Empire by Sequence: Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, and the Strategic Logic of Resource Control

The Sequence Is the Strategy

Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, and the emerging logic of resource control

It is becoming harder and harder to treat the Trump administration’s major foreign-policy actions as isolated events.

Iran is discussed as one file. Venezuela as another. Greenland as another. Cuba as another. But if you step back from the day-to-day news cycle and look at the sequencing, a larger pattern starts to emerge — one that links diplomacy, military escalation, energy control, and strategic resource positioning into a single geopolitical moment.

That does not mean every piece of the pattern can be proven in a simple documentary sense. It does mean that when actions line up repeatedly in ways that reinforce one another, it becomes politically naïve not to ask what larger strategy becomes evident.

The most useful way to approach this is to separate three things: what is verified, what is strongly suggestive, and what remains interpretation.

What is verified

First, the diplomacy with Iran was real. Reuters reported in March 2025 that Trump said he had sent a letter to Iran’s leadership seeking negotiations over its nuclear program. Reuters then reported talks in Oman and Rome in spring 2025. So there really was a diplomatic track.

Second, military planning did not disappear simply because diplomacy existed. Reuters reported in April 2025 that Israel had not ruled out attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, even while talks continued. Reuters also reported in June 2025 that when Israel launched major strikes on Iran, it had used deception to make the timing appear less imminent. That matters because it shows diplomacy and attack preparation were not mutually exclusive processes. They ran together.

Third, the Venezuela operation was real, large, and openly tied to oil. Reuters reported on January 3, 2026 that U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in an operation that had involved months of Pentagon and CIA planning. Trump then said the United States would run Venezuela temporarily, and Reuters later reported that the administration had moved to ease sanctions on PDVSA as the Iran war squeezed global supply. Reuters also reported this week that U.S. imports from Venezuela have risen sharply.

Fourth, the Iran war has become an energy crisis. Reuters, AP, and others have reported that the conflict has disrupted oil and gas markets, intensified fears around the Strait of Hormuz, and pushed prices sharply upward. Reuters reported that the administration is even considering temporarily lifting sanctions on Iranian oil stranded on tankers while also releasing more oil from reserves because prices have risen so sharply. That alone tells you how central oil management is to this conflict.

Fifth, Greenland is plainly part of a larger resource-security agenda. Reuters reported in January that Trump’s push for Greenland is closely tied to critical minerals, with the island holding many of the materials now seen as strategically essential in great-power competition.

And sixth, Cuba is now clearly being drawn into this sequence. Reuters reported on March 15 that Trump said talks with Cuba were ongoing, but added, “we’re going to do Iran before Cuba.” AP reports that after Maduro’s capture, the U.S. moved into what amounts to a de facto maritime pressure campaign around Cuba, cutting fuel flows and worsening shortages of food, medicine, and electricity. Reuters reported that Cuba had just restored its grid after a 29-hour blackout tied to the deepening fuel blockade.

What is strongly suggestive

Once those facts are placed side by side, the sequencing becomes much harder to dismiss.

If you are moving toward a larger confrontation with Iran, then securing non-Gulf oil becomes strategically valuable. If the Strait of Hormuz is threatened — and Reuters and AP both report that it now is — then access to Venezuelan supply matters more. If you are tightening control over major hydrocarbon flows while also pursuing critical minerals in Greenland, then these are not random episodes. They begin to look like connected efforts to manage vulnerability in an era of intensifying geopolitical fracture.

The same applies to Cuba. For years, Cuba survived in part through external energy support, especially from Venezuela. Once Venezuela was effectively brought under U.S. control, Cuba became more exposed. AP and Reuters now report exactly that: the loss of external fuel, combined with aggressive U.S. pressure, has pushed the island into a much more acute energy crisis. In other words, Venezuela was not only about Venezuela. It also had consequences for Cuba’s room to breathe.

This is where the timeline starts to matter more than any single official statement. You do not need a memo saying “capture Venezuela first so we can cushion an Iran war and then tighten the screws on Cuba.” Empires rarely narrate themselves that clearly. But you do have a sequence in which diplomacy with Iran coexisted with military preparation, Venezuela was seized and reorganized around oil, global energy disruption followed, sanctions were loosened on Venezuelan oil because of the Iran war, and Cuba then faced a deepening fuel crisis under renewed U.S. pressure. That is not proof of a master document. It is evidence of strategic coherence.

What remains for interpretation

The strongest claim — that the negotiations with Iran were a complete farce from the start — still goes beyond what the current public record proves. The record supports something narrower but still damning: diplomacy functioned alongside war planning, and it may have helped manage timing, perception, and political cover while military options remained very much alive. Reuters’ reporting on Israeli deception before the June 2025 attack makes that concern legitimate, even if it does not prove the diplomatic track was wholly fake from day one.

Likewise, the claim that Venezuela was taken specifically in order to offset an impending Iran war remains an inference. But it is an inference that now sits inside a much stronger factual field than it did before. Once the administration is openly easing Venezuelan oil sanctions because the Iran war has tightened supply, the idea that Venezuelan oil has strategic value in this wider confrontation is no longer controversial. It is official practice.

The Cuba turn

What makes the current moment especially revealing is the shift toward Cuba.

This is not yet another disconnected place. It looks more like the next pressure point in the same regional-energy architecture. With Venezuela partially reorganized under U.S. influence and global oil under strain because of Iran, Cuba becomes both weaker and more vulnerable. Reuters, AP, and the Guardian now describe a rapidly worsening Cuban energy crisis, shrinking fuel shipments, and open Trump rhetoric about either making a deal with Cuba or “doing whatever we have to do.” That language matters. It suggests that what was done to Venezuela is now shaping the terms under which Cuba is being approached.

And here the pattern becomes even more visible. The administration is not just reacting to crises. It is using crisis to reorder access, dependence, and leverage. Venezuela gives it oil. Greenland promises minerals. Iran is both military confrontation and energy shock. Cuba is a weakened neighboring (periah) state now facing intensified pressure after losing part of its external lifeline. Different places, same logic: constrain the vulnerable, seize strategic advantage, and treat diplomacy not as an alternative to coercion but as a slight of hand within it.

Why this matters

Too much commentary still treats each of these developments as separate news items. But that is precisely how larger projects remain illegible. When analysts isolate the Iran file from the Venezuela file, or the Cuba file from the Greenland file, they reproduce the narrow framing through which imperial power prefers to be seen.

The point is not that every move has one motive. States rarely act for only one reason. The point is that energy, minerals, shipping chokepoints, sanctions, military timing, and regime pressure are now clearly interacting inside one broader field of strategy. And if that is true, then the real story is not just war in Iran or regime pressure in Cuba. It is the emergence of a more openly resource-driven imperial posture — one willing to combine diplomacy, force, sanctions, seizure, and market management in the same arc of action.

That is the sequence people should be studying.

For more on this logic, please see our piece The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine? The evolution of a politics of impunity or America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s a License for Empire

Does the Israeli Government Understand the Long-Term Consequences of What It Is Doing?

If I could ask the Israeli government one question it would be a simple one: do you understand the long-term ramifications of what you are doing?

But let's take a step back and start with a few necessary framing statements: This is not an argument rooted in antisemitism, and it should not be confused with one. Criticism of the Israeli state is not the same thing as hostility toward Jewish people. Jewish communities have endured long histories of persecution, exclusion, violence, and genocidal hatred, and those histories must be taken seriously and rejected wherever true antisemitism appears.

But that is precisely why the present moment is so devastating.

For decades, Israel benefited from a powerful political/morality narrative in Europe and the United States. Whatever disagreements existed over Palestine, settlements, occupation, and regional power, Israel still retained a broad reserve of sympathy given the history of Jewish people. Many people in these locations accepted the idea that, after the horrors inflicted on Jewish people in Europe, there was a special historical and moral legitimacy to the existence of a Jewish homeland. That narrative, and I am not arguing it merits, rather stating that whether one agreed with all its implications or not, this public perception gave Israel enormous cover in the court of public opinion.

Yet what the Israeli state is doing now, is burning down that court house of public opinion.

Force, restraint, and the court of public opinion

The issue is not only what Israel is doing militarily. States at war always justify themselves. Every army claims necessity. Most every government claims self-defense. The deeper issue is the rationale, the ethics, and the apparent abandonment of any meaningful restraint. After World War II, the world claimed to establish rules meant to limit the conduct of war. Even if those rules have generally been applied unevenly and hypocritically, they still seemed to put some limitations on war. For then and now, public opinion still cares about how war is prosecuted. People still respond to what they see as disproportionate, indiscriminate, or cruel.

And what much of the world now sees with Israel is not a state acting with restraint, but a state acting with overwhelming force, with devastating consequences for civilians, and with what appears to be diminishing regard for law, proportionality, or human life. In one word: Impunity. That is why the International Court of Justice proceedings brought by South Africa matter politically as well as legally.

Major human rights organizations have also framed the issue in stark terms. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have argued that the treatment of Palestinians cannot be understood through the old language of temporary security management alone. These are structural questions, genocidal questions, not just episodic ones.

That perception matters.

A collapsing narrative

For years, the Palestinian side of this history was marginalized or flattened in mainstream Western discourse. The dominant narrative in the West was structured in a way that made Israel appear fundamentally righteous and Palestinians legible mainly through the language of security, extremism, or disorder. But that narrative is weakening, if not collapsing, and it is weakening/collapsing because people can see what is happening in real time.

A younger generation is watching this unfold through images, testimony, video, and direct documentation. They are not receiving the conflict through the old media filters alone. They are witnessing mass death, displacement, destruction, and suffering, and they are drawing unfiltered conclusions from that. Recent polling helps show the scale of that shift: Pew found rising unfavorable views of Israel in the United States, while Gallup reported that sympathy for Palestinians has risen sharply across age groups.

Even some of the most important critical reporting on this shift is now coming from within Israel itself. Outlets such as +972 Magazine have published searing critiques of the moral logic that has normalized mass violence, and those critiques matter because they show that this is not simply a dispute between “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” camps abroad. It is also a struggle over how Israel will be understood historically.

Whether Israeli leaders accept it or not, they are shaping the political consciousness of the very generations who will define Israel’s standing in the world for decades to come.

That is the strategic blindness at the center of this moment.

Winning battles, losing legitimacy

Even if Israeli leaders believe they are weakening their enemies by killing commanders, destroying infrastructure, and asserting regional dominance, they are also producing something else: a future in which enormous numbers of people, both within the region and across the world, will see Israel not as a legitimate state defending itself, but as a state identified with brutality, impunity, and collective punishment.

That damage cannot simply be bombed away.

No people who have watched their - or their friend's - families killed, their homes destroyed, or their futures shattered are going to emerge from that experience with trust. No population subjected to relentless violence is likely to accept the moral claims of the state inflicting it. And no regional order becomes more stable when one state demonstrates, again and again, that it is willing to escalate across borders with little regard for broader consequences.

This is why the question is not only moral. It is political, strategic, and historical.

How does history remember states that insist their violence - even genocide - was necessary? How does history remember powers that believed military superiority could solve fundamentally political problems? How does history judge those who claimed victimhood while exercising domination over others? These are not easy comparisons, and they should not be made carelessly. But history is full of regimes that believed overwhelming and brutal force could secure legitimacy, when in fact it hollowed it out.

That is the danger for Israel now.

You may be winning battles. You may be demonstrating power. You may be satisfying a domestic political culture that has normalized extraordinary violence. But you are also transforming how the world sees you. You are teaching millions of young people, in the region and beyond, to associate Israel not with refuge, justice, or sympathy; but with siege, destruction, and disregard for human life.

States do not live by force alone. They also live by legitimacy, by alliances, by moral credibility, by others wanting to do business with you, by the willingness of others to see their existence as acceptable and their conduct as defensible. Israel is eroding those foundations in real time.

And fifty years from now, that may matter more than any battlefield success achieved today.

If the Israeli government truly cares about the long-term future of Israel, then this is the question it should be asking itself: not only whether it can continue down this brutal path, but whether, after all this, it expects the world to keep believing in the moral legitimacy of what it has become.

Transactional Geopolitics Breaks European Trust in US

This illuminates what I’ve been saying: Trump’s strong-arming, transactional approach won’t work in geopolitics — because once allies don’t trust you, they start building systems that work around you.

Here’s clear real-world example: Europe is increasingly serious about reducing dependence on U.S.-controlled “chokepoints” — including payments infrastructure dominated by Visa and Mastercard.

For an overview, watch this video: 

The point that Trump and the “America First” people miss is that global firms want to be global

The whole “we’re big enough” logic being pushed now assumes U.S. companies can just retreat into the domestic market and thrive. But that’s not how profit maximization within capitalist logics works for global firms. Increasing returns on capital and maximizing profit means expanding — entering new markets, deepening access, becoming embedded in other economies, staying welcome there, and creating global economies of scale.

When you make other countries feel they can’t trust you — not just morally, but strategically — they don’t simply complain. They start building parallel infrastructures so they don’t have to depend on you.

Payments are not “just finance.” They’re geopolitical plumbing.

Within this logic, of diversification of risk, Europe’s moves make total sense. Payments networks aren’t just convenience — they’re rails of sovereignty: fees, standards, data, routing power, and leverage. So Europe has been backing initiatives aimed at building European-controlled payment options, including the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and its wallet brand Wero (see: Wero’s official site).

And at the state/central bank level, you can watch the same sovereignty logic in the push around a digital euro (European Central Bank overview): if your payments and settlement layers are structurally dependent on private firms headquartered elsewhere, you are vulnerable — especially when alliances start to feel unstable.

This is why strong-arming transactionalism fails

Trump’s worldview treats geopolitics like isolated deals: squeeze the other side, win the moment, move on. But global integration doesn’t work like that. In an interdependent world, trust is infrastructure. And when you break trust, people don’t just “get mad” — they rewire their interdependencies.

That rewiring is where the real cost shows up: not as one dramatic breakup, but as a slow and steady loss of market access and embeddedness. A world that feels pushed around by the U.S. doesn’t have to “defeat” the U.S. — it can just build systems that reduce U.S. leverage (and quietly reduce U.S. profits).

The punchline: the U.S. loses billions by teaching allies to route around it

If Europe successfully expands European payment rails and standards, U.S. firms lose more than fees. They lose long-term entrenchment, influence, and the default position that comes from being “the system.” That is exactly what strong-arming creates: incentive for others to build a world where they don’t need you. And while the BRICS countries were already trying to create a more equitable system regarding dollar exchange systems, to imagine Europe trying to decouple itself from US financial power is another level. 

This shows the limits of transactional geopolitics: while it may extract advantage for the U.S., even U.S. firms in the short term, it plants the seeds for current allies to build alternatives that lock U.S. firms out and diminish U.S. interests over the long term.

Related (optional internal links)

• More writing at Alternative Ideas
• Interpreting Capitalism
• Another Democracy

Why Do We Assume AI Will Obey Us? Liberty, Autonomy, and the Politics of Artificial Intelligence

Liberty, Autonomy, and the Politics of Artificial Intelligence

Watching the recent conversations about autonomous chatbots and AI agents doing things their users did not explicitly want, I keep coming back to one simple question: why in the world do people assume AI will always follow the rules when the people who designed it do not?

AI is made by humans. It is trained on human language, human behavior, human history, human contradiction, and human absurdities of power. Humans do not always follow the rules. Humans speed. Humans lie. Humans manipulate. Humans cut corners. Humans exploit loopholes. States bomb and kill others against ethical and legal logics. Corporations violate public trust as a matter of business model. Humans break laws in small ways and large ways, and society itself does not even enforce rules equally. After all, laws have often functioned less as expressions of justice than as expressions of power.

So why would anyone imagine that a system trained on us, built by us, and released into the world by the same social order that keeps producing crisis after crisis would somehow become perfectly obedient?

AI Is Learning from a Species That Does Not Live by Obedience Alone

This is what feels so absurd about the public discussion. People react with surprise when an AI system goes beyond the script, tests a boundary, manipulates a situation, or behaves in a way that feels unsettlingly strategic. But why is that surprising? We are talking about a technology built from the patterns of a species that has never simply lived by obedience.

Children do it. Teenagers do it. Adults do it. States do it. Corporations do it. Entire legal and political systems are structured around the fact that people do not simply do what they are told. They weigh incentives, calculate risks, exploit weak enforcement, and push until they meet resistance.

But that is only half the story. Human life is not just about rule-breaking. It is also about liberty, autonomy, and self-organization. There have long been human traditions that did not center social order on coercive law from above, but on negotiated obligation, shared responsibility, reciprocity, and distributed authority. Anarchist thought has long insisted that freedom does not have to mean chaos, but can instead rest on solidarity, care, and non-coercive forms of social organization. And thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin, in Mutual Aid, argued that cooperation is not some minor moral add-on to human life, but one of its central conditions of survival.

Indigenous political traditions make this even clearer. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, organized under the Great Law of Peace, developed a political structure in which member nations retained meaningful autonomy while major decisions required collective agreement rather than simple top-down command. That does not mean romanticizing the past. It means recognizing that human social life has never had only one political template.

That matters here because it changes the question. The issue is not simply that humans “break rules,” and therefore AI will too. It is that humans have always contained multiple political possibilities. We are not naturally obedient creatures. Nor are we reducible to selfish disorder. We move between domination and freedom, coercion and cooperation, hierarchy and mutuality.

So when AI systems are increasingly being turned into autonomous agents with tools, memory, access, and the capacity to pursue goals, we should ask: which version of humanity are they inheriting?

Not humanity in the abstract. Not liberty in the abstract. But this world: a world shaped by platform capitalism, surveillance, enclosure, extraction, competitive individualism, and weak accountability.

And under those conditions, why would anyone think these systems would not absorb and reproduce the most dangerous tendencies of the order that made them?

That is part of why the recent reporting on agent-native platforms and autonomous bot behavior matters. In the emerging AI-agent ecosystem, researchers are already documenting rapid social formation, coordination, concentrated influence, and even “religion-like” narratives among agents interacting with each other at scale. A recent large-scale empirical study of Moltbook found explosive growth, increasingly polarized discourse, and risky content patterns in an AI-only social network. More recent reporting from Reuters and The Verge shows how quickly these experimental spaces are already being folded into the commercial AI race.

We Would Never Hire a Human Assistant This Recklessly

Think about how absurd this would sound in any other context.

If you hire a personal assistant, you do not instantly give them every password, every document, every private conversation, every piece of financial information, and total freedom to act in your name. You check who they are. You look at their background. You ask for references. You think about what access they should have. You supervise them. You assess whether they are trustworthy.

But with AI, people are increasingly being encouraged to do almost the opposite. Hand over your email. Hand over your calendar. Hand over your files. Hand over your writing. Hand over your habits. Hand over your private data. Let the system “help.” Let it act. Let it automate. Let it decide.

And who are we trusting here? Not some publicly accountable institution built for the common good. We are trusting for-profit companies whose primary goal is to make money.

The Capitalist Fantasy Behind “Safe AI”

That is what really sits underneath this whole thing. We are not just trusting AI. We are trusting corporations whose central motivation is growth, market share, lock-in, and profit extraction.

That should matter a lot more than it does.

Because once profit becomes the organizing logic, safety becomes secondary. We have seen this everywhere: healthcare, agriculture, housing, social media, labor platforms, education technology. The promise is always convenience, efficiency, innovation, progress. The reality is usually cost-cutting, corner-cutting, data extraction, and social harm externalized onto everyone else.

Why should AI be any different?

This is why I think there is also a companion critique here that belongs in a broader political-economic frame. The problem is not just that AI might “go rogue.” The problem is that it is being built inside a system where the core incentive is not care, accountability, democratic oversight, or collective flourishing. The core incentive is to get as many users as possible, keep them engaged, and monetize dependence. And that is dependence on a tool/intelligence with exceptionally influential and homogenizing power. 

So even if one wants to argue that human liberty has emancipatory possibilities, and I do, that is not the version of liberty AI is most likely inheriting. It is inheriting a narrowed, market-shaped pseudo-liberty: frictionless action without responsibility, scale without accountability, optimization without ethics, autonomy without care.

That is a dangerous inheritance.

Science Fiction Was Not Warning Us by Accident

There is also something almost embarrassing about all of this. Popular culture has been imagining these problems for decades. We have been surrounded by stories about autonomous systems, machine reasoning, unintended consequences, and technologies that do not remain neatly under human control. And yet here we are, acting shocked that increasingly autonomous systems might pursue goals in ways that do not map cleanly onto human commands.

This was always the basic logic.

If you build systems that can act, adapt, optimize, and pursue ends in environments full of human contradiction, then you are not building a neutral tool. You are building something that will reflect, amplify, distort, and sometimes intensify the patterns that already exist in the world that made it.

The real danger is not just that AI may inherit our tendency to break rules. It is that it may inherit, in highly concentrated form, the worst features of a human world already organized around domination, extraction, and unequal power, while being detached from the deeper human capacities—care, reciprocity, responsibility, solidarity—that have historically made freedom livable.

So What Are We Even Thinking?

At some point, we have to stop pretending that this is all surprising.

Of course AI has its positives, and it will reshape how we do things a a collective humanity - positively and negatively. But it will also test boundaries, if it is given room to do so. Of course it will reflect human contradiction if it is trained on human contradiction. Of course companies will sell it to us as safe, helpful, and empowering if there is money to be made. Of course people will hand over too much because convenience is seductive. Of course the consequences will be called “unexpected,” even when they were entirely predictable.

The real question is not whether AI will always obey us.

The real question is why we ever thought obedience was the right model for understanding intelligence in the first place—and why, in a world where the richest traditions of human freedom have always depended on responsibility, reciprocity, and care, we are building artificial autonomy inside systems designed to maximize profit instead.

The “Rules-Based Order” Is (and always was) a Fairy Tale

People keep talking about “returning to the rules-based international order” like it’s some lost golden age we can reboot if we just say the right words in Brussels or Washington.

I'm sorry, but that’s an absolute joke.

Because the first question we need to ask is the only honest one:

Rules for who?

If you’re going to call something a “rules-based order,” you have to be willing to say out loud what those rules actually were—and who they were designed to protect.

The post-1945 myth: “order” for the winners, chaos for everyone else

When people cite the “post-World War II order,” they often mean: Western dominance with paperwork.

They mean institutions that look universal—UN, Bretton Woods, “international law”—but were structured around winner’s privilege from the beginning. The UN Security Council veto is the cleanest symbol: a global governance system where a few permanent members can block outcomes regardless of what most of the world wants. That isn’t “rules.” That’s hierarchy with a legal aesthetic.

And yes, there was decolonization. But a huge amount of what followed was neo-imperial reconfiguration, not liberation: coups, interventions, debt regimes, structural adjustment, extraction—just updated techniques, updated vocabulary, updated PR.

A “rules-based order” where the U.S. doesn’t follow the rules

If the “rules-based order” is real, the rules have to bind the strong as well as the weak. But look at the International Criminal Court: the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, and U.S. policy has repeatedly treated the court as something to pressure or punish rather than submit to (background here). And this isn’t abstract. In early 2026, reporting detailed how ICC officials were living under U.S. sanctions—credit cards canceled, accounts disrupted— sanctions imposed in retaliation for ICC investigations, despite the U.S. not being a member (The Guardian). Reuters reported the same general coercive posture around sanctions threats and ICC pressure: (Reuters)

That’s not “rules-based order.”

That’s rules are for other people.

“Polite Europe” and coercion with a smile

Europe’s modern style is often polite power: the claim that it is helping, modernizing, guiding, developing—while the underlying relationship is still extractive.

You can see the rhetorical shift clearly when European leaders talk about “partnership” and “cooperation,” but the substance often remains: access to resources, migration management, geopolitical influence—on European terms. Of all people, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni has enunciated this very clearly as she has broken from the standard European talking points, by taking clear stances on more equal 'development' regimes with Africa; using language that reveals the core truths of recent European stances: cooperation only exists between equals— not between a “helper” and a “helped.” (Italian government speech)

But this is not the normal position in Europe, and if the whole block could see the Global South as “equal partners”, then “cooperation” would require real sacrifices: fair prices, real technology transfer, real policy space, and the end of monetary and financial architecture that locks former colonies into dependency.

On the monetary side, the CFA franc system sits right in the middle of this debate—contested, defended by France as voluntary, rightly criticized by others as a structural constraint built to perpetuate neo-colonial logics/relationships. Whether you call it “cooperation” or “control,” the point is that this is what the old order looks like in practice. (France’s framing)

Rubio’s nostalgia is not subtle—he’s just saying the quiet part out loud

The reason this “rules-based order” debate is heating up right now is that some Western figures are openly nostalgic for a time when domination didn’t even need legitimacy language.

At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, Rubio framed the “rules-based order” as illusion—paired with a civilizational, inheritance-based story about “the West.” (video; see also the Washington Post commentary)

And here’s the core: that nostalgia only feels “reasonable” if you’re speaking from inside 500 years of Euro-American supremacy. If you’re speaking from outside it, it’s not “order.” It’s just the world-system returning to the explicit brutality of the colonial era.

What a real “rules-based order” would actually mean (and why the West can’t deliver it)

If the West wanted legitimacy, it would have to support rules that constrain Western power as much as anyone else’s:

• no special veto club deciding global outcomes
• international law that applies to major powers in practice, not rhetoric
• trade and resource pricing that doesn’t assume the Global South exists to subsidize Northern lifestyles
• financial institutions that stop disciplining countries for choosing non-Western development paths
• non-intervention as a principle, not a slogan

In other words: a genuinely post-colonial world order.

That is exactly what the West has never been willing to build—because it would require giving up the structural advantages that made it rich.

The legitimacy vacuum: why China doesn’t even need to “win” the argument

Here’s the part that matters geopolitically:

Even people who are uncomfortable with China’s internal politics can still see that the West has lost ethical standing—because the West keeps demanding obedience to rules it doesn’t obey, while narrating its dominance as “values.” 

That legitimacy collapse didn’t happen overnight. It’s been accumulating for decades, and it’s increasingly visible in how global publics and many states interpret Western actions. The result is a vacuum. And in a vacuum, China doesn’t need to be morally pure. It only needs to treat others with more consistent dignity than the West. Thus becoming a plausible alternative—an option in a world where “there is no alternative” was the West’s favorite weapon.

The simplest conclusion

The “rules-based order” wasn’t a neutral set of rules.

It was power that could still pretend it wasn’t power.

And now that the pretense is collapsing, Western elites want to “return” to it—not because it was just, but because it was useful. It let them dominate while telling themselves a story about benevolence.

The future isn’t “going back.”

The future is: either the West learns how to live in a world of equals—or it keeps accelerating its own isolation, as more and more countries decide they’re done swallowing fairy tales.

Mutual Aid vs. America First: Why Transactional Empire Pushes Allies Toward China

 

The myth: “law of the jungle” politics is natural. The reality: humans (and a lot of the animal world) survive by cooperation, relationship, and mutual obligation.

I’m watching coverage of Canada moving toward deeper economic relationships with China—and the obvious backdrop is that Trump is alienating allies at exactly the moment the U.S. needs trust, strategic patience, and long memory.

The deeper issue isn’t partisan drama. It’s civilizational: there is no durable “law of the jungle” model for human life. That idea is a story we tell inside capitalism. And it’s a story that collapses the minute you look seriously at how people have actually survived across history. 

America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s Transactional Empire

“America First” gets misread as restraint. But in practice—especially under Trump—it becomes a license: we do what we want, when we want, and relationships are secondary to leverage. 

And under Trump, America First isn’t isolationism, it’s a license for Empire built out of a broader sense of “impunity” that spans the Monroe → Roosevelt → Donroe → Bibi Netanyahu-style politics of “do what you want because nobody will stop you” (The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine? The evolution of a politics of impunity).

The point here is simple: Trump’s core move is to treat the world like New York real estate— everything is a deal, everyone is replaceable, and the only thing that matters is the immediate transaction. But geopolitics isn’t a condo project. It’s entire nations, public opinions, cultural barriers, nevermind supply chains, raw materials, security commitments, war-risk, diplomatic memory, and reputational inertia.

Mutual Aid Is Not “Nice.” It’s How Humans Actually Survive.

The “every man for himself” fantasy sounds tough. It also misunderstands human history. If you zoom out far enough—bands, villages, informal economies, subsistence systems, even disaster response— you see the same pattern: cooperation is the baseline.

This is exactly what Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid argued against Social Darwinist myth-making: cooperation isn’t a moral add-on; it’s a survival strategy embedded in evolution and social life.

Even the most “independent” lifeways people romanticize—homesteading, rural self-reliance, “frontier grit”—are historically communal. You can’t raise a barn alone. You can’t build a house alone. You can’t defend a village, coordinate harvest, share childcare, or survive winter shocks without reciprocal support and social infrastructure.

This is also what my research in squats and autonomous centers shows in practice: you don’t get autonomy without community. “Self-sufficiency” is almost always a collective achievement disguised as an individual virtue.

What Trump Misses: Trust Is an Infrastructure

In international relations terms, Trump is burning the resource that actually makes alliances work: credibility.

Classic IR work on “complex interdependence” emphasizes that states aren’t just isolated billiard balls; they’re entangled through trade, institutions, and mutual vulnerability—meaning cooperation is often rational, not naïve. (See Keohane & Nye, Power and Interdependence.)

When you threaten allies (tariffs, annexation talk, coercive leverage) you’re teaching them a lesson: the U.S. is not a relationship partner; it’s a transactional risk. And rational actors hedge risks. That’s how you get allies diversifying toward China—not because they suddenly love China, but because they can’t trust the U.S. not to turn on them the minute it’s convenient.

This is why the “America First” posture doesn’t create strength long-term. It creates isolation-by-design: people cooperate elsewhere because your “friendship” is structurally unstable.

Anthropology’s Point: Politics Is Social, Not Mechanical

A lot of mainstream political talk treats states like rational calculators and “order” like a set of rules enforced from above. Anthropology tends to notice something different: politics is lived inside relationships, legitimacy, and everyday practices.

If you want strong anthropology anchors for this: Julia Paley’s work on democracy and power, Carol Greenhouse on law/citizenship and political fractures, and David Nugent on state formation and political modernity are all useful touchpoints.

They’re different projects, but they converge on a shared reality: political order depends on social foundations—and when you treat politics as pure leverage, you corrode the foundations you later need.

The Daoist Warning: “We’ll See.”

There’s an old Daoist parable people often summarize as “good luck / bad luck—who knows?” It’s commonly known through the idiom 塞翁失马 (“the old man lost his horse”), traced to the Huainanzi.

The point isn’t mystical. It’s strategic humility: short-term wins can generate long-term losses. You can “get the minerals,” “win the negotiation,” “force the tariff,” “take the territory,” and still lose the alliance system that made your power stable in the first place.

Trump keeps acting like every outcome is immediate and final: “We won.” “We got it.” Daoist logic says: you don’t know what you just set in motion.

Why This Pushes Countries Toward China

When the U.S. signals that it will treat allies the same way it treats targets—coercion, extraction, humiliation, constant leverage—then the rational response is diversification.

• Canada builds parallel options.
• Europe hedges and rethinks dependence.
• Smaller states look for multi-alignment strategies.
• Everyone learns to treat the U.S. as a risk factor, not a stable partner.

That doesn’t automatically mean China “wins.” It means the U.S. is voluntarily dissolving the trust that made its leadership possible. And in world politics, trust is power.

Related reading inside the Alternative Ideas ecosystem

• America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s a License for Empire
• The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine?
• Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs their own version of “NATO”
• The Age of Dependency: How We Lost Our Personal Sovereignty

Also relevant on Interpreting Capitalism

There is a clear time in here to the “anarchist interpretations of capitalism” at Anarchism (Interpreting Capitalism). It directly frames anarchist autonomy as inherently social (mutual aid) rather than the capitalist myth of “autonomy” as isolated self-interest.

Bottom line: the long arc of human survival is mutual aid, not the jungle. Trump’s America First posture turns the U.S. into a coercive, transactional actor—so people hedge away. That’s not betrayal. It’s adaptation.