a kind of geopolitical voltage, a sustained charge that powers our era’s crises, trade wars, and information conflicts. In this light, the American inability to grant full recognition to rivals is not a failure of policy but a technique of control: a way to prevent the global system from releasing its tension—keeping it charged, unstable, and pliable.

This emerging tripartite order mirrors the old medieval hierarchy of estates—those who pray, those who fight, and those who work—each now animated by its own sacred text. The United States, the preaching estate, follows the catechism of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, convinced that the sermon of liberal democracy must close the human story. Russia, the fighting estate, draws its strategic logic from Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, viewing the world as a theatre of armed faiths where cultures must defend their sacred frontiers. Meanwhile, China, the working estate, reads Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia not as a prophecy of collapse but as a manual of flows—a practical guide to mastering the storm of global capital without ever freezing its dynamic processes into a rigid dogma.

Using Simondon’s ideas, the international order is not static but pre-individual, still forming itself. The conflict between the U.S.-led world and the emerging multipolar one is an engine of a planetary transformation.

If classical realism pictured the world as a chessboard—fixed pieces on a stable grid—the Simondonian view reveals it as a planetary weather system. Reality here is not a geometry of positions but a field of tensions in perpetual individuation, an atmosphere whose pressure gradients of power and ideology give rise not to a single storm, but to a climate of ceaseless transformation. Lightning-flash diplomacy is followed by the monsoon’s long saturation; tornadoes of conflict dissolve into moments of uncanny stillness, themselves dense with latent energy. The horizon never clears. What we call “the future” is simply the next modulation of turbulence—a world metastable by nature, always resolving and re-forming in the same vital tempest.

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Even as a ceasefire in Gaza seems to take root, it feels less like the end of a war than a strategic timeout—a pause on one stage to prepare for a larger tragedy elsewhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already begun redirecting Washington’s gaze toward Iran, warning that Tehran’s missiles may soon reach the American mainland. Any hesitation among American influencers to sell a US strike on Iran could imperil his grand designs.

As the geopolitical stakes rise, the tempo of Israel’s information warfare must quicken—what Israeli analysts themselves call the “Eighth Front.” Netanyahu has personally stepped into the fray, granting interviews to rigidly orthodox pro-Israel figures like Ben Shapiro and Dinesh D’Souza. This direct intervention responds to a shocking shift within the American right: prominent voices, while not yet totally abandoning Israel, have begun to question the dogma of unconditional fealty. Figures such as Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and, in his final weeks, Charlie Kirk, have all signalled varying degrees of disillusionment with the Jewish state and its dogmas. To a person, they oppose the idea of American boys dying in Iran.

If sentiment toward Israel lies on a spectrum from ten (unabashed devotion) to zero (tenacious hostility), these conservative voices have slipped from ten’s to seven’s or six’s. From an American vantage point, they remains staunchly pro-Israel. But from Israel’s perspective, anything short of a perfect ten looks suspect. In wartime, ambiguity reads as betrayal—especially in a conflict where tens of thousands of children are being killed.

And so, as the drums of war against Iran beat louder, Israel needs the heavy artillery of influencer tens—the perfect dimes, not the mediocre mids—to drag America into yet another Middle Eastern war.

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Déjà Vu—Israel’s Civilizational Mission

It was in this context that Netanyahu, during his interview with Shapiro, offered a familiar refrain about Israel’s historic mission to Western civilization:

“We are fighting the battle of the free world—the battle to prevent the barbarians from conquering the Middle East, storming into Europe, and then attacking the United States. I’m very proud of our soldiers, who in defending ourselves so courageously, are also defending all of free civilization.”

The grandiosity of the claim is unmistakable. For a small nation dependent on the maternal generosity of the United States, to posture as the saviour of “free civilization” carries the unmistakable stench of narcissism. Yet Netanyahu’s rhetoric is not new. It echoes almost verbatim the vision articulated by Theodor Herzl in Der Judenstaat more than a century earlier:

“Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home… We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.”

Herzl’s vision arose from the trauma of failed Jewish emancipation in Europe. The Dreyfus Affair and the pogroms of the Russian Pale revealed that the promise of integration had collapsed. Emancipation, meant to be a birth into modernity, instead created a new vulnerability—recognition without acceptance. Driven by this European anti-Semitism, Herzl imagined salvation in a state of refuge.

Yet even as he urged Jews to flee Europe’s cruelty, he continued to cast it as the object of his affection—the civilization to be defended from the barbaric figure of “Asia.” The Israeli would become Europe’s loyal son, guarding its frontiers and upholding its values. The persecuted would return as protector, seeking redemption through service to the very power that had rejected him.

What emerges in Herzl’s formulation is a strange reciprocity of dependency: Israel offers to protect the West in exchange for the West’s protection. It is a child’s bargain—I will defend you if you promise never to abandon me—a contract of mutual emotional reassurance disguised as strategic partnership. Beneath the language of civilization and security lies an emotional economy of need, a trade of loyalty for love.

And beneath that civilizational fantasy runs a deeper current still. In casting “Asia” and the “barbarians” as the enemy, Israel preserves its exclusive bond with the Western maternal figure. The tyrannical father—symbolized by the rejected, threatening East—is banished from the scene, ensuring that the primal dyad remains intact. To keep the mother’s love undivided, the paternal other must remain monstrous, unknowable, and safely outside the gates.

Netanyahu’s rhetoric of “civilization versus barbarism,” now aimed at Iran, thus circles back to this ancient family drama. The barbarian is not merely the external enemy but the fantasy figure that sustains the dependent child’s sense of purpose. So long as “barbarians” threaten from without, the son remains indispensable to the mother’s safety—and the father’s absence goes unnoticed. This is the structural trap of the US–Israel relationship: an endless theatre of protection that forestalls separation.

Netanyahu seems dimly aware of this dependency and how it may conflict with the ethos of the American right. In his conversation with Shapiro, he offered reassurance to uneasy Republicans, lest they start to see him as a welfare queen:

“You know, when I first became prime minister in 1996… I said… We can support ourselves. Thank you, America… We’re going to phase [economic aid] out. We don’t need it. Now I’m telling you that we can achieve military self-sufficiency.”

It is the adolescent’s empty declaration of independence—I don’t need you anymore, Mother—even as the allowance continues to flow. In an era when Western economic sanctions themselves are weapons of war, the fantasy of Israeli economic independence, as billions in weapons flow toward the IDF, borders on delusion.

Hidden Fathers

In a brutal parody of Herzl and Netanyahu, right-wing identitarian provocateur Nicholas Fuentes now weaponizes the same civilization-versus-barbarism language, declaring:

“Here’s my program for America: we’re gonna take all the tiny hats and towelheads, put them on a ship and send them back to the f***ing Middle East.”

Fuentes does not reject the structure of Herzl’s myth—only its casting. He flips the roles, placing both Jews and Muslims on the same side of the divide as the “barbarian” other, signalled by their strange headgear. His revolt is not only ideological but fraternal: the rage of the abandoned son. If Israel is the adopted, indulged child—the one a motherly America cannot refuse—then Fuentes represents the firstborn son, displaced and humiliated by maternal rejection. His hysterical rhetoric masks the deeper wound of jealousy: the pain of seeing his mother’s unconditional love bestowed upon another.

Fuentes’ outbursts are thus not the voice of the father returned, but the tantrum of a son fantasizing about finally having one. His fixation on purity, order, and hierarchy performs the missing paternal function through parody—an attempt to conjure the father’s authority where none exists. What he offers is not a law but a costume of law, a childish simulation of discipline meant to restore lost structure.

The Family Drama of American Politics

In Moral Politics, cognitive linguist George Lakoff argues that the great divide in American political life stems from a primal metaphor: the nation as a family. In this schema, government plays the parent, and citizens are the children. Lakoff, a progressive himself, outlines two competing family models. The conservative “Strict Father” emphasizes discipline, hierarchy, and self-reliance, viewing aid as indulgence that weakens character. The liberal “Nurturant Parent,” by contrast, prizes empathy and care, seeing support as a way to help children flourish.

Yet Lakoff’s framework is lopsided. The conservative father is a vivid, embodied archetype—stern, protective, morally absolute—while the liberal counterpart is abstracted into a genderless, therapeutic presence. The metaphor loses its charge. To restore balance, the counterpart must be named for what it is: the “Nurturing Mother,” not as a biological figure, but as a symbolic principle of care, interdependence, and emotional management. Her compassion softens the father’s authority, but unchecked, it slides toward overprotection—an indulgence that confuses love with rescue.

This makes the US posture toward Israel especially revealing. Ordinarily, Democrats and Republicans enact their archetypal roles: the left as the empathetic mother, the right as the stern father. But on Israel, the pattern collapses. The Strict Father is banished as dangerous—his voice condemned as anti-Semitic—while both parties converge in a single maternal posture of unconditional protection. As former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz once declared, there should be “no daylight” between the parties on support for Israel. That phrase is pure maternal fusion: the refusal of separation, the promise never to withdraw warmth.

No one performs this indulgent motherhood more completely than the boomer establishment wing of the GOP. Their embrace of Israel has less to do with strategy than with sentimentality—a yearning to nurture a child who eternally needs protection, a projection of their own fading paternal potency.

Making The Call

The photograph of a stern-faced Donald Trump looking away as Benjamin Netanyahu reads a scripted apology into a telephone captures the essence of their relationship. Trump wants to present as the disciplinarian patriarch, enforcing order upon a dutiful dependent. But a closer look reveals a more complex and feminine dynamic. The power here is not the direct, confrontational energy of the Strict Father. A truly masculine, paternal intervention would have been a private affair—a closed-door meeting where the supposed breach of strategy was addressed directly, consequences were outlined, and order was restored through sober authority, not public theatre.

What we see instead is the passive-aggressive, emotionally manipulative power of the Nurturing Mother as warden. The key detail is the landline telephone resting on Trump’s lap. He does not merely command the action; he physically controls the very instrument of communication, like a parent handing a child the phone to deliver a forced apology. Netanyahu, for his part, plays the part of the repentant child, reading mommy’s scripted words makes this scene a performance of contrition, not an internalized lesson. A cynical observer will understand Trump had probably pre-approved the Israeli attack, so there is a certain incestual complicity added to this family drama.

Trump’s averted gaze completes the picture: it is the weaponized withdrawal of approval, a classic maternal tactic. This is not about enforcing a rule so much as it is about stage-managing a ritual of submission to restore the mother’s sense of social harmony. The United States, under this model, is not a stern father but a possessive matriarch, one who wields indulgence as a tool of control and whose displeasure is expressed not in a roar of anger, but in the temporary silence of a withheld glance.

Weak Fathers Spawn Feral Sons

But within the right, a darker energy now stirs. The populist America First fringe—figures like Nick Fuentes and his online cohort—are not the Strict Father’s heirs, but his abandoned and feral sons. Their rebellion is a scream of paternal betrayal, aimed at a GOP establishment they see as having nurtured a rival child in Israel. Denied a strong father to mediate this dyad, they now enact a violent, juvenile parody of paternal authority themselves, seeking to sever the cuckolded bond and claim the motherland's undivided love through the brutal logic of identitarian exclusion.

Their rage is double-edged: directed upward at the paternal GOP hierarchy and outward at Israel, the chosen sibling who monopolizes parental love. In this symbolic economy, every billion in US aid to Israel becomes another wound, proof that the father’s affection has been misdirected. Their anti-Israel animus is less geopolitical than Oedipal—a rebellion against the father’s law and a desperate bid to reclaim the mother’s love.

The intensity of this resentment cannot be grasped through Lakoff’s gentle metaphors of parental style. It belongs to a darker register, where love, envy, and punishment blur; where family politics become myth; and where the fantasy of patricide—destroying the father to possess the mother—drives the political unconscious of the American right.

The Eternal Return of the Filial Revolt

The fractious tension between the America First feral son and the GOP's deadbeat dad is more than a contemporary political anomaly; it is the latest enactment of a primordial drama that has haunted the Western imagination since its inception. This struggle between generations for legitimacy, authority, and the keys to the kingdom is a deep, recurring script in our collective consciousness, one where the son must inevitably confront the law—and lack—of the father.

This archetypal conflict manifests as a persistent theme with several devastating variations. The most direct is the Greek myth of the usurping son, epitomized by Oedipus, who unknowingly slays his father, King Laius, and seizes his throne and queen. This is the foundational narrative of patricide, where the son’s ascent requires the father’s literal or symbolic obliteration.

A more nuanced look at the Oedipus myth, however, reveals that the father, King Laius, is the true architect of the tragedy. Terrified by a prophecy that his son would kill him, Laius maims the infant Oedipus, piercing his ankles, and abandons him to die on a mountainside. It is this primal act of paternal betrayal—the father’s attempt to murder his son—that sets the entire horrific sequence in motion. Oedipus is saved by a shepherd and raised by a rival king. When he later hears a prophecy that he will slay his father and marry his mother, he flees in horror to avoid this fate—only to encounter an arrogant older man on a narrow road. When the man strikes him, Oedipus kills him in retaliation, unknowingly fulfilling the very prophecy his flight was meant to prevent. The central crime of patricide is thus not a son’s unprovoked ambition, but the disastrous fulfilment of a father’s paranoid violence.

A more theologically complex version is that of the replacing son. In the Christian narrative, Jesus, the Son, can be interpreted as superseding the Old Covenant of the Father—Yahweh's exclusive pact with the Jewish people. By universalizing grace and opening the borders of chosenness to all believers, the Son redefines the very terms of inheritance and legitimacy, creating a permanent theological tension with the original "chosen people" being subject to a transcendental “Great Replacement.”

Odin Complex

Yet these narratives, even with this crucial nuance, still position the son as the primary agent of the final, tragic act. The Norse myths, as analysed by Vera Henriksen, introduce a darker, more complicating archetype where the father's agency is central and unambiguous: the jealous father.

Here, the chief god Odin is not a passive victim but an active, ambivalent agent in his son Balder's fate. Drawing on psychological readings, Henriksen suggests that Odin’s aspects—including the trickster Loki and the blind executioner, Balder’s brother Hod—represent the fractured psyche of a father who, caught between "pride and love" on one hand and "jealousy" on the other, seemingly orchestrates the death of his brilliant heir.

The myth is further charged by the "overly close mother–son relationship" between Frigg and Balder, which Henriksen posits as a catalyst for the father's pathological envy. This dynamic presents an inversion: the "Odin complex," a father's murderous rivalry with his son.

This Norse lens reveals a terrifying political truth: a father’s authority can be corroded not just by external rebellion, but from within by a toxic blend of insecurity and jealousy. The tyrannical father is not always dethroned by his sons; sometimes, he pre-emptively sacrifices his heirs.

In the modern mythological frame, the sacrificial Balder is the late Charlie Kirk—a golden child of the conservative movement who, in his final days, was said to have seen a new "light" and turned against unconditional support for Israel. For the populist fringe, his subsequent, shocking death inevitably feels like a hit ordered from the highest levels of the Odin-like deep-state / Mossad pantheon. And rising in the ensuing chaos is a potential Thor in the form of Nick Fuentes—a god not of luminous wisdom but of raw, emotional fury, whose power lies in channelling populist rage with a hammer's force.

Father's Law versus Son's Desire: The Oedipal Triangle

The concept that would become the cornerstone of psychoanalysis has its roots in a humiliating childhood memory. The young Sigmund Freud was walking with his father, Jakob, when an anti-Semite knocked the older man's new fur cap into the mud, shouting, "Jew! Get off the pavement!"

Freud’s father’s response was one of passive acquiescence; he simply stepped into the gutter and retrieved his cap. For the son, this was a profound betrayal. The father—the figure who should embody invincible authority—had been revealed as weak in the face of a hostile social order. This moment crystallized a central Oedipal theme: the son’s disillusionment with the father and the simmering, shame-filled desire to surpass him.

A similar, collective shame now animates the America First rebellion. Today’s right-wing Zoomer men watch their political fathers in the MAGA movement, whose hats symbolize a promise to stand firm, and see them kowtowing to a foreign nation. They see their leaders' authority figuratively knocked into the mud by demands that "Israel come first," and their acquiescence feels like a betrayal of their own America First creed. The paternal authority, which should be defending its own tribe, is once again revealed as weak.

From this seed of paternal failure grew Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. In its classical formulation, it describes the child's unconscious desire for the exclusive possession of the mother, which brings him into a rivalrous conflict with the father. The father is perceived as a threatening, castrating power who forbids this incestuous union. For the boy to resolve this complex, he must renounce his desire for the mother and, crucially, identify with the father. He internalizes the father's authority, which becomes the bedrock of his own superego—the psychic agency of morality and law. The father is the one who says "No."

This is the critical failure in the US--Israel relationship. A true paternal function requires the imposition of law and limit. Yet Donald Trump, while posturing as the Strict Father to his domestic base, refuses to say "No" to Netanyahu. By never imposing its authority, the United States remains stuck in the maternal function for Israel—a source of unconditional nourishment and protection, but not of law. This refusal to enact the paternal "No" prevents the necessary Oedipal resolution, trapping both nations in an infantilizing dyad and fuelling the patricidal rage of the sons who see their inheritance being given away.

Death in Persia

This America First filial rebellion is not merely ideological; it is fuelled by a primal, biological fear. The ancient Greek tragedian Euripides gave voice to a timeless dread when he wrote, "It is a terrible thing for old men to send the young to die." For the Zoomer cohort, this is not an abstract literary theme but a palpable political reality. They see a gerontocracy of "decrepit boomers"—playing the Nurturing Mother to a foreign dependent—whose geopolitical feud with Iran threatens to become a war that they will be sent to fight. The rebellion, then, is a pre-emptive strike. It is a refusal to be the sacrificial generation for the mother's favourite son—a raw, Oedipal explosion of rage against a paternal void that offers not protection, but betrayal.

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With political figures, I tend to have what might be called an avoidant attachment style: I remain largely emotionally uninvested, neither loving nor hating them, though I come closest to breaking that rule with figures like Lindsey Graham or Victoria Nuland. My attachments, instead, follow what I think of as concentric circles of empathy: first toward my own family, then outward to those who resemble them, and ultimately to humanity at large. Yet the innermost, most visceral circle is reserved for the young. It is this empathy that constricts my heart when I witness boys dying—boys who could be my sons—in the relentless slaughter of Ukraine and Gaza, where children perish in staggering numbers every day.

Charlie Kirk was a father of two young children. I know through close friends the lifelong anguish of growing up fatherless—a pain his own children will now face. Yet my most immediate reaction to the assassination was not to his death, but to the sight of an older man being arrested (mistakenly it turned out) for the crime. The image of the old harming the young recalled the grotesque inversion of natural order I witnessed during the Covid years, when risk was systematically pushed downward onto the young for the benefit of the old. In these moments, society contorts the concentric circles of duty and empathy: instead of nurturing the young as carriers of the future, it sacrifices them upon an altar of affluence and its concomitant disorder.

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Yahweh, Satan, Job and His Wife

As someone generally uninvested in the two establishment parties, I was nonetheless aware of Charlie Kirk—primarily as the nemesis of Nick Fuentes, two forces vying to corral today’s right-wing youth. What struck me most about Kirk was how anachronistic he seemed: essentially a millennial Mitt Romney, tasked with marketing his political fathers’ failing boomer conservatism to its primary victims—the despairing Zoomer generation (born 1995–2010), confronting unprecedented economic and social pressures.

This generational tension deepens when refracted through myth. In the Book of Job, Yahweh and Satan lounge together in heaven, sharing an eerily cordial conversation about the faith of a single earthbound man. Yahweh extols Job’s integrity; Satan cynically suggests it’s merely the fruit of privilege. Their bet resolved, Job is stripped of comfort, family, and fortune. In the nadir of suffering, Job’s wife reactively urges him to curse the very deity they both once revered.

Fuentes assumes the role of Job’s wife in the political realm, tempting his cohort to break from reverence. He is the Zoomer Francisco Franco: Catholic, strident, nationalist, rhetorically symbolizing the return of yesterday’s hard men. While Kirk urges his audiences to “stay the course” and endure, Fuentes pushes for transgression—profaning the icons of today: Jews, blacks, women, even the Trump administration. It is this last target that brought him into the mainstream eye; there is no critic of Trump more devastating than Fuentes, which paradoxically is why major outlets have platformed him.

Kirk’s political “fathers” are tangible, anchored in the boomer establishment and the machinery of governance, demanding that he subsume his interests to the reigning order. The “Israel Question,” for example, exposed the gut-wrenching tension between his personal inclinations and the expectations of power. Fuentes, by contrast, is unburdened by living patriarchs—his “fathers” are spectral, the fascist ghosts of generations past, granting him rhetorical and imaginative freedom.

This dynamic mirrors psychoanalytic insight: hatred and aspiration displaced onto surrogate father figures—a classic ego-ideal transfer. Two archetypes emerge: the resented, reactive father as locus of grievance, and the aspirational, idealized father as site of creative emulation.

What was once latent in Fuentes’s rhetoric emerges in recent Zoomer doubts about whether the “right side” even won the Second World War, invoking General Patton’s controversial suggestion that the U.S. may have fought the wrong enemy. The despair fuelling these doubts is rooted in real precarity. As Fuentes puts it: “Debt slavery. Never owning a house, never owning a car, never paying off their school. Never making an income to support a family. Not being able to have a family.” Who really did win World War 2?

Fuentes’s program might be called a reactive re-filiation, a fantasy in which the Greatest Generation would have chosen fascist cohesion over liberal-capitalist dissolution. Dubious as it is, the example of Communist China shows how a disciplined, homogenous, hierarchical state can achieve what fascist America might have dreamed.

Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives, anticipated modern theory: true understanding arises not from binaries but from the productive power of relation. He paired Caesar with Alexander for contrast, not opposition. Kirk and Fuentes, too, are not fixed adversaries but generative dyads—mutual shapers whose interplay produces pressures, meanings, and outcomes neither could secure alone.

The Browning of White Supremacy

Dealing with the Zoomer world is challenging for us oldsters because their language is highly creative, ironic, and layered. If Rush Limbaugh had his Dittoheads, Nick Fuentes commands his own angry army: the Groypers.

The origin of the term “Groyper” remains unclear and elusive—a fitting reflection of the playful ambiguity central to Zoomer meme culture. First attested around 2015, the name is closely tied to a rotund, contemplative frog image, various hypotheses about the word’s roots circulate: some suggest a blend of “goy” (a non-Jew or Gentile) and “griper” (a habitual complainer); others propose a play on “grope” or an onomatopoeic nod to a toad’s croak. Yet none commands consensus, and the term’s meaning remains fluid and multi-layered—resisting fixed interpretation while embodying the movement’s ethos of boundary-testing through irony and coded language—the height of postmodernism.

The movement gained notoriety in the so-called “Groyper Wars” of 2019, when Fuentes’s followers confronted Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA events, ambushing panels with loaded questions on Israel, immigration, and cultural issues. For these young dissidents, a “Groyper” became a Gentile challenger, someone who would confront the Zionist-friendly right from an implicitly America First perspective.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and near-uniform Republican support for Israel, with Democrats muted and hesitant, many young people desperate for critique have found their clarion in Fuentes. This is the double bind: to support the most scathing critic of Israel and its bipartisan American enablers means embracing a provocateur with open fascist tendencies.

Fuentes himself—an ethnic amalgam of Mexican, Italian, and Irish ancestry—is as magnetic at the microphone as he is ideologically transgressive. The establishment media, drawn to the spectacle and the fractures he exposes, recently granted him and the Groypers space in The New York Times and The Atlantic. Their interest: the insurrection on the right led by Fuentes, including his threats to turn his movement toward Gavin Newsom in 2028. With trademark provocation, he praises the all-American whiteness of Newsom’s family—an almost parodic jab at both Republican performative multiculturalism and Democratic racial neuroticism. On JD Vance he delivers another: “You can’t make me go and vote for some fatass with a mixed-race family.” Trolling is both method and message.

In one remarkable monologue, Fuentes transgressed both partisan lines and racial taboos, when he brutally chastised Stephen Miller, a Jewish immigration hawk who currently serves as the White House deputy chief of staff. When Stephen Miller insulted “white liberal women,” Fuentes rejected any right wing partisan alliance with Miller, and instead claimed a more primal racial filiation with left wing women. He threw down a racial gauntlet, bluntly inviting Miller to move back to Israel if he could not accept all political shades of the racial founders of America, defending the ideal of whiteness before any partisan loyalty.

The Atlantic article, published prior to Kirk’s murder, highlighted the divergent approaches Fuentes and Kirk took toward Trump:

In June, many MAGA figures adjusted their positions after Trump attacked Iran. At the time, Charlie Kirk wrote on Facebook that he was open to America supporting regime change in Iran; a few months earlier, he’d posted on X that, under Trump, “America has a golden opportunity to pull away from Middle East quagmires for good.” By contrast, Fuentes criticized Trump directly: “So delicious watching people defend Trump for the past week because ‘he isn’t doing regime change,’ only for him to immediately start advocating regime change the day after bombing Iran,” he wrote on X.

When the Trump administration refused to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, many pro-Trump figures were unhappy but did not directly attack the president. “I’m going to trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done,” Kirk said at the time. Fuentes took a different approach: “Let us never forget that one year ago today, our President Donald Trump was spared from sudden death by God,” he posted on X. “Trump took a bullet so that he could live to cover up Epstein’s pedophile island and to bomb Iran for Israel.”

This puts the liberal establishment in a paradoxical bind. Fuentes is the most effective critic of Trump’s administration and America’s ongoing support for devastation in Gaza—yet his own ideological values are odious to the mainstream. Do they platform him as he eviscerates the right, or recoil from a man committed to upending every norm of dialogue? By labelling him a white supremacist, their articles serve as a kind of performative hygiene measure, simultaneously condemning and legitimating his rebellion on the right.

The deepest irony is that Fuentes and much of his movement are, at best, “off-white” or often outright mixed-race. Many blacks, Muslims, and disaffected leftists are joining his army, demonstrating that ideology is not a linear spectrum but a circle, where the so-called “extremes” converge.

Moreover, when Tucker Carlson recently referred to Fuentes as “gay” he wasn’t calling him lame, but was instead referencing the word’s more archaic connotation of “homosexual.” Fuentes did not bother to deny this characterization and has been credibly linked to transgender love interests. It seems Zoomer white supremacy is more aspirational and otherworldly, not based on the material reality of genetic ancestry but on the idealization of America’s past—an ideology in which racial, sexual, and political identities circulate, fold, and entangle into monstrous ideological miscegenations.

Over the years, Fuentes repeatedly challenged Kirk to debate him, but Kirk refused to share the stage with what he considered an anti-Semitic, far-right provocateur. Yet when Kirk extended a hand toward civil discourse with the college campus left—“let’s talk this out”—his Antifa-inspired murderer metaphorically answered with a single, brutal bullet: “No, I prefer to shoot you in the neck.”

What Is To Be Done?

It is always difficult to analyse breaking events like the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Narratives shift as new facts emerge, while waves of partisan slop flood the algorithm, trying to pin blame on the opposing faction. Still, it is hard to ignore the grotesque spectacle of progressives posting celebratory TikToks gloating over Kirk’s death—an uncanny echo of Israeli families picnicking on hillsides overlooking Gaza, cheering as airstrikes obliterate lives and buildings below. The human impulse to revel in an adversary’s destruction is the same; only the scale of devastation differs.

In the United States, every act of political violence inaugurates a tense interlude, where rival camps scramble to shape the story—like spin doctors parsing a debate, verbally joisting over the pools of blood. A decade ago, the right reflexively blamed jihadists; the left rehearsed its catechism that the perennial villain—a straight, conservative white male—must be responsible. Today, the scripts have shifted only slightly: the right now rushes to accuse a “transformer” or “troon” (derisive Zoomer slang for a transsexual), while the left clings to its familiar archetype of the dangerous white conservative male.

In Kirk’s case, tragic irony reigned. The shooter embodied a uncanny Hegelian sublation: a white male from a conservative background, shacking up with a male-to-female transsexual. Contradiction did not resolve; it was lifted to a higher plane, simultaneously negated and preserved, proving the illusory quality of identity.

In this macabre game of partisan guessing, the right scored the closer hit—but only on points, not by knockout. Both lovers had grown up in conservative households, yet each in his way rejected his straight father figure, escaping the postmodern gulag of white male otherness by embracing minority sexual identities.

As if the contradictions weren’t baroque enough, the shooter reportedly had links to paramilitary Antifa groups—ostensibly anti-fascist, yet exhibiting the discipline and violence they claim to oppose. Opposition mutates into identity; anti-fascism begins to mirror fascism itself. Here again, Hegel’s sublation is evident: negation is lifted, inverted, and turned into a new, impotent form of the original.

Binaries are treacherous. To define oneself solely by negation risks Nietzsche’s axiom: “He who fights with monsters should take care lest he thereby become a monster.”

Today, the progressive left embraces the act but not the actor—they would have preferred a Groyper. Tyler Robinson may yet rise to the status of Luigi Mangione. And if he were to follow the Chelsea Manning path—transforming into a transsexual martyr—he could ascend into a true icon of progressive reaction.

The right faces its own fork: pursue affirmative systemic change, or fall into static reaction. Already, some call for Kirk’s murder to become a Republican “Jan 6th,” a purge of partisan enemies, with Antifa cast in the villainous role once held by the Proud Boys. Yet many doubt that a comfort-seeking boomer like Trump has the will or focus required for such a campaign.

Here, both sides stumble into the same odd trap: the futile game of “getting even.” Balance is a mirage; equivalence cannot exist. The ledger is always odd, the arithmetic partisan. Was Kirk’s death commensurate with George Floyd’s? Each side insists on its own calculation, and the score is always already uneven.

This is no accident. The political establishment cultivates reactive movements, letting them burn themselves out—Antifa in the streets, January 6th in the halls of Congress. If calls for a “9/10” roundup gain traction, they will be tolerated, perhaps even quietly supported, because reaction is safe. What is missing on both left and right is affirmation: the articulation of a New Order that does not merely negate the old, but creates something radically new.

Endless rounds of reaction provide narcotic comfort, a cocoon where nothing changes. Affirmation is perilous: high-risk, high-reward, capable of catastrophe as easily as renewal. Once again, the story of Job again resonates.

Job endures, suffering without revolt. Satan embodies sterile reactivity, tormenting without risk, secure in the impossibility of victory over Yahweh—yet delighting in the power to inflict destruction. Job’s wife, in contrast, represents a darker, potentially Promethean force: the lure of creative destruction. Her cry to “curse God and die” profanes the sacred, clearing a space where something entirely new might emerge. She offers no promise, only negation—a necessary chaos, the gamble that from destruction something novel may take root, even if the outcome is monstrous.

American politics today oscillates among three vectors: Job’s patient endurance, Satan’s sterile ressentiment, and Job’s wife’s destructive affirmation. Each carries its own peril: one traps us in endless suffering, another perpetuates cycles of revenge, and the third dares the terrifying, high-stakes gamble of a New Order. The question hangs: will America endure as Job, react as Satan, or leap with Job’s wife into the unknown—even if what rises from the flames is hideous?

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We gaze toward a sky dense with stars, but never leave them as they are. Through acts of selection, we trace certain shapes—a dipper, a plough, a lion—enjoining a chosen few while fainter points are relegated, the countless remainder dismissed as mere background. Every constellation is a product of exclusion, setting form against multiplicity.

Such pattern-making, universal to human instinct, answers the need for order: to enclose and shelter ourselves amid cosmic excess. Constellations impose meaning on chaos, anchoring myth and navigation, yet each culture's unique configuration overlays, without erasing, others. Planets—unsettled wanderers—drift through these patterns, quietly reshaping them.

But to draw a constellation is, inevitably, to draw a border. Order emerges in defining figure and ground, establishing the liminal spaces between belonging and displacement. Historiography operates likewise: history is a crowded firmament, its events scattered until chosen moments are bound together, some shining as golden ages, others casting shadows to be avoided. Our navigation—by hope or despair—depends on such selective illumination.

Patterns, however, are fluid. Revisionists—heretics of inherited memory—redraw the historical sky: golden ages recast as times of conquest, dark eras unveiled as fertile silences. This perpetual re-charting sustains historical inquiry—a dialectic between mapped certainties and the uncharted dark.

Empires mirror this labour on the ground, assembling disparate peoples as constellations in an imposed design. Promising order, they construct hierarchies: some lights dominate, others fade. Such arrangements offer orientation, but only by casting entire peoples into shadow.

If a subordinate star claims its own radiance, the drive for independence is set in motion—a singularity sought, even as the coherence of nationhood demands its own internal exclusions. Nationalism fuses divergent lights into apparent unity, mirroring the same process of exclusion by which empires and constellations first took shape. In breaking free, the newly sovereign may eclipse its own “others within,” perpetuating the cycle from marginalization to marginalizer.

Ideology sets the scale, refracting the eternal pattern of inclusion and exclusion through new lenses of sovereignty and belonging.

Today, Europe’s political project attempts radical universalism, dissolving prior national configurations into abstract dissolution—a fate marked by conformist anonymity for stars once vibrant and distinct.

Elsewhere, as in Palestine, Zionism drew a new constellation not alongside but over the old, overwriting and occluding previous lights.

Zionism forged ideological unity from diaspora, anchored in the geography and myth of Zion—aggregating scattered communities into a singular objective, a lodestar amid the shifting constellations of exile. For many, it functioned as a North Star: a point of orientation that promised direction and coherence within historical night. Yet this unity required the eclipse of former ties, replicating the exclusionary logic from which it sought to escape; thus, national self-creation arrived shadowed by new categories of otherness.

The Zionist ideological constellation was composite, assembled from strands of Political, Labour, Revisionist, Cultural, and Religious Zionism—each exerting its own force and sometimes collision. Yet the surrounding darkness remained: Palestinian communities became counterpoints, their own histories and claims colliding with the emergent order, a dialogue of light and shadow.

Constellations are enlivened by planetary wanderers—charismatic leaders whose motion reshapes ideological landscapes. Herzl, Ha’am, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, Kook—all moved among these currents, binding or fracturing them, giving luminous form to projects that, as ever, transformed exclusion into guiding light.

It is the enduring human act: to forge illumination by tracing constellations—selecting stars that align to an ideology—while countless others remain unchosen, scattered in the shadows beyond the constellation’s tragic light.

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Prelude to Zionism: Imperial Strife in Ukraine

The seed of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict was sown not in the sacred soil of Jerusalem but in the shifting borderlands where two waning imperial stars—the Ottoman and Russian empires—clashed. Cities like Odessa and other ports along the Black Sea coastline marked the volatile frontier where Russian and Ottoman ambitions collided, their destinies intertwined with the fate of millions—Jews foremost among them, and the Ukrainian peasantry increasingly stirred amid the tides of upheaval. The conflict’s contested borders, inscribed by imperial collapse rather than ancient prophecy, were forged in the crucible of nineteenth-century geopolitics decades before the First World War would unravel the old order.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the "Eastern Question" obsessed European chancelleries. How could the inevitable decline of the “Sick Man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire, be managed? Russia’s answer was relentless expansionism: southward, toward the warm-water ports of the Black Sea.

Obstructing this advance was the Crimean Khanate, a vassal of Ottoman suzerainty whose economy thrived on slave raids funnelling tens of thousands into Ottoman markets from the steppes of modern Ukraine and southern Russia. By the late eighteenth century, Russia decisively crushed this frontier power, annexing Crimea in 1783 and solemnly declaring victory over Ottoman suzerainty. The khanate’s former borders now overlay Ukraine’s current conflict zones—an eerie echo of the Russian desire for security (against then slave-raiders, now NATO) resulting in creeping imperial expansion.

Concurrently, Russia pressed westward into the fertile Balkans. The Crimean War (1853–1856) was a violent prelude to future confrontations—a desperate British and French coalition willing to curb Russia’s Mediterranean ambitions and preserve the European balance of power. Their dread was that Ottoman collapse would birth a Russian colossus astride vital sea lanes.

That very Black Sea coastline remains today the arena for a tense reprise: Russia versus NATO-backed Ukrainian resistance. This strategic pivot of Eurasia, identified by Zbigniew Brzezinski as the indispensable “grand chessboard,” persists as a perennial geostrategic prize.

From Pale to Palestine

In its imperial expansion, the Russian Empire absorbed millions foreign to the Tsar’s ideal of Orthodox Russian homogeneity. Faced with this challenge—most acutely its vast new Jewish population after partitioning Poland—Russia did not seek assimilation but quarantine.

The solution was the Pale of Settlement. Established in the late eighteenth century and encompassing much of today's Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, the Pale was a vast borderland ghetto—a constellation of confinement. Jews were legally forbidden from residing permanently outside its borders, barred not only from settling in the Russian interior but often from mere travel there. They were seen as a designated alien nation, trapped where imperial tensions were highest.

Prior to 1881, Jewish life within the Pale—though brutal and humiliating—operated under a fragile but established order. Certain Jews could obtain limited permits to travel or reside beyond the Pale, and an exploitative modus vivendi maintained a tense, if unstable, calm.

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 by revolutionaries, with minimal direct Jewish involvement, became the pretext for radical change. The state responded not with targeted justice, but with sweeping collective punishment: the May Laws of 1882. These enacted economic strangulation and accelerated expulsions, transforming the Pale from a zone of containment into an instrument of systemic pressure and exclusion. Polemic Jewish activists of that era may have referred to these settlements as “open-air prisons”—a rash of Gaza-style points of repression, dotting the vast Ukrainian steppe.

The human cost of this shift is reflected in the experience of Chaim Weizmann, a chemist, leading Zionist diplomat, and eventual first president of Israel. Often described as one of the founding fathers of political Zionism and a key figure in securing British support for the movement, Weizmann recalled, as a young man living in the Pale before exile, the absurd humiliation of clandestinely entering Moscow for a meeting only to have it cancelled. Unable to be legally present or seen openly, he was forced to pay a cab driver to circle the city until he could slip back to the Pale by train. His offense was not action but identity—the condition of being an “other within,” a Jew whose very presence beyond the designated zone was deemed unlawful and dangerous.

Pogroms: From Ukraine to Palestine

This shift in imperial policy was accompanied and intensified by a wave of violent outbreaks known as pogroms—organized, often suspected to be state-tolerated attacks against Jewish communities that swept through the Pale and adjoining regions during the 1880s and beyond. Pogroms exceeded mere anti-Semitic fury; they were social catastrophes rooted in the volatile interplay of economic crisis, nationalist agitation, and the Tsarist state’s fragile authority. In these brutal riots, Jewish homes and businesses were looted, communities terrorized, and lives extinguished. The pogroms functioned as instruments of collective punishment and intimidation, signalling the fragility of Jewish existence under imperial rule and the limits of the earlier “stable” containment. For many Jews, pogroms crystallized the necessity of decisive escape or transformation—fuelling emigration, radical political movements, and ultimately, the Zionist project as refuge and national promise.

Yet, to understand pogroms solely as anti-Semitic violence risks oversimplification. Many perpetrators were Ukrainian peasants caught in the turbulence of imperial decline and economic precarity. These peasants were shedding their Ruthenian identities amid the ethnonational ferment engendered by Polish and Russian imperial domination. Inspired and symbolized by cultural figures like Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian nationalism emerged as a powerful, though complex, resistance to imperial rule.

Jews, frequently perceived as intermediaries of imperial authority or components of exploitative economic structures, became inextricably linked and vulnerable participants in this wider upheaval. This shared context of imperial “churn” forged parallel trajectories: while Jews adopted Zionism as both refuge and political project in response to exclusion and violence, many Ukrainians embraced nationalism as liberation from centuries of imperial domination.

This complex legacy of coexistence, resentment, and shared oppression is rarely granted full nuance in contemporary narratives. In particular, the Western embrace and promotion of Ukrainian nationalism—fuelled by Cold War desires to fragment the USSR—has often resulted in a sanitized memory of figures like Shevchenko, whose works and legacies are sometimes detached from their more ambivalent or contested historical contexts. While Shevchenko remains an enduring national bard, a closer examination reveals his—and Ukrainian nationalism’s—complicated relationships not only with imperial powers but also with Jewish communities.

Of course, pogroms were not acts solely of Ukrainian peasants; blame cannot be localized without recognizing broader imperial provocations, political manipulations, and social fractures. Nonetheless, this intersection underscores how nationalist movements—even those resisting empire—could and did reproduce exclusionary logics—mirroring and at times participating in the cycle of defining and expelling the “other.”

Casting a Palestinian Pale

This pattern—where a catalytic atrocity triggers a state’s adoption of total siege and collective retribution—is neither unique nor confined to one era. It finds a stark modern echo in the Israeli administration of Palestinian territories following the 1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

For decades, Israeli rule operated a system of conditional, exploitative integration. The permit system controlling Palestinian labour, while humiliating and discriminatory, created a regulated flow of people and capital—a mechanism generating dependence and limited mobility. The attacks of October 7, 2023 shattered this precarious framework. Israel’s response extended far beyond military retaliation, imposing a total siege on Gaza, severing supplies of food, water, and energy, and freezing movement and work permits in the West Bank: a conscious policy of collective punishment.

The parallel between Tsarist Russia and contemporary Israel lies not in moral equivalence but in a shared strategic logic: designating an entire population as a collective threat and revoking conditional rights wholesale. Both the May Laws and the post-October 7 siege sought to break collective will by making life unliveable, betting on desperation to provoke ethnic displacement.

Yet the outcomes diverged starkly. For Jews under Tsarist Russia, this pressure opened an exodus—a tragic valve of flight. For Palestinians in Gaza, it forged sumud, a grim steadfastness and resistance born of siege.

From this crucible of imposed crisis arose Zionist settlement—not as an isolated act of return, but as a consequence of imperial rupture. The national destinies of Jews fleeing confinement and Palestinians resisting dispossession were thus shaped in recursive opposition: one exodus fuelling another; one claim to land forged in flight from another’s oppression.

Grounded constellations were redrawn. New national iconography—the lion, the olive tree, the bison—were traced across contested terrain, connecting points of light while dimming others. On the ground, these celestial patterns materialized in the violent birth of states and the grim cartography of partition: the contested borders of Israel and Palestine, and the blood-soaked frontiers of Ukraine.

What emerges is a materialist truth: nations, like constellations, are not primordial magic but political constructs, made and unmade through the unrelenting mechanics of history—the drawing of borders, the exclusion of others, and the struggle to orient oneself beneath a transformed and transforming sky.

Read the first essay here: Moving Home: Roots, Routes and Ruins

Next in the series: Primitive Zionism: Why the First Aliyah Failed.

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To survey Jewish history is to confront a persistent oscillation between catastrophe and triumph, between the effort to transform adversity into vitality and the recurrence of destruction that echoes through the ages. From the bondage of Egypt to the conquest and settlement of the Promised Land, the narrative registers both human agency and divine orchestration: the jubilation of arrival is commemorated in sacred space, yet the threat of annihilation looms always on the horizon.

The First Temple, built by Solomon, symbolized a moment of national consolidation, a locus of triumphal identity, while its destruction by the Babylonians became a paradigmatic catastrophe, etched into collective memory. Yet even in exile, catastrophe gave rise to renewal: in Babylon, the Jewish people began to reorganize their religious, social, and legal structures, laying the foundations for much of later Judaism. The exile demonstrates the persistent cycle of disaster and consolidation, where the loss of homeland and temple paradoxically became a crucible for communal and spiritual creativity.

The Second Temple period, beginning with its construction under Zerubbabel with Persian support and later expansion by the client-king Herod the Great, witnessed a renewal of Jewish life in Judea—a renewal increasingly darkened by the shadow of Roman imperial power. This tense equilibrium shattered in 70 AD, when the destruction of the Temple by the Romans—archetypal imperial authority, embodied in the figure of Caesar—marked a profound rupture in Jewish life. The subsequent, heroic but doomed stand at Masada served not as a parallel event, but as its tragic coda: where the Romans represented overwhelming external force, Masada became a symbol of defiant Jewish agency, even in total defeat. Echoes of this ancient last stand reverberate through Gaza today.

In the aftermath of this catastrophe, a new liturgical and theological framework emerged, interpreting the disaster as divine judgment. As the Talmud (Yoma 9b) explains, the Temple was destroyed primarily because of sinat chinam—“baseless hatred” between Jews themselves. This internal strife was seen as a spiritual failure so grave it invited divine punishment in the form of Roman conquest. This theology became the core of the exilic creed: Jews were expelled from the Land of Israel for their own sins, and their return was to await the coming of the Messiah—a hope deferred, yet persistent, recited annually at the Passover Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Zionism, in this light, can be read as the most modern chapter in an ancient cycle: a deliberate and political act of moving home. The phrase itself carries a layered resonance. In Britain, the more common expression is moving house—a pragmatic description of the logistics of relocation, packing boxes and resettling elsewhere. Yet the British usage moving home exists alongside it, inflected with greater emotional weight: the attempt to establish or re-establish a dwelling. In American English, meanwhile, moving home typically suggests a return to one’s origins, to a familiar or ancestral place. Zionism draws power from both registers. It was at once a colossal logistical undertaking—settlement, infrastructure, sovereignty—and a mythic act of return, a homecoming framed against centuries of exile. In this doubleness, Zionism exemplifies the wider human struggle for rootedness: the tension between the material act of relocation and the existential yearning to belong.

The Palestinians, likewise, are caught in this relentless movement: displaced by the Zionist project and forced into involuntarily moving home in the British sense — relocating amidst destruction and blockade — while simultaneously clinging to the idea of their lands and communities, always dreaming of a return, of a moving home in the American sense.

Zionism, in its successful realization, transforms recurring vulnerability into sovereign self-determination, yet remains inescapably conscious of the shadows cast by past catastrophes suffered in defeat, from Babylon to Rome. But Jewish sovereignty has also left catastrophes in its wake: the Nakba of 1948 and the ongoing devastation in Gaza, where another people’s exile is bound up with Israel’s survival. Whether triumph was celebrated in a Temple or mourned in dispersion, the rhythm of calamity and resilience has continually shaped Jewish existence — and, more broadly, underscores the universal human negotiation between home and homelessness.

The question of “homeland” — or more profoundly, the German concept of Heimat, implying a deep, almost mystical belonging to a particular soil, culture, and community — has always haunted Jewish existence. Centuries of exile, ritualized in prayers for return, produced not only a spiritual yearning but also a social condition of homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), where communal cohesion was as much a defense against rootlessness as against persecution. It was this very European ideal of Heimat that became a potent weapon against Jews: the 19th-century German Romantic vision defined belonging in exclusive ethnic, cultural, and territorial terms, thereby casting Jews as eternal outsiders, incapable of true rootedness. Yet, in a profound paradox, the ghettos and shtetls that embodied this exclusion also served as fragile, functional forms of Heimat. Though imposed and often humiliating, they offered bounded spaces where Jewish ritual, language, and community could persist in a state of relative autonomy.

Emancipation disrupted this equilibrium. It promised liberation from confinement, but it also dissolved the protective walls of the ghetto, exposing Jews to the demands and pressures of assimilation. What had been an enforced Heimat, however limited, gave way to the precarious task of negotiating belonging in a wider gentile society that continued to regard Jews as alien. The newfound freedom was thus double-edged: it granted access but intensified vulnerability, dissolving one form of cohesion without securing another.

Zionism emerged as one response to this predicament. In place of the vanished ghetto, it sought to create a new and deliberate Heimat, grounded not in imposed segregation but in sovereign self-determination. If the ghettos had been an involuntary home, Zionism imagined a chosen one: a collective project to transform centuries of exile and displacement into a national framework of belonging. Yet in doing so, it carried forward the paradox of Jewish history: the attempt to solve homelessness through the construction of home, while simultaneously producing new forms of exclusion for others.

This paradox points toward a broader, universal condition: the uncanny space between Heimat and Heimatlosigkeit, where belonging is precarious, provisional, and never secure. In Mandate Palestine, both Jews and Palestinians inhabited this liminal zone: Jews claiming a homecoming yet marked as newcomers, Palestinians rooted in the land yet increasingly unsettled by the slow erosion of their security. Here, the questions of colonialism and immigration converged. The very drama of “return” was also the drama of intrusion, forcing both peoples into the unstable middle ground between home and homelessness.

That same instability reverberates into Europe today, where the influx of migrants unsettles the fragile balance of identity and belonging, inverting the roles of figure and ground: once the colonizer, Europe now experiences itself as the site of contested Heimat, a stage where migration, memory, and fear collide. From the migrants’ perspective, the rupture is even sharper: leaving societies embedded in long civilizational continuities, they arrive in a postmodern Europe where—as Marx once wrote of the relentless churn of capitalism—“all that is solid melts into air.” For those from societies often defined by deep, if sometimes oppressive, continuities, this experience is one of radical disorientation: the very semblance of order evaporates into flux.

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Proto-Zionism: Krochmal’s Hegelian Idealism

Nachman Krochmal was born in 1785 in Brody, a Galician town on the unstable borderlands of empires—a man shaped by a world where the very idea of Heimat was fragile and contested. Galicia was the quintessential unstable homeland: administered from Vienna but haunted by Polish memories of lost sovereignty, peopled by Ruthenians (later known as Ukrainians) nursing their own national aspirations, and dotted with Jewish shtetls that embodied a precarious, almost metaphysical rootedness—a sense of place utterly divorced from political power. Sovereigns moved across the region, borders shifted, and various groups sought to make Galicia their home. In this crucible of unstable belonging, Jewish communities learned that moving home was not just physical, but social and spiritual, negotiating identity amidst impermanence.

Out of this environment emerged the first systematic philosophy of Jewish history. Krochmal’s Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman (“Guide for the Perplexed of the Time”), published posthumously in 1851, attempted for the Jews what Hegel had performed for Europe: to discern a rational pattern in the convulsions of history and to provide a framework for future regeneration. If Galicia revealed Heimat as a perpetually unsettled condition, Krochmal’s project foreshadowed a movement—later Zionism—that would seek to stabilize Jewish existence once and for all, transforming cohesion from a reactive effect of exile into the conscious project of a people.

For Krochmal, the glue of Jewish continuity had always been external oppression: in the absence of sovereignty, persecution acted as the centripetal force holding the people together. But this was, in his eyes, a negative, mechanical bond—an artefact of historical necessity, not inner vitality. The Enlightenment opened a new horizon: Jewish cohesion could be reborn not through reaction to hatred from without but through a conscious, philosophical grasp of Jewish destiny. In this, Krochmal was an idealist.

Half a century later, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the founding father of modern Zionism, confronted this same problem in a radically different historical context. Born in Budapest and working as a journalist in Vienna and Paris during the Dreyfus affair, Herzl witnessed anti-Semitism as a virulent, inescapable reality. Where Krochmal sought to transcend coercion through consciousness, Herzl insisted that external hostility could not be philosophically dissolved but must instead be harnessed. “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends,” he wrote in his diaries; “the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” For Herzl, persecution was not a problem to be solved abstractly but a lever to achieve sovereign Jewish self-determination—a very concrete form of moving home, asserting stability in a world that had persistently denied it.

Benjamin’s Philosophy of Catastrophe

Walter Benjamin, writing in the first half of the twentieth century, approached history from a profoundly different angle. Where Krochmal discerned a dialectical ascent and Herzl saw opportunity in adversity, Benjamin perceived catastrophe as the persistent, unrelenting condition of human affairs. History, for him, was not the unfolding of Spirit or the teleology of progress, but a landscape of wreckage: “a storm blowing from Paradise” that drives humanity forward while the debris of the past accumulates endlessly at our feet. Each epoch leaves its ruins, each triumph conceals catastrophe, and every act of construction is haunted by what has already collapsed.

Benjamin’s method becomes startlingly tangible in the present. One need look no further than Gaza: nearly two million souls inhabit a densely packed, largely underground world, surviving amid landscapes of flattened homes and shattered infrastructure—the unmistakable debris of contemporary catastrophe. Here, home is more than four walls and running water; it is the claim to presence itself, the refusal to accept homelessness, to be cast permanently as wanderers or exiles. This steadfast refusal to be displaced—this human insistence on claiming home despite overwhelming force—ensures, in Benjamin’s stark terms, the endless accumulation of ruins. It is a tragic dynamic that imposes an unavoidable ethical weight on every future reconstruction built atop today’s devastation.

The immediacy of catastrophe is further amplified when Tel Aviv enters the frame. During the recent Twelve Day War, Iranian ballistic missiles struck residential neighbourhoods, reducing apartments to rubble and spreading terror—though on a scale miniscule compared to the devastation in Gaza. Yet this asymmetry itself is deceptive; it plants a ruinous seed, a hint that the historical cycle of destruction may be rebounding, its logic now accelerated to a terrifying pulse. Where ancient rhythms of conquest and exile—from Babylon to Masada—unfolded over centuries, modern violence compresses them into days.

This is the fatal acceleration of war that Paul Virilio diagnosed: technological ‘progress’ that shrinks time and space to deliver ruin instantaneously. The languid rhythm of history has been shattered; triumph and ruin are now simultaneous events, and the fragile human Heimat is perpetually imperilled. It evokes Adorno’s grim observation on the dialectic of progress: that humanity’s journey from the slingshot to the megaton bomb is one of technological perfection coupled with moral atrophy—a progression that now echoes in the Middle East’s escalating exchange of fire.

It is in this tragic register that Benjamin illuminates the tension at the heart of Zionism. Krochmal offered a vision of catastrophe sublimated into vitality, a pathway through which adversity could be transformed into a consciously chosen Heimat of the spirit. Benjamin, by contrast, insists on the ruins, the debris, the impossibility of full reconciliation: catastrophe must be confronted, remembered, and acknowledged. Zionism, in the modern state, exists in this interstitial space: it aspires to a stable and enduring Heimat, yet it is perpetually marked by the recurrence of violence, the weight of historical rubble, and the ethical entanglement of building home atop displacement.

The oscillation between Krochmal’s idealist horizon and Benjamin’s tragic awareness is the lens through which not only Jewish political and cultural life but human history more broadly must be read. Today’s drama in Gaza will, in one form or another, be replayed across the crumbling industrial cities of Europe, where the struggle for Heimat endures. It is the human fate of a compulsively migratory species that values nothing more than rootedness, yet is perpetually confronted by displacement, ruin, and the relentless return of catastrophe.

The Architectures of Answer: Four Paths from the Ghetto's Shadow

The opening of European society in the nineteenth century presented Jews with both opportunity and crisis — a paradox heightened by the simultaneous rise of European nationalism. While emancipation dissolved the protective walls of ghettos and opened civic and social avenues, the newly consolidated nation-states were increasingly defining belonging in ethnic and cultural terms, leaving Jews in a double bind: granted rights as citizens, yet persistently marked as outsiders. This collision of sudden freedom with constricting social boundaries produced a spectrum of competing, and often mutually hostile, strategies for negotiating catastrophe, cohesion, and Heimat — the precarious sense of home and belonging. Four archetypal responses emerged: assimilation, psychoanalytic reflection, revolutionary transformation, and nationalist political pragmatism. Each sought to reconcile the pressures of history and modernity with the desire for stability, recognition, and agency in a world that could turn catastrophic at any moment.

Assimilation: The Strategy of Social Integration:
Assimilation represented the attempt to secure Heimat through full integration into European society. Jews who pursued this path, from the followers of Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin to the champions of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), sought to minimize difference, blending into dominant cultural norms. Reform Judaism, whether in Germany or later in the United States, attempted to reframe Jewish identity into a socially legible "religion" analogous to Protestantism, often shedding national and linguistic particularities. Yet the experience was fraught with tension: the Jewish parvenu, admired for achievement and sophistication, could quickly become the pariah, marked as other when social or nationalist anxieties intensified. Stability, recognition, and belonging were therefore always provisional; catastrophe could strike in an instant, revealing the fragility of a Heimat dependent on external approval rather than autonomous cohesion.

Freud: The Strategy of Psychological Universalization:
Sigmund Freud offered a distinctive strategy for navigating the double bind of emancipation and exclusion. He reframed Jewish particularities — psychic conflicts, neuroses, and cultural traits — as expressions of universal human conditions. In works like Civilization and Its Discontents, the pressures of modern life and the disruptions of social integration were not uniquely Jewish; they were symptoms of the human condition writ large. Heimat, in Freud’s schema, is internal and psychological: coherence of the self, a stable psychic domain amid the turbulence of history and society. Catastrophe becomes a shared, existential challenge, and survival is enacted through understanding and integrating these psychic pressures rather than through territory or politics.

Marx: The Strategy of Political Transcendence:
Karl Marx approached Jewish identity through the lens of historical materialism. In On the Jewish Question, he made his notorious argument: the practical, worldly spirit of the Jew had become the foundational principle of bourgeois civil society itself. What had been a specific Jewish relationship to money and contract was now the universal logic of capitalism. Therefore, the "social emancipation of the Jew" meant the emancipation of society from capitalism itself. The solution, for Marx, was radical: to transcend the very categories of "Jew" and "Christian" through revolutionary class struggle. Catastrophe is systemic, and Heimat is reconceived at the level of social structure: belonging is not secured through culture or territory but through the transformation of society itself.

Herzl/Zionism: The Strategy of Political Realism
Theodor Herzl’s response was pragmatic and territorial—a direct refutation of Krochmal's philosophical idealism and a embrace of raw agency. Confronted with persistent exclusion, he sought to convert Jewish vulnerability into sovereignty, creating a tangible Heimat through statehood. Political realism guided his strategy: anti-Semitism could be leveraged as a tool if European powers saw a Jewish homeland as serving their interests. Jews, through political and military organization, could assert themselves as a normal people, fully sovereign and capable of defending their space in the world.

Zionism in the Storm of History

Zionism was never a monolith; it was and remains a battlefield. The same historic pressures that produced the four archetypal Jewish responses to emancipation—assimilation, psychoanalysis, revolution, and Zionism—crystallized within the Zionist project itself and branched into five competing currents, each claiming the one true path to a Jewish Heimat.

This series on Zionism will dissect these five tendencies:

• Political Zionism (Herzl): The diplomacy of desperation, pursuing a charter for statehood by leveraging the rivalries of empires, a modern echo of the court Jew's precarious art.

• Labour Zionism (Ben-Gurion): Socialism with Jewish characteristics to create a new Jew and a just society, forged through sweat, soil, and the exclusivity of Hebrew labour

• Revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky): An iron-wall doctrine of Hebrew honour, military strength, and unapologetic sovereignty, underpinned by a fascist-corporatist model that dissolved class struggle into national glory.

• Cultural Zionism (Ahad Ha'am): The spiritual centre, fearing a people without a soul, winning the diaspora through cultural hegemony rather than political conquest of the Palestinians.

• Religious Zionism (Kook): The mystical belief that human political agency—the act of building a state—is a sacred catalyst for divine redemption, its first flowering.

We will trace these currents from their origins in the diaspora, through the battles of Mandatory Palestine over immigration and land, to the Palestinian catastrophe of the Nakba and the founding of the State of Israel. This is not merely history. It is the key to understanding the fierce internal conflicts that define Israel today—and the uncanny echoes of these struggles in contemporary Europe’s battles over migration, home, and belonging. The central question is no longer just what Zionism was, but which of its competing visions will ultimately prevail. And as Europe and its newcomers slide toward confrontation, as indigenous majorities trend towards minority status, each may yet find themselves unconsciously replaying the strategic precedents first forged in the Zionist-Palestinian crucible.

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Along the Ukraine war’s front lines, Russian advances have shed their glacial pace. As Ukraine builds strong defensive structures in the Donbass, their lack of manpower means these fortification lines are quickly seized by Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups, and once entrenched, Ukraine has no ability to dislodge them. As so often in war, the rampart erected for safety becomes, in the turn of a tide, the enemy’s throne.

After nearly a year of attritional pressure, Chasov Yar was finally prised away, becoming the pivot for a broader operational design: four emerging kotyols—cauldrons—taking shape around Kupyansk, Seversk, Konstantinovka, and the logistics hub of Pokrovsk. Each is being sealed not through frontal assaults, but by the patient tightening of artillery arcs and the interdiction of supply routes—a calculated geometry of collapse drawn in deliberate strokes.

A kotyol—literally “boiler” in Russian military usage, often rendered in English as “cauldron”—carries the image of a kettle under heat: pressure mounting, steam building, escape possible only through the spout. On the battlefield, that “spout” may be slammed shut in Clausewitzian fashion, as at Stalingrad—an enemy fixed, surrounded, annihilated. Or it may be left ajar, creating a “semi-cauldron” in which a narrow corridor tempts the trapped into pre-sighted killing grounds. This is Sun Tzu’s counsel to leave an enemy an outlet—not from clemency, but to erode the desperation that fuels last stands. The illusion of escape breaks cohesion; retreat becomes rout.

At Korsun–Shevchenkovsky in February 1944, German forces west of the Dnieper were encircled but left a single corridor through frozen fields. Soviet artillery and aircraft turned that corridor into a slaughterhouse, annihilating men and materiel as they fled.

In the early phase of the Ukraine war, two brutal battles in the Donbas region—Ilovaisk in 2014 and Debaltseve in 2015—recreated the open-sided trap: the fiercest losses did not occur within the encirclement itself, but during the desperate flight through its narrow exit. These engagements were more than just military defeats; each semi-cauldron emptied directly into negotiation rooms in Minsk where Moscow leveraged battlefield gains for diplomatic concessions. The front’s geometry dictated the pace of diplomacy—the tighter the encirclement, the louder the calls for “peace.”

The Minsk accords, brokered under German and French mediation, were nothing more than holding patterns from the outset—designed less to settle than to forestall collapse while Ukraine avoided concessions and rebuilt itself as a NATO proxy.

Minsk I, signed in September 2014 after the rout at Ilovaisk, promised ceasefires, prisoner exchanges, and autonomy for the Donbas. Kiev treated it as a breathing spell; hostilities resumed within weeks.

Minsk II was born of Debaltseve’s encirclement in February 2015. Ukrainian forces in the strategic rail hub, under relentless artillery fire, petitioned for withdrawal. As casualty reports mounted, Merkel abandoned her studied detachment, flying to Moscow to plead for a halt. The accord signed days later froze the front just long enough to extract what remained of Ukraine’s garrison. It was less a peace than an act of triage—a political tourniquet disguising a military defeat. Merkel’s dash to the Kremlin revealed the West’s real posture: when Russia advanced decisively, “peace” meant damage control.

Minsk II came with the imprimatur of UN Security Council Resolution 2202, prescribing special status for the Donbas—amnesty, local elections, language rights—before Ukraine regained control of the border. In private, Western leaders knew Kiev would never comply. Their candour surfaced years later: in December 2022, Merkel admitted Minsk had been a device to “give Ukraine time,” while Hollande confirmed it was used “to strengthen its army.” Seven years of Western training, ideological radicalization, and encrypted communications followed. By the eve of the 2022 invasion, Russia’s local advantages had been eroded. The ceasefires had done their work: NATO’s proxy was ready.

As pressure builds in the four cauldrons today, are we on the brink of a Minsk III in Alaska?

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Trump Slips a Neocon Cauldron?

If the kotyol is a battlefield trap, its political analogue is no less constricting. The man circling inside it today is not a Ukrainian general but the president of the United States. Six months into his second term, Donald Trump harbours no illusions about Ukraine’s battlefield trajectory. The war’s end is not in doubt: Kiev is losing, and much of the Western hardware that reaches the front is destroyed by Russian strikes or wasted in doomed offensives. For Trump, Ukraine is a distraction from his real priorities. Israel’s air-defense stockpiles are running down; U.S. arsenals must be conserved for the possibility of confrontation with China. The sooner the war ends, the better—and the terms matter little to him.

Others in Washington see profit in prolongation. Neoconservatives and their Republican auxiliaries, led by Lindsey Graham, are trying to lock Trump into a “political cauldron” of their own design: by forcing him to issue secondary tariffs on buyers of Russian oil. These would spike global energy prices, feed inflation, and erode Trump’s economic standing—costs his intraparty rivals would gladly pay. Trump answers with his familiar mixture of threat and hesitation, announcing sanctions or tariffs but often stopping short, and when he does act, he soon chickens out.

Hemmed in by a ring of Neocon pressure yet holding no real leverage over Russian President Putin, Trump in mid-July donned his familiar tough-man mask. He issued a theatrical “50-day ultimatum” for Russia to end the war—“or else.” The bluff was obvious. Moscow answered with silence. After two weeks of studied indifference by Putin, Trump halved the deadline to ten days, naming August 9th as “T-Day,” when “bone-crunching” sanctions would fall. The calendar advanced, the war ground on, and Russia not only ignored the threats but unveiled its first Oreshnik missile batteries—already rolling off the production line.

Trump’s attempts to pressure India and Brazil—two of the most pro-Western members of BRICS—ended in open defiance. Tariffs on Indian imports were justified as punishment for its purchase of Russian crude, often refined and resold to Europe. In reality, the measures were riddled with carve-outs, including one allowing Indian sales of Russian oil to the United States itself. Only India’s gem industry really felt the pinch.

Washington tried to turn the dispute into leverage over India’s agricultural market, demanding lower tariffs and entry for U.S. food exports. For India’s hundreds of millions of small farmers, such competition would be ruinous—echoing the collapse of Mexican agriculture under NAFTA, when peasants displaced by cheap Big Ag products, crossed into the United States in the millions. For Trump’s Big Tech backers, the result would be a boon: a new desperately poor migrant labour pool ready to be shipped to America’s gates.

Narendra Modi responded with calculated provocation. He invited Vladimir Putin to New Delhi, confirmed his attendance at a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in China—his first visit there in seven years—and publicly denounced the tariffs. In geopolitics, the aim is to split adversaries; Trump has managed the reverse. “Divide and rule” has become “unite and lose.”

The trade war has now bled into the strategic sphere. China has begun restricting exports of rare earth elements, the essential inputs of advanced weapons systems. A century ago, communists promised to sell capitalists the rope with which to hang themselves; today, communist China will not sell them the very metals that could be forged into weapons against it.

Nor is this Trump’s first recoil. Several times he has sought to cut Ukraine off entirely, only to back down under combined pressure from Europe and Washington’s hawks. Each time, the Neocon cauldron has tightened another notch.

Diplomatic Thunder on the Tundra

But in the blink of an eye, Trump flipped from hunted to hunter. First, he feigned victory, claiming the Kremlin had “begged” for talks to stem the tide of his tariff threats. In reality, it was his personal fixer, real estate magnate Steve Witkoff, who flew to Moscow to beg for a summit—and the Kremlin eventually granted it. On August 15th, in Anchorage, Trump will sit down with Putin.

Suddenly, Ukraine, Europe, and American hawks shifted from anticipating bone-crushing sanctions across the globe to fearing Trump will force Ukraine to surrender land and withdraw from key eastern oblasts. With one deft move, Trump slipped free from the Neocon cauldron, pivoting from besieged to initiator—for the time being.

Vice President Vance has already signalled to European leaders that they will be expected to endorse any deal that comes out of Alaska. Europe is attempting to draw the line at allowing Russia to maintain de facto control over the Ukrainian land they actually occupy. But with Ukrainian resistance collapsing, why would Russia stop today? Moscow are already calculating the potential land they will amass in say the next six months.

For Europe and the hawks, as in 2014 and 2015, today’s imperative for a ceasefire in Ukraine is less about securing peace than avoiding humiliation. The danger is that a Ukrainian withdrawal decided at the negotiating table will signify a military defeat too loudly for their Mighty Wurlitzers of propaganda to drown it out. A frozen front offers a narrative shield: not a loss, but a pause; not failure, but a “platform for further negotiations.”

In the end Europe will swallow whatever they are told to, for fear that their tariffs will be spiked. They all know that Trump’s tariff bluster targets America’s own allies more than its adversaries. Without firm American and European backing, Ukraine’s military effort risks slipping into palliative care, with a “Do Not Resuscitate” order ominously pinned to its bedside. But considering the the peace process on the Iranian nuclear issue was used to cover a surprise attack on Tehran, can the Russians really trust Trump?

Terms of Encirclement

NATO’s ideal Ukrainian intermission would lock the front along the current line of contact, leaving roughly 80% of Ukraine under Kiev’s control and Russia with the 20% it now holds. While in public the West may complain, in private this would be a stunning victory—Ukraine, bloodied but sovereign over most of its territory, with NATO arms and advisers flowing in to rebuild and rearm. NATO missile installations could be built in Kharkov, less than 700 kilometres from Moscow. Crimea and the Black Sea coast could wait for retrieval in the 2030s or 2040s, once time, training, and matériel had shifted the balance.

The Kremlin’s preferred ending is different in kind. What it seeks is not the cartographic freezing of a divided Ukraine but the submission of the whole—withdrawal from the four oblasts it claims, and binding assurances of perpetual NATO abstention. The model is not South Korea’s militarised stalemate, but Belarus’s docile alignment: a Ukraine with the form of sovereignty but none of its strategic substance.

For Zelensky, the constitutional bar on territorial concessions is a useful wartime flourish. But constitutions make poor shields against military realities imposed by force and ratified by exhaustion. If, after the Alaska summit, Trump instructs him to withdraw from specified regions, his generals do have the legal power to obey; the evacuation will hand Moscow de facto control, leaving the formalities—the de jure recognition of sovereignty—to be dressed up later in referenda.

Russian guns will fall silent once such withdrawals are announced, it would not make great optics for Russia to fire on retreating troops, despite the West not seeming to have a problem with starving civilians getting shot up in Gaza. But Putin would need to pre-empt an 80–20 NATO “victory” by warning that any post-ceasefire influx of Western arms or “volunteer” contingents—especially to Odessa—remains a legitimate target. Negotiations would then follow Ukraine’s pullback, by which point Kiev’s bargaining power will have ebbed still further, their political cohesion will be tested by the risk of nationalist militias rejecting retreat from “sacred” Ukrainian soil.

Russia’s maximal aims remain fixed: Ukrainian withdrawal from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia; codified neutrality; demilitarisation; and the pliable yet potent label of “denazification.” With Ukraine’s forces stranded behind shattered Donbass lines, Moscow holds the upper hand. In Brussels and London, outrage is strangely muted—as if Europe’s polished diplomats have already penned Zelensky’s fate in a ledger of sacrifice. Their temperance is a cold Judas kiss upon Kiev’s brow, while Trump compulsively scrubs at the blood of Ukraine from his hands—an echo of Lady Macbeth’s tortured guilt—treating the war as a stain he desperately wishes to erase, yet cannot escape.

American hawks, steeped in a reflexive animus toward all things Russian, will not slip quietly into irrelevance. In Washington, Neoconservatives may gamble on sabotage at home—engineering scandal, launching kompromat offensives, even dredging up lurid, Epstein-adjacent rumours—to weaken Trump’s hand before any deal can be struck.

If the summit fails and Putin holds fast—no NATO personnel in Ukraine, no foreign arms—the worst-case scenario for Russia would be roughly six months of continued Russian advance against an already demoralised Ukraine, before a total collapse. But if he hesitates and agrees to a premature ceasefire—and releases Ukrainians trapped in the Donbass cauldrons—NATO could seize the opening, lock in its share of the country, and call it “strategic containment” of Russia. In this duel of closures and encirclements, the margin for error is slender, and the price of miscalculation—total.

If Putin falls for a “Minsk III” trap, his continued rule in Russia will be in peril. Three “Minsks” and you are out.

Putin’s Alaska Summit: Shattering the Moral Chiaroscuro

The West’s information war thrives on moral chiaroscuro—a Renaissance conceit where light and dark clash in stark, unblended contrasts. In this propaganda palette, Zelensky is rendered in saintly whites, Putin in demonic blacks, a cartoonish duality that tidies away the messy greys of geopolitics.

Why would Putin risk a Minsk III deal with an America that is notoriously agreement incapable? By stepping onto American soil for the Alaska summit, Putin gains something subtler: the chance to swap this crude binary for moral pointillism, in which scattered dots of ambiguity erode the West’s rigid moral canvas. A handshake with Trump, the grey neutrality of the Alaskan backdrop, the optics of negotiation rather than isolation—each becomes a pixel in a more complicated portrait, one that blurs the edges of villainy and nudges the silhouette toward something recognisably human.

In Latin America there’s a word—malinchismo—for the fascination with the outsider, the reflexive privileging of the foreigner’s esteem. Some in Russia accuse Putin of a similar weakness, an overinvestment in how he is received in Western capitals. They see this as the flaw that led to the first two Minsk accords, where a lightweight like François Hollande walked away with the better hand.

The alternative reading is colder: in 2014, Putin simply lacked the economic insulation he now enjoys. Russia was then far more vulnerable to sanctions; today, with parallel trade routes and energy leverage in place, he can afford the luxury of a drawn-out game.

In either case, the Alaska summit offers rewards beyond the battlefield. It’s a chance to signal—to domestic elites and to a watching world—that Putin is not a pariah but a peer. It allows him to test Trump’s resolve in person and to deepen the fracture lines within the West. And, like a general loosening the lid on a kotyol just enough to let the pressure vent in the direction he chooses, Putin may see Alaska as a venue where US-Russian diplomatic steam can be released on his terms.

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Despite the grim-faced EU photo ops and stern communiqués demanding Russia accept an unconditional ceasefire—and President Trump’s self-proclaimed power to enforce a 50-day halt backed only by wishful tariff threats—there is not merely no Western path to victory in Ukraine, but no end to the war in sight. Russia appears in no rush to conclude its so-called Special Military Operation; with each passing month, its position grows stronger, whether for eventual negotiations or, more ominously, for imposing terms on a broken Ukraine. The Russian’s slow, grinding advance through the Donbass continues to drain Western arsenals—limited stocks that, when push comes to shove, will always be prioritized for the golden child of U.S. military aid: Israel.

In a recent report by Seymour Hersh, a curious narrative structure emerges—one that invites analysis through the conceptual lens of Leo Strauss, the German émigré political philosopher whose work explored the role of esoteric writing, deception, and myth in political life. Strauss famously argued that regimes often require noble lies—deliberate falsehoods told by elites to preserve social cohesion or the authority of the state. These are not mere propaganda, but foundational fictions meant to reconcile order with belief.

In this light, Hersh’s reporting reads less like standard investigative journalism and more like a glimpse into a truth carefully managed for mass consumption. His central contention is that elements within the U.S. security establishment are preparing to cast aside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, possibly in favour of General Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief of Ukrainian forces. That premise, in itself, is unsurprising: dissatisfaction with Zelensky’s wartime leadership has surfaced before, and Zaluzhny—battle-tested, blunt, and technocratic—offers a more palatable figure to a Western alliance increasingly attuned to the limits of its investment and the perils of strategic overreach.

This portion of Hersh’s article rests on firm ground. Zelensky has spent three years performing a postmodern pastiche of Winston Churchill—rallying liberal sentiment, framing the conflict in moral absolutes, and basking in the adulation of Western parliaments. Yet the result has been a steady erosion of territory, the exposure of NATO’s industrial limits, and the creeping disillusionment of his sponsors. Now, belatedly, it appears to be dawning on Western strategists that their man in Kiev may need to channel not Churchill but Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim—the Finnish field marshal who, recognizing the futility of continued resistance, negotiated an honourable peace with Joseph Stalin after Finland’s defeat in the Winter War of 1939–40.

Three years ago, in an interview with The Economist, General Valery Zaluzhny offered a cryptic comment, heavy with implication—one that slipped past most readers, obscured by the unfamiliar historical referent and the coded gravity of the message:

“It is not yet time to appeal to Ukrainian soldiers in the way that Mannerheim appealed to Finnish soldiers. We can and should take a lot more territory.”

To decode this statement is to return to the origins of the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, where myth and military necessity collided—and where, ultimately, myth gave way.

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A Winter’s War

The war began not from ideological antipathy, but from geostrategic logic. With the Nazi-Soviet Pact temporarily securing Stalin’s western frontier, attention turned to the vulnerability of Leningrad, less than thirty kilometres from the Finnish border. The Soviet leadership, anticipating future German aggression, sought territorial adjustments along the Karelian Isthmus and control of key islands in the Gulf of Finland. In exchange, Finland was offered larger tracts of Soviet land elsewhere. It was a rational, if unpalatable, demand—not imperialist rapacity, but prophylactic realpolitik.

Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, head of the Finnish Defense Forces, understood the imbalance of power. Finland’s military was ill-prepared for sustained war against the Red Army. He urged accommodation—a bitter compromise, but one grounded in sober appraisal. Helsinki’s liberal parliamentarians thought otherwise. Possessed by an inflated belief in Western support and a sentimentalized vision of national sovereignty, they rejected Stalin’s terms. War ensued. Mannerheim, though opposed to the policy, was tasked with executing it.

The conflict soon gave rise to a mythology that has endured in Western memory: of a noble David resisting a brutal Goliath. There is some truth to this. Finnish resistance was inventive and brave. Lightly armed ski troops harassed Soviet columns through the Karelian snows; the Mannerheim Line held longer than expected. But material asymmetry was implacable. The Red Army adapted. By late February, they had breached the line. The road to Helsinki stood open.

It was at this critical juncture that Mannerheim returned to his original counsel. Facing encirclement and national collapse, he urged negotiation. This time, the government listened. Stalin, aware of the strategic cost of continued occupation and perhaps chastened by earlier battlefield humiliations, imposed terms only marginally harsher than his original offer. Finland lost valuable territory and industry, but retained its independence and regime. The Soviet Union secured its buffer zone. Both sides stepped back from annihilation.

At the war’s end, Mannerheim addressed his soldiers—not in triumph, but in truth. His message was one of dignity salvaged through realism:

“Peace has been concluded between our country and the Soviet Union, an exacting peace which has ceded to Russia nearly every battlefield on which you have shed your blood… You did not want war… Yet, in spite of all bravery and spirit of sacrifice, the Government has been compelled to conclude peace… Your heroic deeds have aroused the admiration of the world.”

The deeper lesson of the Winter War is not the moral nobility of the Finnish cause, but the calculated discipline of a retreat that preserved the nation. Finland survived not because it prevailed, but because it knew when to stop—forcing its adversary to settle while retaining enough of its own sovereignty to fight another day. It was not myth but moderation that saved it.

This was the implied threat in Zaluzhny’s comments, that he would not fight to the last Ukrainian, as Western war hawks insist, but once outside support wavered, Kiev would cut its losses and make their deal with Putin.

Today, for those in the West still capable of privileging unwelcome truths over consoling illusions—those who have not imbibed the noble lie as sacrament—Finland’s outcome stands as the most realistic model left for Ukraine. Survival, not triumph; statehood preserved through strategic concession, not territorial maximalism. And only a figure like Zaluzhny, armoured in battlefield legitimacy and unburdened by the theatrical imperatives of wartime mythmaking, possesses the authority to execute such a pivot.

In this light, Seymour Hersh’s reporting—reliant though it is on the murky signals of anonymous intelligence agency briefers—emerges as a plausible glimpse into elite recalibration. One pivotal question remains: will Vladimir Putin, now in the position once held by Stalin, show the same cold restraint when dictating Ukraine’s final terms?

Ignoble Lies

Yet buried within Hersh’s seemingly straightforward account of power politics is an extraordinary claim: that Russia has suffered two million casualties since the war began—“nearly double the current public numbers,” according to Hersh’s intelligence sources. These “current public numbers” are the already highly exaggerated Ukrainian propaganda figures. The assertion that Kiev’s media manipulators are underestimating Russian war deaths by 50% is so fantastical, so extravagantly detached from battlefield realities, that it demands to be read not as a factual statement, but as a rhetorical device. And here, the legacy of Strauss becomes vital.

Strauss argued that philosophers—and, we might add, intelligence bureaucrats—writing under the shadow of totalitarian regimes, often write in two registers. One is exoteric, the public-facing narrative crafted for the common reader. The other is esoteric, buried between the lines, directed to those capable of decoding the deeper message. To protect themselves from persecution—or to advance a political objective—clever writers employ contradiction, overstatement, and allegory as camouflage.

In his Economist interview, Zaluzhny used the esoteric method by subtly bringing up Mannerheim to warn his Western sponsors that he would seek terms from Russia if they did not provide him with the military hardware required for victory.

Hersh’s anonymous source tells us that Russian casualties have reached an apocalyptic scale: two million dead, most of them highly trained soldiers, mid-level officers, and elite armour units. The implication is that Russia has exhausted itself, its army now composed of “ignorant peasants” and rusting equipment.

If this were true—if Russian forces had indeed suffered two million fatalities—then basic strategic logic would dictate a very different course of action. Far from urging Ukraine to sue for peace, NATO would be escalating support, the EU would be mobilizing in earnest, and Western special forces would be preparing their Ukrainian proxies for the next phase of advance toward the outskirts of Moscow.

And far from contemplating Zelensky’s political disposal, the West would be canonizing him as a latter-day Alexander, the supreme warlord of the democratic world—his portrait hoisted in every NATO war college, his doctrine enshrined in every future field manual.

But the opposite is happening. Western arsenals are depleted, Ukrainian forces are ceding ground, morale is visibly fraying, and calls for a ceasefire—whether immediate or deferred by fifty days—grow louder with each passing week. It is in this context that Strauss’s concept of the noble lie returns in grotesque modern form. The lie on offer is not noble in Plato’s civic-mythic sense, but strategic: a manufactured narrative, designed not to uplift but to obscure collapse and manage decline. The exoteric storyline fed to the public is one of Russian implosion; the esoteric message, for those attuned to it, is far more bleak. As the Freudian principle of projection would suggest—if not Freud himself—accusations often operate as veiled confessions. A properly Straussian reading of Hersh’s article yields a brutal subtext: the massive death toll haunting the war is not Russia’s, but Ukraine’s.

Fabricating Peace: From Tehran to Kiev

The pattern of strategic deception—the exoteric lie spoken aloud and the esoteric truth buried in silence—reappeared in even starker relief during the recent twelve-day war between Iran and Israel. That conflict, which risked engulfing the Middle East in a region-wide conflagration, ended with a whimper disguised as a trumpet blast. At its climax, President Donald Trump announced with great fanfare that U.S. B-2 bombers, deploying GBU-57 “Massive Ordnance Penetrators,” had obliterated Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in a precision night strike. It was, by his telling, a feat of techno-military grandeur, confirming American dominance and obviating further escalation.

But even the more credulous corners of the foreign policy press raised an eyebrow. Analysts across NATO capitals quietly affirmed that little, if any, meaningful damage had been done to Iran’s deeply fortified sites. Tehran, for its part, responded with only token retaliation not because it had been bludgeoned into silence, but because Washington had—through backchannels—signalled its interest in ending the war. The lie, therefore, was not so much a fabrication as a cover, designed to veil withdrawal in the language of victory.

What followed was the now-routine sanctification of untruth: those questioning the obliteration narrative were accused not of rational scepticism, but of insulting the valour and integrity of U.S. service personnel. The epistemic field was narrowed to a single acceptable noble lie—heroism plus triumph—with deviation cast as desecration.

Yet to grasp the genealogy of the concept, we must return to its origin in Plato’s Republic, where the noble lie appears not as a crude deception but as a founding political myth—a story told by rulers to ensure social harmony and civic cohesion. Plato proposed two distinct but related fictions. The first is a myth of indigeneity, a “blood and soil” narrative in which citizens are taught they were born from the same earth, siblings in the service of a common destiny.

This fiction was designed to elicit sacrifice for the polis—a metaphysical alibi for patriotism. In postmodern, progressive polities, such atavistic nationalism has long been discredited. Yet ironically, Ukraine, lionized by the very societies that claim to have moved beyond mythic ethnos, has come to depend entirely on precisely this form of collective hallucination. And, increasingly, it appears to be fraying: Telegram channels now overflow with footage of forced conscription, men violently dragged off the street in scenes that mark the passage from the noble fire of myth to the cold paralysis of truth, where ideological fervour has been replaced by a death dread that cannot be lied away.

The second part of Plato’s myth introduced a tripartite caste system, based on an alleged “metal” in each person’s soul: gold for rulers and philosophers, silver for auxiliaries and enforcers, and bronze or iron for laborers and artisans. This structure allowed for some social mobility—golden children could emerge from iron households—but more importantly, it encoded the logic of differentiated discourse. Each class was meant to receive a form of rhetoric suited to its nature. The bronze masses were to be ruled by blunt binaries: good vs. evil, hero vs. villain, our tribe vs. theirs. The silver class—today’s professional managerial class (PMC), from press secretaries to think tankers—crafted and disseminated these narratives. But for the gold, the philosopher-rulers or (in modern guise) intelligence analysts, truth was to be sacrosanct, preserved in spaces immune to political coercion, so that wise decisions might still be made based on kernels of golden truth hidden within the midst of iron and bronze myth.

In theory, then, the intelligence community and reality-based geopolitical commentators ought to function like the commissioner’s box in a sports stadium, where the tribal loyalties of the crowd and the narrative flair of the commentators give way to dispassionate assessment. The bronze fans might chant for the 49ers while the iron root for the Raiders, the silver scribes might spin their columns accordingly, but only from the commissioner’s perch can one observe the rules, penalties, revenue flows and entertainment value with clarity. Yet when even this level is infected—when the gold class begins to imbibe its own propaganda—the system corrodes. Intelligence becomes indistinguishable from ideology, and decision-making, untethered from fact, drifts toward fantasy. In the context of Ukraine, where public discourse forbids acknowledging Russian advances or Ukrainian collapse, such blindness at the summit can only hasten imperial miscalculation.

But unlike the mythic cohesion of Plato’s noble lie—designed to harmonize society under a shared fiction—Trump’s fabrication was forged in the cold furnace of strategic necessity. It was not that the truth was unknown to the gold tier of decision-makers; quite the contrary. Intelligence channels had made the situation clear: America and Israel were nearing depletion of their most advanced air defense interceptors. Iron Dome, Arrow, and THAAD systems had been stretched to the brink, and Iran, having weathered the initial bombardment, had begun to respond with far more precise, high-grade munitions.

Worse still, Israel’s shift to a counter-value strategy—targeting civilian infrastructure—threatened to provoke a broader, more dangerous Iranian response. A rapid de-escalation became imperative. Yet openly acknowledging this operational vulnerability risked not only political embarrassment, but reputational collapse. The solution was archetypal: craft a story that would end the war while preserving the illusion of triumph. A noble lie, then—not in its ideal Platonic form, but in its modern realpolitik guise—was summoned to stitch over the widening gap between strategic interest and public perception. The U.S. needed a dignified off-ramp from Iran; the truth could not provide one. The fiction of triumph, therefore, became the condition for disengagement.

Truth or Dare in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine, still ongoing, presents a more rigid structure of demands. Unlike in the Iranian case, where temporary disengagement was acceptable to both parties, Russia insists on a settlement tantamount to recognition of victory: full Ukrainian withdrawal from the four annexed oblasts, acknowledgment of Crimea as Russian territory, an end to NATO ambitions, demilitarization, and constitutional protections for the Russian-speaking minority. In addition, Russia would expect the lifting of Western sanctions and the unfreezing of assets—effectively, the restoration of a normalized relationship on Russian terms.

This list of demands would be absurd—indeed, politically suicidal—for any Western government to entertain if Russia were truly suffering two million casualties. Were Moscow haemorrhaging men and material at that scale, the logic of attrition would compel NATO to escalate. Killing another million Russians, or pushing the front into Moscow’s leafy suburbs, would be strategically irresistible. That none of this is happening, and that calls for ceasefire now multiply across NATO capitals, indicates which story is exoteric performance and which is esoteric warning.

To this, one might append a literary footnote. In Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, the young truth-teller Gregers Werle insists on revealing a long-suppressed family secret, convinced that freedom lies in absolute honesty. But when the veils are stripped away, the result is destruction, not emancipation. “If you take the life-lie from a man,” one character observes, “you take away his happiness.” And so, many political truths, especially in declining hegemonies, are transformed into “regime-lies”—necessary to maintain the illusion of coherence, capability, and control.

Today, the West finds itself in such a posture: unable to admit the limits of its own power, unwilling to pay the price of true negotiation, and so trapped within the exoteric myths it tells to its own publics. Whether in Kiev or Tehran, the lie is rarely noble, but always necessary. And perhaps—as with the Soviet Union in its final years—the system will continue to speak of triumph even as it negotiates defeat.

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President Trump was quick to declare “mission accomplished,” boasting that his midnight strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear weapons threat. While debate rages over how much physical damage the bombs actually inflicted—surface scratches or deep destruction—the reality is simpler: Operation Midnight Hammer amounted to little more than slamming the barn door after the nuclear horses had already bolted. Whether the attack succeeded tactically is beside the point—strategically, it was a failure. All it has done is force Iran into a binary choice between the fate of non-nuclear Libya and the path of nuclear armed North Korea. And it doesn’t take a genius to see which direction Tehran must now take to avoid being caught lacking.

In response to the American strikes, Iran has pledged not only to continue uranium enrichment but to accelerate it. Whether this effort resumes at Fordow or shifts to undisclosed underground facilities remains unclear—no independent assessment of the damage at Fordow has been made public. Multiple sources, including Israeli analysts, have indicated that the heavily fortified enrichment hall may have withstood the assault. On the morning of June 23rd, Israeli forces reportedly demolished the access road to the complex, effectively sealing it off and forestalling any near-term inspection that might contradict the US President’s triumphant declaration of mission accomplished.

Yet what we’re witnessing is a TikTok strategy for an ADHD age—a flashy set piece packaged as a final act, even as the real narrative is only just beginning. In geopolitical terms, the US and Israel have offered the illusion of resolution: a single, high-drama airstrike meant to symbolically “close the file” on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But if the real objective is to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state—and there are plenty of reasons to doubt that’s even the primary goal—then this operation is not a conclusion. It’s merely the first scene in what promises to be a long, multi-season geopolitical docudrama, one that could stretch across years, if not decades.

In the best-case scenario for Israel, Iran currently holds around 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity. That’s enough for roughly ten nuclear warheads and forms the foundation of a credible deterrent. Advancing from 60% to weapons-grade enrichment at 90% is technically straightforward—and it’s entirely possible that Iran has already made that leap with part of its stockpile. If Israel is truly committed to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, it must prepare for a sustained campaign of disruption and containment. This will not be resolved with a single strike. The only definitive endpoint to this standoff may come when Iran decides to conduct a nuclear test.

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MAGA Chasing MacGuffins

In classic film theory, a MacGuffin is the object that drives the plot—a statue, a suitcase, a nuclear formula. It’s what the characters chase, but it often holds little intrinsic meaning. Alfred Hitchcock made the term famous: the MacGuffin is what the story pretends to be about, while the real drama unfolds in the pursuit. Think of The Maltese Falcon, or the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. In this case, the uranium is the MacGuffin—everyone claims to be hunting it, even if no one knows exactly where it is or what they’re prepared to do to recover it.

Just consider the scale of what would be required. It took the US months of occupation, tens of thousands of troops, and vast intelligence resources to locate a single man—Saddam Hussein. Now imagine trying to track down a dispersed stockpile of highly enriched uranium, hidden across a country the size of Alaska, in bunkers, basements, and mobile labs. The idea that a handful of precision strikes could neutralize Iran’s nuclear capability isn’t just optimistic—it’s strategic fiction.

So if the uranium is the MacGuffin in this unfolding drama, then chasing it means tracking a scattered herd of wild horses across deserts, tunnels, cities, and mountains. It might make for compelling cinema. But as a military doctrine, it’s a roadmap to quagmire—a long, grinding war of attrition that ends with MAGA boots on Iranian soil.

Breaking the Rules-Based Order

In response to the US-led strikes on its nuclear facilities, Iran is threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This would mark a seismic shift in global nuclear governance. It is worth remembering that the NPT was originally written and aggressively promoted by the United States in the late 1960s, entering into force in 1970. Its goal was to formalize the distinction between nuclear-armed states (those that had tested nuclear weapons before 1967) and non-nuclear states, while offering the latter a grand bargain: in exchange for forgoing the development of nuclear weapons, they would be granted the right to pursue peaceful nuclear energy programs under international supervision.

The NPT's fundamental logic is surveillance in exchange for sovereignty: non-nuclear states retain their right to enrich uranium and build nuclear infrastructure, so long as they do so transparently under the watch of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). That is the essence of the so-called "rules-based international order" when it comes to nuclear policy.

Iran, notably, remains a signatory to the NPT and has, according to most expert assessments and IAEA monitoring reports, stayed within the letter of the agreement. It is not illegal for Iran to enrich uranium up to 60% purity—a level that is technically below weapons-grade—as long as this activity is declared and inspected. Even if one believes that Iran has a clandestine weapons program operating parallel to its civilian infrastructure, the existence of such a shadow program has not been verified by Western intelligence and certainly not by international inspectors. If these facilities exist, they remain unlocated and therefore unstrikeable.

This raises an uncomfortable truth: the United States and its allies have now attacked the declared, monitored infrastructure of an NPT-compliant country. This is not just a diplomatic contradiction—it is a gross violation of international law. Under the NPT, member states are explicitly prohibited from attacking one another’s safeguarded nuclear sites. The attack on Iran's nuclear program is not only a strategic gamble but a breach of the very framework the West helped create to stop nuclear proliferation.

Meanwhile, Israel—the state most aggressively pushing for military action against Iran—has never signed the NPT, and so paradoxically has more legal flexibly to attack Iran. It maintains a longstanding policy of nuclear opacity, refusing to confirm or deny the existence of its arsenal, though it is widely believed to possess over 200 nuclear warheads. Unlike Iran, Israel has never allowed IAEA inspections, never declared its stockpiles, and operates entirely outside the rules-based system it accuses others of violating.

On paper—and for the most part in practice—it wasn’t Iran that first walked away from the so-called rules-based order. Tehran, to be sure, has tested the boundaries, pushing hard against the upper limits of the NPT in an effort to force sanctions relief. But it was the West that ultimately flipped the table, abandoning the very treaties it once authored in favour of an ad hoc doctrine of "might makes right." If Iran now chooses to withdraw from the NPT, it won’t be breaking the system. It will be responding to a system already broken—one that punished compliance and rewarded power. If Iran now hopes to ascend and survive in a world governed by raw force, it must rapidly adapt its war-making capabilities and deepen its strategic alliances.

Iranian Attrition

While it’s obvious that both Russia and China have strong incentives to see the US bogged down in a draining war of attrition against Iran, what’s less acknowledged is that America’s own domestic elite share the same incentive. What better way to neutralize the populist right “menace” than to ship its sons off to die in the desert—for Israel? For the Uniparty, “winning” means MAGA youth bleeding out on the approaches to Tehran. They don’t want another Iran–Iraq war; they want an Iran–MAGA war. Every fallen soldier is a double victory: the populist threat is bled, and the forever war machine is fed. Trump and his war party influencers are already turning their fire on the anti-war wing of MAGA with the fervor of inquisitors rooting out heresy. What better fate for these faint-hearted dissenters than to atone with a one-way ticket for uranium hunting in Persia?

It is difficult to take wartime statements at face value, especially when deception is rewarded and truth-telling can be a liability. There are reports suggesting that Israel, through indirect channels, is signalling to Iran a willingness to consider a ceasefire. Following US strikes that triggered threats against American bases, some air defense assets originally deployed to shield Israel may have been redirected to protect US personnel. However, given the extent of American political and emotional fetishization of Israel, it's unclear whether such a strategic reallocation would actually be prioritized.

Yet, as the US learned in Ukraine, ending a war requires both sides to turn off the tap. While neither Israel nor the US may seek a prolonged war of attrition—especially as they reportedly face shortages of air defense interceptors—Iran appears to be adapting. Fewer missiles are being launched, but a greater proportion are now penetrating Israeli defenses.

Israel, for its part, has entered a counter-value targeting phase, striking civilian infrastructure deeper inside Iran. This strategy failed to deliver decisive results even in the tightly confined battleground of Gaza. Iran, by contrast, is vast—and even if the political will existed, neither Israel nor the US possesses the arsenal or endurance to sustain a campaign of mass destruction across such a sprawling terrain. Iran, on the other hand, holds a large and growing inventory of ballistic missiles, and Israel remains a small, densely populated state.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s insistence that the mission has “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear threat reads less like triumph and more like an attempt to avoid being dragged deeper into the Iranian tar. Even if this chapter of the regime-fragmentation campaign against Tehran may seem to be drawing to a close—for now. Give it a few months, and the next episode will be ready for release.

The Iranian Trap

The tale of the Tar-Baby, drawn from African-American folklore and popularized in the 19th-century Uncle Remus stories, tells of Br’er Rabbit who, enraged by a silent tar figure that he mistakes for a snubbing stranger, strikes it—only to become stuck, limb by limb, in the sticky trap. The more he struggles, the deeper he’s caught.

The story has long served as a metaphor for entrapment: a situation that tempts retaliation, but punishes it with irreversible commitment. In military terms, this is known as a pinning-down operation—where one party lures another into a fight it can’t easily escape.

The Iranian nuclear program is today’s tar-baby. The US and Israel, believing they can strike it decisively, have instead initiated a process that may bind them to years of strategic and kinetic engagement. Each strike meant to send a message or "restore deterrence" only deepens the entanglement, forcing ever-more commitments to maintain credibility. Iran, aware of this logic, is now goading them into further reaction, knowing the more punches they throw, the more stuck they become.

We can also reverse this metaphor. In the original folktale, the tar-baby is the trap — a snare that catches those who lash out. But in the US–Iran saga, it’s just as true that Washington also plays the role of the tar-baby, luring Tehran into entanglement not through provocation, but through the illusion of diplomacy. The question, then, is: why does Iran keep reaching out? Why risk another encounter with the West’s sticky promises?

The answer lies in a persistent, perhaps fatal hope: that sanctions relief — the great prize of engagement — might one day be real. The 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated under Obama, represented the high-water mark of this aspiration. Iran complied. It accepted intrusive inspections and capped enrichment. In return, it got temporary relief — until Trump tore up the agreement, reimposed sanctions, and demonstrated beyond doubt that the US is, in the words of many Iranian officials, "agreement incapable."

Still, the temptation remains. Iranian liberals look across the Persian Gulf at the skyscrapers of Dubai and Doha — the financial opulence of US-aligned Gulf monarchies — and dream of a future in the global economy. That fantasy acts as the honey pot in America’s trap. But unlike the Gulf States, Iran will never be permitted to integrate into the US-led order. Its independence is its original sin. Washington will always find a pretext to keep sanctions in place. Iran might be wiser to take a page from Russia’s book: accept the permanence of Western hostility, forget their American dreams, build resilience, and chart a sovereign economic course.

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Iran, the latest target in more than two decades of Israeli-American regime change operations, is no easy prey. This is a vast, mountainous nation guarding a proud and ancient civilization—one not easily broken by either conventional bombing campaigns. While President Trump offers soothing words about a “limited” intervention aimed at halting Iran’s nuclear program, the reality is far more volatile. The moment Iran retaliates to overt US aggression—by sinking a US ship, striking bases across the region, or launching sabotage and assassination operations through America’s porous borders—mission creep becomes inevitable.

What begins as a precision airstrike ends with a World War II–scale invasion, and with no viable proxy force, it will be MAGA boots on the ground doing the dying.

In response to Israeli aggression, Iran appears to have already launched its own campaign to demilitarize Israel. Its strategic missile strikes have targeted the nerve centers of Israeli military power, though Israeli censorship laws mean the full extent of the damage remains unclear. On June 19th, however, that blackout was briefly lifted: a military hospital and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange were struck. Iran claims to have hit key Israeli military command sites, including the IDF’s Military Intelligence Center in Gav-Yam and its Cyber Command HQ. Whether those claims are true or exaggerated, the images will be enough to stoke war fever in Washington.

At this stage, both sides are locked in a war of attrition fought through airpower and sabotage. Neither has the means to invade the other, though Mossad has deployed a network of saboteurs across Iran, bombing police stations and critical infrastructure in what appears to be an effort to spark a domestic revolt. Perhaps Israel dreams of American and Israeli troops parading through Tehran, met with flowers and applause. But dreams aside, the Iran-Israel War is a grinding stalemate—and that’s where US involvement comes in.

President Trump has announced he will make a decision on intervention within two weeks—which, in the cynical language of Washington, means the bombs start falling fifteen minutes after markets close on Friday!

Bombing is the easy part, the gateway drug of geopolitics. It gives pundits and politicians a quick, potent hit of strategic dopamine. But Iran isn’t likely to fold just because a few bombs are falling. Gaza hasn’t. Ukraine hasn’t. There will be no white flags flaying over Tehran any time soon, although Trump is certain to deploy a plethora of “Mission Accomplished” banners through his Truth postings.

Once the bombing begins, the retaliation will come in waves. US bases across the region will burn. Perhaps also Saudi oil infrastructure will also go up in flames. Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz with mines laid by special forces, choking global oil shipments and throwing the world economy into chaos. Inflation will spike, growth will collapse, and America’s global rivals—China, Russia, and others—will quietly supply Tehran with arms, intelligence, and money, just as the US and Europe once did for Ukraine.

If Netanyahu is serious about regime change—and let’s not pretend otherwise—he’s going to need ground troops—a lot of them. Israel’s army is exhausted from two years in Gaza, and European militaries aren’t fit for anything more than photo-ops. That leaves one option: American soldiers. And after all, what price is too high for GI Joe to pay to prevent another Holocaust?

But it won’t be Ivy League grads or blue-state technocrats with pronouns in their bios marching into Persia. It’ll be MAGA kids—working-class Americans whose fathers thought they voted against forever wars, not into one. The same people who once shouted “No more wars for Israel” may soon find themselves bleeding out on the slopes of the Zagros Mountains, while pundits in D.C. sip cocktails and mock their naiveté.

Seeking to protect MAGA partisans from a Persian slaughter, a strong anti-war faction has emerged on the right. Peaceniks include Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jack Posobiec have all spoken out against America acting as Israel’s military proxy. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s original pick for US Attorney General, has even floated the once-taboo idea that Israel should be denuclearized to promote stability in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, China and Russia will sit back and watch. Iran is a key node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Beijing buys Iranian oil at bargain basement prices thanks to American sanctions; there’s no chance Beijing lets it fall without a fight. The Chinese have already banned rare earth exports vital to the US military. American stockpiles are already depleted after three years of funnelling weapons to Ukraine and two years of arming Israel in Gaza. When it comes time for “Operation Iranian Freedom,” the Pentagon may discover it simply doesn’t have the gear to fight it for very long and few exit paths to leave the conflict with US honour intact—although it is the genius of President Trump to mould even the worst outcomes into apparent victories.

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Air Power Alone

The notion that airpower alone can bring Iran to its knees is a fantasy recycled from failed campaigns past. From Korea to Vietnam, and more recently in Iraq, Libya, and Gaza, we’ve seen the limits of bombing. It can maim and disorient, but it rarely delivers regime change. In Iraq, both in 1991 and 2003, airstrikes were only effective because they preceded or accompanied full-scale invasions. Even NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia—often touted as a successful air war—only worked under the threat of a ground invasion and after intense diplomatic pressure.

Israel’s own experiences make this case even clearer. Its 2006 war on Hezbollah achieved little despite weeks of airstrikes. Its repeated assaults on Gaza—including the current one—have reduced much of the strip to rubble, yet failed to eliminate Hamas or win a stable post-war settlement. Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza is a strategic failure cloaked in tactical brutality. The idea that Iran—a nation of 90 million with an experienced military, a proud national identity, and a history of endurance in the face of war—will fold under air pressure alone is delusional.

This is not a country that breaks easily. Iran weathered an eight-year war with Saddam Hussein, enduring chemical attacks, immense casualties, and economic siege. And unlike Iraq or Libya, it has allies, industrial capacity, and geographic depth. If regime change is the real goal—and it’s clear from Netanyahu’s rhetoric that it is—then bombing won’t suffice. It will take a ground invasion. Israel won’t do it. It can’t. That burden would fall to the United States.

Fortress Iran

Iran is a geographic fortress. Natural barriers abound: rugged mountain chains, two vast deserts, and narrow passes that choke off access from nearly every side. An eastern approach from Afghanistan involves navigating desolate terrain with few staging points. A western approach, via Turkey, is politically improbable. Ankara refused to let the US use Turkish territory for the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and US–Turkey relations have only deteriorated since then. Besides, once Tehran were out of the way, Israel would turn its gun sights on Turkey.

The southern route—the one Saddam attempted—offers no easier path. The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates forms a swampy bottleneck easily defended by entrenched forces. Beyond it lie the Zagros Mountains, which chewed up Saddam’s military for eight fruitless years.

Any serious ground campaign would require overwhelming numbers. One military estimate suggests as many as 1.6 million troops would be needed to seize and occupy Iran—far beyond the 180,000 the US deployed at the height of the Iraq War, and well beyond America’s current capacity to house or supply such a force in the region.

The Human Cost and the Political Trap

The casualties would be catastrophic. A campaign to forcibly remove Iran’s leadership could kill not thousands, but millions. Urban warfare in cities like Tehran or Mashhad would make Fallujah look like a warm-up drill. And unlike Iraq, there would be no illusion of a “coalition of the willing.” No European power wants to bleed for Netanyahu’s war.

And yet, bizarrely, the diplomatic option has been allowed to rot on the vine. A “deal” to de-escalate is now politically impossible. Israel has no interest in such a deal—it has, in fact, systematically eliminated much of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team. The US, meanwhile, has rendered itself agreement incapable. Trump tore up the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated under Obama, then demanded Iran continue to follow its terms. It remains a mystery why Tehran’s boomer leadership ever returned to the table after that betrayal. Perhaps the lure of selling their oil at market prices instead of supplying it so cheaply to Beijing?

Strategic Depth and Realignment

Despite its resilience, Iran is not without flaws. The revolutionary leadership suffers from stagnation. Its gerontocratic elite, marinated in martyrdom ideology, clings to outdated tools—WhatsApp, reportedly compromised by Mossad, was still widely used by Iranian officials until very recently. But even Mossad’s assassinations may have unintended consequences: thinning the aging ranks and making room for a younger, more capable generation of Iranian leadership—one that is more open to outside assistance.

Iran has long feared becoming anyone’s pawn. It kept its distance from both China and Russia, and even flirted briefly with India—a relationship now under stress as Indian-descended IT contractors are alleged to be serving as Mossad assets deep within Iran’s state infrastructure. But if this war escalates, that strategic aloofness will vanish. Iran will have no choice but to deepen its ties with Beijing, Moscow—and perhaps even Islamabad.

Yes, there are contradictions in a Pakistan–Iran alliance. But for Pakistan, realism will triumph over ideology. It will not want a Zionist client state planted on its western border. Humiliation and survival are powerful motivators. In war, Iran will be forced to overcome its internal contradictions, because what awaits it otherwise is far worse.

The Nuclear Question: Totem and Taboo

At the heart of current US-Israeli war planning lies Iran’s nuclear infrastructure—especially the heavily fortified Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, buried deep within a mountain near the city of Qom. Fordow is no longer just a facility—it’s a totem. A symbol of Iran’s nuclear sovereignty, buried deep within the mountains not just for protection, but for reverence. It stands for national pride, self-determination, and the unyielding will to survive in a hostile geopolitical landscape. It is both real and mythic: a physical site and a symbolic one, housing not just centrifuges, but narratives of martyrdom, resistance, and deterrence.

To destroy Fordow is not merely to strike a technical target. It is to desecrate a totem—to symbolically neuter the Iranian state, to humiliate it before the world, to proclaim that no depth is safe, no sovereignty sacred. For the war planners in Tel Aviv and Washington, the fantasy runs deeper still: to strike like Yahweh into the heart of the mountain, to send divine fire crashing through rock and reinforced steel, obliterating not just uranium but the very idea of resistance. But this is a messianic delusion. Iran’s enriched uranium is likely long gone, dispersed or duplicated, and what remains at Fordow is more myth than matter—an empty altar, awaiting a sacrificial bomb.

To breach this nuclear fortress, the Pentagon has considered deploying its most powerful non-nuclear weapon—the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). This 30,000-pound gravity bomb was engineered to punch through reinforced bunkers, but even MOP has limits. Fordow’s depth and surrounding terrain—granite, layered concrete, and high-altitude geography—make it almost impossible to reach without multiple sequential hits in precisely the same spot, a task rendered virtually impossible by gravity-based delivery systems alone.

The unpleasant truth is this: no conventional weapon can guarantee the destruction of Fordow. And so the taboo rears its head.

Breaking the Nuclear Taboo?

In classified war game scenarios and increasingly in semi-public statements, US military planners and hawkish think tanks have floated the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons to ensure destruction of hardened Iranian sites. That’s where the real danger begins—not to Iran alone, but to the global system. Because once a nuclear weapon is used, no matter how "small" or "surgical," the nuclear taboo is shattered. The last barrier to total war collapses.

This taboo is not law, but it is real. It has governed behaviour since 1945—not through treaties, but through norms, shame, deterrence, and the deeply internalized fear of opening Pandora’s Box. As political scientist Nina Tannenwald has documented, even during moments of extreme geopolitical stress—Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, the Gulf War—states with nuclear capacity held back, constrained by a moral and strategic logic that defied pure military calculus.

To violate that taboo, even “just a little,” would unleash incalculable consequences. Russia, Pakistan, India, North Korea, and China might interpret it as a green light to use their own tactical nukes in regional conflicts. Iran would gain immense moral capital and global sympathy. Non-nuclear states would scramble to go nuclear, rightly concluding that only the threat of retaliation—not law, not treaties, not norms—offers true protection from annihilation. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would collapse in spirit, if not in formal structure.

And yet the US–Israeli folie à deux may be just unhinged enough to believe they alone can claim nuclear privilege—reserved not for defense, but for the messianic task of stopping any future “Holocausts.” This is not deterrence; it is sanctified aggression. Israel, already displaying a staggering degree of moral asymmetry—even for a nation that claims to be divinely chosen—has razed more than 30 hospitals in Gaza, yet cries foul when Iran destroys an IDF intelligence bunker housed beneath an Israeli military hospital. The asymmetry is no longer strategic—it is theological. And the question now is whether Tel Aviv will demand that this moral exceptionalism extend to the nuclear realm as well.

Yet even within Israel’s strategic community, there are realists who understand the perils of this path. Martin van Creveld, one of Israel’s most respected military historians, has long acknowledged the logic behind Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In 2004, he stated bluntly:

“Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.”

By 2007, his message had become even more pointed:

“The world must now learn to live with a nuclear Iran the way we learned to live with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China…. We Israelis have what it takes to deter an Iranian attack. We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us… thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany.”

Creveld’s cold-eyed realism stands in stark contrast to the fantasy that Iran can be bombed into surrender without setting off a broader nuclear cascade. The cruel irony is this: breaking the nuclear taboo to keep Iran out of the club may well guarantee that others rush to join it.

The late Thomas Schelling, Nobel laureate and Cold War strategist, saw this danger with piercing clarity. In his 2005 Nobel lecture, he warned:

“The next possessors of nuclear weapons may be Iran, North Korea, or possibly some terrorist bodies. Is there any hope that they will have absorbed the nearly universal inhibition against the use of nuclear weapons, or will at least be inhibited by the recognition that the taboo enjoys widespread acclaim?

Part of the answer will depend on whether the United States recognizes that inhibition, and especially on whether the United States recognizes it as an asset to be cherished, enhanced, and protected—or, like John Foster Dulles in Eisenhower’s cabinet, believes ‘somehow or other we must manage to remove the taboo from the use of these weapons.’”

“The most critical question about nuclear weapons for the United States Government is whether the widespread taboo… is in our favor or against us. If it is in the American interest, as I believe obvious, advertising a continued dependence on nuclear weapons… has to be weighed against the corrosive effect on a nearly universal attitude that has been cultivated through universal abstinence of sixty years.”

Trump, in his signature blend of theatricality and menace, may be bluffing—floating the specter of a nuclear strike as part of a grotesque “art of the deal” gambit. Pressure Tehran, excite the base, spook the allies. But if it’s not a bluff—if he truly believes, like Dulles, that the taboo must be broken—then this is not just about regime change in Iran.

It’s about regime change for the international order itself.

A Criminally Crazy Regime?

If Iran has spent the last two decades dancing on the knife’s edge of nuclear capability—flirting with weapons-grade enrichment, testing delivery systems, funding proxies to attack Israel, watching as weaker nations with no deterrent were invaded and dismantled—and still hasn’t built the bomb, then Van Creveld was right: they are insane. Criminally naïve. Any regime that lived through the Iran-Iraq War, that watched what happened to non-nuclear Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and yet still failed to secure a nuclear deterrent is one that deserves to be overthrown—not by America, but by its own people, for strategic malpractice on a civilizational scale.

But is it believable that Iran is truly that stupid?

The more plausible interpretation is far darker—and far more stabilizing in its own twisted way. Perhaps Iran, like Israel, has simply chosen opacity. Perhaps it already has a handful of warheads, or enough fissile material to assemble them rapidly. Perhaps Fordow has already served it purpose, but is now just diversion away from a stockpile already quietly complete and dispersed. And perhaps the reason Iran has not used them is not out of fear, but restraint born of the nuclear taboo.

In that scenario, the real danger isn’t the emergence of an Iranian nuclear weapon—it’s the shattering of the nuclear taboo by the United States. If Washington drops even a “tactical” nuclear bomb on Qom or Natanz, it won’t just vaporize hardened bunkers—it will vaporize the global norm that has kept nuclear warfare off the table for nearly 80 years. And in doing so, it may give Tehran exactly the permission structure it needs to drop the mask.

In the best-case scenario, Iran responds to a nuclear attack not with retaliation but with revelation. A nuclear test—detonated beneath its own soil—marks an apocalypse in the original sense: an unveiling, a shattering of illusions. The message is clear, the humiliation deliberate, and Trump is exposed as the fool who gambled and lost and allowed a nuclear Iran to reveal itself. But in the worst-case scenario, Iran skips the theatrics. It opens the silos. And Tel Aviv, long shielded by opacity and messianic exuberance, may come to understand apocalypse in its more familiar, final sense.

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On the eve of Istanbul peace talks, Russia suffered coordinated attacks across its territory. In Bryansk, Ukrainian sabotage teams detonated explosives beneath a railroad overpass as a passenger train approached, killing 10 civilians and injuring scores—a blatant terrorist strike. Nearby, the Kursk region saw another rail bridge destroyed, temporarily crippling critical infrastructure.

But the REALLY BAD blow for Russia came a few hours later with “Operation Spiderweb” — an unprecedented asymmetric strike by NATO and its Ukrainian proxies against five deep-inland Russian airbases: Belaya, Dyagilevo, Ivanovo Severny, Olenya, and Ukrainka.

Swarms of drones were launched from concealed civilian trucks positioned near the targeted installations, in what appears to have been a meticulously coordinated multi-axis assault on Russia’s strategic bomber force. The message was unmistakable: NATO, operating through Ukrainian hands, can strike at will, anywhere inside Russia’s supposed hinterland.

The operation involved 117 drones and highlighted not only the vulnerability of Russia’s long-range aviation assets — including the Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 — but also exposed critical lapses in rear-area security. More than the physical damage, which Russian sources claim was limited, the psychological and strategic impact has been severe. Airbases long considered outside the range of Ukrainian capabilities have now proven to be within reach, challenging Moscow’s assumptions about the depth of its strategic sanctuary.

While the war in Ukraine has revealed NATO’s inability to supply, yet alone conduct, peer-to-peer combat, Operation Spiderweb is a textbook demonstration of NATO’s evolving proxy warfare model: Western ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), targeting infrastructure, and operational planning are fused with Ukrainian execution. The effect is to give NATO the ability to project force far beyond its borders, while minimizing political liabilities thanks to its Ukrainian proxy mask. The symbolism is potent — Russia’s most prestigious air assets, struck not at the front, but in the rear — and the Kremlin must now account for a reality in which no target is truly safe.

In the aftermath of the attack, the Ukrainian informational "Mighty Wurlitzer" —amplified by Western media organs—went full blast with inflated claims that 40 Russian bombers were destroyed. However, verifiable imagery and credible assessments suggest the actual losses number fewer than ten. The most successful strikes were concentrated at Olenya and Belaya airbases, while the remaining three targets sustained only superficial or ineffective damage. Russian commentators—given the Kremlin’s silence on the matter—likely err on the side of minimization, but even their downplayed accounts remain far closer to the truth than Kiev’s theatrically inflated narrative.

What matters more than raw aircraft losses is the vulnerability the operation revealed. The attacks exposed significant gaps in Russian base security and air defense coordination in a new era where low-cost drone swarms can punch well above their weight. Tactically, the damage is modest; strategically, it is a wake-up call. Russia’s strategic bomber force remains largely intact, but its presumed invulnerability has been punctured. The psychological blow—especially in terms of deterrence and global perception—may prove longer lasting than the physical damage itself.

Russia’s strategic bombers, which have played a central role in sustained strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure, are unquestionably legitimate military targets. Russian forensic analysis reportedly confirms the use of U.S.-origin C4 explosives in the drone attacks, suggesting direct Western involvement in their execution. However, the method of delivery—launching drones from civilian vehicles—strains the boundaries of international law. More troubling still, the Bryansk train bombing, which targeted civilians using NATO-supplied munitions, crosses into the realm of unambiguous terrorism.

The operational authorship of “Spiderweb” becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of insider reporting. According to Rezident, a consistently credible Ukrainian opposition Telegram channel, British intelligence played the principal role in both the planning and coordination of this attack—echoing their alleged involvement in the Crimean Bridge sabotage. As Rezident put it:

“Our source in the OP [Office of the President] said that yesterday’s special operation, like the blowing up of the Crimean Bridge, was prepared by British intelligence, using its agents in Russian regions. The Ukrainians were not involved in the active phase, but only delivered parts to various warehouses. Satellite repeaters were tuned to NATO frequency, enabling the raid. Thanks to the Center for Informed PsyOps, the media effect was achieved and the inflated number of 40 destroyed aircraft was disseminated. In reality, the number is three times less—but in cognitive war, the goal is psychological shock, not accuracy.”

Perhaps most telling is what didn’t happen. Neither President Putin nor Donald Trump issued immediate statements. The silence is conspicuous—especially from Trump, who once revelled in dramatic pronouncements, such as after the raid that killed ISIS leader al-Baghdadi during his first term. This unusual restraint speaks volumes. It marks a moment in which the neoconservative establishment has reasserted its dominance in the operational domain of military escalation. Operation Spiderweb is thus more than a drone strike: it is a calibrated act of hybrid warfare, aimed at reshaping not just battlefield dynamics, but the perception of who truly wields power—within NATO, within Ukraine, and even within the West itself.

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Tell-Tale Truths?

Did President Trump Authorize the NATO-Ukrainian Strikes on Russian Airbases?

Either answer indicts his leadership.

If he approved the attacks, he did so while posturing as a neutral peacemaker—undermining his own credibility as a mediator. If he didn’t, then the operation proceeded under his nose, executed by a Pentagon and intelligence community that no longer answer to him. In either case, Trump appears not as a commander-in-chief, but as a hostage to the very machinery of escalation he claimed to be running against on the campaign trail.

Emerging reports suggest that Pentagon officials were fully briefed before and during the operation, confirming that this was no rogue manoeuvre. The defense establishment appears to have treated the assault on Russian strategic aviation as an ongoing mission with standing authorization. Trump’s potential fall-back defense—that it was a “Biden-era plan” he merely inherited—only reinforces the perception of impotence. Declining to veto a provocation of this magnitude, while pursuing a media blitz promoting peace talks, reveals either duplicity or weakness. Possibly both.

Mask of Mediation

Trump’s performance as mediator between Ukraine and Russia now borders on farce—like a homewrecker pretending to arbitrate the divorce he helped cause. For a decade, the U.S. has funded, armed, trained, and politically fortified Ukraine’s confrontation with Russia. It has pushed NATO eastward, abetted the Maidan coup, and backed successive waves of escalation. And yet here stands Trump, draped in peacemaker’s robes, presiding over talks in Istanbul as though his hands are clean.

Trump’s own words betray the hollowness of his neutral posture. On Truth Social, he cast Putin as the violent, irrational husband—“killing needlessly, and not just soldiers”—while simultaneously rebuking Zelensky for inflammatory rhetoric, claiming, “Everything out of his mouth causes problems… it better stop.” This domestic allegory reduces a complex geopolitical conflict to soap-opera roles: the abusive brute, the shrill enabler, and Trump as the weary but wise counsellor—performing neutrality while actively backing one of the parties with funds, arms, and intelligence.

The deeper absurdity lies not just in the theatre, but in the strategic schizophrenia it masks. The United States is not refereeing this war—it is underwriting it. Ukraine is not an independent actor—it is a proxy. And Trump, for all his bombast, seems to not be calling the shots—he manages perceptions while others set the course.

The immediate context of the drone attacks reveals the contradiction. Russia’s large-scale retaliatory strikes on Kiev that triggered Trump responses came after two high-risk Ukrainian operations: a coordinated drone barrage on Moscow and what appears to have been a failed assassination attempt on President Putin via drone strike during his visit to recently liberated Kursk. These missions were far beyond Ukraine’s autonomous capabilities. They required targeting data, logistical coordination, and electronic warfare support—components only NATO can reliably supply.

Leading up to the Istanbul summit, speculation swirled that Trump—growing frustrated with Ukraine’s battlefield stagnation and the political and economic costs of endless war—might pivot sharply and withdraw support. Such a shift would wound Ukraine far more than Russia. Yet instead, the world was greeted with Operation Spiderweb—a full-spectrum escalation on Russia’s strategic heartland, launched just hours before peace talks were to begin.

How can Trump kick his geopolitical sidepiece to the curb now after Ukraine’s spectacular success?

But the most revealing element in this spectacle is not Trump’s hubris—it is Putin’s calculated tolerance. Why would the apparent master of the Ukraine battlefield permit his enemy’s sponsor to assume the role of judge? Why entertain this illusion of American neutrality?

A true master need not react to every provocation—his power lies not in moral preening or rhetorical balance, but in the capacity to absorb shocks without being thrown off course. Putin’s strategy, though at times maddeningly patient, is guided by long-term objectives: degrading Ukraine’s military capacity, outlasting the Western political cycle, and gradually exposing the contradictions within the NATO proxy war model.

By allowing Trump to perform his pantomime of peace, Putin underscores the hollowness of U.S. moral authority. Each day that Trump plays the mediator while NATO strikes strategic Russian targets, the fiction becomes more unsustainable—and the mask slips further.

Spiderweb’s Impact on Istanbul

At the June 2nd peace conference in Istanbul, Moscow's diplomatic position remained unchanged—firm, familiar, and unsentimental. Yet the strategic context had subtly shifted. Ukraine’s high-profile success with Operation Spiderweb gave Zelensky political cover to engage in talks that many factions within Ukraine had previously deemed premature or even traitorous. By demonstrating the capacity to strike deep into Russian territory—even symbolically—Kiev managed to reframe negotiations not as an act of desperation, but as a confident strategic manoeuvre. In this sense, the operation may have achieved its most significant effect on the Ukrainian domestic front: normalizing dialogue with Russia.

Russia, for its part, arrived in Istanbul with a chilling psychological gambit. Moscow proposed a unilateral “humanitarian gesture”: the return of 6,000 Ukrainian war dead. Most of these bodies, it claimed, had been identified by forensic teams, making them eligible for full compensation under Ukrainian law. The state, by statute, must provide the families of fallen soldiers with death benefits totalling up to 17.27 million hryvnia (approximately $422,800 USD) per soldier. Should Kyiv accept the corpses and comply with its own laws, the financial burden could exceed $2.5 billion—a staggering sum for a regime already dependent on Western aid to meet basic budgetary obligations.

It was a masterstroke of macabre diplomacy—calculated not to resolve, but to reveal. Ukraine fights on borrowed resources, and increasingly, on borrowed time.

Spiderweb’s Impact

Operation Spiderweb’s success is real but narrow—a tactical humiliation, not a strategic turning point. Like a desperate football team running a trick play to narrow the score from 35-14, it makes for compelling footage but changes little. The hysteria over crippling Russia’s nuclear triad ignores a fundamental truth: unlike America, Moscow has never treated its bomber fleet as the crown jewel of deterrence. That role belongs to its ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles—systems untouched by these strikes.

Russia’s own calculus has long been shifting. As modern air defenses proliferate globally, those hulking Tu-95s and Tu-160s—once symbols of Soviet reach—now resemble relics awaiting obsolescence. The bombers persist more for prestige than necessity, their vulnerability laid bare not just by Ukrainian drones but by Russia’s own deployment patterns. This strike may accelerate what was already inevitable: the quiet demotion of Russia’s strategic aviation in favour of hypersonic missiles and silent submarines.

Many overestimate the impact of recent attacks on Russia’s capabilities to strike. The bulk of damage inflicted on Ukraine comes from Iskander-M ballistic missiles and Geran-2 drones—not Tu-95 bombers. Russia now launches hundreds of cheap, effective Gerans daily, while Iskanders—nearly unstoppable and packing heavier payloads—remain the primary tool for hitting both static and mobile targets. By contrast, Tu-95s and Tu-160s fire Kh-101 cruise missiles, which require lengthy logistical preparations, are less versatile, and are more vulnerable to air defense.

While losing even a few bombers is costly—given their irreplaceability and long repair times—their operational role has diminished compared to missiles and drones. The real significance of these strikes lies in their psychological effect: both shattering the illusion of Russian invulnerability but further galvanizing domestic support for the war. Rather than crippling Moscow’s campaign, the attacks may harden resolve, reminding Russians that the conflict is no longer confined to distant battlefields.

Russia’s Response Options

As of this writing Russia has not responded, neither through narratives nor attacks. While some clamour for nuclear strikes or overwhelming retaliation, such a reaction would only legitimize Ukraine’s provocation—proving that a handful of damaged bombers could derail Moscow’s strategic discipline. True power in war lies not in reflexive fury, but in the cold discernment between meaningful threats and mere distractions. Clausewitz called this friction—the inevitable chaos of conflict that separates the tactician from the strategist.

For now, Russia’s focus remains fixed on Ukraine’s military centers of gravity: grinding down its manpower, strangling its logistics, and dismantling its industrial base. Symbolic strikes like Spiderweb are glittering decoys, designed to lure Moscow into squandering its initiative.

That said, Ukrainian provocations can create political cover for actions that may have long been on the table. For instance, one might ask: why does Russia continue to tolerate the steady stream of Western leaders parading through Kiev, using it as a geopolitical catwalk? Or why haven’t the Dnieper bridges—crucial for Ukrainian logistics—been permanently disabled, if Russia possesses that capability?

Politically, Putin remains strong and enjoys broad domestic support, but within the security and defense apparatus, hardliner factions are likely chafing at what they see as his measured, even liberal, restraint. While the current strategy may be accepted with regard to Ukraine, there may be a different calculus forming in relation to NATO—particularly the UK, which is viewed in Moscow as an especially aggressive provocateur and a likely co-conspirator in Sunday's attacks.

The coming phase may see Moscow pivot to shadow warfare: cyber strikes, covert sabotage, and asymmetric reprisals against NATO, particularly Britain. These plausibly deniable tools offer retaliation without overt escalation, preserving Russia’s strategic focus while settling scores. The true tipping point would only come if Ukraine’s capacity to provoke were to ever outpace Russia’s willingness to endure. Until then, the smouldering Tu-95s serve not as a military setback, but as a test of nerve—one that will define who controls war’s rhythm, and who merely reacts to it.

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"Victory has a hundred fathers," John F. Kennedy observed days after the Bay of Pigs invasion imploded, "but defeat is an orphan." He spoke not as a triumphant statesman, but as a coroner delivering an autopsy—cool, clinical, already stepping back from the still-smouldering wreckage. The disaster in question: a CIA-trained exile force, dead or captured on Playa Girón's sands, their promised anti-Castro uprising evaporated like morning mist under Cuban gunfire.

There it was—the bitter truth, suspended like breath in winter: victory is always a crowded christening—everyone jostling to be godfather, to claim a hand in the miracle. Defeat gets no such ceremony. It is left at the threshold in the dead of night, unblessed and unnamed.

In the Ukraine war’s defiant early months, they dressed their gamble in sacred vestments—casting Zelensky as a paladin of modern virtue, arming him with weapons, myths, and standing ovations. They saw themselves as midwives to liberal democracy reborn in the black mud of Kherson. But the dream could not survive the discipline of Russian attrition. As the frontlines stalled and counteroffensives dissolved into mire, the self-declared fathers of victory grew queasy, slipping into shadow as their creation began to rot.

Today, the pathology returns as tragic farce. European leaders and American hawks cling to the illusion of victory—not secured on the battlefield, but performed through ultimatums, pageant diplomacy, and the hollow theatre of sanctions. This is no longer strategy, but reflex: a compulsive shedding of responsibility, a disavowal of a war no longer convenient to claim—masked by ever-louder cries for justice that barely muffle the silence of inner defeat.

As the outcome sours, a new adversary emerges—not in Moscow, but in the White House. The temptation grows to pin failure on the man who refuses to follow their script, to recast their miscalculation as his betrayal. Like Roman patriarchs exposing an unwanted child to the elements, they abandon their geopolitical offspring, hoping the cold wind of history will carry off both the body and the blame.

The war now marches forward—increasingly disowned by its patrons, sustained only by the one power that never recoiled. For Moscow, there is no shame in the scars of this conflict, no urge to rewrite its origins. Even its most disfigured chapters are embraced as providence—grim, perhaps, but righteous. And so, in the ceremonial hush of the Kremlin’s vaulted halls, they wait for the hundred fathers of victory to one day claim their seats.

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Istanbul 2.0

In a last-ditch effort to blunt the trajectory of Ukraine’s defeat, Western leaders issued an ultimatum on May 10. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Poland demanded that Russia submit to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire by May 12—or face expanded sanctions on its financial and energy sectors, along with a renewed surge in arms deliveries to Ukraine.

The Kremlin swiftly rejected the Western diktat. At a 2 a.m. press briefing on May 11, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that “the language of ultimatums is unacceptable for Russia,” and insisted on addressing the “root causes” of the war. Rather than comply, Russian President Vladimir Putin tore up the Western script and imposed his own: direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on May 15. President Trump, determined to force an end to the conflict, compelled Kiev to accept Russia’s terms.

For Moscow, the aim is not to open a new chapter but to resume the one left unfinished in 2022—when peace talks were first derailed by Western intervention. The symbolism is clear: once again, negotiations take place in Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace; once again, Russia’s delegation mirrors its earlier form, now reinforced with senior military officials to underscore both resolve and leverage.

Back in the early days of the war, Ukraine appeared ready to accept sweeping concessions: permanent neutrality, strict limits on its military capabilities, a ban on foreign troops, cultural protections for Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and a 15-year timeline to negotiate Crimea’s status. But these terms unravelled shortly after Russia’s retreat from Kiev, when Western leaders—especially Joe Biden and Boris Johnson—urged Zelensky to reject the deal. Instead, they unleashed a flood of arms and promises of victory. For these leaders, it was not enough merely to avoid defeat; they sought to sire triumph—to be remembered as the proud fathers of a decisive strategic victory over Russia.

For a brief period, this strategy created the illusion of success. Ukraine reclaimed territory through mid-to-late 2022, but by the failed summer offensive of 2023, momentum had decisively shifted. Ukrainian forces crashed against an impenetrable Russian defensive wall. Since then, Russia has seized the initiative—both on the battlefield and at international diplomatic forums.

Russia has survived the Western sanction onslaught, outpaced the G7 in growth, and now unquestionably commands the battlefield. The perceived balance of power has changed—and so has the language of diplomacy. Western leverage has dwindled to a theatre of gestures: sanctions that failed, stockpiles that thinned, and declarations no longer matched by capacity.

What remains is a vanishing space for illusion. Wars do not end through moral appeals or maximalist demands from the losing side. They end through negotiation—or collapse—depending on the foresight of those facing defeat. Caught between these fates, Ukraine and its patrons oscillate in confusion—unable to accept the war is lost, yet desperate to end it on terms that feign dominance. They speak in the language of resolution not to claim authorship, but to obscure it—nudging the burden of paternity toward more convenient shoulders, hoping history forgets who first blessed the cause. Yet the window for meaningful dialogue narrows with every uncompromising demand.

Kellogg’s Ceasefire Plan

The Western call for an “unconditional ceasefire”—echoed by Kiev and increasingly framed as the moral minimum for peace—rests largely on a blueprint attributed to retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg. His proposal has come to define the broad contours of Washington and its allies’ expectations: an internationally monitored armistice, with the United States and European powers acting as “neutral guarantors,” tasked with enforcing compliance through the solemn theatre of impartiality.

At its core is the demand that both Russian and Ukrainian forces withdraw 15 kilometres from the current line of contact, creating a demilitarized buffer zone—a frozen strip of contested land intended to suspend hostilities and cool tensions along the front.

But what are the odds this plan will play out as advertised? Imagine Ukrainian artillery shelling European monitors in the buffer zone, blaming it on Moscow and then executing a swift punitive advance into the vacated zone towards the new Russian lines? Would British or French officers then solemnly indict Kiev for violating the terms? Or would Moscow once again be the predictable scapegoat? The answer is as damning as it is obvious.

For Vladimir Putin, accepting such a plan would be political self-immolation. Signing away strategic ground under the watchful eyes of adversarial “arbiters” would not only weaken Russia’s military posture—it would be seen as capitulation dressed in legalese. The penalty for such betrayal would not be diplomatic embarrassment but a bullet in a Kremlin courtyard.

For Moscow, the Kellogg Plan is a non-starter. The ancient axiom endures: the weak do not dictate terms; they suffer what they must.

Premature Peace Negotiations

Following Putin’s call for renewed peace talks in Istanbul, the world watched a tense choreography unfold. Ukrainian delegates stalled, detouring to Ankara while their Russian counterparts sat in cold silence at the Dolmabahçe Palace table. After a day of low-stakes manoeuvring and diplomatic squirming, the two sides finally met face-to-face on Friday, May 16—their first direct negotiation since the collapse of peace talks in March 2022.

And yet, despite the high stakes, these talks remain premature. Russia’s battlefield momentum is undeniable, but not yet decisive enough to dictate terms outright. It is as if, in early 1864, a battered yet unbroken Confederacy had demanded a ceasefire from a rising Union—not in surrender, but as a calculated gambit to freeze the war and preserve the means to fight another day.

From Moscow’s perspective, any ceasefire must represent an unambiguous admission of defeat: a full Ukrainian withdrawal from the four annexed oblasts—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Even this concession, Russian officials warn, is a closing window of opportunity.

When asked if he had threatened, “Next time there will be five regions,” Russia’s chief negotiator corrected him: “No. I said, next time it will be eight.” In Moscow’s view, time is firmly on its side—both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. The terms offered now are already harsher than those of 2022; what comes next promises to be even more severe.

What most shocks American observers is Russia’s insistence that Ukraine vacate these oblasts even where Moscow lacks full military control. Beneath this surprise lies a common delusion: that territorial gains must mirror battlefield occupation. History suggests otherwise.

In the 1846–48 Mexican-American War, the United States annexed over half a million square miles—including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and beyond—without ever fully occupying them. Japan, too, surrendered all of its territory, despite the U.S. never invading the Japanese home islands, let alone coming anywhere close to capturing Tokyo. Europe offers further precedent: Alsace-Lorraine changed hands between Germany and France twice with only partial occupation, and Finland ceded 11% of its territory to the Soviet Union in 1940 despite fiercely resisting Stalin’s invasion.

Art of the U-Turn

By compelling Ukraine back to the negotiating table on Russian terms, President Trump reveals that he holds more leverage over Zelensky than over Putin. He has already shown he’s both willing and able to halt military aid and suspend intelligence cooperation—pressure points Kiev cannot afford to ignore. Reports from the Ukrainian capital suggest the country’s defenses could hold out for only four more months under such conditions.

With Russia, however, Trump’s options are narrower—and politically perilous. His only potential instruments of leverage—reviving sanctions or resuming large-scale arms transfers—would require him to embrace the very policies he denounced on the campaign trail. Doing so would lend retroactive legitimacy to Joe Biden’s Ukraine strategy while undermining Trump’s own populist credentials. Such a pivot risks alienating his base. Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham boasts of 70 senators ready to back “bone-crushing sanctions.” That number carries weight: it exceeds the threshold needed to override a presidential veto—and, ever so faintly, gestures toward the spectre of impeachment should Trump impose peace on terms deemed too harsh for Ukraine.

As the delegations departed Istanbul for the airport, having only achieved a 1,000 for 1,000 prisoner exchange deal, the Trump team’s new message was unequivocal: the path to peace must pass through a personal summit between Trump and Putin. But Moscow has held firm since the start of Trump’s second term—summits are ceremonial endpoints, not negotiation venues. They occur only after every clause of an agreement has been finalized and signed off by the Kremlin. There is no room in Russian protocol for impromptu theatre or improvisational statesmanship. If Trump wants a handshake for the cameras, he must first deliver terms that Moscow has already endorsed—final, binding, and on paper.

In America’s Five-Front Trap, I argued that the U.S. had dangerously overextended itself by engaging in multiple simultaneous conflicts, when prudence demanded a sequential strategy. Since then, Trump has done a great job pivoting: reversing course in Yemen after Houthi air defenses exposed the F-35’s vulnerabilities; easing trade tensions with China; and extending diplomatic overtures to Iran, even at the cost of a public “breach” with Israel. North Korea remains a dormant front, likely to be activated only if others spiral out of control. On paper, these reversals free up military bandwidth to focus U.S. pressure on Russia.

But these de-escalations are tenuous at best. Yemen and China are quiet, not resolved. Iran is a tinderbox. After U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff allegedly promised Hamas that in exchange for the release of prisoner Edan Alexander, the Gaza food blockade would be lifted—a promise still unfulfilled—American credibility has been wounded. In this context, why would Putin take U.S. assurances at face value now?

In many ways, Trump has stumbled into a trap laid not by Moscow, but by the very neoconservatives and European elites who oppose him so viscerally. Just as Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive broke against an immovable Russian wall, Trump now finds himself caught between two planks of intransigence—Moscow’s cold resolve on one side, and the unyielding demands of Western hawks on the other. The walls are closing in. His attempt to wrench a frozen peace from the jaws of Western defeat has become a solitary campaign of theatrical will. For his adversaries in London, Paris, Berlin, and the think tanks and Senate chambers of Washington, the war that truly matters isn’t in Ukraine—it’s against Trump himself.

And yet, whatever the outcome, Trump has a knack for declaring it a triumph. If defeat is an orphan, then Trump is the self-declared father of a hundred victories—sometimes christened in defiance of the facts, but always a declared monument to his own legacy. The battle may seem unwinnable, but the genius of Trump is that any seeming orphan of defeat can be rebranded, dressed in glory, and proudly claimed as rightful victorious progeny.

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On May 10th, Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Geneva—a cautious first step toward taming President Trump’s tariff tempest. Since Trump’s declaration of economic war, raising tariffs on Chinese imports to 145%, Beijing has responded with composure and strategic patience. The viral meme “Do nothing. Win.” hasn’t just captured the mood—it’s become policy. While Washington lashes out, Beijing watches and waits.

But beneath this surface calm lies something deeper. The Chinese understand the dollar for what it truly is—not just a national currency, but a global operator with divided loyalties. They see what many Americans overlook: that the dollar long ago stopped working solely for the United States. In this view, the dollar has become a kind of double agent—serving the interests of global finance even when they run counter to those of its nominal home.

This uneasy allegiance has reshaped global trade, investment flows, and geopolitical strategy—often at the expense of ordinary Americans. The paradox is stark: in tailoring its currency to meet global demand, the U.S. undermines its own economic foundations. Meanwhile, others—China chief among them—seem content to watch America cinch its own monetary straitjacket, even as they quietly prepare for a world less tethered to the dollar’s shifting loyalties.

The dollar long ago transcended national borders, functioning as a kind of post-national currency—an international lingua franca spoken across the globe, yet borne by one nation alone. It is a financial Esperanto, with its grammar, syntax, and even its logic of value overwritten at the whim of its sole author.

This arrangement is historically peculiar. Past monetary systems either revolved around non-sovereign stores of value—like gold—or were anchored to an imperial state that ruled both politically and financially. The gold standard—and, in its own way, Bitcoin—represents an attempt at stateless currency, where trust in scarcity substitutes for trust in governments.

But the dollar is different: it is both deeply national and structurally global. It floats freely, issued at will, and deployed as a tool of American statecraft—yet the world treats it as a public utility to which it is perpetually entitled. In turn, the U.S. exploits this demand. Both sides have grown dependent—and emboldened—by a system neither fully controls nor truly understands.

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The Catch-22 of Reindustrialization

The tension between the dollar’s global role and America’s domestic priorities becomes stark as calls to reindustrialize the U.S. grow louder. As President Trump attempts to reshape trade policy, a fundamental dilemma emerges: can the United States restore its manufacturing base, shrink its twin deficits, and still uphold the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency?

At first glance, these goals might appear aligned. Who wouldn’t want more American factories, smaller deficits, and a dollar that serves the needs of Main Street? But beneath the surface lies a contradiction built into the very structure of the global monetary system.

The U.S. issues dollars through its central bank—willing them into existence as fiat currency. But while creating dollars domestically is straightforward, supplying them to the global economy is more complex. The rest of the world cannot mine dollars or pluck them from trees. Instead, they flow outward from the U.S. through trade deficits, financial investments, foreign aid, military spending, interest payments, and remittances—an intricate system that exports dollars to sustain global trade, reserves, and debt.

However, the classic method remains simple: foreign countries produce goods—whether raw materials or finished products—and exchange them for green paper, making trade the most fundamental way to acquire U.S. dollars.

This outflow is sustained by the twin deficits: the fiscal deficit (when government spending exceeds revenue) and the current account deficit (when imports exceed exports). Together, they act like an irrigation system—sending dollars abroad to quench the world’s dependence on greenbacks. If these deficits were eliminated, the global economy would face a severe dollar drought, starving markets of the currency they rely on for liquidity.

Critics, including Trump, often frame the trade deficit as a symptom of industrial decline—a sign that America is importing too much and producing too little. But Wall Street offers a different view: the trade deficit allows Americans to consume more than they produce, a privilege extended by global demand for the dollar. What is often portrayed as a weakness is, in fact, a structural feature of U.S. financial power.

And yet, this privilege has costs. A shortage of dollar outflows would push up the dollar’s value, making U.S. exports less competitive and imports cheaper. This would deepen the trade deficit—exposing the self-reinforcing nature of the system. Global dollar demand requires constant supply, and any attempt to balance the books is met with systemic resistance.

A striking illustration of this dynamic appeared in the 1990s, when the U.S. made notable progress in reducing its federal budget deficit. But as the fiscal deficit shrank, the trade deficit ballooned. In 1993, it was roughly $65 billion (1% of GDP); by 2000, it had soared to over $380 billion (3.7% of GDP). One deficit gave way to another, preserving the global dollar flow and revealing how the system rebalances itself.

This is the core paradox: efforts to fix domestic imbalances intensify the international ones. The dollar’s global role acts like a gravitational field, pulling the U.S. economy toward external deficits. Unless alternative mechanisms are found to distribute dollars abroad, any serious effort to reduce America’s trade imbalance would threaten the very system the dollar supports.

The Dollar Pipeline — Twin Deficits and the Machinery of Global Flows

To dive deeper into how the U.S. supplies the world with dollars, it’s necessary to examine the U.S. balance of payments, which consists of two interconnected components: the current account and the financial account. These accounts function like a seesaw: when one side tips into deficit, the other must swing into surplus. This isn’t a matter of choice—it’s an accounting identity. Every outflow from one account must be matched by an inflow into the other, ensuring balance in the system, with only minor exceptions for errors and omissions.

The current account tracks the trade of goods and services, along with investment income and transfers. While often used interchangeably with the term “trade deficit,” the current account is broader, encompassing not only the balance of trade but also income from investments and financial transfers.

When the U.S. imports more than it exports, it runs a current account deficit—sending dollars abroad in exchange for goods, services, and capital income. In 2023, this resulted in a current account deficit exceeding $1 trillion. The financial account, by contrast, records the corresponding surplus: foreign entities using those dollars to acquire U.S. assets such as Treasury bonds, equities, and real estate.

But these dollars don’t re-enter the domestic U.S. economy in the usual sense. Foreign investors, including central banks, often hold U.S. assets abroad—as reserves, as stores of value, or as collateral in international lending. The dollars are recycled, not repatriated. They remain embedded in global financial circuits, sustaining the dollar’s role as a medium for trade, a unit of account, and a reserve currency. This reinvestment supports the international demand for dollars—not because the dollars return to the U.S. consumer economy, but because they remain useful beyond its borders.

Can the World Be Supplied with Dollars Without a Current Account Deficit?

In a recent paper, economist Maurice Obstfeld explores an intriguing possibility: that the world’s demand for dollars might be met without America having to run persistent trade deficits. Instead of relying on imports and consumption to send dollars abroad, the U.S. could theoretically become a net buyer of foreign assets—real estate, stocks, bonds—effectively exporting dollars by investing abroad.

This would represent a complete inversion of the current arrangement, where foreigners purchase U.S. assets, creating a financial account surplus for America. Under Obstfeld’s model, however, the U.S. would run a financial account deficit, as dollars would be flowing out to purchase foreign investments rather than flowing in from foreign purchases of American assets.

But this elegant inversion runs up against a hard constraint: the basic accounting identity that governs international payments. Again, the system operates like a seesaw: when one side tips, the other must rise to restore balance. If the U.S. suddenly runs a financial account deficit—sending capital abroad—it must simultaneously run a current account surplus. In other words, America would have to export more goods and services than it imports, transforming itself from the world’s consumer of last resort into an export-driven manufacturing powerhouse.

In theory, this is possible, and it seems to be the vision many in the Trump Administration hold dear: U.S. reindustrialization while maintaining dollar hegemony. In practice, however, it would require a massive economic transformation—reduced consumption, increased savings, a revitalized industrial base, and a fundamentally different orientation of the U.S. economy.

To achieve this, America would need to turn forward to the past, reclaiming its pre-World War II identity as a global manufacturing powerhouse. This shift would take decades, and during the transition, global demand for dollars would remain constant—even as their supply began to shrink due to the inevitable decrease in the U.S. trade deficit.

Today, the U.S. finances its trade deficit by attracting foreign capital, which flows into American markets, inflating the value of stocks, bonds, and real estate. This influx has benefited many affluent Americans by boosting retirement portfolios and elevating home values, key pillars of financial security. However, the current pattern comes with costs: while Wall Street prospers, Main Street has suffered. The manufacturing base has withered, and the wealth generated from inflated asset prices has largely concentrated at the top.

Obstfeld’s vision of domestic renewal while maintaining dollar supremacy presents an alluring ideal, yet the costs of such a transformation would be real. Wall Street would bear the brunt, with financial markets contracting and the balance of power tilting toward labour.

The implicit bargain that has underpinned the dollar’s dominance—America tolerating chronic trade deficits in exchange for the privilege of issuing the world’s reserve currency—has always been asymmetric. While Wall Street gained yachts, Main Street lost factories. A rebalancing of this system could bring some of the long-overdue benefits to the American public, but it would come at a steep price, both domestically and globally.

If the U.S. were to reverse this pattern and become a net exporter of capital, the flow of dollars into U.S. markets would shrink. As a result, asset prices would fall. The stock market would dip, housing prices would decline, and many well-off Americans would see their wealth, tied up in retirement savings and home equity, diminish.

Yet, for younger and working-class Americans, this shift could provide long-awaited relief. Lower housing costs, the revitalization of U.S. industry, and a more production-focused economy could follow, benefiting those who have long been excluded from the windfall of speculative financial gains.

At the same time, the broader global economy would face its own reckoning. Countries that have relied on U.S. consumer demand and capital inflows might have to adjust to a world where they are no longer running trade surpluses with the U.S. The global imbalance, once seen as mutually beneficial, would give way to new challenges, including deindustrialization and rising financial strains abroad.

As appealing as Obstfeld’s proposed shift may seem to many Americans, the transition would be slow and politically fraught. Replacing America’s trillion-dollar trade deficit with a trillion-dollar financial deficit demands a two-trillion-dollar adjustment in order to match current outflows of dollars to the world.

While such an idea is politically implausible in the U.S., imagine, as a thought experiment, a twenty-year plan to shrink the trade deficit by $100 billion annually. By year five, the deficit is halved—progress for the U.S., but a challenge for the world. As the global supply of new dollars contracts, scarcity drives the dollar’s value higher. A stronger dollar makes U.S. exports less competitive, undermining the very industrial resurgence the transition requires. The process begins to devour itself.

By year ten, the U.S. would in theory achieve external balance—no net trade deficit, no net capital inflows. But reaching this point would be like a monster truck pulling an increasingly weighted drag sled: each foot forward amplifies the burden. The stronger the dollar becomes, the harder it is to export. What started as a manageable rebalancing soon becomes a grinding, uphill struggle, defying political reality. Between year five and ten, the only plausible path forward would be some form of intervention to weaken the dollar—an intentional effort to tip the scales and keep the wheels turning.

Achieving the Herculean task of balancing its current account would be a domestic triumph for America. But for the global financial system, it would be a crisis. The pipeline of fresh dollars would dry up. Global monetary irrigation would falter. The system’s most vital resource would vanish—even as the world’s demand for it accelerates.

As early as year five, a fork in the road emerges. With the U.S. no longer supplying dollars through trade deficits, the world would be forced to find an alternative. It would not wait another decade for the U.S. to resume exporting dollars—this time through outbound investment, as Obstfeld envisions.

Assuming the fiscal deficit has also been reined in under this scenario, the world would be cut off from its primary sources of fresh dollar supply. The dilemma becomes impossible to ignore. The dollar is trapped between two irreconcilable roles. To serve domestic industry, it must weaken and withdraw. To serve global finance, it must continue to flow outward—sustained by deficits, bubbles, and distortion.

In the long run, the dollar cannot serve both masters. Something must give.

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