May 2026.¹

I. Context: The End of the Inter-Cold War Period

The roughly three-decade interval following the collapse of the Soviet Union, during which China and Russia turned inward toward domestic consolidation and the United States broadly upheld the post-1945 rules-based order, produced compounding global growth.² That period has ended.

The structural divide now reasserting itself is between two distinct theories of how power is generated.³

Continentalists treat territory as the currency of power. The logic is zero-sum, and in practice often negative-sum. Contested territory destroys productive capacity faster than it transfers it. The two principal continentalist powers today are Russia and China, and their aggression deserves equal weight.

• Russia. Russia has seized Ukrainian territory at severe long-term cost to its own demographic and industrial capacity. Casualties since February 2022 stand at approximately 1.2 million. That is the largest figure for any major power in any war since World War II. Manufacturing is in decline. Growth slowed to 0.6% in 2025.^4,5 The collapse is not acute, but the cost is real.
• China. China has pursued an equally aggressive continentalist program in maritime East Asia. The People’s Liberation Army Navy and the China Coast Guard have, since the early 2010s, moved into waters across the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. The 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration rejected China’s nine-dash-line claim and found Chinese conduct in violation of UNCLOS. China rejected the ruling and accelerated its program.^6,7

Rules-based order participants treat compounding trade and institutions as the currency of power. This is positive-sum and has historically produced the largest sustained increases in global welfare on record.⁸

The rules-based order is now in acute jeopardy, and its survival is not guaranteed.

A note on the critique of the rules-based order. A principled critique of the framing above exists on both right and left. It holds that the post-1945 rules-based order was always selectively applied by its principal sponsor. Notable departures include the 2003 invasion of Iraq, sanctions regimes operating outside UN authorization, the Israel–Palestine question, and the externalization of 2007–2008 financial-crisis costs onto developing economies. The structuralist position holds that what is collapsing is not a pristine universal order but a US-dominant order whose universalist claims were always partly hypocritical.⁹ This document accepts the empirical force of that critique. It maintains, nonetheless, that the erosion of even a hypocritical order may be worse for global welfare than its continuation, in part because the alternative custodians on offer do not propose to replace selective hypocrisy with universal probity.

A third pole: The hedging Global South. The continentalist and rules-based binary clarifies central dynamics. It does not classify the largest part of the present international system. India, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, South Africa, and other large states of the Global South operate as a hedging third pole. They neither align with the Sino-Russian continentalist bloc nor function as subordinates of the rules-based order. India’s foreign minister has explicitly disavowed de-dollarization while accepting BRICS expansion. The Gulf states retain US security guarantees while routing sovereign capital into both Sino-Russian and US-aligned investments. Brazil resists US tariff coercion without abandoning the dollar system.¹⁰ The framework that follows applies most directly to the contest between the first two poles. The strategic posture of the third is increasingly decisive for which pole prevails.

II. Inductive Survey of Recent Events

The events below are not the work of external adversaries. They are self-inflicted wounds. Each is an act undertaken by the second Trump administration and ratified by the Republican Party that controls Congress. Each weakens the United States. Each transfers strategic advantage to its rivals. The pattern is one of own goals, of self-errors, of a great power systematically dismantling the institutional and reputational capital that took 80 years to build. The list below is not exhaustive. It covers both specific norms broken or attempted to be broken by the administration and the structural removal of accountability mechanisms that has accompanied them. The agents of the damage are domestic. The beneficiaries are abroad.

• Birthright citizenship by executive order. Executive Order 14160 of Jan. 20, 2025, purported to end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented or temporary-status parents, in direct contradiction of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and roughly 150 years of Supreme Court precedent. Multiple federal courts enjoined the order; the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Trump v. Barbara on April 1, 2026, with a majority of justices apparently skeptical of the government’s position.¹¹
• Tariffs imposed without statutory authority. On Feb. 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, invalidating the April 2025 reciprocal-tariff package and the early-2025 duties on Canada, Mexico, and China.¹²
• Impoundment of appropriated funds and unilateral dismantling of statutory agencies. Article I of the Constitution vests appropriations authority exclusively in Congress, and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 sets the exclusive procedure by which the executive may decline to spend appropriated funds. The administration has nonetheless dismantled USAID — an agency established by statute — and has withheld foreign-assistance and public-broadcasting funds, asserting a unilateral impoundment power last credibly claimed by any administration before the Nixon era.¹³
• Firings of independent agency officials without cause. In defiance of the 1935 precedent of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States and the governing statutes, the president dismissed FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and other agencies whose tenure Congress had restricted to specified grounds. The lead case is pending at the Supreme Court.¹⁴
• Executive orders punishing disfavored law firms. In March 2025 the president issued executive orders revoking security clearances and federal-building access for Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey, on the basis of their representation of political adversaries or the prior employment of lawyers who had investigated him. Four federal judges — two of them Republican appointees — struck the orders down as violating the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments; the Justice Department abandoned its appeals in March 2026.¹⁵
• Removals to El Salvador under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. In March 2025 the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT maximum-security prison without due process and in defiance of a federal court’s temporary restraining order. Judge James Boasberg subsequently ruled that the conduct was illegal and that the removed class had been denied its constitutional right to a meaningful opportunity to contest designation as gang members.¹⁶
• Domestic military deployments in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Federalized National Guard units and active-duty Marines were deployed to Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and other US cities over the objections of state and local officials. In September 2025 Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Los Angeles deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878; the Ninth Circuit affirmed in December; and the Supreme Court declined to disturb a lower-court order blocking the Chicago deployment.¹⁷
• Retaliatory prosecutions of perceived political opponents. In September and October 2025, federal grand juries indicted former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — both of whom had been publicly named as prosecution targets by the president — on charges brought by an interim US Attorney appointed for the purpose after a previous US Attorney refused to file them. A federal judge dismissed both cases in November 2025 on the ground that the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed; two subsequent grand juries declined to re-indict James.¹⁸
• Self-dealing and the conversion of executive office into family business. Multiple ventures launched during the second term have channelled significant foreign-government and foreign-business money to the president and his immediate family. World Liberty Financial alone reported over $57 million in income to the president in 2024; subsequent transactions included a $500 million investment from an entity tied to a senior UAE national-security official, and a $2 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign-fund investment routed through Binance using WLFI’s USD1 stablecoin. In October 2025 the president pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, convicted in 2023 of money-laundering-control failures that had enabled transactions linked to Hamas and Iran sanctions evasion, following business arrangements between Binance and the Trump family crypto venture. The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk under a Special Government Employee designation that exempted him from federal divestment requirements, presided over the awarding of multi-billion-dollar contracts to his companies (including a roughly $6 billion Space Force award) while eliminating contracts of competitors and dismantling agencies regulating them.¹⁹
• Extraterritorial seizure of a foreign head of state. In January 2026 US elite forces conducted a military operation in Venezuela that captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and removed them to the United States to face prosecution. This was the first capture of a foreign head of state by US forces since Manuel Noriega in 1989, and the first capture of a sitting head of state by a major power since World War II. Senior administration figures contemporaneously framed the operation as the inaugurating act of a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, signaling that the territorial-integrity norm now applies selectively in second-Trump-administration foreign policy.²⁰
• Self-litigation: the president sues his own administration and settles for a $1.776 billion fund. On Jan. 29, 2026, the sitting president, his two adult sons, and the Trump Organization filed Trump v. Internal Revenue Service in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The plaintiffs sought $10 billion in damages over the 2019–2020 leak of the president’s tax returns by an IRS contractor. The defendants were the IRS and the US Treasury, agencies controlled by the plaintiff’s own administration. In April 2026, Judge Kathleen Williams ordered briefing on whether the parties were sufficiently adverse to confer federal jurisdiction. In May 2026, before that question was resolved, the case was voluntarily dismissed pursuant to a settlement under which the plaintiffs received a formal apology and no direct monetary payment. The same settlement created the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund. The figure is a deliberate reference to the founding year, 1776. The fund is financed from the federal Judgment Fund, the permanent appropriation Congress established in 1956 to pay legal claims against the government. It is administered by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General. Its stated purpose is to compensate third parties who allege harm from federal investigations under the prior administration, including the approximately 1,600 individuals pardoned by the president for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. The fund operates outside ordinary judicial oversight. The acting Attorney General who approved the settlement, Todd Blanche, was the president’s personal criminal defense lawyer in the 2024 prosecutions. Legal critics across the political spectrum, including former DOJ Civil Division officials, have described the arrangement as a slush fund and as the most direct conversion of executive office into personal benefit on the public record.²¹
• Structural removal of judicial constraints on money in politics and partisan map-drawing. This item belongs to the Supreme Court rather than the administration, but is the institutional condition that makes the rest durable. Beginning with Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Court has progressively dismantled limits on campaign spending: corporate independent expenditures (Citizens United), aggregate individual contribution limits (McCutcheon v. FEC, 2014), post-election loan-repayment limits (FEC v. Cruz, 2022), and — likely, given the December 2025 oral argument — coordinated party expenditure limits (NRSC v. FEC, pending), which the Trump administration declined to defend. In parallel, Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) held that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court at all, and Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026) substantially weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the racial-vote-dilution context. The federal-judicial constraints on partisan map-drawing and election spending that would normally hold an administration accountable have been removed at precisely the moment when an administration has assumed extraordinary powers.²²

These actions have, on present evidence, transformed the United States into the primary external concern of most of its former allies and a substantial number of non-aligned states—an analytical reading supported by favorability polling pre- and post-April 2025 and reinforced by the December 2025–January 2026 Greenland crisis (treated separately in Section V below).²³

The concept of pivotal error

A pivotal error is a decision after which the decision-maker’s remaining options are categorically worse than those available before. Pivotal errors are not merely bad choices among bad choices; they are choices that destroy the option set itself.

A single decision as the simpler case: the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran²⁴ foreclosed itself when the United States withdrew unilaterally in May 2018,²⁵ and no subsequent agreement with Iran is likely to be as favorable. The cost of that withdrawal is paid not in 2018 but in every subsequent year of the option set that no longer exists.

The pattern documented in Section II above operates at a different scale entirely: pivotal error not of a single decision but of an entire political party and its presidential leadership, compounded across an administration and the Supreme Court majority enabling it. Each item in isolation would be recoverable. The combination is not.

What has been destroyed is not principally any single statute or institution but the credibility of the system as a whole. Allies do not return to functional dependence on a government that may, at any future inauguration, again be captured by the same coalition pursuing the same project. Adversaries do not negotiate seriously with a counterparty whose commitments expire every four years. Long-horizon investors do not commit capital where contract enforcement and asset security depend on personal presidential favor and the composition of a five-justice majority. The option set in which the United States was the indispensable convener of the rules-based order is gone, and the structural changes documented in the 10th bullet of Section II ensure that the responsible coalition is positioned to repeat the exercise after the next election it wins.

The Republican Party bears the principal collective responsibility, having enabled or ratified each item above and continuing to defend most. Donald Trump bears the principal individual responsibility, having ordered or directed most of them and benefited personally from several. The error is theirs in the strict sense: not error in the colloquial sense of a mistake — the project is being pursued intentionally and with apparent discipline — but error in the structural sense Thucydides traces through his account of the Sicilian Expedition in Books 6 and 7 and summarizes in the disputed retrospective verdict at 2.65.11–12, where the historian attributes the Athenian collapse to the post-Periclean displacement of public deliberation by private ambition and rivalry, with consequences that destroyed the option set in which Athens had been a great power.²⁶ Recovery from pivotal error in this sense, if it occurs at all, will require decades of demonstrated institutional reliability for which the political incentives in the United States do not now exist.

The closer modern analog to the cumulative distributed pattern documented above is not Athens of 415 BC but Germany of 1890–1914. Bismarck’s successors made a series of individually defensible decisions — the abandonment of the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890, the Tirpitz naval program of 1898–1912, the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908, the blank cheque to Austria-Hungary in July 1914 — each of which destroyed an option in the European state system that had taken decades to construct, and each of which was undertaken by political agents whose proximate motives were domestic-political: Wilhelm II’s personal grievances, the Reichstag’s naval-construction coalition, Austrian internal-stability concerns. The cumulative result was the strategic isolation of Germany among great powers, the consolidation of Britain–France–Russia against it, and the catastrophe of 1914–1918, after which the option set in which a unified Germany had been the indispensable convener of Mitteleuropa was permanently gone. The applicable scholarship is now substantial.²⁷ The Sicilian-Expedition framing is rhetorically powerful for the discrete-decision case (the JCPOA withdrawal); the Wilhelmine-Germany framing is more apt for the distributed-decision case (the pattern documented in Section II).

III. Conceptual Toolkit

A. Limited and unlimited objectives

In the Clausewitzian tradition,²⁸ war aims fall on a spectrum.

Unlimited objectives seek the overthrow of the adversary’s government. The most extreme variant combines regime change with the destruction of the defeated population—that is, genocide. The Nazi war against the Soviet Union is the canonical 20th-century example.²⁹

Limited objectives leave the adversary’s government intact. Bismarck’s wars of German unification (1864, 1866, 1870–1871) are the textbook case: each terminated with the defeated regime still in place and capable of negotiating peace.³⁰

A critical asymmetry follows: in limited wars, it is the defeated party that decides when the war ends, because that party alone determines when the costs of continued resistance exceed the costs of acceptance. The United States in Iraq (2003–2011) and Afghanistan (2001–2021) illustrates how this asymmetry traps a stronger power that has set itself an unlimited objective without the means to enforce it.³¹

Three combinations result.

1. Both sides limited—e.g., Bismarck’s wars (above).

2. Both sides unlimited—e.g., the European theater of World War II, where Allied and Axis war aims were each incompatible with the other regime’s survival.³²

3. Mixed objectives—e.g., the Pacific theater of World War II, where Imperial Japan did not seek regime change in Washington while the United States explicitly sought it in Tokyo.³³

B. Application to the Russo-Ukrainian War

Russian war aims are unlimited of the most extreme variety: regime change combined with the suppression of Ukrainian national identity. Supporting evidence includes Putin’s essay of July 12, 2021, denying the legitimacy of a distinct Ukrainian nation,³⁴ documented filtration and deportation operations,³⁵ and the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants of March 17, 2023, concerning the unlawful deportation of children.³⁶

Ukrainian war aims are limited: territorial restoration and Russian withdrawal, not regime change in Moscow. This is consistent with Ukrainian official statements.³⁷

Russian negotiating positions through 2025–2026 have moderated in stated form even as underlying objectives remain ambiguous. Moscow now demands Ukrainian withdrawal from the remaining ~20% of Donetsk that Russian forces have failed to capture, security guarantees against Ukrainian NATO membership, and the lifting of Western sanctions, rather than overt regime change in Kyiv. As of late May 2026 a US-mediated negotiation has resulted in a three-day ceasefire (May 9–11, 2026) but no broader settlement; the central sticking point is territory.³⁸ The analytical implication is that the framing of Russian aims as “unlimited of the most extreme variety” is correct as to historical record (the July 2021 essay; documented filtration and deportation operations; ICC warrants) but does not exhaust the menu of postures Moscow is prepared to adopt for tactical advantage.

C. Death ground

The concept of death ground—terrain on which an army must fight because flight or surrender means annihilation—originates in Sun Tzu.³⁹ When an aggressor pursues unlimited objectives of the most extreme variety, it places the target on death ground and thereby converts even dysfunctional polities into ferocious adversaries.

Historical illustrations follow.

The Wehrmacht’s treatment of Soviet civilians and prisoners of war in 1941–1942 hardened Soviet resistance and arguably forfeited an early opportunity for collaboration in formerly Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic territories.⁴⁰

The Iranian leadership now operates on death ground following the targeted killings of senior IRGC and nuclear-program personnel in summer 2025.⁴¹ Deterrence against further Iranian escalation appears, on this framework, exhausted; alternative analyses dispute that conclusion.⁴²

D. Value of the object

The Clausewitzian Wert des Objekts holds that the resources a belligerent will commit to a conflict are proportional to the value that belligerent assigns to the contested object.⁴³ The corollary is that distance from the theater of war typically correlates with lower valuation: populations in theater place the highest, often existential, value on the outcome; neighboring states place a high but bounded value; distant powers place a lower value.

For Iran in a war fought on Iranian soil, the value of the object is existential; for Israel it is high but bounded; for the United States it is materially lower; and for partisan factions within the US political system it is lower still. The asymmetry implies that Iran will tolerate higher absolute costs and a longer time horizon than its adversaries.⁴⁴

E. Positive and negative objectives

A negative objective—most importantly, deterrence—succeeds invisibly. Nothing happens. The pathology is twofold: the achievement is unobservable and politically unrewarding, and the task is permanent, since deterrence must be re-established every day.

The illustrative failure case is the US Pacific Fleet’s relocation to Pearl Harbor in 1940 as a deterrent against Japanese expansion.⁴⁵ Tokyo read the deployment not as a deterrent but as an opportunity, with the result of Dec. 7, 1941.

F. Tracking primary enemies and how they shift

Strategic assessment requires identifying not only one’s own primary enemy but the primary enemies of every relevant third party—and tracking how those rankings change.

Case: the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). The primary enemies of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang were each other, except during the period of full-scale Japanese invasion (1937–1945), when Japan displaced each as the other’s primary enemy. With Japan’s defeat in 1945, the prior primary-enemy relationship reasserted itself immediately.⁴⁶ The Marshall Mission’s attempt to broker a coalition government in 1945–1947⁴⁷ was a non-starter once this fact was understood: parties whose primary enemy is each other do not form coalition governments.

Case: the pre-World War II alignment shift. Britain and Russia were strategic rivals through the 19th and into the early 20th century, but Hitler’s Germany became the primary enemy of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and ultimately the United States, while the Axis powers themselves did not share a common primary enemy and divided their effort across geographically distinct theaters.⁴⁸

G. Frozen conflicts and veto players

Conflicts that persist across changes of administration and method typically do so because at least one veto player prefers continuation to any feasible settlement.

Case: the Korean War (1950–1953). Armistice negotiations stalled for two of the war’s three years. The United States and ultimately the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea favored termination; Syngman Rhee opposed it but could be pressured; Stalin opposed it and could not be pressured.⁴⁹ The armistice was signed within roughly two weeks of Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953.⁵⁰

Democracies engaging dictatorships should therefore have contingency plans for the succession interval—the period during which a new autocratic leadership has not yet consolidated and may temporarily prioritize internal positioning over external commitments.

IV. Application to the Current Iran Conflict

The frameworks above combine as follows. The analytical predictions advanced in earlier drafts of this material have, in substantial measure, materialised between drafting and the present.

US and Israeli stated objectives toward Iran approached the unlimited end of the spectrum⁵¹ and were achieved in part. On Feb. 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated air war against Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — the first targeted killing of a major-adversary head of state by external military action since the United States Army Air Forces shot down Admiral Yamamoto on April 18, 1943, and the first such killing in peacetime in the post-1945 system. Khamenei’s son was installed as successor. The value of the object is existential for Iran, high for Israel, and progressively lower for distant participants.⁵²

The destruction–construction asymmetry favors the actor willing to inflict damage on physical infrastructure. Iranian retaliation since Feb. 28, 2026, has included missile and drone strikes on US embassies, US military bases in the region, Israeli civilian and military targets, and oil and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf monarchies, with several Arab states forced to cut or suspend oil production as a consequence.⁵³ Attacks on regional oil infrastructure illustrate the asymmetry; desalination-plant attacks remain a plausible further escalation, given Gulf-state water dependence on desalination.⁵⁴

The most consequential development, predicted in earlier framings of this material as plausible and now realized, is Iran’s demonstrated capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids and a comparable share of liquefied natural gas previously transited.⁵⁵ Iran declared the Strait closed on March 4, 2026. Commercial traffic dropped to approximately 5% of pre-conflict levels and has remained at or near that level for most of the period since. The US imposed a counter-blockade on Iranian ports on April 13, 2026. As of late May 2026 the United States and Iran are negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding intended to end the war and reopen the Strait; the outcome is uncertain. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has stated publicly that conditions in the Strait “will never return to their former status, especially for the US and Israel.” Whether or not the formal closure is reversed within the present diplomatic cycle, the demonstrated capacity is now an established feature of Iranian strategic calculation, and the Iranian polity has been moved by external military action from a deterred posture to a death-ground posture.

V. The Strategic, Operational, and Tactical Levels of Analysis

The three levels of war⁵⁶ are not interchangeable. Excellence at one level can coexist with disaster at another.

Illustration 1: Pearl Harbor as operational success and strategic catastrophe. The Japanese attack of Dec. 7, 1941, was an operationally accomplished naval action—long undetected transit, surprise achieved, US battleline neutralized at minimal Japanese loss.⁵⁷ At the strategic level, it produced the Tokyo firebombing of March 9–10, 1945⁵⁸ and the atomic bombings of August 1945. Operational brilliance that yields strategic destruction is not brilliance.

Illustration 2: the Oval Office meeting of Feb. 28, 2025. At the tactical level—the discrete event itself—the public hectoring of President Zelensky by President Trump and Vice President Vance⁵⁹ functioned as a domestic-political performance. At the operational level, it signaled to third-party governments that protocol norms have been abandoned. At the strategic level, it accelerates the structural reorientation of US allies away from Washington—a prediction supported by subsequent European defense-procurement decisions.⁶⁰

Illustration 3: the Greenland annexation threats, December 2025–January 2026. Beginning shortly before his second inauguration and continuing through the third week of January 2026, the president publicly raised the prospect of US annexation of Greenland — a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark and therefore covered by NATO’s collective-defense guarantee — refused to rule out the use of military force, and threatened 25% tariffs against several European nations unless Denmark ceded Greenland. The threats were withdrawn at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026. At the tactical level the episode functioned as a domestic-political performance and as procurement leverage against Denmark and the European Union. At the operational level it signaled to every other NATO member that Article 5 guarantees are not unconditional and may be unilaterally reweighted by Washington against allies whose territory the United States desires. At the strategic level it produced the response the framework predicts: an acceleration of European defense-industrial decoupling from US suppliers (Germany’s major defense-procurement plan now allocates roughly 8% of purchases to US contractors, against the historic ~64% European NATO share),⁶¹ and a public statement by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen that a US attack on a NATO ally would mean “the end of NATO.”⁶² The threats were withdrawn before being tested, but the signaling was successfully received and the operational and strategic consequences are durable.

Tactical wins that produce strategic losses are net losses. The Republican Party’s electoral focus is operational; the question of what governing power is for is strategic, and the strategic answer that historically anchored both parties—improving the security and prosperity of subsequent generations—is presently unserved by current policy.

VI. The Methodology of Sound Strategy

Sound strategy proceeds in identifiable steps.

1. Assessment—including one’s own weaknesses and the adversary’s strengths, not only the inverse. A best-case-only assessment systematically underestimates required resources.

2. Setting a feasible policy objective—feasibility constrained by the assessment.

3. Strategy—the matching of means to the objective.

4. Continuous reassessment.

The current US administration omitted the second half of step (1), as evidenced by the gap between announced expected outcomes (rapid trade concessions, rapid Iranian capitulation, rapid Ukrainian settlement on US terms) and observed outcomes.⁶³

Application: reopening the Strait of Hormuz

The problem is naval. Geography is decisive.⁶⁴

North America and Europe are bordered by open oceans. Oceanic blockades against industrial economies of that scale are not feasible with current technology, and arguably less feasible in the drone era.⁶⁵

Eurasia, by contrast, presents a series of narrow seas—the Baltic, the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea—through which seaborne trade must pass.

The asymmetry: large surface combatants can close narrow seas but cannot open them. Opening a contested narrow sea is determined by control of the shorelines, because shoreline-based anti-ship systems are cheap, dispersible, and difficult to suppress.⁶⁶

Russia and the People’s Republic of China are therefore inherently geographically contained: Arctic exits exist but lack the population, industry, and supply infrastructure necessary to sustain wartime naval operations.⁶⁷ The strategic implication is that maritime-power coalitions retain a structural advantage that is presently being squandered.

VII. The Opportunity: European Leadership of the Democratic Core

The United States’ apparent renunciation of leadership of the post-1945 democratic coalition creates an opening—and an obligation—for European leadership.

The term democratic core is preferable to the West, and it includes the European Union and the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and any other state willing to operate within rules-based norms.

The historical analogy is the institution-building of 1945–1955, during which the same generation produced the United Nations system, the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the foundations of the OECD.⁶⁸ That generation faced an existential threat and used roughly a decade to construct durable institutions. The present generation has more education, more wealth, and better global connectivity than its grandparents and faces a comparable threat.

Concrete European action is already underway, including new free-trade agreements concluded in 2024–2025, European payment-system and digital-infrastructure independence initiatives, European defense industrial base expansion and reduction of US arms-procurement dependence, and de-dollarization efforts in trade settlement.⁶⁹

Another example: Carney at Davos. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a special address at the 56th World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 20, 2026, titled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path.” Carney described the post–1945 rules-based order as having experienced “a rupture, not a transition.” He called on middle powers to cooperate to protect their vital interests. He framed the choice plainly. “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” And again. “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.” The speech received a standing ovation, which is unusual for World Economic Forum addresses. It drew a public rebuke from President Trump the next day. It has been compared to Churchill’s 1946 Fulton, Missouri, “Iron Curtain” address as a bookend to the order Churchill helped inaugurate. The Davos speech is a model of the kind of democratic-core leadership that this section is calling for. It is articulate, it is unflinching, and it is delivered by a head of government to a major audience.⁷⁰

Capability caveat. Honesty about the present state of European leadership requires noting that defense spending has risen substantially faster than capability output. European NATO defense budgets rose from approximately €218 billion in 2021 to approximately €381 billion in 2025, an increase of roughly 75%; the EU activated the national escape clause for defense spending for 17 member states by February 2026; and the ReArm Europe plan targets cumulative spending of approximately €800 billion through 2030. Yet European NATO equipment stocks remain below their 2021 levels as of February 2026, the Czech-led 2024 ammunition initiative sourced 1.6 million rounds entirely from third countries because European production could not deliver at scale or speed, and approximately 80% of EU funds for Ukraine were spent on non-European products for the same reason. The structural reorientation is real; the operational substitution is on a three-to-five-year horizon, not an immediate fact. Until then, European NATO members remain dependent on US weapons, intelligence, and strategic enablers, with the political consequence that the European posture toward Washington must hedge between confrontation and accommodation rather than choose between them.

The existential framing must be leveraged precisely because it can break bureaucratic inertia that has previously prevented integration.

VIII. Why the Business Audience in Particular Should Care

The rules-based order’s contract-enforcement function is the load-bearing element for cross-border commerce. In its absence, contracts are not enforceable across jurisdictions without bilateral leverage, expropriation risk rises sharply (as commodity-producing economies have repeatedly demonstrated),⁷¹ and transaction costs rise—figuratively, the suitcase-of-cash and private-mercenary models invoked in the underlying remarks; quantitatively, this maps onto the development-economics literature on the costs of weak institutions.⁷²

Independent-minded business figures fare poorly under continentalist regimes. Russian business-figure defenestrations and unexplained deaths since February 2022 are extensively documented,⁷³ as is the disappearance of Jack Ma from public life in late 2020 and the subsequent regulatory action against Ant Group.⁷⁴

IX. Empirical Indicators of Change: 2022 to 2026

The shift identified throughout this document is observable in concrete metrics. The list below organizes the principal indicators across two columns: where the international system in 2026 differs materially from 2022, and where less has changed than the headlines have suggested. Together they support the analytical claim that the period since 2022, and especially since the second Trump inauguration, represents a pivotal break of the kind defined in Section II rather than the periodic noise of a still-functioning rules-based order.

A. Where the system has changed materially since 2022

The first major US war in approximately seven years is underway, against Iran, with active US naval blockade of Iranian ports and approximately 95% reduction of Strait of Hormuz commercial traffic for the period since March 4, 2026. The first killing of a major-adversary head of state by external military action since the targeting of Admiral Yamamoto in 1943 has occurred (Ali Khamenei, Feb. 28, 2026). The first capture of a sitting foreign head of state by a major power since World War II has occurred (Nicolás Maduro, January 2026). The first credible threat of annexation by the United States against the territory of a NATO ally has been made and (for now) withdrawn (Greenland, December 2025–January 2026). The largest war in Europe since 1945 continues, with the highest cumulative casualty count for any major power in any war since 1945 — approximately 1.2 million Russian casualties as of February 2026.

German major defense procurement now allocates approximately 8% of purchases to US contractors, against an historic European-NATO share for US suppliers of roughly 64% of weapons imports between 2020 and 2024; European NATO defense budgets rose from €218 billion in 2021 to €381 billion in 2025; the EU activated the national escape clause for defense spending for 17 member states by February 2026. The dollar’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves stood at approximately 57%–58% in the Q4 2025 IMF COFER release, the lowest level since 1994, against approximately 72% in 2000–2001; central banks have purchased gold at above 1,000 tonnes per year for three consecutive years, more than double the 2010–2021 annual average.⁷⁵ The BRICS bloc, including its post-2024 expansion members, accounts for approximately 40% of global GDP by purchasing-power parity. US favorability among allies has fallen sharply: the UK figure dropped from 69% in April 2024 to 35% in 2026, with 34% of UK respondents now characterizing the United States as a threat; Canada’s favorability fell roughly 20 percentage points year-on-year; Sweden’s fell from 47 to 19%; Mexico’s from 61 to 29%.⁷⁶

B. Where less has changed than the headlines suggest

The dollar remains dominant by a wide margin; no operational alternative exists for the unit-of-account function, and even the institutions of the BRICS replacement architecture (mBridge, BRICS Pay) operate primarily for intra-BRICS trade settlement rather than as global reserves. NATO has neither dissolved nor seen a formal Article 5 invocation; no member has withdrawn. The United States retains the only blue-water naval capacity capable of opening a contested chokepoint, as the present negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz tacitly acknowledge. China has not moved on Taiwan despite the second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy of December 2025 explicitly committing to first-island-chain defense; the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis continues at an elevated but managed level. India, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other large hedging states of the Global South continue to maintain functional relationships with the United States while declining to subordinate themselves to either pole. The trans-Atlantic alliance remains operationally functional even as its political foundations strain.

C. Synthesis

The honest synthesis is that the pivotal-break hypothesis advanced in this essay has accumulated substantial empirical support since drafting a few months ago, sufficient to shift its analytical status from prediction to description. The framework’s principal vulnerability is not that it overstates the magnitude of change but that it understates the speed. Several developments treated in earlier framings as predictions for the next several years occurred within a 90-day window of this document’s drafting. That compression is itself methodological evidence for the essay’s theories, while equally counselling humility about the limits of any single analytical lens or person. The case for the pivotal break does not depend on any single indicator above. It depends on the cumulative pattern, and the cumulative pattern is now substantially better attested than it was at the start of 2026.

X. Concluding Argument

The democratic core presently faces a window in which institutional reform and parallel institution-building are feasible. That window will not remain open indefinitely. Failure to act transmits the cost to subsequent generations. It is therefore a moral failure as well as a strategic one. The underlying analytical framework supports this conclusion, though the prediction is not certain and competing analyses should continue to be engaged.⁹

The most articulate public statement of this position to date was delivered by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 20, 2026. Carney named the moment a “rupture, not a transition.” He called on the middle powers and the democratic core to act together. The standing ovation he received from the assembled global business and political audience suggests the analytical reading advanced here is widely shared by those whose decisions will determine whether the window is used. The choice is no longer whether to recognize the rupture. The choice is what to build in response to it.⁷⁰

Editorial Note on Citation Practice

This document distinguishes three categories of claims, which require different treatment.

1. Established historical or doctrinal facts are citable to standard sources.

2. Analytical frameworks drawn from the source remarks are citable to their underlying scholarly publications.⁷⁷

3. Finally, I generally do not, I hope, present contemporary political predictions and judgments as citable facts.

Reviewers verifying citations should pay particular attention to my claims involving specific incidents from 2025–2026 (the January 2026 Venezuela operation, the Iran strikes, the Oval Office Zelensky meeting, the April 2025 tariffs), for which contemporaneous primary sources are now available and should be used in preference to retrospective summaries.

Notes

References are numbered consecutively and collected here for ease of reading.

1. This has been a theory building throughout 2026.

2. World Bank, World Development Indicators, series NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG; International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook database.

3. Sarah C. M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sarah C. M. Paine, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

4. UK Ministry of Defense, daily intelligence updates on Russia–Ukraine, gov.uk; Mediazona and BBC Russian Service, ongoing named-casualties tally; International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance (London: IISS, annual).

5. On the magnitude and texture of Russian war losses, see CSIS, “Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine,” Feb. 12, 2026 (nearly 1.2 million Russian casualties since February 2022, the largest of any major power in any war since World War II; manufacturing in decline; growth of 0.6% in 2025); Brian Taylor, “The Impact of the Russia-Ukraine War on Russian Demographics,” Forbes, Oct. 10, 2025; “Russia’s War Boom Masks an Economic Implosion,” Foreign Policy, April 28, 2026; and Bruegel, “How Resilient Is Russia’s Economy After Four Years of War,” Working Paper, December 2025.

6. Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative,” https://amti.csis.org/.

7. On Chinese island-building, the weaponization of features, and clashes with the Philippines and Vietnam, see Permanent Court of Arbitration, South China Sea Arbitration (Philippines v. China), Award, July 12, 2016 (rejecting China’s nine-dash-line claim and finding that Chinese island-building violated UNCLOS obligations); CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, satellite imagery and incident tracking, 2014–2026 (documenting the construction of artificial islands at Fiery Cross, Subi, Mischief, and other reefs, and the installation of runways, hangars, radar, and missile batteries); US Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, annual reports (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense), 2018–2025 editions; Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “China’s Coast Guard and Maritime Militia in the Gray Zone,” 2024. On the China Coast Guard ramming and water-cannon attacks against Philippine resupply missions at Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal, 2023–2026, see contemporaneous Reuters, Associated Press, and BBC reporting; statement of the Government of the Philippines, Department of Foreign Affairs, multiple diplomatic protests, 2023–2026. On Chinese-Vietnamese clashes in the Spratly and Paracel groups, see Carl Thayer, “Vietnam Stands Firm in the South China Sea,” The Diplomat, periodic reporting 2024–2025; Vuving, Alexander L., ed., Hindsight, Insight, Foresight: Thinking About Security in the Indo-Pacific (Honolulu: Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2020).

8. Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Maddison Project Database, version 2023,” Groningen Growth and Development Center, University of Groningen; “Our World in Data,” series on world GDP since 1945, https://ourworldindata.org/.

9. For competing perspectives, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, updated ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Jeffrey D. Sachs, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Cited for representation, not endorsement.

10. On the Global South as a hedging third pole, see S. Jaishankar’s statements (multiple, late 2025) that India has “no policy to replace the dollar” and that “the dollar as the reserve currency is the source of global economic stability”; Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s September 2025 BRICS statements rejecting both US tariff coercion and “violent de-dollarization”; Chicago Policy Review, “BRICS and the Shift Away from Dollar Dependence,” Oct. 8, 2025. On Indian, Brazilian, Indonesian, and Gulf hedging more broadly, see C. Raja Mohan and Constantino Xavier, eds., India and the New World Order (Brookings Institution Press, 2024); Oliver Stuenkel, The BRICS and the Future of Global Order, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020).

11. Exec. Order No. 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” 90 Fed. Reg. 8449 (Jan. 20, 2025); Washington v. Trump, No. 2:25-cv-00127 (W.D. Wash. Feb. 6, 2025) (granting preliminary injunction); Trump v. Barbara, oral argument heard April 1, 2026; U.S. Constitution, amend. XIV; Immigration and Nationality Act § 301(a), 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a).

12. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), slip op., decided Feb. 20, 2026 (holding 6–3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs); International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1708.

13. U.S. Constitution, art. I, § 9, cl. 7; Impoundment Control Act of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93-344, 88 Stat. 297; Philip G. Joyce, “High Noon for the Separation of Powers? Trump and the Impoundment Control Act,” Public Budgeting & Finance (2025); Mark Sandy, “Trump Is Usurping Congress’s Power of the Purse,” Lawfare, Nov. 25, 2025.

14. Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935); Slaughter v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-00909 (D.D.C. July 2025); Trump v. Slaughter, oral argument heard Dec. 8, 2025; Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S.C. § 41.

15. Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 1:25-cv-00716 (D.D.C. May 2, 2025) (Howell, J.); Jenner & Block LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice (D.D.C. May 2025) (Bates, J.); Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP v. Executive Office of the President (D.D.C. May 2025) (Leon, J.); Susman Godfrey LLP v. Executive Office of the President (D.D.C. June 27, 2025) (AliKhan, J.).

16. J.G.G. v. Trump, opinions and orders of Judge James E. Boasberg, US District Court for the District of Columbia, March–December 2025, including order of Dec. 22, 2025, finding that the Alien Enemies Act removals to CECOT denied due process; Alien Enemies Act of 1798, 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24.

17. Newsom v. Trump, opinion of Judge Charles R. Breyer, US District Court for the Northern District of California, Sept. 2, 2025 (finding Los Angeles deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act); Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, 18 U.S.C. § 1385; subsequent orders blocking deployments to Portland and Chicago, fall 2025.

18. Order of Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissing United States v. Comey and United States v. James, E.D. Va., Nov. 24, 2025 (finding that interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan had been unlawfully appointed); see also Protect Democracy, “Retaliatory Action Tracker,” https://protectdemocracy.org/work/retaliatory-action-tracker/.

19. Donald J. Trump, executive branch personnel public financial disclosure for calendar year 2024, US Office of Government Ethics; Public Citizen, “Conflict Coin: How the Trumps’ Billion-Dollar Crypto Stake Depends on a Company That Helped Iran Evade Sanctions,” April 2026, https://www.citizen.org/article/trump-crypto-world-liberty-financial-binance-iran-sanctions/; Ben Weiss, “How a ‘Spy Sheikh’ Bought 49% of the Trump Family’s Flagship Crypto Company,” Fortune, Feb. 2, 2026; Gram Slattery and Chris Prentice, “Trump Pardons Convicted Binance Founder Zhao,” Reuters, Oct. 23, 2025; Economic Policy Institute, “Trump Is Enabling Musk and DOGE to Flout Conflicts of Interest,” 2025, https://www.epi.org/publication/trump-is-enabling-musk-and-doge-to-flout-conflicts-of-interest-what-is-the-potential-cost-to-u-s-families/; 18 U.S.C. § 208 (federal conflict-of-interest statute); U.S. Constitution, art. I, § 9, cl. 8 (Foreign Emoluments Clause).

20. On the January 2026 Venezuela operation, in which US elite forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to face prosecution in New York, see contemporaneous Reuters, Associated Press, and Wall Street Journal reporting from January 2026; on the framing as a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, see Atlantic Council, “Trump’s Quest for Greenland Could Be NATO’s Darkest Hour,” Jan. 14, 2026.

21. Donald J. Trump et al. v. Internal Revenue Service et al., No. 1:26-cv-20609 (S.D. Fla. filed Jan. 29, 2026); Order on Jurisdiction, ECF No. 41 (S.D. Fla. April 24, 2026) (Williams, J.) (questioning whether the parties were sufficiently adverse to confer jurisdiction). On the May 2026 settlement and the Anti-Weaponization Fund, see U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Justice Department Announces Anti-Weaponization Fund,” press release, May 18, 2026, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-anti-weaponization-fund; Time, “What to Know About the DOJ’s New ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’,” May 18, 2026; NBC News, “DOJ Sets Up $1.8B ‘Anti-Weaponization’ Fund After Trump Voluntarily Drops $10 Billion Lawsuit Against IRS,” May 2026; CBS News, “Is Trump’s $1.7+ Billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ Legal? Experts Weigh In,” May 2026; PBS NewsHour, “Why Legal Experts Say Trump’s New ‘Anti-Weaponization’ Fund Is Unprecedented,” May 2026; Ankush Khardori et al., “Trump’s $1.776 Billion ‘Anti-Weaponization’ Fund Leaves Legal Firestorm at Feet of Lawmakers,” The Hill, May 2026. The fund is financed from the federal Judgment Fund: 31 U.S.C. § 1304 (1956). Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the principal signatory of the settlement on behalf of the Department of Justice, served as Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense counsel during the 2024 New York and federal prosecutions: see Reuters and New York Times contemporaneous reporting on Blanche’s appointment as Deputy Attorney General. Coalition critique: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington et al., “Coalition Sign-On Letter on Presidential Payouts — Trump v. IRS,” April 9, 2026.

22. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 U.S. 185 (2014); Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate, 596 U.S. 289 (2022); National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, No. 24-621 (argued Dec. 9, 2025) (Trump administration declined to defend coordinated-spending limits, requiring Court appointment of amicus); Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019) (partisan-gerrymandering claims nonjusticiable in federal court); Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), slip op., decided April 29, 2026 (substantially weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in racial-vote-dilution claims).

23. Pew Research Center, Global Attitudes Survey; YouGov–Eurotrack; Gallup International.

24. “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” July 14, 2015, US Department of State and European External Action Service; International Atomic Energy Agency, verification and monitoring reports, 2016–2018.

25. Donald J. Trump, “Remarks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” The White House, May 8, 2018; National Security Presidential Memorandum on Ceasing US Participation in the JCPOA.

26. Thucydides 2.65.11–12 is among the most discussed passages in the work, and its precise meaning has been debated since antiquity. For the Greek with facing-page English translation, see Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. and trans. Charles Forster Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1919–1923). Major English translations include Richard Crawley (London, 1874; widely reprinted, including in Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides (New York: Free Press, 1996), the most usefully annotated edition), Rex Warner, History of the Peloponnesian War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), Steven Lattimore, The Peloponnesian War (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), Martin Hammond, The Peloponnesian War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and Jeremy Mynott, The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On 2.65 specifically, see H. D. Westlake, “Thucydides 2.65.11,” Classical Quarterly 8, nos. 1–2 (1958): 102–110. See also Donald Kagan, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Lisa Kallet, Money and the Corrosion of Power in Thucydides: The Sicilian Expedition and Its Aftermath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Emily Greenwood, “Thucydides on the Sicilian Expedition,” in Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, and Ryan Balot, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Thucydides 2.65 itself does not employ the noun ἁμάρτημα (hamartēma). The passage attributes the Athenian collapse to internal political competition driven by ἰδίας φιλοτιμίας (private ambition) and ἴδια κέρδη (private gains). For Thucydides’ broader vocabulary of error (hamartēma and cognates), see his usage at 1.32, 1.140, 3.45, and 4.18.

27. On Wilhelmine Germany 1890–1914 as the closer modern analog to cumulative distributed strategic error, the canonical reference is Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), esp. chaps. 5–6; see further Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012); Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013); and on Bismarckian foundations specifically, Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

28. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), bk. 8.

29. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

30. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961).

31. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, final reports, sigar.mil; Brown University, “Costs of War Project,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill, joint declaration on unconditional surrender, Casablanca, January 1943.

33. Potsdam Declaration, July 26, 1945.

34. Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” President of Russia, July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.

35. Yale University, Humanitarian Research Lab, reports on the Russian filtration system in occupied Ukraine; United Nations Human Rights Council, Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, periodic reports.

36. International Criminal Court, “Situation in Ukraine: ICC Judges Issue Arrest Warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova,” press release, March 17, 2023.

37. Government of Ukraine, “Peace Formula,” presented by President Volodymyr Zelensky at the G20 summit, Bali, November 2022.

38. On the evolution of Russian negotiating positions through 2026, see Al Jazeera, “Trump Ups Pressure on Kyiv as Russia, Ukraine Hold Peace Talks in Geneva,” Feb. 17, 2026; CSIS, “The Unfinished Plan for Peace in Ukraine: Provision by Provision,” Feb. 9, 2026; Carnegie Endowment, “What If Trump Gets His Russia–Ukraine Deal?,” Feb. 13, 2026.

39. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), chap. 11 (“The Nine Situations”).

40. Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978); Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).

41. Contemporaneous reporting on Israeli and US strikes on Iranian nuclear-program and IRGC personnel, summer 2025; primary sources from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and Haaretz required.

42. See, e.g., RAND Corporation, Iran-program commentary; International Institute for Strategic Studies, analyses from late 2025 onward.

43. Clausewitz, On War, bk. 1, chap. 2.

44. Andrew Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,” World Politics 27, no. 2 (January 1975): 175–200.

45. Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The US Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991).

46. Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

47. US Department of State, United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949).

48. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

49. William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Kathryn Weathersby, working papers, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

50. Korean Armistice Agreement, signed at Panmunjom, July 27, 1953.

51. Contemporaneous public statements by US and Israeli officials concerning regime outcomes in Iran, summer 2025; primary sources required.

52. On the 2026 Iran war, the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the US naval blockade of Iranian ports, and the May 2026 MoU negotiations, see House of Commons Library, “Israel/US–Iran Conflict 2026: Reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” Research Briefing CBP-10636, May 26, 2026; “2026 Iran war,” Encyclopædia Britannica (entry as of May 2026); US Congressional Research Service, “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities,” Report R45281 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, March 11, 2026); and Al Jazeera, “US, Iran Inch Closer to Deal to End the War,” May 24, 2026.

53. Reporting on attacks on Middle East oil infrastructure, 2024–2026, including Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping and Saudi/Emirati facilities and Iranian and Iran-aligned operations; International Energy Agency oil-market trackers.

54. World Resources Institute, reports on Gulf Cooperation Council water stress; International Renewable Energy Agency, Gulf desalination-capacity assessments.

55. US Energy Information Administration, “World Oil Transit Chokepoints,” most recent edition; the roughly one-fifth share for the Strait of Hormuz is standard but should be verified to the current year.

56. US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 1: Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States (Washington, DC: Department of Defense); NATO, Allied Joint Doctrine, AJP-01.

57. Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981).

58. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, reports on the Pacific theater (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946); Thomas R. Searle, “‘It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers’: The Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945,” Journal of Military History 66, no. 1 (January 2002): 103–33.

59. White House transcript and pool video, meeting between President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, and President Volodymyr Zelensky, Feb. 28, 2025.

60. European Commission, “ReArm Europe / Readiness 2030” package announcements, March 2025; subsequent European defense industrial spending data.

61. On the gap between European defense spending and capability output, see Friends of Europe, “Europe’s Defense Gap: Increased Spending, Limited Power,” April 8, 2026, drawing on McKinsey & Company’s February 2026 defense dashboard (European NATO equipment stocks still below 2021 levels despite three years of historic spending increases); European Parliament Think Tank, “EU Member States’ Defense Budgets,” March 9, 2026; Council of the EU, “European Defense Readiness,” updated February 2026.

62. On the December 2025–January 2026 Greenland crisis, see Atlantic Council, “Trump’s Quest for Greenland Could Be NATO’s Darkest Hour,” Jan. 14, 2026; Time, “The Greenland Crisis Could Break NATO,” March 11, 2026; Time, “Trump: Anything Less Than U.S. Control of Greenland Is ‘Unacceptable’,” Jan. 14, 2026; statement of Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on TV2, Jan. 5, 2026 (“if the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops… including our NATO”); Trump’s public withdrawal of the threat at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Jan. 21, 2026.

63. Side-by-side compilation required: announced administration projections on trade concessions, Iranian capitulation, and Ukrainian settlement, against observed outcomes during 2025–2026.

64. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1945, and Paine, The Japanese Empire, on maritime versus continental geographies and the constraints that shoreline control over narrow seas imposes on naval power projection.

65. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, reports on uncrewed surface and aerial systems and naval interdiction; Royal United Services Institute, related analyses.

66. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, studies on anti-access / area-denial in narrow seas; CNA, reports on Iranian naval doctrine, with particular reference to IRGC Navy small-boat and anti-ship missile tactics in the Persian Gulf.

67. CNA, Russia Studies Program, reports on Northern Fleet logistics and Arctic infrastructure constraints.

68. Charter of the United Nations (1945); Articles of Agreement, International Monetary Fund, and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (Bretton Woods, 1944); North Atlantic Treaty (1949); General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947); Treaty Establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (Paris, 1951); Convention for European Economic Co-operation (1948), succeeded by the Convention on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (1960).

69. Specific developments to be sourced individually: 2024–2025 trade-agreement progress (e.g., EU–Mercosur ratification, EU–India negotiations), European payment-system and digital-infrastructure initiatives, defense industrial base expansion, and de-dollarization efforts in trade settlement.

70. Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path,” special address at the 56th World Economic Forum, Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, Jan. 20, 2026. Transcript at World Economic Forum, “Davos 2026: Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada,” weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/; full text transcript at Foreign Policy, “Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos Speech: Read Full Text Transcript,” Jan. 21, 2026. Carney described the post–1945 rules-based order as having experienced “a rupture, not a transition,” and called on middle powers to cooperate to protect their vital interests. Reporting on its reception: Maria Cheng, “Trump’s Rhetoric Rallies Canadian Support for Prime Minister Mark Carney,” Reuters, Jan. 22, 2026; “One Venue, Two Speeches — How Mark Carney Left Donald Trump in the Dust in Davos,” The Conversation, Jan. 21, 2026; International IDEA, “What Does Carney’s Davos Speech Teach Us About Promoting Democracy?,” 2026; policyoptions.irpp.org, “Carney Was the Adult in Davos. Canada Needs That at Home, Too,” March 16, 2026 (drawing the parallel to Churchill’s 1946 Fulton, Missouri, “Iron Curtain” address).

71. On the Mexican oil expropriation of March 18, 1938, see Lorenzo Meyer, Mexico and the United States in the Oil Controversy, 1917–1942, trans. Muriel Vasconcellos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977); on Venezuelan nationalizations beginning in 2007, see Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chávez, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015); on Russian seizures of Western-owned assets after February 2022, see contemporaneous Financial Times and Reuters reporting.

72. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012); Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

73. Investigative compilations by The Insider and Bellingcat, and contemporaneous Western press reporting, on unexplained deaths of Russian business figures since February 2022.

74. Lulu Yilun Chen, Influence Empire: Inside the Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2022); Financial Times and Wall Street Journal reporting, late 2020 through 2021, on the suspension of the Ant Group initial public offering and subsequent regulatory action.

75. On the dollar’s status, see International Monetary Fund, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER) database, Q4 2025 release (dollar share of global reserves approximately 57%–58%, the lowest level since 1994; down from approximately 72% in 2000–2001); World Gold Council, central bank gold purchase data, 2022–2025 (above 1,000 tonnes per year for three consecutive years, more than double the 2010–2021 annual average); J.P. Morgan Research, “De-Dollarization: The End of Dollar Dominance?,” 2024–2025 series.

76. On the broader pattern of US favorability decline among allies, see Pew Research Center, Global Attitudes Survey 2025 (favorability dropped 20 percentage points in Canada, 28 in Sweden, 32 in Mexico year-over-year); Opinium polling for UK, March–April 2026 series (UK respondents seeing the US as an ally fell from 69% in April 2024 to 35%; 34% now characterize the US as a threat); European Council on Foreign Relations, “From ‘Ally’ to ‘Necessary Partner’,” Feb. 2025 report (14-country European survey).

77. A complete bibliography of the source remarks and the analytical literature drawn upon should be appended in any version of this document intended for formal academic citation.

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