Will it be done?
Listening
Plenty of noise, plenty of signal, one is left sorting through news like a tramp going through the rubbish. To follow: scattered observations on scattered conditions.
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‘The only rational conclusion to draw from this is that it’s high time to straighten our backs’. So someone tells the FT. In 2026. One might have thought that backbones should have been grown and straightened a bit earlier. Standing up ‘will come at a price, without doubt’ says another. And so will it be done? For all the talk of ‘strategic autonomy’, it requires not only material capacity, but also strategic capacity and will.
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Between Nietzsche and Fukuyama, we also find ‘men without chests’ in C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943):
And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
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In a recent note, Daniel Drezner identifies an important insight from constructivist theory in IR, summed up in the line, ‘anarchy is what states make of it’. The basic point is that a world of separate sovereign states does not automatically mean chaos or conflict, there is scope for different configurations. From this, Drezner uses Wendt’s categories to identify the significance of what is now unfolding, namely, that international politics are effectively moving from a Lockean order based on cooperation to a Hobbesian order based on conflict.
To simplify greatly with the help of this clunky and far from perfect Gemini diagram:
Given that AI-generated images assist but do not charm, we can also make a similar distinction by using Henri Rousseau paintings.
Kantian order based on cooperation: ‘The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Greet the Republic as a Sign of Peace’ (1908):
Lockean order based on competition: ‘The Football Players’ (1908):
Hobbesian order based on conflict: ‘The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope’ (1905):
You could also make a similar point with game theory: the game is changing, and with it, the pay off matrix shifts, with better and worse strategies in response. One can extend this logic further: what appears ‘rational’, what ‘makes sense’, changes as the order changes. One does not play football with a lion. At least, one should not try to and expect a good outcome.
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In the epilogue of Philosophy of Existence by Karl Jaspers, he reflected:
For beasts in possession of an absolute power to destroy must be treated with cunning and not as men and rational beings.
After many years of talking about panopticons, it is time to recall more immediate, direct forms of power. See the last note’s discussion of birds of prey and other predators.
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In a recent interview, Helen Thompson observes:
Having said that, I don't sign up really either to the view that there's nothing new going on here. Because I think that the way in which the United States has come to exercise power—to some extent this was true under Biden as well, and perhaps even a little bit under Obama, but it's very clear in the Trump case, more so in Trump 2 than in Trump 1, but it was clearly there in Trump 1—is a turning point. And I think it's a turning point for this reason: the entire time that the United States has been the world's dominant power... the United States was able to take for granted its primacy in the Western Hemisphere. It wasn't like there were never any threats to it—think about the Cuban Missile Crisis—but it wasn't a big structural problem that it faced. That isn't true any longer. And I think it goes back to the fact that there's this historical coincidence, which might perhaps not have to have been this way, whereby the United States rose as a geopolitical power at the moment in which Imperial China, the end of the 19th century, was entering its, you know, twilight years. So actually the United States' position in the world, I think, was dependent historically upon Imperial China's profound weakness at that moment. And once you have the end of let's call it China's century of humiliation and the return of China, then I think almost by necessity the United States is going to be a different kind of power.
The US becoming a different kind of power, alongside China being a different kind of power. And so don’t be surprised if there are different kinds of international relations.
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A parallel observation can be found in Adam Tooze, ‘After Escape: The New Climate Power Politics’ (2020):
If the truly decisive destabilization of the moment is that nature no longer serves as an outside to politics, the secondary destabilization arises from the fact that second nature, i.e., the economy, has begun to destabilize the order of states. It is not just that economic crises like that of 2008 and 2020 require interventions by the state. Even when the world economy functions well—or particularly when it functions well—combined and uneven growth challenges the existing structure of state power. This is the “jealousy of trade” problem that goes back to the eighteenth century, for which liberalism was supposed to be the antidote. But liberalism always operated on an unspoken assumption. The reason that global economic growth could be regarded as a universal blessing was that it did not disturb the delicate global order, anchored first by British and then by American global hegemony. In the last ten years that confidence has collapsed.
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In his 2025 letter, Dan Wang offers his carefully manicured supply-side gliberalism:
Rather than “winning the AI race,” I prefer to say that the US and China need to “win the AI future.” There is no race with a clear end point or a shiny medal for first place. Winning the future is the more appropriately capacious term that incorporates the agenda to build good reasoning models as well as the effort to diffuse it across society.
What if the future is not to be ‘won’, but can be ‘lost’? What to do in conditions where capacious terms are trampled by the capricious exercise of power?
The future of US-China competition demands a resounding demonstration of the superiority of one country’s system to perform better for its citizens, which no country has thus achieved.
Does this hold in conditions where legitimacy matters less and force matters more?
A more compelling formulation offered by Wang:
Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.
The word ‘cold’ should be removed for this sentence to fully land.
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In a globalised world of competition there are ‘bottlenecks’. Note the imagery: it appears as an object, the blocking is an unfortunate consequence as a result of the design. It is presented as not being intended or intentional.
Moving to an order based on conflict, ‘bottlenecks’ become ‘chokepoints’. Choking is active and agentic, and it can occur in different ways:
Too much demand: more, Moore and MOAR resulting in the race for memory, compute, commodities and energy.
Too much supply: flooding markets and depressing prices to wipe out competition and achieve dominance in strategic sectors.
Squeezing: deliberate choices to constrain and withhold. ‘Just in time’ takes on a very different valence in this situation.
A different image is that of the boomerang, one that might be more appropriate, especially as rendered in Mad Max.
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Recall E.H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939):
The foundation of international economic freedom lies in the recognition that when strong nations place themselves on the defensive, they act just like the weak ones do, and that all of them have an equal right to defend themselves with their own resources.
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In a recent conversation with James Aitken, he offers an important reminder to remember to look for signal amidst the noise:
I'll state the obvious: it's often difficult when one follows the headlines and tweets and cabinet press conferences, it's often difficult to discern anything that might be described as a coherent strategy from the Trump administration. But as you both know, and many listeners know, when you go a couple of layers down, they're very, very well organized and very determined. And again, I acknowledge it's hard to see any of that if we're only focused on what's coming out of the White House itself or the President himself.
It is about a year since the ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ scheme was doing the rounds. While that idea has faded, some of the so-called ‘Fin-Fi (finance fiction)’ of Zoltan Pozsar is starting to look rather reflexive. One would not be surprised if his advisory firm was talking to people who are not too far away from power.
In an August 2022 note, ‘War and Industrial Policy’, Pozsar observes:
All sides were entangled commercially as well as financially, and as the old wisdom goes, if we trade, everyone benefits and so we won’t fight. But like in any marriage, that’s true only if there is harmony. Harmony is built on trust, and occasional disagreements can only be resolved peacefully provided there is trust… if there is trust, trade works. If trust is gone, it doesn’t. Today, trust is gone…
He lays out the task at hand:
To ensure that the West wins the economic war – to overcome the risks posed by “our commodities, your problem”; “chips from our backyard, your problem”; and “our straits, your problem” – the West will have to pour trillions into four types of projects starting “yesterday ”:
(1) re -arm (to defend the world order)
(2) re -shore (to get around blockades)
(3) re -stock and invest (commodities)
(4) re -wire the grid (energy transition)
This lines up very closely with the logic presented in Craig Tindale’s essay, ‘The Return of Matter: Western Democracies’ material impairment’, which Gillian Tett reports ‘has caused a frisson in some financial circles — and in the White House.’
One can quibble about the exact framing, but Tindale captures something here:
The core pathology of Western impairment is a Clash of Time Horizons. Our system is ruled by multiple clocks that are out of sync, and adversaries have learned to play them against one another.
The Financial Clock is measured in quarters. It demands efficiency, just-in-time inventory, and asset lightness…
The Industrial Clock is measured in decades. It requires long-term capital commitments, redundant capacity, and patience for permitting and construction…
The War Clock is measured in days and months. It demands immediate surge capacity, massive physical stockpiles, and the ability to absorb losses at scale…
The Climate Clock is measured in carbon budgets and degree ceilings. It translates atmospheric physics into political deadlines: “halve emissions by 2030,” “net-zero by 2050.”
Another way of presenting this is of contradicting preferences, where there are hard, irreconcilable tradeoffs. So much appears hardly real, keep in mind what is really hard.
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The matter that Tindale starts with is the matter that is used to build and destroy, manufacturing and industrial capacity. Moving from a logic of cooperation to one of conflict, here we can see the context in which climate might be vaguely and partly addressed, as a second order ‘bonus’ of resilience and war readiness. Electric batteries might give us fancy EVs, they might also give us better tanks, subs and drones.
Realpolitik returning as ‘greenpolitik’ or ‘anthropolitik’. Whatever neologism you want, insofar as geopolitics and geoeconomics are front and centre, these are frames that emphasise space and materiality. The destabilising climate is part of the new game emerging. Wanted or not, resilience in the context of preparing for conflict and disruption increasingly presents itself as part of the response to a world out of balance. Acceleration and escalation appears set to continue. Recognising and reckoning with these emerging conditions is a vital task for the year ahead.