Geopolitics 2026, crossover with Seeking Truth From Facts podcast - #103
China leapfrogged Western expectations so fast.
It went from, you know, the West thinking it was still a backwards, low labor cost, low end manufacturer with shitty technology.
It went from that to the West suddenly perceiving that,
“oh, my God, they’re just slightly behind in AI and they’re caught up in lots of areas and actually surpassed us in a bunch of areas.”
That sort of more or less short circuited the Thucydides trap.
The Thucydides trap is if you have a rising number two, there’s often a war because the number one power sees that number two has more momentum and realizes it better fight early because if it waits, number two’s growth curve will allow it to surpass number one and the number one won’t be able to prevail in a competition.
So that’s the dynamics of the Thucydides trap.
But Han Feizi points out that like what might have happened is that they zoomed up this catch-up curve so fast that now there isn’t actually a Thucydides trap dynamic, that when the planners in Washington actually look at what a hot confrontation will look like, they think they’re going to lose.
So actually, instead of a Thucydides trap dynamic in the Western Pacific, what’s actually happening is intense planning for fortress Americas.
Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of Seeking Truth Through Facts.
Today, I am joined by a regular and friend of the show, Steve Hsu, to do a roundup of 2025 from a geostrategic point of view.
How are you doing, Steve? Great. It’s great to be with you again, Alp.
Perfect.
So we’re fitting now in just five days into the new year on the back of a 2025 that was very eventful from a geostrategic standpoint.
I think it would be good to start off by asking what the major trends of the year were and focusing in to the more regional level.
What do you think of that?
Got it.
So obviously, the big thing was the economic, shall we say, friction between Trump and China.
And I think the main thing that was learned, at least I think a reasonable interpretation, is that Trump’s team were overconfident in the degree to which they could leverage tariffs against China.
So there’s sort of a, maybe you could call it a boomer take that, you know, might have been true 10 or 15 years ago, but isn’t true anymore, which is that:
- China’s economy is dominated by exports.
- Most of those exports go to the U.S.
- The U.S. consumer is the consumer of last resort, and the Chinese economy is heavily dependent on the U.S. consumer.
And, you know, each of those statements is wrong.
So:
- Exports is a relatively small chunk of the total Chinese economy.
- The U.S. portion of total Chinese exports is relatively small.
- And I think basically exports to the U.S. is something like two to three percent of the Chinese economy.
So even if that went to zero, that would, you know, not be the end of the world. They wouldn’t like it.
It would also hurt a lot of Americans’ ability to get products. It would hurt the ability of a lot of U.S. manufacturers even to, you know, access the supply chain items that they need.
But if you think about it, the Chinese economy is growing, you know, even in the current situation where they’re kind of recovering from a property bust. It’s still growing sort of four to five percent a year.
So losing three percent of GDP, i.e. if the U.S. completely cut off trade, it isn’t something that would cripple them. It would just mean they have a bad couple of years and then maybe they recover from it after that.
So for people who followed this, you know, the Trump team, I think, thought they were going to be able to use this as leverage against China.
And every time the Trump team did something to China, there was an immediate Chinese response.
Ultimately, it culminated in the Chinese actually rolling out rare earth materials controls of their own, which I think the U.S. realized that this is a huge problem for, you know, defense, the defense industry, which I think actually is still currently restricted from getting rare earths from China.
But also things like car manufacturing and other key aspects of the U.S. economy.
So I think it’s fair to say, although this last part, I think, is, you know, you could argue about it, but it does seem like the Chinese got the best of a tariff war that Donald Trump started.
I guess that like two points I picked up on there:
- You mentioned that China’s still growing around four to five percent a year.
- I think most independent stats I’ve seen on that do fall within that range.
- But I know some have disputed that. I don’t know what you think of that dispute.
- At the same time, I think you picked up on something very important that I’ve also noticed, which is that a lot of the kind of, as you said, boomer attitudes towards China are based on these assumptions that may have been true 20 years ago, That China’s only competitive because of its lower labor costs, that it artificially keeps wages low for that purpose. And that’s basically the core of its economic model when in reality, real wages in China have been rising quite steeply for the past 20 or so years.
Yeah, I think we could go on for the whole hour on what’s happening with the Chinese economy, Chinese manufacturing, competitiveness, et cetera. The view or what the reality was 20 years ago is just very different from today.
And they’ve succeeded in climbing the value chain to the point where one could almost argue in the majority of advanced manufacturing sectors, they now either dominate or are at parity with the best competitors from anywhere in the world. So that’s an amazing story because not only did they have very strong economic growth for 20 years, but they actually caught up technologically.
There are only a few areas where they really significantly lag behind the best of the rest of the world. So, for example:
- EUV lithography
- Advanced semiconductors
They’re still a little bit behind. But in all kinds of other areas, they might actually be way ahead, like:
- Battery technology
- Electric vehicles
- Alternative energy
- Solar panels
So in some of those areas, they’re actually way ahead. So it’s just a very, very different situation than I think, honestly, Trump is pretty old. So, I think he could be forgiven for being pretty out of date in his views on what the strategic balance is in terms of trade between the U.S. and China.
So one reading of 2025 is that people learned the hard way, because I think just like when the Ukraine invasion happened, people assumed a lot of people were confident that “our economic sanctions would bring Russia to its knees.” And that turned out not to be the case.
And a lot of people, when Trump started his tariff stuff, thought that would cause the Chinese to basically make a lot of concessions to the U.S. But it didn’t happen that way at all. In fact, they didn’t make any concessions.
Now, looking into the future, there’s some issue of whether they sort of pulled the rare earth trigger too early. Is that something that now that they’ve made the West aware that there’s this vulnerability around rare earth metals, materials?
Is that something the West is going to be able to react to and build their own supply chains to make themselves independent of China on rare earths? That’s a sort of forward-looking strategic conversation that we could have.
I think generally it’s harder than people think. I think that it’s not the mining of these materials that is hard. It’s actually the processing of these materials.
Although you wouldn’t necessarily compare that in terms of technical difficulty to extreme ultraviolet light sources made by ASML, it’s still something that isn’t something that your companies figure out how to do overnight. It could take many, many years of trial and error and experimentation to figure out how to do this refining of rare earths in an economically viable way.
And it did take China a long time. They’ve been emphasizing this particular area for a long time.
Another one of the key developments of the year has been Donald Trump’s return to the White House, as well as his announcing and implementation of a new national security strategy.
Just shy of a year in, what do you make of the Trump administration’s geopolitical performance so far? And how radical a shift do you think that there has been from the liberal orthodoxy that prevailed under the previous administration?
Right. So if you step away from economic competition to, more broadly, geostrategic competition, which could include military competition, there I think there’s been a very strong break from the attitudes or the analysis that prevailed under the Biden team.
So people like Hegseth, our current secretary of war, he’s the first really senior person to just say out loud that:
“If we got into a shooting war in the Pacific, that potentially the Chinese could sink all of our aircraft carriers.”
And that’s something that people who are technically inclined and think about missiles and missile defense, long range sensors, hypersonic weapons, all this whole sort of panoply of technologies that I think are going to be very crucial for a war in the Pacific, people like me have been warning about this for many years now.
It appears the Chinese have properly developed a suite of technologies that hold at risk the U.S. fleet anywhere within one to two thousand kilometers of the Chinese mainland.
And so the Western Pacific would be a very, very difficult place for the U.S. to operate without losing huge amounts of material. And what’s interesting is the Trump people openly acknowledge this.
So Hegseth openly acknowledges this, and their new official defense strategy policy papers acknowledge this. And so what you’re really seeing is a move toward fortress Americus, not America singular, but Americus to include Venezuela, for example.
So I’ve sort of said this in conversations about the geo-strategic and military balance of power. I’ve always said the U.S. may no longer be able to dominate the Western Pacific, but it can dominate the Americas, North and South America, and is protected by two oceans from the Russians and the Chinese.
And if the U.S. were to withdraw from a more sort of forward posture in the Western Pacific, they could still easily defend themselves on their side of the Pacific. It isn’t yet an existential threat from the buildup of the Chinese military, even if we lose our dominance of the Western Pacific.
What’s interesting about the Trump people is they seem to more or less acknowledge this and they’re building their strategic position around these assumptions. Whereas during the Biden administration, you could not find any senior Biden people who would acknowledge that this is the case.
So I think this is a very fundamental question. Like if you and I are playing a strategy game, like a board game, like Risk or something, or maybe something more advanced, like Civilization or something, you know, our evaluation of the competitor’s strengths and our own strengths, that’s sort of the fundamental baseline that you have to have before you then plan your strategy.
And I think there’s been a shift between the last administration and this administration in their evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. versus China. And I think that’s not been really the media has focused on individual actions of the Trump administration or the documents that they publish. But no one’s really come and said, like, well, actually, the Trump people have this view of the weapon systems and the balance of power and the ability to manufacture these weapon systems at scale.
You know, all of these things put together, which determine the balance of power, say, in the Western Pacific. The Trump people really have a fundamentally different view, which I think is actually more realistic than what prevailed under Biden. Biden was really just, if you like, the boomer thing, like basically what prevailed in U.S. thinking for the last 20, 30 years.
Right. So the Trump people have actually broken pretty strongly from that. I think in, quote, serious defense analysis circles, or the media has been under analyzed or under discussed.
Would you say that’s a quite key difference between the strategy being pursued by the current Trump administration and the strategy that was pursued during his first term?
Yeah, I think in the first term, they had not come to this kind of radical change in perspective on the balance of power. Remember, we had COVID and stuff like this. So they were not really even focused on it. So I think Trump 2 is quite different from Trump 1 regarding this and quite different from Biden.
And to kind of zoom in on a more regional level, one, everywhere there has been a real shift in policy, it seems, is Ukraine.
Of course, Trump came into office with his promise to end the Ukraine war. And whilst the proxy war does remain ongoing, it seems that thanks to the work of Steve Witkoff, among others, progress has been made towards a deal to end the war.
To what extent do you think progress has been made? And what do you make of the fact that any deal reached will most likely be worse for Ukraine than what was on the table in Istanbul in 2022?
Yeah, so I feel that Ukraine will end up worse off than if we had settled things in Istanbul or even earlier before the Russian invasion.
So in the end, it’ll be a big loss for the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian nation. The infrastructure, their productive capabilities, their economy, I think, are just pretty much destroyed. And, you know, they’ve had - we don’t know the exact number, but it could be of order a million casualties or maybe both sides combined are a million casualties.
So it’s really a tragic outcome.
And I actually am not sure whether Trump and Witkoff are going to be able to settle this. I think it may be, as Mearsheimer says, settled on the battlefield so that Russians will just keep advancing, maybe even get served to Odessa and, you know, break through this network of defenses that has been built up over many years in the western part of the Donbass.
If they break through there, then, you know, there may be a collapse on the Ukrainian side and the whole thing has to be settled in a very sort of dramatically bad way for the Ukrainians. It might happen that way.
And I think that’s what Putin’s sticking to, because it seems like Trump and Witkoff, although they do want to settle this war, they don’t want to be enemies of the Russians. They want to, if possible, pry the Russians away from the Chinese or at least settle out this theater so that they’re not forced to allocate a lot of U.S. resources or even mindshare to this theater. They, I think, that’s their goal. But I think they’re not realistic in understanding what Putin’s breakpoints are in the negotiation.
I think Putin has been consistent the whole time, the things he’s been asking for. And I think if we don’t give him those things, like guarantees regarding NATO membership and the size of the military that Ukraine is allowed to have after the conflict ends, unless we give on those particular negotiation points to Putin, the war won’t end except with them winning in a military fashion. And then us just being forced or Ukraine just being forced to accept terms from them. And I still think that’s quite a likely outcome.
Are we in the fourth year of this war or something? So it’s amazing how slowly Russia has proceeded. I think this mainly has to do with some new aspects of warfare, like drones that have enabled the Ukrainians really to hold off the Russians for a long time. So even that part of it’s still a little bit unpredictable.
But my impression is that, before the news cycle a few months ago or a month ago sort of turned away from Russia-Ukraine, it did seem like the Russians were really winning and potentially coming close to sort of winning an outright military victory. But that could be wrong. I don’t have super high confidence in that. And it still remains to be seen.
But in any case, I think the Trump people wanted to end this conflict and still want to end this conflict, but can’t quite get it done.
Okay. And I mean, to move to another zone of tension, tremendous events have continued to take place in the Middle East with the fallout from events in 2024, such as Israel’s purge operation against Hezbollah and the fall of Assad, as well as the seemingly failed U.S. mission to counter the Houthis and the Red Sea.
What do you think of the main developments out of the Middle East in 2025? And bringing the conversation into 2026, how much, if at all, potential do you think the current situation in Iran has to reshape the region?
Yeah, so if I were to tally up the wins and losses on different sides from 2025, well, for sure:
- The collapse of Syria
- The neutralization of Hezbollah by Israel
I think surprised a lot of people. I think Israel surprised on the upside in those two goals, which are really, for them, pretty important strategic goals, like neutralizing Hezbollah and removing Assad. That’s really, in ordinary terms, if you were talking about this a few years ago, those would be considered just major, major positive strategic developments for Israel.
So, on the L side, I think probably the most obvious L, and the one that I have the highest conviction in, is the inability of the U.S. Navy to reopen shipping through the Red Sea and to subdue the Houthis.
And this is very important if you actually analyze what happened to the U.S. carrier groups that were operating in the Red Sea, the missile systems and drone systems used by the Houthis, the bombing campaigns against the Houthis, etc.
What happened there has actual implications for something more serious, like an actual world war that might happen in the Western Pacific. And I think it shows, similar related to what I said earlier, that missile systems really hold at risk surface ships. And the Navy really can’t defend those ships, even against pretty crappy missile systems that the Houthis got from the Iranians, and definitely not the best systems that the Iranians have. They can’t defend their ships and they can’t defend Israel itself from these missile systems.
And again, someone like me who’s been studying missile defense since the Cold War, since Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program, which happened when I was in college studying physics. I actually almost went to work for the Institute for Defense Analysis on X-ray lasers, which were part of the Star Wars program.
So I’ve been following this suite of technologies, i.e., the technical problem of whether a country can defend itself or a ship can defend itself against modern maneuvering ballistic missiles or even hypersonic missiles. And I’ve always been a skeptic. I’ve always thought that the claims of U.S. defense contractors and Israeli defense contractors that they can actually defend against that kind of attack has been strongly overstated.
I think what happened in the Red Sea vis-à-vis the Houthis is pretty strong evidence that that’s the case.
In a moment, I’ll go on to the Iran-Israel conflict, although I have less conviction in this because a lot of the details still are classified and we don’t know exactly what happened in the missile and drone exchanges between Iran and Israel. So my moderate conviction conclusion is that the combination of the best Israeli defense systems like David Sling, plus U.S. Arleigh Burke destroyers, plus U.S. Patriot systems-basically everything that you could throw at the Iranian missile attacks-actually didn’t work that well.
And also expended billions and billions of dollars of anti-missile missiles. I think we’ve used up a significant chunk of the entire supply that has ever been made in that short conflict. And I actually interpret that conflict as having ended because it was starting to look bad for Israel if Iran were able to keep up its regular salvos of their missiles; gradually, it would… we didn’t have enough systems to defend and Israel would start taking really significant damage from these attacks.
Now, I don’t have as high conviction, as I said, on that conclusion as I do. So it’s a distinct question of:
- Whether Israel can defend itself against Iranian missiles
- What the magazine depth of Iran is
- How many of their most advanced missiles they actually have
That’s a separate question of whether the U.S. would risk operating a carrier group in the Red Sea against the Houthis. I think for that, it’s pretty clear we don’t want to do it. It was touch and go.
There have been interviews with the captain, I think, of Eisenhower. There were a bunch of mishaps where they lost some F-18s into the ocean because the carrier was maneuvering to try to avoid the missiles. I think the commander said at one point there was a Houthis missile that passed within a few hundred meters of the ship.
So I think it’s pretty clear that one theory of the case is that:
“Oh, we have these Arleigh Burkes and we have SM-3s and SM-6s and a carrier group can defend itself against modern ballistic and hypersonic missile attack.”
I think there are actually some people who claim that. I think Hegseth is not one of those people, but there are people out there, boomer-type military analysts who claim that. I think that’s totally untrue, and I think what happened in the Red Sea with the Houthis is pretty strong evidence that that’s not true.
Lower conviction is this narrower question of whether Iran has a formidable enough conventional ballistic missile arsenal to threaten Israel, even with the U.S. expending massive resources to help protect Israel against that missile attack. And we may see this hypothesis tested again because we may have another war between Israel and Iran coming up soon.
I guess to bring events into 2026, I mean, I don’t know how much you’ve looked into the situation, but I don’t know what, if you have any idea, the likelihood given the current unrest in Iran of any kind of regime change. So I haven’t been following that closely.
You know, here’s the thing. The people that are sort of, we’re using this sort of caricature of like a boomer, very pro-Western or overconfident person who’s very overconfident in the strategic situation of the West vis-a-vis everybody else. One of the assumptions that such people make is that:
- “These authoritarian regimes tend to be very brittle,
- and actually sometimes they just collapse and you can remove the, you know, the hated leader, the dictator, autocrat of that system more easily than you thought.”
And certainly like Syria is a case where that turned out to be true. Russia is a case where it turned out not to be very easy to bring down the Putin regime, which I think was one of the, for the really most extreme war hawk neocons, that was one of the main reasons they wanted to not compromise and cause this Ukraine-Russia conflict because they thought it would ultimately bring down Putin, but that turned out not to be true.
I don’t think the regime in PRC is brittle and would be easily toppled by, you know, some setback, military setback, or by U.S. covert operation. Iran is kind of in the middle. I don’t know enough about Iran. I wouldn’t be that surprised if the theocracy that runs Iran is in danger from these current riots.
I mean, the economic situation there is very bad and they’ve been under sanctions forever from the West. And I’m sure people are very, very unhappy with the current economic situation. And I also think the Israelis and the Americans have probably massive intelligence operations there to gin up these kinds of protests. So I don’t really know what’s going to happen in Iran.
I guess at low conviction, I sort of think they aren’t going to be able to topple the regime through these actions, although I think they’re trying quite hard.
And what’s interesting on the point of the kind of boomer analysts often overestimating the extent to which these regimes will just fall, Syria is an interesting case because, I mean, yeah, well, in 2024, the final push to remove Assad was very quick. I mean, it did take a a 13-year-long war to lodge him from power. Even Iran, Iran’s seen very serious protests before in 2009.
You make a very good point, which is that the final downfall, which is non-linear, if it happens, is some non-linear event, which might happen, seem to happen really quickly. But it’s a result of decades of sanctions and also covert actions against the regime, you know, arming rebels, arming splintered factions within the country.
So, yes, that’s fair. Assuming that the CIA is not totally incompetent and that they’re actually using the money that they’re allocated in a reasonable way, they have been applying pressure to all these regimes for a long time.
So, sometimes it’s not the right characterization to say that the regime was brittle and it fell, but rather that they were under pressure for a long time and finally fell. I mean, another example is Gaddafi, right, where they go in to back the rebels there.
And the assumption is that it would be like an Iraq job where the regime falls within days. But the 2011 Libyan intervention took months for Gaddafi’s troops to give up and for Tripoli to fall. Unlike in Syria, Libya had basically no international support.
Usually in these cases, the West has complete air superiority and they’re just bombing the country, like in the case of Libya, where the French were actually bombing him. So, yeah. It’s a complicated story.
Not to jump ahead, but I think the case that we’re going to examine very closely soon is Venezuela. They got Maduro, but his regime is still in power. And are they going to be able to quickly topple and/or co-opt that regime now and get what they want?
So, that’s like the open question that we’re all going to be focused on for the next few months, probably. Absolutely. I think we’ll come on to Venezuela later.
But I think the shift focus on, I think what we both agree is the most crucial geopolitical contest of the century, namely the contest between the United States and China.
What are your major impressions of how 2025-and I know we’ve covered this partially-but I guess to go more in depth, how 2025 saw the US-China competition evolve?
Yeah, so, as I was saying earlier, I think the Trump people came in and thought they could win based on economic coercion, based on tariffs. I think that has turned out not to be the case.
Interestingly, at the same time that that set of economic-well, you could call it economic warfare-was underway, I think the US military was sort of moving in the other direction, thinking that, “oh, these guys are not going to be a pushover.”
In fact, when we do the calculations of how many ships and hypersonic missiles and stealth jets they’re producing, we don’t think we can take them in the Western Pacific.
And most of our efforts are now trying to arm the Philippines and Taiwan and try to get them to at least evolve into a sort of porcupine, not as easily coerced or taken over by the Chinese. But we don’t seem to have any stomach for direct military confrontation with the Chinese.
I think, as you said, this general recognition-in early 2025, I think it was quite common for me to encounter people who had a much more negative view of the Chinese capacity for innovation across all areas, not just AI, but across all areas.
A lot of statistics came out last year:
- The rate at which they’re installing robots
- The rate at which they’re increasing their electrical power generation
- The fact that they’re threatening all the major Western automakers now and have already sort of eclipsed the Japanese automakers in Asian markets
So all these things are, I think, gradually people are becoming aware that, “oh my God, these guys in fact may have even actually leapfrogged us.”
There’s a writer for Asia Times whose pseudonym is Han Feizi, and I’ve had him on my show. I interviewed him when we were both in Beijing. There’s an episode of Manifold called Letter from Beijing where I interview this guy, Han Feizi, who actually has a background in, he was educated in the US in engineering and then became an investment banker. And now he lives in Beijing.
He’s quite aggressive on X. One of the things he quipped was:
“China leapfrogged Western expectations so fast. It went from the West thinking it was still a backwards, low labor cost, low-end manufacturer with shitty technology to suddenly perceiving that, oh my God, they’re just slightly behind in AI and they’ve caught up in lots of areas and actually surpassed us in a bunch of areas.”
But that sort of more or less short circuited the Thucydides trap. The Thucydides trap is if you have a rising number two, there’s often a war because the number one power sees that number two has more momentum and realizes it better fight early because if it waits, number two’s growth curve will allow it to surpass number one. And then number one won’t be able to prevail in a competition. So that’s the dynamics of the Thucydides trap.
But Han Feizi points out that, like, what might have happened is that they zoomed up this catch-up curve so fast that now there isn’t actually a Thucydides trap dynamic; that when the planners in Washington actually look at what a hot confrontation will look like, they think they’re going to lose. So actually, instead of a Thucydides trap dynamic in the Western Pacific, what’s actually happening is intense planning for fortress Americas:
- The U.S. going to take over the oil in Venezuela
- Solidify itself in North and South America, including Greenland
- And hopefully, thanks to Yankee Ingenuity and our indomitable free market system, maybe in 10 or 20 years we’ll reshore all our manufacturing and at some point, it’ll be competitive again.
But it’s not really competitive now, and we need to pull our resources back in and rebuild ourselves.
I think that thinking actually is quite, I mean, again, not explicitly stated by the media or the more mainstream think tanks because it’s just too discouraging. But the Trump people are actually acting as if that’s the case.
Now, to move on to the elephant that’s been in the room for our entire discussion that I’m sure everyone wants to hear about: I think any geostrategic discussion right now would be incomplete without a discussion of the situation in Venezuela, where Nicolas Maduro was two days ago captured by U.S. Special Forces at time of recording, representing a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine or the Donro Doctrine as it has been unofficially renamed.
Do you think the ramifications of this are as serious, especially for China, as some are asserting? And do you think that this indicates the reaching of the grand bargain of Latin America in exchange for most of Asia between the U.S. and China, the possibility of which we have discussed previously?
I have more questions than answers when it comes to Venezuela. One, because I’m not an expert on Venezuela. And two, because events are moving so fast. So everything I’m going to say you should take with a grain of salt and as low conviction.
So, number one, what are the strategic implications for the U.S.-China competition of the U.S. taking control of Venezuela?
Venezuela - the Chinese have been active, I think, in developing the oil infrastructure there, and they buy a fair amount of oil from Venezuela. But I don’t view this as a really critical strategic matter for them.
In other words, it’s possible that they cut a deal with Trump and said,
“We’re not going to react super strongly if you take over Venezuela.”
Maybe they made a deal like that. It’s very hard to know. Of course, the public stance is very negative. They called a special session of the Security Council, and they publicly denounced the kidnapping of Maduro.
Well, as anyone who believes in, quote, international law, we can talk about this in a second. But anybody who believes in the facade of, quote, international law would not be very happy about this set of events.
But in any case, it is not implausible to me - it is plausible to me - that the Chinese are willing to cut some deal with Trump saying that we’re not going to take active measures against you over Venezuela. And who knows what the quid pro quo was. Maybe there isn’t any deal.
I mean, I don’t think the Chinese are really in a great position to contest U.S. action in Venezuela. Maybe in some extreme scenario, they could supply the Venezuelan military with some weapon systems. Although even that, like getting weapon systems to them against U.S. interdiction, I think wouldn’t be that easy.
So, yeah, very hard to know exactly what’s going on. One could ask, if there were some kind of quid pro quo, what did they get out of Trump in order to not contest this very much? I guess the same thing would go for the Russians. But you could imagine lots of things that Trump could give them.
I mean, to join on there to your point about international law. The idea of international law has always seemed to me to be one of those notions that if you think about it for more than five seconds, it just becomes transparently laughable. The idea that you can have law, a law that is impossible to enforce, that you can have a legal regime above the state level, A, is kind of one of those ideas that’s just ridiculous on the face of it.
Yeah, so I never believed in it. I always thought at the end, when push comes to shove, it becomes a matter of pure power, pure, coercive, violent military power.
Now, I guess to state more fully my view on international law and the, quote, “so-called rules-based order,” so typical boomer neocon or boomer Western analyst will always couch things in the following way.
Like,
- oh, we have this really great rules-based order, it’s good for everyone,
- and these revisionist powers like Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China,
- these are revisionist powers who want to overthrow our really nice rules-based order.
And, you know, without saying that I am an endorser of Putin’s regime or Xi Jinping’s regime, I would just say that way of phrasing things is just, I think, kind of very stupid. Because it’s pretty clear that when it wants to, the U.S. doesn’t give a shit about any rules and just enforces its own diktat.
Trump is an extreme case of this. Like, okay, Trump is maybe the poster child. You might argue that,
“all the non-Trump presidencies or non-Trump administrations have a reasonably strong commitment to the rule of law, and it’s only Trump that’s the outlier.”
But you go back to the Iraq War, that was probably illegal, right? And that caused like a million [deaths]. Some of the stuff that, I guess, Reagan was doing in Central America or whatever. Yeah, or even Bush, like grabbing Noriega, which is probably the closest analog to what just happened to Maduro.
So, I think the right way to say this is that, of course, there are two phases:
- One is the Cold War phase,
- and then one is the post-Cold War phase where the U.S. is the sole hyperpower, which maybe that phase now has ended with the rise of China.
It persisted for a good 20 plus years.
In all those phases, it was definitely useful for the U.S. to con, you know, weak-minded jurists of international law or just random people writing editorials in newspapers or people in the street. You know, you always want people to think that there is a just and fair system in place. Of course, secretly, it’s run by the powers that be, but it’s better if people think of it as mostly fair, operates pretty well.
It’s in all our best interest because then they’re not fighting the system. They’re accepting the system, and you don’t have to expend your scarce resources suppressing these people or controlling them in some violent way. So, it’s better just to con them into thinking that this rules-based order is good and it’s pretty fair and all the nations are going to prosper if they just play by the rules.
So, clearly, I think that was what we were trying to do, what the U.S. empire was trying to do, and it was largely successful, I think, just because most people are not ever reasoning from first principles and don’t have deep command of the facts and how the world works.
So, you can pull stuff over on most of the world, including
- professors at law schools whose specialty is, quote,
“international law,”
- even foreign policy experts, etc.
You can definitely pull the wool over those people’s eyes.
And every now and then, when the U.S. is thinking of doing something, like
- “oh, we’re going to go get Noriega, we’re going to invade Panama and get Noriega,”
- or, “oh, we’re going to pretend that there’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then we’re going to invade Iraq,”
right, without UN Security Council approval or what. You know, whatever thing it is that the U.S. strategists feel we really want to do, we really need to do it, there will always be, at minimum, a kind of cost-benefit analysis where someone within the administration will say,
“oh, but this will undermine the perception of the rest of the world that there’s something called rule of law or that the United Nations means something.”
The way I view it is that when the imperial hegemon does something, it’s doing a kind of cost-benefit analysis where if it sort of shows that it can do things that totally violate the rules, but only it can, and it’s just because it’s an exercise of raw power, it has to think about what the downstream consequences of that action are.
And you can have a legitimate, sincere debate among people within the U.S. system, who might not believe at all in the rule of law except as a useful tool for control, like a totally fake system that lets the U.S. control the world without resorting to violence all the time.
Even if they do have that cynical view of the rule of law system, international law, they still don’t want to make it completely obvious to everyone that the whole thing is a sham because enough people believe in it, it becomes normative, that it does a lot of work for the hegemon. So some people, like on X, when I said I gave, I tweeted out about Maduro’s kidnapping as being like just yet the latest example of like rule of law and rules-based order, international rules-based order is a total sham and it’s just theatrics for the dim-witted. I’d say things like that and some people got upset, but, you know, I think that most serious foreign policy strategists do understand this point and they might argue that the U.S. should conform to the rules-based order more rather than less, but they’re doing that for selfish reasons because they think that it is better in the long run for the U.S. to conform to the rules-based order.
Not because they care necessarily about the utility of these other countries, but just because, “oh, it’s a useful fiction for us to have around.” So that’s my view of all the rules-based order and international law.
And I guess one final kind of thing to add on to that that just came to mind was all this talk at the moment over Greenland and how serious do you think the Trump administration’s designs on Greenland are? And if they do make some kind of move, whatever that may be, what kind of consequences do you think that might have if it’s possible to tell at this stage?
Yeah, I don’t know how serious they are about Greenland. It does seem like they have a kind of tin ear.
Like, I think, even if you were a very strong American primacist and all you care about is America needs to strengthen itself for the continued long-term competition with China, and you say, yes, it would be good if we controlled Greenland, right?
You can argue whether that’s really so important or not, but let’s suppose you’re convinced that it is.
But surely there’s a way to work this out with the Danes in such a way that it doesn’t completely rupture NATO and, you know, create yet another example of the rules-based system being completely flouted by the United States.
Like, there seems to be a way to do this with finesse, but the Trump administration lacks finesse. That’s how I would say it.
But this is kind of related to the fact that if you watch the recent press conferences that Trump has been giving, both about Maduro, but just in general, he clearly is undergoing some kind of cognitive decline.
I think he’s clearly less sharp than Trump won, you know, in his first term. And that Trump was much less sharp than Trump when he was a younger man, like 40 years old or something like that.
So I’m not an anti-Trump kind of mad king kind of person, but there is a little element of this going on.
There is definitely some mad kinginess, I think, going on with Trump.
Now, what’s very amusing for people who have the sort of what I call the normie boomerish view of how government and sovereignty work, like say in the EU, you’ll just notice like all the EU people are afraid to criticize Trump over Maduro.
Like all these British politicians when called on the carpet about rule of law, like they’ve been banging on about international rules-based system and international law, like because they like it because Russia violated that in invading Ukraine.
So that’s like a very important talking point for these British guys.
But now when Trump is doing it, they don’t really know what to say.
It’s like their heads are exploding and occasionally the interviewers are actually good enough to force the British politicians to confront this, and it’s like their heads are exploding.
But like Merz just said, “oh, it’s complicated.”
And like Callis doesn’t know what to say.
I think someone asked her point blank, “well, what would happen if the U.S. just took Greenland?”
And she’s like, “oh, you know, we don’t comment on diplomacy, you know, because diplomacy is complicated and it’s happening in real time.”
So I just don’t think those guys know what to say or do.
Some of them probably thought this wasn’t an imperial system and everything was on the up and up, and they’re suddenly shocked to realize, no, it is an imperial system and you’re the subjects.
So some people are probably like that.
Some of them are just controlled, probably CIA, people that were allowed to rise to these high positions within the EU because U.S. intelligence services had compromising information about them and they could be controlled.
And so they’re just controlled, as ridiculous as it makes them sound.
They’re going to try to avoid saying anything that makes their American handlers angry.
I think to finish on that note, I think it’s been a fantastic recap of 2025 and the first few days of 2026 as eventful as they have been.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Steve.
I’m sure we’ll do something like this again and I’ll be very glad to do it.
“Yeah, great to be with you again, Alp. Have a great 2026.”
“Have a great 2026.”