My Realist Journey, Part 5: Our State of Recovery.

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , ,

Volume 7 of the States of Mind project: State of Recovery.

In my 2013 book (paperback in 2014), State of Recovery: The Quest to Restore American Security After 9/11, I present a retrospective reflection of the decade following the September 11 attacks, explorong how a  sustained wave of technological innovation was deployed to restore homeland security and overcome our collective “state of despair.”

State of Recovery serves as a direct sequel to my 2012 book, The Art of War in an Asymmetric World: Strategy for the Post-Cold War Era, originally known as State of Chaos. While The Art of War in an Asymmetric World focuses on how the collapse of the Cold War order birthed a fragmented world driven by tribal and asymmetric insurgencies, State of Recovery serves as the tactical and architectural response to that chaos.

It positions “recovery” not as a return to the pre-9/11 status quo, but as a technological and doctrinal evolution to restore Western homeland security against decentralized threats. The Art of War in an Asymmetric World argued that modernization and globalization have pushed non-Western, indigenous, and radical groups to weaponize asymmetrical warfare and tribal structures to destabilize the nation-state.

State of Recovery serves as the logical and sequential next step: How does a major state power heal from a massive asymmetric shock and reconstruct its security framework? Rather than focusing strictly on foreign battlefields, this book analyzes the decade-long domestic and technological mobilization within the United States to insulate and defend the homeland.

It documents how American defense shifted inward, investing heavily in innovation like biometric scanners, remote border sensors, and autonomous drone capabilities to build a preventative shield. State of Recovery was originally conceptualized as the final volume of the States of Mind series and the sequel to the updated post-Cold War volume I added to the original three-volume Visions of Order treatise after 9/11. It tracks the intellectual transition of strategic thinkers from the state of total vulnerability examined in The Art of War in an Asymmetric World (originally titled State of Chaos) back to a state of managed stability:

  • Expanding the Battlefield Away from the Homeland: It illustrates that a core tenet of the American recovery strategy was ensuring that future kinetic engagements would take place far from the homeland. It examines operational efforts like Operation Iraqi Freedom and counter-proliferation efforts in North Korea and Iran to show how the U.S. attempted to control asymmetric volatility abroad.
  • Bridging Fields: While The Art of War in an Asymmetric World focused heavily on counterinsurgency and international relations theory, State of Recovery bridges these concepts with homeland security, domestic intelligence, cyberwarfare, and the private tech sector.

Ultimately, my transition from The Art of War in an Asymmetric World to State of Recovery demonstrates my belief that surviving modern conflict requires shifting away from old Westphalian military symmetry toward a dynamic, agile, and technologically fortified state of constant resilience. The core themes and arguments of State of Recovery include:

A Technology-Driven “Recovery”

I argue that the primary way the United States filled the security vacuum left by the 9/11 attacks was through an unprecedented surge in technology spending and innovation. I chronicle how thousands of tech professionals, scientists, and policy experts collaborated to build entirely new defensive and offensive layers. Key examples include:

  • Defensive: The erection of new border defenses utilizing remote sensors and biometric scanners.
  • Offensive: The rapid deployment of autonomous air warfare capabilities, most notably the drone program.

Pushing the Battlefront Outward

A central pillar of America’s post-9/11 strategy was the conscious effort to ensure that future military engagements would take place far from the American homeland. I analyze major geopolitical shifts and interventions through this lens, examining: Operation Iraqi Freedom; the rise of Iran as a nuclear threat and North Korea’s accelerated missile program; and the development of a global ballistic missile shield designed to thwart emerging threats from the (overly conflated and much exaggerated) “Axis of Evil” before they could reach U.S. soil.

“Engineering” Security over Cyberwarfare

Unlike many contemporary security texts that focus purely on cyber warfare, State of Recovery focuses on the physical and structural engineering of homeland security. It looks at how the integration of tech across multiple disciplines created a new, algorithmic type of security.

Individual and Social Networks

Borrowing from international relations theory, I analyze the GWOT conflict from the level of the individual and the social networks in which they are embedded. I explore not only how the U.S. government leveraged network technologies to combat terrorism, but also how asymmetric, militant Islamist adversaries (like al-Qaeda) adapted and used those exact same digital and technological tools to wage war against a superpower.

State of Recovery is first and foremost a comprehensive retrospective on how the United States leveraged technological innovation to rebuild its national security apparatus in the decade following the September 11 attacks. Rather than focusing strictly on the politics of the War on Terror, it analyzes the intersection of public policy, private enterprise, and emerging technologies that transformed America’s defensive and offensive capabilities:

Technology to the Rescue: It argues that the sheer shock of 9/11 left a deep psychological and systemic vacuum in America. To pull the country out of this “state of despair,” policy makers turned heavily to technologists. The resulting massive influx of public and private capital triggered a decade of rapid innovation. 

An Algorithmic Age of Defense: The book chronicles the shift toward automated, digital, and data-driven defense systems. It outlines how modern security became reliant on things like biometrics, advanced information-sharing networks, and automated infrastructure protection. 

Border and Frontier Security: A significant portion of the monograph breaks down how America secured its borders. It details the deployment of remote sensors, biometric scanners, and less-lethal border solutions designed to balance security with functional infrastructure. It evaluates three distinct “fronts”: Maritime Front: securing seaports against illicit cargo or weapons of mass destruction; Southern Front: reducing border violence and high-volume illegal immigration; and Northern Front: managing the vast, open border with Canada through integrated surveillance.

Geopolitics and External Threats: Beyond non-state actors like al-Qaeda, I contextualize how these technologies were deployed against conventional state threats during the early 2010s—specifically analyzing America’s response to Iran’s emerging nuclear ambitions, North Korea’s missile acceleration, and the conceptual deployment of a ballistic missile shield. 

The Asymmetric Battlefield: The book examines how both the U.S. and militant Islamist groups adapted to the digital age. I note that the internet evolved into a literal theater of war, forcing the U.S. to focus heavily on information security and tracking how terrorist entities went “virtual” to recruit and coordinate. Northern Front: Managing the vast, historically open border with Canada through integrated surveillance.

Geopolitics and External Threats: Beyond non-state actors like al-Qaeda, I contextualize how these technologies were deployed against conventional state threats during the early 2010s—specifically analyzing America’s response to Iran’s emerging nuclear ambitions, North Korea’s missile acceleration, and the conceptual deployment of a ballistic missile shield. 

Conclusion

I conclude that while the combination of innovative technology and aggressive foreign policy succeeded in preventing another mass-casualty attack on the U.S. homeland for over a decade, it created a highly complex, fragmented world. Security is no longer static; it is an ongoing, evolving struggle where both states and non-state actors are trapped in a continuous loop of technological adaptation.

Ultimately, State of Recovery presents an historical mosaic of the thousands of unsung engineering and policy professionals who fundamentally redesigned how America protects itself, moving the battlefield far from the homeland while embedding security into the everyday digital fabric of the country.

It also lays the foundation for the post-GWOT era of frequent but exceedingly limited wars fought from the skies without boots on the ground, initiated during the Obama administration and in many wars perfected during the second Trump administration, which has come to experience near-constant ultra-limited warfare culminating in strategic and economic partnerships with former rivals, transforming the world order into a global business arena where war is not a continuation of policy by other means by the continuation of business-as-usual by other means before defaulting to a more transactional and less kinetic relationship.

It is amidst such a climate of perpetual peace (albeit with brief armed conflicts to rebalance regional orders to better meet American interests) that we celebrate our historic 250th anniversary of America’s momentous 1776 Declaration of Independence.

Looking back 2,500 years as I have done in my States of Mind project helps to contextualize the American experience, and our experiment forging a new republic from the American wilderness, integrating the Western pillars of the realist order into separate but largely equal branches of government, so that the people, the state and the armed forces stand united against all enemies of Western value. It’s thus not naïve to imagine not only another 250 years of American liberty, but a full 2,500 more years of Western order—an order defended by American values and power.

My Realist Journey, Part 4: Navigating the State of Chaos.

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , ,

Volume 6 of the States of Mind project: State of Chaos (published as The Art of War in an Asymmetric World).

Volume 4 of my treatise on Constructive Realism, State of Siege, spawned not just one sequel (as volume 3, State of Awe did with State of Doom), but two sequels: the first of which wasThe Art of War in an Asymmetric World: Strategy for the Post-Cold War Era (originally known as State of Chaos), which examined how the international security landscape transformed following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It chronicled how the end of predictable, bipolar Cold War dynamics did not lead to a utopian “End of History,” but rather unleashed a wave of global chaos and entropy. This volume bridges the fields of counterinsurgency (COIN), cyberwarfare, counterterrorism, and international relations theory through several core pillars:

1. Rebellion Against Modernity and Globalization

I position modern asymmetric conflicts—ranging from the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico to Al Qaeda’s global jihad—not as isolated incidents, but as unified reactions against globalization, Western dominance, and forced modernization. Stripped of the stabilizing structures of the Cold War, marginalized populations and radical movements rebelled against state-centric, Western-imposed structures.

2. The Adaptation of American Power

A significant portion of the text analyzes how the United States military and intelligence communities had to radically rewrite their strategic doctrines. Designed to fight massive, conventional nation-states, the U.S. had to pivot during the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to counter decentralized networks, fluid insurgencies, and technological threats like cyberwarfare. I evaluate the theoretical and operational contributions of GWOT-era  military strategists (such as Stanley McRaven and David Ronfeldt) who helped shape these new approaches.

3. The “Fourth Image”: The Tribal Foundations of Order

Expanding on Ken Waltz’s classic “three images” of international relations analysis (the individual, the state, and the international system),  I introduce a Fourth Image: the tribal level. I provocatively argue that in the remote, indigenous, or poorly governed spaces where asymmetric modern wars are actually fought, state-imposed centralized control fundamentally fails.

Instead, I suggest that stable, long-term peace can only be achieved by understanding, cooperating with, and restoring traditional, bottom-up tribal order. In short: my framework shows that modern asymmetric warfare is a clash between globalizing state forces and localized tribal identities, requiring a complete rethink of classical strategic theory for a fragmented world. Rather than entering a harmonious, stable democratic era, the post-Cold War landscape unleashed fractured, non-state elements that defied classical nation-state containment.

Global Disorder: The Post-Cold War Era (Part 1)

The Collapse of Bi-Polar Stability and the Illusion of the Peace Dividend

I introduce my central thesis by challenging the prevailing neoliberal optimism of the early 1990s. The fall of the Berlin Wall prompted western theorists to predict an era dominated by market economies and democratic peace theory. I systematically dismantle this premise, demonstrating that the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, despite its terrifying nuclear risks, acted as a powerful stabilizing mechanism. This architecture effectively suppressed localized ethnic, tribal, and religious rivalries.

The removal of this overarching systemic pressure did not lead to international integration. Instead, it triggered a massive, systemic phenomenon that I describe as global entropy—a rapid descent into decentralized chaos, fragmentation, and structural decay within weak or artificial nation-states.

Global Entropy and Systemic Decay

In this section, I draw a sharp contrast between classical war and the security challenges of the modern era. While classical interstate competition was defined by institutional order, predictability, and formal declarations, post-Cold War entropy is characterized by its fluidity and lack of structural boundaries. I explore how the vacuum left by superpower retrenchment allowed pre-modern identities to reassert themselves. Entire regions, particularly across the Global South and the post-Soviet periphery, experienced a regression from state-level governance back to sub-state allegiances. I detail this structural decay not as an accidental byproduct of history, but as a predictable consequence of removing systemic equilibrium. The post-Cold War era is therefore defined not by international law, but by a chaotic scramble for localized survival and autonomy.

Rebellion Against Modernity, Globalization, and Western Hegemony

A core pillar of my framework is the ideological reinterpretation of asymmetric warfare. Rather than viewing modern insurgencies, radical groups, and trans-state networks merely as criminal syndicates or isolated terrorist cells, I re-conceptualize them as a unified, deep-seated rebellion against modernity and globalization.

Globalization, driven heavily by Western economic models and digital connectivity, has consistently threatened traditional, localized ways of life. I explore how asymmetric actors leverage asymmetric methods to fight back against what they perceive as an intrusive, homogenizing, and imperialistic Western framework. This resistance manifests across a wide spectrum, from the neo-Zapatista movement (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, which directly opposed global trade pacts like NAFTA, to the rise of radical jihadist networks seeking to overturn Western political influence in the Middle East.

Asymmetrical Conflict and the Information Age (Part 2)

Netwar, Cyberwarfare, and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)

Turning my focus to the technological landscape, I analyze how the Information Age fundamentally disrupted the traditional distribution of power. During the Cold War, cutting-edge military technology required the immense industrial and financial backing of a superpower. The digital revolution completely inverted this dynamic by democratizing the tools of mass communication, intelligence gathering, and precision disruption.

I examine the concept of Netwar—a term popularized by Rand Corporation theorists David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla. Netwar describes conflicts waged by decentralized, network-centric actors who lack a formal hierarchy, clear command structure, or geographical center of gravity:

AttributeConventional WarfareInformation-Age Netwar
Organizational StructureStrict military hierarchyDecentralized, flat network cells
Primary Center of GravityCapital cities, industrial hubs, formal militariesShared ideological narrative, digital nodes
Operational SpeedLinear, dependent on supply chainsRapid, swarm-based, digitally synchronized
Resource RequirementsImmense industrial capital and state revenueLow-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf technology

The Democratization of Force and Non-State Multipliers

I explore the strategic implications of this technological inversion, noting that the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) inadvertently handed asymmetric adversaries devastating force-multipliers. A non-state group no longer needs an air force or an industrial base to project power across borders.

Through cyber operations, open-source intelligence collection, and low-cost digital orchestration, a tiny cell can disrupt critical infrastructure, manipulate international media cycles, and compromise the information infrastructure of a heavily armed nation-state. This digitization of conflict strips traditional powers of their conventional advantages. In the digital arena, mass and heavy armor are easily bypassed by agility, anonymity, and distributed networks.

Case Studies of Early Asymmetric Digital Actors

To ground these information-age theories, I provide detailed historical case studies:

  • The Zapatista Uprising (1994): I highlight the EZLN as one of the earliest pioneers of modern netwar. Recognizing they could not defeat the conventional Mexican military in a direct engagement, the Zapatistas utilized early internet networks, listservs, and international solidarity groups to wage a highly effective informational campaign. They successfully constrained the Mexican government’s military response through global public pressure.
  • The Evolutionary Trajectory of Al Qaeda: I next document how Al Qaeda transitioned from a localized, sanctuary-dependent organization in Afghanistan into a highly adaptive, globally distributed digital franchise. By using web forums and media manipulation, they decoupled their operations from physical geography, allowing their ideology to survive and replicate even after losing their primary territorial safe havens.

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) (Part 3)

The Strategic Shock of September 11 and Policy Misalignments

I position the September 11 attacks as the definitive, tragic confirmation of my thesis on global entropy and asymmetric threat vectors. The destruction of the World Trade Center demonstrated how a non-state actor, using minimal financial resources and commercial infrastructure, could inflict a catastrophic strategic shock on the world’s sole remaining superpower.

However, I critiques the initial Western response. I argue that the United States and its allies suffered from deep-seated institutional inertia, attempting to view and fight the early Global War on Terror through a conventional, state-centric lens. This led to a profound strategic misalignment: attempting to use heavy, industrial-era military machines to capture fluid, phantom networks.

The Doctrine of Counterinsurgency (COIN) and Operational Adaptation

As conventional interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan devolved into complex, protracted multi-sided insurgencies, the Western military apparatus was forced to undergo a radical intellectual evolution. I chart this transformation by focusing heavily on the revival and rewriting of Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, spearheaded by figures like General David Petraeus and reflected in the release of Field Manual (FM) 3-24.

This pivot required moving away from conventional “kinetic” operations (killing or capturing enemies) toward population-centric warfare. I detail how the military had to transform its soldiers into nation-builders, diplomats, and cultural anthropologists. Success was no longer measured by terrain seized, but by the degree of security, economic viability, and political legitimacy provided to the local population.

The Evolution of Special Operations Forces (SOF)

Alongside population-centric COIN, I explores the massive expansion and structural elevation of Special Operations Forces (SOF) within the global security framework. I specifically highlight the theoretical and operational insights of strategists like Admiral Stanley McRaven.

McRaven’s theories on relative superiority—achieved by a small, highly integrated force using element of surprise, speed, and precision purpose—became the bedrock of modern counterterrorism. I describe how SOF units adapted to combat network-centric enemies by building their own highly integrated, inter-agency networks. This organizational evolution allowed them to shrink the time between intelligence acquisition and operational execution, creating a highly lethal tool designed to match the agility of asymmetric adversaries.

The Art of War in an Asymmetric World (Part 4)

Synthesizing Classical and Modern Strategic Theory

In this section, I deliver my primary theoretical contribution by placing modern asymmetric realities in direct conversation with classical strategic thought. I bridge the historical gap between timeless principles of conflict and the chaotic features of the 20th and 21st centuries.

I systematically revisit the foundational works of classical strategic thinkers, filtering their enduring insights through the lens of modern decentralized, non-state conflicts:

  • Carl von Clausewitz: I re-evaluate Clausewitz’s core concept of the remarkable trinity—the dynamic balance between the government (reason), the military (chance and strategy), and the people (passion and primal violence). In an asymmetric world where the state is no longer the sole actor, this trinity becomes fragmented. The “government” may be an amorphous tribal council, and the “military” a fluid network of insurgent cells. I argue that Clausewitz’s emphasis on the political nature of war remains true, but warns that when the political entity lacks clear borders, finding its strategic center of gravity becomes exceptionally difficult.
  • Antoine-Henri Jomini: Jomini’s classical focus on geometric lines of operation, concentrated mass, and territorial control is heavily challenged by me. In asymmetric netwar, there are no front lines, defined flanks, or conventional territories to capture. I argue that over-reliance on Jominian geometric principles misleads modern commanders, as the modern battlespace is human, cognitive, and digital rather than physical.
  • Sun Tzu: I suggest that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is far more applicable to asymmetric environments than Western industrial-era theories. Sun Tzu’s emphasis on deception, winning without fighting through psychological subversion, avoiding strength, and attacking weakness directly mirrors the operational art of the asymmetric warrior.

The Asymmetric Paradox: When Vulnerability Becomes Strength

I introduces a counterintuitive concept known as the asymmetric paradox. In conventional warfare, a lack of heavy armor, secure logistics bases, and centralized command hierarchies is considered a fatal vulnerability. However, in asymmetric conflicts, this absolute lack of infrastructure becomes a profound strategic strength.

Because an asymmetric adversary has no permanent military bases to target, no cities to hold hostage, and no formal economy to sanction, they offer zero conventional targets to a state military. Their extreme material weakness forces them to remain fluid, hidden, and deeply embedded within the civilian population. This structure leaves conventional states with immense firepower but no clear targets against which to deploy it.

The Tribal Foundations of Order (Part 5)

Extending Realist Theory: The Application of the “Fourth Image”

The climax of my strategic analysis occurs with his critique and extension of structural realism. In international relations theory, Kenneth Waltz’s landmark framework established three images (or levels of analysis) to explain the causes of conflict and the nature of world politics:

  1. The First Image: The Individual (human nature, psychology of leaders).
  2. The Second Image: The State (domestic political and economic structures, democracy vs. authoritarianism).
  3. The Third Image: The International System (anarchy, distribution of material power among nation-states).

I assert that this three-tiered framework suffers from a glaring, Eurocentric, state-biased blind spot. In the remote, fractured, and underdeveloped regions where modern asymmetric wars are actually fought, the state is an alien, artificial concept imposed by colonial history.

To correct this deficiency, I introduce the Fourth Image: the tribal level of analysis.

The Fourth Image focuses on sub-state kinship networks, clan allegiances, and traditional, localized structures of authority that have existed long before the Westphalian state system.

The Primacy of Indigenous and Tribal Sovereignty

I assert that when modern states attempt to stabilize an asymmetric battlespace by building centralized state institutions from the top down, they are fighting against the natural grain of local society. Whether in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, the valleys of Waziristan, or the vast expanses of the Arctic and the Amazon, local populations look to traditional kinship structures for security, justice, and resource allocation.

Top-down state-building is frequently viewed by local populations as a hostile, foreign occupation. I argue that true, durable social order in these environments cannot be achieved by imposing Western administrative institutions. Instead, it must be carefully negotiated, built, and secured from the bottom up, utilizing the organic legitimacy of traditional tribal authority.

Policy Implications for Grand Strategy and Stabilization

In the concluding chapters, I deliver a pragmatic warning to Western policymakers and military strategists. If international stabilizing efforts continue to ignore the Fourth Image, they are destined to experience perpetual strategic failure.

Grand strategy must adapt to treat tribal and indigenous structures not as obstacles to modernization, but as foundational partners in creating sustainable regional security. I call for a paradigm shift: an evolution toward an organic, decentralized approach to global order that respects, integrates, and cooperates with the tribal realities of the post-Cold War world.

My Realist Journey, Part 3: Strategy After Hiroshima (State of Doom).

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , ,

As I updated and expanded my States of Mind series in the 2000s and 2010s, I found the need for a fourth, then a fifth, then a sixth, and finally a seventh volume to complete my treatise. What became volume 5 was an outgrowth of volume 3 (State of Awe), drilling in on the nuclear age which had culminated in volume three my with discussion of order in the age of total war.

While this was indeed, a single era as war industrialized and later nuclearized, achieving absoluteness in its destructiveness, I felt both the need and the desire to explore the nuance of the nuclear age, in part in homage to Waltz whose neorealism, like Brodie’s deterrence theory, sought to tame the terror of the nuclear age (and did for a little while).

Both can be thought of as nuclear realists, but as I wrote, I came to find the literature on neorealism rather light and lacking in substance, while the literature on nuclear strategy was refreshingly complex and nuanced and provided the true foundation of the nuclear order (a dangerously brittle one that collapsed like a house of cards under the unforeseen massing of Gandhian people power in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.)

My 600-page dissertation, Bernard Brodie and the Bomb: At the Birth of the Bipolar World (published in book form in 2011 by Continuum (now Bloomsbury) as the much shortened (by 300 pages!) State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, the Bomb, and the Birth of the Bipolar World), stands as a definitive professional biography and philosophical investigation of one of the 20th century’s most vital strategic minds. It explores how Bernard Brodie (1910–1978) earned his reputation as “America’s Clausewitz” or the “Clausewitz of the Nuclear Age.” 

By tracing Brodie’s intellectual journey from his pre-World War II writings on naval engineering to his foundational texts on atomic deterrence and his late-career work translating Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, it reveals the existential dilemma of the modern era: How can a state utilize military force for political objectives when the weapons at its disposal threaten total planetary destruction? Brodie answered these questions, which were left unanswered, uncomfortably so, by Waltz’s neorealism (which left all the heavy lifting to the imagined “system,” as if a cult or new religion structured upon God’s grace and infinite wisdom.)

Introduction: The Strategic Crucible of the Bipolar World

I frame his exploration around the transition from a multipolar global system to the rigid, highly tense bipolar structure of the Cold War. In this landscape, the United States and the Soviet Union faced an unprecedented security environment defined by the “balance of terror.” At the center of this transformation was Bernard Brodie. As one of the first civilian defense intellectuals to bridge the gap between academia and military policy—most notably through his long tenure at the RAND Corporation—Brodie fundamentally redefined the purpose of military force.

My core thesis is that Brodie’s intellectual life was a lifelong project to reconcile classic military theory with technological shifts. When the splitting of the atom yielded the absolute weapon, traditional concepts of victory, total mobilization, and kinetic warfare were shattered. Throughout his career, Brodie fought to bring politics back into command of military strategy, preventing the machine of war from triggering a global apocalypse.

Before the Bomb: Sea Power and Technological Determinism

Before becoming the premier architect of nuclear strategy, Brodie was a scholar of naval history and sea power.  I emphasize that understanding Brodie’s early work is essential, as it established his analytical framework for evaluating how technological paradigm shifts alter strategic realities.

Sea Power in the Machine Age (1941)

Brodie’s first major academic contribution analyzed the profound transition of naval warfare during the industrial revolution. He tracked four great technological revolutions that fundamentally altered naval architecture and strategy:

  1. The transition from sail to steam propulsion.
  2. The replacement of wooden hulls with iron and steel armor plating.
  3. The evolution from solid shot to explosive shells and rifled ordnance.
  4. The introduction of submarine warfare and the torpedo.

Brodie observed that military establishments are historically slow to grasp the true strategic implications of new inventions. Tacticians often attempt to force revolutionary technologies into outdated operational doctrines. I highlight this as Brodie’s first encounter with technological determinism—the idea that technology drives changes in human history and warfare, requiring an equal revolution in strategic thought to prevent catastrophe.

A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy (1942)

Published right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, this book established Brodie as a clear-eyed strategic communicator. It arrived at a moment when many critics believed the airplane had rendered the surface fleet obsolete.

Brodie took a nuanced, balanced view. He argued that while air power changed the tactics of naval engagement, it did not change the fundamental strategic purpose of sea power: the control of maritime lines of communication. This early insight previewed his nuclear-era philosophy—technological leaps change the means and costs of warfare, but they do not automatically erase basic geopolitical realities.

The Absolute Weapon: The Invention of Nuclear Deterrence

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 completely upended Brodie’s strategic worldview. Within months of these events, Brodie edited and co-authored a foundational text, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (1946). It was in this work that modern nuclear deterrence theory was born.

The Inversion of Military Utility

I analyze this iconic quote to illustrate how profoundly Brodie broke from traditional military tradition. For centuries, military strategy focused on securing victory through the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces.

Brodie recognized that the atomic bomb rendered total war obsolete as an instrument of statecraft. Because an atomic exchange could destroy entire civilizations in a matter of hours, a war fought with such weapons could yield no rational political benefit. Therefore, the military’s primary job shifted from war-fighting to war-averting.

The Pillars of Early Deterrence Theory

In The Absolute Weapon, Brodie laid out the core principles that would govern U.S. and Soviet interactions for the next four decades:

  • The Futility of Defense: Brodie argued that there was no foreseeable, reliable defense against an atomic attack. Even if a defensive system intercepted 90% of incoming bombers, the remaining 10% would still deliver unacceptable, civilizational ruin.
  • The Primacy of Retaliation: Since defense was impossible, security could only be achieved through the guaranteed threat of overwhelming retaliation. A potential aggressor must understand that attacking would trigger their own destruction.
  • The Irrelevance of Superiority: Once a state possesses enough nuclear weapons to destroy its opponent’s society, acquiring thousands more offers little strategic advantage. Nuclear utility hits a point of saturation.

Preserving Order in the Age of Apocalyptic War

As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the strategic landscape grew vastly more complex and dangerous. I detail how Brodie’s early, clean models of deterrence were severely tested by fast-moving historical developments.

The Loss of the American Monopoly (1949)

When the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in August 1949, the United States lost its nuclear monopoly much faster than Washington political elites had predicted. This shift created a symmetric balance of terror, giving rise to the truly bipolar world.

Brodie had to adapt his theories to a world where both sides could instantly retaliate. This eliminated any lingering illusions that the atomic bomb could be used as an offensive tool of diplomatic coercion without risking domestic annihilation.

The Thermonuclear Revolution

The strategic equation changed again with the development of the Hydrogen Bomb (the thermonuclear weapon), first tested by the United States in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953.

While the atomic bomb measured its yield in kilotons (thousands of tons of TNT equivalent), the thermonuclear bomb measured its yield in megatons (millions of tons of TNT). Fission bombs were city-killers; fusion bombs were region-killers, capable of poisoning massive geographic areas with lethal radioactive fallout.

I point out that while some defense intellectuals, like those in the Air Force, viewed the H-bomb as just a larger explosive tool for strategic air power, Brodie saw it as a qualitative leap into absolute absurdity. The H-bomb removed any remaining doubt about his 1946 thesis: total war with thermonuclear weapons was absolute suicide.

Rethinking the Unthinkable: Escalation and Limited War

With total war off the table as a rational choice, Brodie turned his focus to preventing brushfire conflicts from escalating into all-out thermonuclear exchanges. My analysis of this period highlights Brodie’s tenure at the RAND Corporation, where he interacted and frequently sparred with other giants of nuclear strategy, such as Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, and Henry Kissinger.

The Problem of Massive Retaliation

During the Eisenhower administration, U.S. defense policy relied heavily on the doctrine of Massive Retaliation. This policy declared that the U.S. would respond to any communist aggression globally—even local, conventional incursions—using overwhelming nuclear forces at times and places of its own choosing.

Brodie emerged as a sharp critic of Massive Retaliation. He argued that the threat lacked credibility in an era of nuclear parity. If the Soviet Union launched a localized conventional attack in Europe or Asia, would an American president truly risk the destruction of New York and Washington to defend a distant border?

Brodie asserted that a non-credible threat fails to deter. If the enemy exposes the bluff, the U.S. would face a terrible choice: launch a suicidal nuclear war or suffer an embarrassing geopolitical retreat.

The Architecture of Limited War

To solve this credibility gap, Brodie helped develop the theory of Limited War, which he detailed in his 1959 masterpiece, Strategy in the Missile Age.

Brodie argued that to make deterrence function at lower levels of conflict, the United States had to develop the capability and political will to fight limited wars using restricted means and targeting limited objectives.

  • Limitation of Means: Intentionally holding back maximum military power—such as avoiding the use of tactical nuclear weapons—to signaling a desire to avoid total war.
  • Limitation of Objectives: Fighting not for the unconditional surrender of the enemy or the total overthrow of their regime, but for specific geopolitical corrections (e.g., restoring a pre-war border).

I highlight the deep irony Brodie wrestled with: to prevent an absolute war, a superpower must become proficient at fighting restrained, sometimes frustratingly inconclusive limited wars.

A Clausewitz for America: Reuniting War and Politics

The final chapters of my book dive into the philosophical culmination of Brodie’s career: his deep engagement with the writings of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz:

The Clausewitzian Renaissance

In the late 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by the strategic failures of the Vietnam War, Brodie dedicated himself to a deep reassessment of classical strategic philosophy. He collaborated with historian Peter Paret to produce the landmark 1976 Princeton University Press translation of Clausewitz’s On War, providing an extensive commentary that contextualized the Prussian master for the nuclear age.

Brodie discovered that Clausewitz provided the perfect philosophical toolkit to fight the technocratic, math-heavy trends that had taken over American defense planning. Strategists like Robert McNamara had tried to turn war into a bureaucratic exercise of systems analysis, body counts, and raw cost-benefit equations. Brodie used Clausewitz to remind the world that war is inherently an unpredictable, messy, human phenomenon driven by emotion, chance, and politics.

Reconciling the Famous Dictum

The core of Clausewitzian theory rests on the famous dictum: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” This means that military violence must always serve as a tool for a specific political objective, and the political goal must entirely dictate the scale of military effort.

I carefully map out how Brodie solved the paradox of applying this 19th-century rule to the thermonuclear era:

  • The Separation Point: In an all-out nuclear war, the sheer scale of destruction breaks the connection between violence and statecraft. Because no political goal can justify the total annihilation of one’s own society, total thermonuclear war cannot be a continuation of politics. It is simply madness.
  • The Solution: Therefore, the only way to keep war Clausewitzian in the modern era is through nuclear deterrence and strict limitation. Deterrence uses the threat of force to achieve the political objective of stability and peace. When kinetic conflict does break out, it must be kept strictly limited so that the costs of fighting never outgrow the political value of the goal.

By aligning deterrence with Clausewitz, Brodie elevated it from a temporary military fix to a permanent, morally grounded framework for preserving global order.

The Lingering Legacy of the (Brief) Bipolar Peace

In my analysis, it becomes clear that Bernard Brodie’s contributions were central to preventing the Cold War from turning hot. The stable bipolar order was not an accidental byproduct of technology; it was a constructed intellectual architecture designed by thinkers who walked the world back from the brink of doom.

Brodie’s evolution reflects the journey of an era:

  • Technology and War: He began by studying how technology changes the machinery of war (Sea Power in the Machine Age, and Guide to Naval Strategy).
  • The Bomb and Obsolescence of Total War: He recognized when technology had made total war obsolete (The Absolute Weapon).
  • Escalation: He built the operational guardrails of escalation management (Strategy in the Missile Age and Escalation and the Nuclear Option).
  • He grounded the entire system in the timeless truth that military power must always serve political ends (“Guide to Reading On War“ and War and Politics).

I conclude that while the modern international system has continued its shift away from the bipolarity of the Cold War into a complex, multipolar landscape featuring asymmetric threats and nuclear proliferation, Brodie’s insights remain essential. The challenge of the 21st century mirrors that of 1946: ensuring that human political wisdom stays in control of our terrifying capacity for technological destruction.

My Realist Journey, Part 2: Our Enduring Realist Tradition; 2500+ Years of Constructive Realism.

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , ,

In my four-volume The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order, I unpack 2,500+ years of strategic history. To me, “constructive realism” is not a tragic acceptance of endless war, but a tool of heroic idealism—a systematic, philosophical effort by key thinkers across millennia to use power, strategy, and statecraft to actively craft order out of chaos.

My framework is fundamentally the conceptualization, explication and defense of Constructive Realism. By focusing on these states of mind, I attempt to revive the first Waltzian image (the psychological, human, and sub-state level of analysis). I argue that international order is not just an accident of systemic architecture, but a conscious, evolving philosophical product constructed by human actors responding to the changing nature of violence. I structure my exploration chronologically through four distinct eras, using an historic roster of foundational thinkers, military leaders, and strategists to illustrate this concept.

Volume 1: The Classical Foundations (State of Hope)

In the ancient world, where systemic chaos reigned supreme, thinkers laid down the cognitive and linguistic tools needed to conceptualize international order.

  • Thucydides: The ancient Greek historian who chronicled the Peloponnesian War. I  treat him not as a pessimist who famously declared that “the strong do what they can,” but as a constructive pioneer who first mapped out the objective mechanics of the security dilemma, allowing future societies to consciously design balances of power.
  • Socrates & Plato: I highlight the philosophical pivot toward defining justice, structural stability, and the idea of the “Philosopher King.” Plato  epitomizes the constructive realist effort to intellectualize governance, arguing that true political order requires aligning supreme power with supreme wisdom.
  • Aristotle: The father of empirical political science. I also view Aristotle as a pioneering constructive realist who analyzed the anatomy of various state constitutions to determine how practical, balanced, and stable governance could survive internal and external shocks.

Volume 2: The Rise of the Modern State (State of Fear)

Confronting the brutal collapses of regional orders, early-modern theorists sought to build an unshakeable sovereign foundation to protect humanity from its own destructive nature.

  • Niccolò Machiavelli: The Florentine diplomat famous for The Prince. I look past the caricature of Machiavellian ruthlessness to reframe him as a visionary of sovereign creation. Machiavelli’s dream was the journey from a fractured prince’s rule to a stable, enduring republic capable of defending its people through civic virtue and martial readiness.
  • Thomas Hobbes: Dubbed by me as the “Ultimate Constructive Realist.” Hobbes famously described life in the anarchic state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short” (somewhat like life on the “Island” during the final season of Lost). I note that Hobbes’ response was a masterpiece of constructive statecraft: inventing the Leviathan (the modern state), which trades total individual freedom for collective security under a centralized authority.
  • Frederick the Great: The Prussian king who embodied the transition from theory to practice. I chronicle Frederick’s journey from writing his idealistic critique of Machiavelli (Anti-Machiavel) to ruling as a pragmatic “Philosopher King” who used a highly disciplined military apparatus to stabilize Central European geopolitics.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte: The ultimate catalyst of total war. I view Napoleon’s legacy as the structural shockwave that forced the European continent to graduate from limited Westphalian warfare into industrialized, nationalized conflict, testing the limits of state-built order. Theorists of modern war, Carl.von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini serve as the intellectual bridge at the end of Volume 2, dueling over how to impose order onto the chaotic explosion of the Napoleonic Wars.
  • Antoine-Henri Jomini: The Swiss officer and military theorist who sought to reduce the chaotic genius of Napoleon into a reliable, scientific manual. I frame Jomini as an early champion of a highly structured, geometric approach to strategy. To Jomini, war could be mastered through immutable principles—lines of operation, concentration of force, and geometric symmetry. He modernizes constructive realism by codifying these precise rules, so that states could make warfare a predictable, manageable instrument of national policy.
  • Carl von Clausewitz: The Prussian general and philosopher of war whose masterwork, On War, serves as the ultimate counterweight to Jomini. Rather than trying to iron out chaos with geometry, Clausewitz embraced it. He introduced concepts like “friction” (the unexpected things that go wrong in war) and the “fog of war.” I position Clausewitz as a cornerstone of modern constructive realism because he fundamentally reconnects violence back to human order, famously declaring that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” By subordinating raw military destruction to rational political objectives, Clausewitz provided the conceptual guardrails to prevent war from consuming civilization in the age of total war.

Volume 3: The Nuclear Era and Neorealism (State of Awe)

The advent of the atomic bomb forced 20th-century strategic minds to completely redefine the relationship between state survival and total destruction.

  • Bernard Brodie: Known as “America’s Clausewitz,” Brodie was one of the first to grasp the reality of the nuclear age. I  examine how Brodie brilliantly adapted classical military theory to the absolute weapon, asserting that the primary purpose of the military had fundamentally changed: it was no longer to win wars, but to avert them through deterrence. (My chapter on Brodie in State of Awe later evolved into a separate volume entirely in my States of Mind treatise, becoming State of Doom.)
  • Herman Kahn: The legendary (and provocative) nuclear strategist who wrote On Thermonuclear War. I note Kahn took a “Jominian” (highly calculated, geometric, and systematic) approach to strategic thinking. By boldly “thinking about the unthinkable,” Kahn constructively mapped out scenarios to ensure that even if deterrence failed, escalation could be controlled and civilization could survive (albeit with much denial on the lingering consequences of nuclear fallout and radiation).
  • Kenneth Waltz: The father of structural realism (neorealism), a critique of which began my own realist journey as I sought to reinvigorate the First Image (the individual), and de-emphasize the Third (system level). I focus on Waltz and his peers as the “wizards of automation.” Waltz shifted the lens away from human psychology to system architecture, illustrating how the bipolar structure of the Cold War created an equilibrium that mechanically preserved global stability (until it didn’t!)

Volume 4: The Age of Peoples’ War & Insurgency (State of Siege)

In the contemporary era, the traditional state’s monopoly on violence is challenged by asymmetric, decentralized, and non-Western movements. I highlight that these architects of upheaval are often visionaries constructing alternative political models and sovereign structures.

  • Sun Tzu: The ancient Chinese strategist whose philosophy anchors modern asymmetric conflict. I utilize Sun Tzu to show how strategic order can be achieved by prioritizing deception, subversion, and psychological manipulation over costly, direct state-on-state clashes.
  • Mao Zedong: The architect of modern insurgent warfare. I analyze Mao’s theory of “People’s War,” framing him as a constructive theorist who successfully weaponized marginalized, agrarian populations to overthrow an established political order and forge an alternative state model.
  • Mahatma Gandhi: Pioneering theorist of “People Power.” I explain how Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance (and Gene Sharp’s structural/theoretical interpretation of Gandhi) framework for civilian-based defense are highly strategic, calculated exercises of power designed to dismantle oppressive regimes without the traditional tools of kinetic war.
  • Osama bin Laden: The infamous mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. I analyze bin Laden through a dark realist lens—not as a nefarious, chaos-inducing terrorist, but as a sub-state strategic actor attempting to challenge the global Westphalian model and build an alternative transnational, faith-based political order through militant jihadism.

My Realist Journey: Looking Back Upon 2,500 Years of Realist Theory as America Turns 250

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Part 1: An American State of Mind

It’s amazing how fast 250 years can go by!

Celebrating America’s 250th anniversary since its momentous Declaration of Independence certainly makes a quarter millennium feel like the blink of an eye. Especially after the triumph of people power brought President Trump back into office in a sweeping indictment of the deep state and its subversion of American values and constitutional principles.

Ultimately, the American experience has been an experiment in achieving a realist vision of the world, and crafting a modern republic built upon the same balanced “trinity of power” (a liberating alignment of the people, the state and the armed forces) that has empowered the Western order since the days of Socrates, Plato and Xenophon.

But to fully grok the universal significance of the American experiment, we must look back not just 250 years, but much farther — to the start of the Western experiment 2,500 years ago!

And it just so happens that I have penned just such a retrospective analysis, originally (before the Cold War ended) called Visions of Order, a three-volume work (Volume 1: State of Hope; Volume 2: State of Fear; and Volume 3: State of Awe); and later, States of Mind, an expanded four-volume work with the added volume, State of Siege, which soon again expanded to include a fifth, sixth and seventh volume, State of Chaos, State of Doom and State of Recovery. 

My original three-volume treatise (Visions of Order) concluded, in State of Awe, with the bipolar Cold War peace, and was penned in the mid-to-late 1980s, coming to completion just as Cold War ended, collapsing the seemingly millennial era of bipolarity (like all such millennial dreams of everlasting order), and with the swiftness of that collapse, unmasking neorealism and most other Cold War IR theories (with notable exceptions like Regime Theory) as brittle ideological dogmas masquerading as theories.

Visions of Order was going to be my dissertation, a rebuttal of Ken Waltz’s neorealism written under Waltz’s apoplectic supervision (he hated it, but at the same time, loved it, but mostly hated it!) His other students were unwilling to stand up to him, and he loved a good debate (as Scott Sagan came to appreciate with their post- Cold War debate on nuclear proliferation). But when the Cold War ended, imploding the now obsolete field of Soviet and East European Studies, and unmasking a whole generation of IR theorists as delusional navel-gazers and Waltzian butt-kissers, I proposed a new subfield in Circumpolar Studies to replace the now-obsolete field of Soviet and East European Studies (itself a fiction of Russian imperialist fantasy), but was laughed at by the pompous defenders of obsolete subfields.

Rather than kick a dead horse, I hopped on my 250cc Honda Rebel motorbike and road up the Alaska Highway to Whitehorse, and from their up the Klondike Highway to Dawson, and from there up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik on the Mackenzie River Delta near the Beaufort Sea Coast, where over the next decade I penned another three-volume treatise on the foundations of international relations, based upon my observations and experiences in the Western Arctic (and which is discussed in the companion to this retrospective theoretical memoir, “My Arctic Journey.”)

Two decades later, as the dust and debris of 9/11 was settling, I pulled out my handwritten draft of my completed, three-volume Visions of Order on spiral bound notebooks, and hired a wonderful typist on Craigslist to digitize the manuscript for me for the Internet era, with the idea of adding new volumes to bring what I was now calling States of Mind up to date (as both tribute to, and defiant mockery of, the nonsensical, and overly ideological, Constructivist school that has colonized the hive mind of academia after neorealism became obsolete with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to people power.)

As my updated expanded treatise approached completion, I decided it was time to publish it. Waltz was still alive, and still beating the dead horse of neorealism, even arguing in The New York Times that an Iranian bomb would be good for world peace. Though too late to become a dissertation under his supervision, he did enthusiastically agree to serve as an external reader, but unfortunately passed away before the public defense, owing to an overly eager junior faculty member insisting on yet another revision to bring the work current with the literature, since I wrote the first draft just before the end of the Cold War, resulting in a year delay that we simply did not have as Waltz’s precarious health deteriorated.

With Waltz no longer with us, I refocused my attention on State of Awe, in tribute to Waltz, and wrote the expanded State of Doom which further evolved into a strategic biography of Bernard Brodie, a contemporary of Waltz’s who did for deterrence and strategic theory what Waltz did for IR theory: wedded it to the existential nuclear challenge of the post-Hiroshima world.

States of Mind further evolved into what ultimately became a seven-volume treatise and I ended up dividing the work in two to ensure the entire work could be published. Praeger Security International agreed to publish the original Visions of Order with the addition of the post-9/11 State of Siege, while Continuum Books agreed to publish State of Doom, State of Chaos, and State of Recovery.

Thus, in 2011, my four-volume, twenty-five century chronicle of realism across the ages (The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order) came to press—the first part of my seven-volume States of Mind project. In it, I present a sweeping and provocative (if I do say so myself!) reinterpretation of realist theory.

Challenging the systems-centric neorealist tradition of structural realism as articulated by Waltz—one of the two most stubborn mentors I’ve ever had, the other being Gene Sharp, another realist thinker of Waltz’s generation who was as unyielding on strategic nonviolence as Waltz was on systemic structure—I frame the evolution of realist thought through the eyes of two-and-a-half millennia of individual realist thinkers and their respective quests to tame the chaos of their times, from the era of city-states and classical empires to global nuclear superpowers, yielding an evolving but strikingly consistent philosophical and theoretical tradition.

I conclude that the foundations of world order are built upon these evolving “states of mind” that correspond to distinct historical eras and their respective technologies, strategies and paradigms of warfare. I organized this framework into four distinct “states of mind,” each examined in its own volume, capturing how political leaders, philosophers, and strategists responded to, and yearned to transcend, the chaos of their times.

Volume 1: State of Hope: Order in the Age of Classical War

  • The Era: Classical Antiquity (tracing back to Thucydides and ancient Greece).
  • The Concept: This state of mind emerges from a baseline of supreme geopolitical chaos. It is a “state of hope” because it represents humanity’s earliest philosophical efforts to conceptualize, predict, and ultimately tame international anarchy. Rather than accepting perpetual vulnerability, classical realism sought the intellectual foundations necessary to construct a predictable, sustainable balance of power out of raw conflict.

Volume 2: State of Fear: Order in the Age of Limited War

  • The Era: The early-modern period through the Enlightenment (and the rise of the Westphalian states system).
  • The Concept: Driven by a collective psychological dread of endless religious and civil bloodbaths (such as the Thirty Years’ War), this state of mind prioritized survival and stability above all else. This collective “fear” directly catalyzed the birth of the modern sovereign nation-state. By monopolizing violence and establishing strict borders, states constrained the scope of conflict, transitioning the world into an era of structured, “limited” warfare governed by clear diplomatic rules.

Volume 3: State of Awe: Order in the Age of Total War

  • The Era: The 20th century through the Cold War (both World Wars and the nuclear age).
  • The Concept: The rise of absolute industrialized warfare and the advent of the atomic bomb shifted humanity into a state of psychological “awe”—a paralyzing realization of our capacity for total self-destruction. Realist strategy during this period evolved to manage unprecedented systemic danger. It gave rise to the philosophy of nuclear deterrence and strategic stability, where order was paradoxically maintained through the terrifying equilibrium of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Volume 4: State of Siege: Order in the Age of Insurgency

  • The Era: The post-Cold War and post-9/11 contemporary world.
  • The Concept: This modern state of mind reflects the fragmentation of the traditional nation-state’s monopoly on security. As globalized networks, tribal factions, and asymmetric actors rose up against Western modernization, states found themselves in a perpetual “state of siege” from within and below. This era shifts the realist focus away from massive, state-on-state clashes toward navigating non-state insurgencies, counter-terrorism, and localized border friction.

The Return of the State of Doom: Drone Strikes, Desperation, and Putin’s Nuclear Temptation

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

How Ukraine’s Successfully Waged War of Asymmetric Attrition Could Trigger Russia’s Nuclear Escalation, and Collapse the Western Order.

The skies over Moscow, once an untouchable symbol of Russia’s impenetrable imperial security, have become the Ukraine War’s latest contested territory.

As Ukrainian drones routinely slip past Russian air defenses to strike at the heart of Vladimir Putin’s capital, the psychological, economic and strategic landscape of the war in Ukraine is undergoing a tectonic shift. It is a stunning display of asymmetrical ingenuity and a testament to Ukraine’s unbroken resolve four years into a brutal

But for those of us who study the grim calculus of international relations, realist theory, and nuclear strategy, this tactical triumph casts a profound existential shadow. We are edging precariously close to the terrifying reality that Bernard Brodie—the founding father of modern nuclear strategy—recognized at the dawn of the atomic age. We are re-entering a state of doom.

Fifteen years ago, in my 2011 book, State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, The Bomb, and the Birth of the Bipolar World, I explored how the advent of the absolute weapon fundamentally altered the nature of war and statecraft. Brodie famously observed in 1946 that, until the atomic bomb, the chief purpose of a military establishment was to win wars. “From now on,” he wrote, “its chief purpose must be to avert them.” For 80 years, this logic of deterrence has held firm. Nuclear weapons became the ultimate insurance policy against regime collapse and total state defeat, creating a stable, if terrifying, equilibrium among superpowers.

But what happens when that insurance policy is held by an authoritarian leader who launched a war of choice, only to find himself entangled in a humiliating, multi-year quagmire—and suffering more than one million casualties and counting?

As we navigate 2026, the conflict has evolved into a grinding war of attrition that has systematically bled Russian conventional forces. Now, with drones detonating in Moscow, the illusion of Russian invulnerability has been entirely shattered. The war is no longer a distant “special military operation” broadcast safely on state television; it is rattling the windows of the Kremlin.

From a classical realist perspective, a state’s primary imperative is survival. However, in my research on the tribal foundations of world politics, I have often noted that beneath the veneer of the modern Westphalian state, older, primal loyalties dictate behavior—rooted in an unyielding tribalism. Putin’s Russia has increasingly shed the trappings of a modern institutional state, reverting to an insular, tribal autocracy run by the its security elite (the siloviki). For this ruling clan, the survival of the Russian state and the survival of their regime are inextricably linked.

The drone strikes on Moscow are not measured strictly in military terms; they are profound political humiliations. They signal to the Russian elite and the public that Putin cannot protect his own stronghold. In the brutal logic of power politics, humiliation breeds desperation. And when the tribe’s inner-most sanctum is breached, the leadership’s risk calculus can radically change.

This is precisely where the architecture of nuclear deterrence begins to buckle. Deterrence relies on rationality—on the shared understanding that the costs of crossing the nuclear threshold outweigh any conceivable benefit. But rationality is subjective, bound by the specific pressures and fears of the decision-maker. If Putin believes that a conventional defeat in Ukraine, or the steady erosion of his domestic authority brought about by persistent strikes on the Russian homeland, will lead to his downfall, the unthinkable suddenly becomes thinkable. Using the bomb, of which Putin has so many, becomes a viable strategic option when their continued non-use could cause both military defeat and regime collapse.

The immediate fear has never been that Putin will launch a strategic first strike against Washington or London, triggering the near-certainty and totality of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The far more chilling and realistic peril is the use of a non-strategic, or “tactical,” nuclear weapon within the Ukrainian theater. A low-yield detonation—perhaps over a military concentration, an infrastructure hub, or even as a demonstration over the Black Sea—would serve a dual purpose for a desperate autocrat.

First, it would aim to reverse the fortunes of a failing conventional campaign, dramatically persuading Kyiv to compromise via the same unimaginable explosive shock that did the same for the unyielding Emperor of Japan eighty years earlier.

Second, it would test the ultimate resolve of the West. Putin may gamble that while NATO is willing to supply advanced conventional technology to maintain Ukrainian territorial integrity, it is not willing to risk Western capitals for Kyiv. Putin might calculate that a limited nuclear strike would paralyze the Western alliance with the fear of further annihilation.

Western analysts often comfort themselves with the assumption that a nuclear strike would turn Russia into a global pariah, completely alienating its remaining partners. But they may be dangerously wrong. In a fracturing global order, a successful, unpunished tactical nuclear strike could achieve the exact opposite of isolation: it would send a seismic shockwave through the international system, demonstrating that the West is ultimately a paper tiger when confronted by the East’s absolute resolve.

Rather than repelling Beijing, Tehran, or Pyongyang, such an unapologetic display of power might further unite the autocratic world around a newly dominant center of gravity. It could reinvigorate Russia’s diplomatic leadership among revisionist states, positioning Moscow as the ultimate vanguard against Western hegemony.

This is the hidden trapdoor of the current crisis: the very real temptation that nuclear brinkmanship could pay off, rewriting the rules of global governance in favor of autocracy. Hence the temptation for Putin; hence the danger for us.

We are currently witnessing a volatile collision between the paradigms of modern conflict. Asymmetric, unconventional tactics are now colliding with the rigid, devastating power structures of traditional states. Ukraine has brilliantly exposed the hollow core of Russian conventional might, utilizing decentralized, high-tech drone warfare to outmaneuver a lumbering superpower. Yet, in doing so, it has inadvertently increased the utility of Russia’s unconventional, apocalyptic deterrent.

By bringing the pain of war to Moscow, Ukraine is effectively cornering the bear. And a cornered bear, armed with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, could become the most dangerous actor in the international system.

Recognizing the danger of Putin’s nuclear temptation is not a call for appeasement; it is a prerequisite for survival. For years, the West has walked a geopolitical tightrope: arming Ukraine sufficiently to defend its sovereignty without provoking a Russian nuclear response. The drone strikes on Moscow represent a fraying of that tightrope.

Brodie warned us that the absolute weapon demands an absolute transformation in how we manage conflict. In this renewed state of doom, the ghosts of the Cold War have returned, armed with new anxieties and asymmetric triggers. As waves of drones continue to fly east toward Moscow, the distance between conventional humiliation and nuclear retaliation shrinks by the day.

We must tread ever carefully, for the absolute weapon forgives no miscalculation.

Escaping the Fatalism of the Thucydides Trap: A Manifesto for Constructive Realism

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , ,

We’ve long been told by the foreign policy establishment (aka the Blob) that war between great powers is mathematically encoded into the structure of international politics. For generations, the Blob’s dark, deterministic and devoutly bipartisan fatalism has taken root in the corridors of power. Analysts and statesmen have viewed the shifting tectonic plates of global power as an inescapable conveyor belt leading directly toward interstate conflict.

This deep geopolitical anxiety has found its modern vocabulary in the “Thucydides Trap.” The concept, popularized by political scientist Graham Allison, warns that when a rising power threatens to displace an established ruling power, war becomes the historically expected outcome. Scholars constantly point back to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ famous assessment that “it was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”

Today’s strategists map this ancient framework onto the contemporary turbulent relationships between established great powers and their ascendant rivals, treating geopolitical friction not as a series of manageable human errors, but as an unalterable, structural law of nature.

However, I reject such systemic and ubiquitous fatalism. Fifteen years ago, my sweeping exploration of the realism (The Realist Tradition in International Relations: The Foundations of Western Order, PSI, 2011) convinced me that we are not helpless prisoners of historical cycles, nor are states passive victims of structural fate. The Thucydides Trap is a psychological prison of our own making, and we possess the agency to break its locks.

To do this, I proposed a framework I call Constructive Realism. This approach reconciles the harsh truths of power politics with the profound reality of human agency. It acknowledges that structural constraints exist, but it refuses to let those constraints dictate our destiny. Leaders can consciously shape their strategic choices, reject the false binary of zero-sum competition, and avoid the devastating cycles of hegemonic war.

The Problem with Structural Fatalism

Traditional realism assumes that the international system is anarchic, states are rational actors seeking survival, and the distribution of material power dictates state behavior. Under this view, when a rising state gains economic and military might, the established power panics. The rising state feels a growing entitlement to prestige and global influence, while the ruling state interprets every single move as an existential threat. A classic security dilemma follows: actions taken by one side to ensure its own security are viewed by the other as active preparations for war.

However, traditional realism commits a critical error by removing human choice and agency from the equation. It reduces complex nations to uniform billiard balls knocking into one another on a table. It implies that regardless of who is in power—whether statesmen are wise, reckless, diplomatic, or deeply paranoid—the structural outcome remains predetermined.

This structural fatalism is inherently dangerous. When leaders fully believe that war is inevitable, their behavior shifts fundamentally. They stop looking for diplomatic off-ramps. They begin to treat compromise as a weakness and dangerous escalation as prudence. The shared belief that a conflict is inevitable becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and fear, rather than rational calculation, takes the steering wheel of global statecraft.

The Alternative: Constructive Realism

Constructive realism offers a vital corrective to this flaw. It bridges the gap between traditional realism and constructivism. While realism focuses heavily on material power and structural anarchy, constructivism reminds us that international relations are socially constructed. The identities, core interests, and threat perceptions of states are not fixed in stone; they are continuously forged through human interaction, political rhetoric, and strategic choice.

Constructive realism asserts that geopolitical reality is malleable. The international structure sets the stage, but human leaders write the script.

First, consider agency over structure. While structural conditions impose clear constraints, the actual paths nations take are determined by deliberate strategic choices. The transition of power does not mechanically trigger global war. History shows us that peaceful power transitions are entirely possible. Structure did not doom earlier generations to fight, just as structure does not doom us today.

Second, we must actively manage fear. Traditional realism correctly identifies fear as a primary driver of conflict, but it treats fear as an unmanageable constant. Constructive realism focuses on diagnosing and actively managing the psychological drivers of geopolitical insecurity. It requires dominant powers to understand a rising power’s legitimate desire for respect and integration into the global order. Simultaneously, it requires rising powers to recognize and respect the ruling power’s deeply-rooted security concerns.

By addressing these perceptions directly through diplomatic engagement, states can open doors for mutual accommodation. We can maintain a stable balance of power through careful, empathetic diplomacy, rather than relying solely on brute deterrence and military mobilization. (This was, to my great relief, on display during President Trump’s cordial summit with President Xi in Beijing, where the Thucydides Trap was openly discussed by the very world leaders most able to escape it.)

Transcending the Trap

To transcend the Thucydides Trap, emerging and dominant powers must actively construct entirely new narratives of cooperation. For generations, international relations discourse has been overly saturated with zero-sum competition, where the Blob saw every economic policy, technological breakthrough, and diplomatic summit through the distorted lens of an impending cold war. If one side won a trade agreement or a technological race, the other side assumed it had lost vital ground.

Instead, constructive realism demands that we build positive-sum frameworks. There are vast, critical arenas where the ultimate interests of great powers converge, including global economic stability, climate volatility, pandemic prevention, and collaborative management of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence. When states anchor their relationships in their shared vulnerabilities, they can agilely rewrite the rules of their engagement.

The Path Forward

The Thucydides Trap is not a law of physics. The rise of Athens and the fear of Sparta did not make war inevitable; the specific choices made by Athenian and Spartan leaders made war seem inevitable. They allowed fear to blind them to alternative paths, choosing pride over prudence, and military mobilization over diplomatic negotiation. Add in a little bit Hellenistic hubris to this volatile mix, and the ruinous path to tragedy came to be perceived as all but inevitable. It wasn’t.

We stand today at a similar historical crossroads; the structural pressures of a shifting global balance of power are real, and they are immense. But they do not hold the pen that writes our future. We do.

By embracing constructive realism, we can acknowledge the realities of power without succumbing to its worst, most destructive impulses. We can recognize that our rivalries are real, but also accept that our survival is shared.

We have the agency to shape our strategic choices. We can manage our fears, rewrite our competitive narratives, and deliberately choose a path of peaceful coexistence. The trap is open, it always has been; it’s up to us to see this, and carefully avoid its grasp.

New issue of Isonomia Quarterly is OUT!

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

It’s the mag’s first-ever special issue, and it’s a doozy:

Click here to read it. Notes On Liberty (and a special guest — a Notewriter) makes an appearance in the coda 🙂

How Greenland’s Independence Could Catalyze Canada’s Balkanization

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , ,

The Westphalian map of North America is fracturing before our eyes. For over a century now, the establishment has treated our continent’s borders as permanent, sacred lines etched immutably into polar ice. But they’ve been ignoring the deeper tectonics of history, resource economics, and indigenous self-determination.

If Nuuk moves closer to cutting its final colonial cords to Copenhagen, it will not merely be charting a path to liberate Greenland. It will instead be pulling the linchpin from an over-centralized, overly archaic Canadian confederation. Indeed, when Greenland successfully achieves full sovereignty, it won’t remain an isolated event for long.

It will light a fuse: a cascading domino of pent-up yearning for independence and newly nurtured secessionist sentiment will quickly roll across Canada, breaking this vast, centralized state apart into a more logical, decentralized alignment under a continental American umbrella.

Ottawa’s long era of continental neglect is approaching its terminal hour: an inevitable liberation of Greenland will provide the ultimate spark for a sweeping prairie fire of state collapse and geopolitical realignment.

Proximate Polar Pioneers: Nunavut and the Northwest Territories Will Lead the Way

The first dominoes to tumble would likely be from the High North. The artificial cartography of the 20th century explicitly severed the Inuit nation across colonial boundaries. Once Greenland secures its status as a sovereign state protected by an American aerospace shield, the structural logic for Nunavut to remain tied to a chronically underfunded Ottawa will disappear entirely.

Nunavut would likely be the first to follow Nuuk’s lead, exercising its inherent right to self-determination. For decades, Iqaluit’s economic autonomy has been stifled by federal mandates. By seceding from Canada, Nunavut can merge its multi-level indigenous governance model with a newly independent Greenland, creating a unified, greater Inuit maritime power.

The Northwest Territories (NWT) would quickly follow this northern exodus. The NWT’s vast mineral wealth—critical for the digital age—remains locked behind federal regulatory paralysis. A sovereign NWT, unburdened by Ottawa’s red tape, would logically align its economic and security architecture with Alaska and the Yukon. This would complete a contiguous, resource-rich northern buffer zone under a single, streamlined continental command structure.

Western Revolt: Alberta’s Financial Liberation

As the northern rim detaches, the economic engine of Western Canada will inevitably look for its own exit. Alberta’s grievances against the Laurentian elite are structural, deep-seated, and entirely justified. For generations, federal equalization formulas have systematically plundered Albertan energy wealth to subsidize the political dependencies of Eastern Canada.

• Fiscal Plunder: Ottawa drains billions annually from Calgary while actively sabotaging its industrial growth.

• Pipeline Paralysis: Federal environmental mandates deliberately choke landlocked energy corridors to global markets.

• Sovereignty Act: Alberta has already built the legal framework to nullify federal overreach.

Greenland’s transition to a high-growth, sovereign partner of America will provide Alberta with the ultimate blueprint. A newly independent republic of Alberta would no longer plead for market access. It could instead secure it directly through a bilateral strategic partnership with Washingtonl , seamlessly integrating its massive oil and gas reserves into the American energy heartland.

The Pacific Gateway: British Columbia’s Continental Pivot

With Alberta gone, British Columbia (BC) would face an existential geographic choice. Cut off from the rest of Eastern Canada by an independent prairie republic, Victoria could not remain an isolated outpost of a dying state. BC’s economic reality has always been oriented vertically along the Pacific Coast, rather than horizontally across the Rocky Mountains.

An independent British Columbia could execute a rapid continental pivot. The Cascadia corridor—stretching from Vancouver to Seattle and Portland—is already an integrated economic ecosystem. BC’s vast critical mineral deposits, clean hydropower, and strategic deep-water ports make it a natural titan of the Pacific Rim.

Freed from Ottawa’s strategic inertia, a sovereign BC could directly negotiate its own trade and security protocols with Washington and Tokyo. It would transform its coastline into the premier, unhindered gateway for democratic commerce across the Indo-Pacific.

Final Fracture: Quebec’s Unfinished Journey

The western and northern departures would leave the historical core of Canada fundamentally unsustainable. Quebec has kept one foot out of the confederation door for over half a century. The cultural, linguistic, and political friction between Francophone identity and Anglo-federalism is an unhealable wound.

• Linguistic Sovereignty: Quebec operates as a distinct nation in all but name.

• Hydro-Power Independence: Its energy grid is completely autonomous and globally integrated.

• Institutional Readiness: The province maintains its own civil legal code and international offices.

When Western Canada fractures, the remaining federal state will lack the financial capacity to appease Quebec’s nationalist aspirations. But Quebec’s secession would not be an act of chaotic rebellion; it would instead be the orderly final step of a decades-long march toward statehood. 

A sovereign Quebec would control the St. Lawrence River gateway, trading seamlessly with its neighbors while preserving its distinct cultural civilization free from Anglo-federal meddling, and its proximity to Nunavut would position it to be an emergent near-Arctic power unto itself.

New Continental Equilibrium

Critics within the obsolete foreign policy establishment will decry this potential balkanization as a dangerous collapse of order. They fundamentally misunderstand the nature of modern statecraft. The breaking of the Laurentian empire would not be an act of imperial chaos; it would be an act of democratic renewal.

The old Canadian confederation remains a product of British colonial architecture, designed to keep different regions artificially bound together against their natural economic inclinations. By allowing these distinct regions to find their true sovereign potential—just as Greenland is currently attempting to do—we can replace a hollow, dysfunctional federal state with a vibrant, high-growth brotherhood of independent nations.

Every single one of these emerging republics—from the pristine Arctic tundra of Nunavut to the vast and lucrative oil and gas fields of Alberta to the deepwater ports of Cascadia—shares a common destiny.  They will find their ultimate security, their market access, and their democratic baseline under a reimagined, pan-American umbrella. 

The era of Arctic and western neglect is drawing to a close. Greenland is writing the playbook, but if successful in its quest for liberty, the Canadian dominoes will quickly follow.

New issue of Isonomia Quarterly is OUT!

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

It’s the mag’s first-ever special issue, and it’s a doozy:

Click here to read it. Notes On Liberty (and a special guest — a Notewriter) makes an appearance in the coda 🙂

Greenland and the Spirit of 1776

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , ,

On this sacred 250th anniversary of our Republic’s birth, to fully grok how the liberation of Greenland can fulfill our unextinguishable Spirit of 1776, we must discard the outdated notion that the Arctic is a frozen, peripheral wasteland. 

Throughout my career analyzing Arctic sovereignty, borderlands, and geopolitics, I have argued (since I was a young man in 1991) that the Far North is emerging as a central arena for global freedom, resource independence, and democratic sovereignty. Upon this July 4th’s sacred, quarter-millenium celebration of our liberty, this long-foreseen centrality has come to pass.

In my view, the Spirit of 1776 is not a static historical event: it is instead an ongoing, dynamic process of expanding self-determination, rolling back old-world colonial empires, and securing our continental perimeter against authoritarian overreach. 

To fulfill our Spirit of 1776 in the 21st century, the United States must extend its democratic umbrella northward! This is not an act of alliance-imploding imperial conquest as Denmark has sought to portray; rather, it is an inclusive act of collaborative liberation. 

By helping Greenland sever its last colonial ties to Europe and integrating it into North America’s hemispheric security and economic architecture, we can achieve three philosophical and strategic imperatives:

Continental Completeness: We complete the geopolitical vision of the Monroe Doctrine, ensuring North America is entirely governed by consent and free from European or Asian state interference.

Democratic Self-Determination: We empower the Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit) people with true economic and military independence, backed by American constitutional guarantees.

Frontier Ethos: We re-ignite the American pioneer spirit on the Arctic frontier, viewing the far north as a dynamic space for democratic civilization.

To help actualize this collabarative liberation, Greenland can craft a Constitution mirroring while customizing our own paradigmatic Constitution. Some key components could include the following.

A Proposed Constitution of the Republic of Kalaallit Nunaat

Preamble

We, the people of Kalaallit Nunaat, grateful to our ancestors who survived and thrived across the Arctic frontier, determined to preserve our culture, our language, and our environment, and committed to the universal principles of human liberty and democratic self-governance, do establish this Constitution for our sovereign Republic.

Article I: Sovereign Status and Geography

  1. The Republic of Kalaallit Nunaat is a sovereign, democratic, and independent nation encompassing the entire island mass of Greenland, its continental shelf, and its territorial waters.
  2. The sovereign power resides in the people, to be exercised through their elected representatives and direct democratic referendums.
  3. The official national languages are Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) and English.

Article II: Bill of Rights and Liberties

  1. Fundamental Rights: Every citizen is born free and equal in dignity. No law shall discriminate based on race, ancestry, language, or creed.
  2. Freedom of Expression: The right to free speech, a free press, and peaceful assembly shall not be abridged.
  3. Property and Private Enterprise: The right to private property is guaranteed. Free-market enterprise is the baseline economic system of the Republic, protected against arbitrary state nationalization.
  4. Indigenous Customs: The collective right of the Inuit people to hunt, fish, and manage local community lands in accordance with sustainable tradition is permanently protected.
  5. The Right to Bear Arms and Self-Defense: The right of the people to keep and bear arms for self-defense, protection against wildlife, hunting, and the security of the Republic shall not be infringed. No law shall prohibit the possession, carry, or responsible use of firearms by citizens. Licensing and registration shall be kept minimal and non-prohibitive to ensure remote families are never left defenseless against the elements or predators.
  6. Inherent Rights to Traditional Harvest and Lifeways: The right of citizens to engage in traditional hunting, fishing, gathering, and harvesting is an unalienable birthright. This includes the absolute right to harvest marine mammals, specifically whaling and sealing, as well as terrestrial fur trapping. The use, breeding, training, and deployment of sled dogs (Qimmit) for transportation and hunting is protected. No administrative regulation or international treaty shall penalize or restrict these practices. The local trade, consumption, or garment-making of legally harvested furs, skins, or traditional foods shall not be criminalized.
  7. Conversion of Ecological Zones to Subsistence Hunting Preserves: All lands previously designated as national parks, restrictive nature reserves, or ecological preserves under foreign administration are permanently converted into National Subsistence Hunting Preserves. The right of local populations to access these lands for subsistence hunting, traditional trapping, fishing, and temporary shelter is absolute and supreme over pure preservationist mandates.
  8. Family Sovereignty and Prevention of Child Removal: The family is the foundational and sacred unit of society. No agency of the state or external non-governmental organization shall have the authority to separate families or remove children from their parental home based on poverty, standard of housing, or adherence to traditional indigenous child-rearing practices. Separation shall be permitted only as an absolute last resort in instances of proven, severe physical harm, established by an independent jury of peers in a court of law. Preferential placement must be given to extended kinship networks and local community members.

Article III: Legislative Branch (Inatsisartut)

  1. Legislative power is vested in a unicameral parliament, the Inatsisartut, consisting of 31 members elected by proportional representation every four years.
  2. It has sole authority to pass domestic laws, levy taxes, approve national budgets, control and restrict immigration, and ratify commercial treaties.
  3. All laws concerning the extraction of critical mineral wealth require a three-fifths supermajority vote.

Article IV: Executive Branch (The Presidency)

  1. The executive power of the Republic is vested in the President, elected by direct popular vote for a term of five years, limited to two terms.
  2. The President serves as the Head of State, Head of Government, and Commander-in-Chief.
  3. Strategic Alliance Provision: The President has the constitutional power, with the consent of parliament, to delegate the external defense and aerospace protection of the Republic to the United States of America under a permanent Compact of Free Association.

Article V: Judiciary

  1. The judicial power is independent of the executive and legislative branches, vested in a Supreme Court and lower regional courts.
  2. The courts interpret the laws of the Republic, integrating western common law with traditional Inuit customary justice.

Article VI: Amendment and Ratification 

  1. Amendments to this Constitution may be proposed by a two-thirds vote of the Inatsisartut or by a petition signed by twenty percent of registered voters.
  2. An amendment becomes valid only when ratified by a majority vote of the citizens in a nationwide referendum.

Why This Fulfills the Spirit of 1776

Greenland’s current status under the Danish Realm represents a lingering anomaly of old-world European colonialism. While Nuuk has enjoyed increasing “Home Rule” and later “Self-Rule” governance, its security, defense, and monetary systems remain anchored in Copenhagen, with multiple levels of continuing dependency.

The Rejection of Imperial Feudalism: The Spirit of 1776 revolted against a small island nation in Europe governing a vast continent across the sea. Denmark’s management of Greenland inverse-mirrors this dynamic with a small continental nation governing a vast North American Arctic island. Facilitating Nuuk’s exit completes the decolonization of the Western Hemisphere.

Guarding the Empire of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson envisioned a continental space where democratic institutions could multiply safely. By more tightly integrating Greenland into America’s hemispheric perimeter, we can more ably protect critical minerals and contested seabeds from our rivals, while expandine the rule of law and the zone of liberty.

Self-Actualization of Indigenous Peoples: My scenario of liberation places the Kalaallit people at the center of their own destiny. By partnering with the United States, they trade a paternalistic European welfare state for a high-growth, constitutionally protected partnership, becoming absolute masters of their own nation.

It is time for their colonial dependency to end. It is time for the whole of North America to be free. It is time, on this sacred quarter millennium since America’s birth, for Greenland to declare its own independence, and to join us in the brotherhood of nations and free peoples. Let our 250th Independence Day become Greenland’s first!

New issue of Isonomia Quarterly is OUT!

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

It’s the mag’s first-ever special issue, and it’s a doozy:

Click here to read it. Notes On Liberty (and a special guest — a Notewriter) makes an appearance in the coda 🙂

New issue of Isonomia Quarterly is OUT!

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

It’s the mag’s first-ever special issue, and it’s a doozy:

Click here to read it. Notes On Liberty (and a special guest — a Notewriter) makes an appearance in the coda 🙂

Code Blue: How America Can Help Heal Greenland’s Rural Health Crisis

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , ,

The vast, ice-locked expanse of Greenland is facing a quiet, structural rural health crisis. While global powers look north to debate emerging shipping lanes, untapped deposits of rare-earth minerals, and increasingly salient geopolitical positioning in the Arctic, a human crisis is unfolding across the territory’s remote coastal settlements. Greenland’s rural healthcare system is straining under the weight of persistent staffing shortages, extreme geographic isolation, and an overwhelming infrastructural deficit.

As America expands its diplomatic and strategic footprint in the Arctic and High North Atlantic, Washington can no longer afford to view Greenland solely through the lens of national defense and radar stations. Addressing Greenland’s rural health crisis is not just a moral imperative; it is a critical opportunity for the United States to practice meaningful, localized diplomacy that secures long-term stability and goodwill in a vital region.

The recent public rejection of a U.S. hospital ship by Greenlandic and Danish officials was a triumph of nationalist pride, but a tragedy for the island’s most vulnerable residents. The political friction began on February 21, 2026, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was deploying a “great hospital boat” to Greenland, claiming the population lacked proper care.

The response from Nuuk and Copenhagen was immediate. As ABC News reported, “‘It’s a no thank you from here,’ Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said,” just hours after President Trump’s generous offer: “‘President Trump’s idea of sending an American hospital ship here to Greenland has been noted. But we have a public healthcare system where treatment is free for citizens. That is a deliberate choice — and a fundamental part of our society. That is not how it works in the USA, where it costs money to see a doctor.'” But as all residents of Nordic states know, it costs money to see doctors there too, through higher taxes and in the specific case of Greenland, Danish subsidies.

Denmark’s leadership quickly reinforced this message. As the New York Times reported, “Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister, told Denmark’s public broadcaster, DR, that his government had not been made aware of the plan. He said that there was ‘no need for special health care efforts, in Greenland.'” Perhaps he needs to spend more time in rural Greenland before making such a bold but dubious claim.

Danish PM Mette Frederiksen — who barely survived Denmark’s March parliamentary elections by assembling a four-party minority coalition government 69 days after her party, the Social Democrats, delivered their worst electoral performance in over a century — responded similarly but indirectly to President Trump’s generosity, writing on Instagram “I’m happy to live in a country where there is free and equal access to health care for everyone,” as the New York Times also reported, “The same approach exists in Greenland.”

In dismissing the U.S. President’s generous offer so quickly and cavalierly as an unnecessary political stunt, these Greenlandic and Danish leaders touted Greenland’s free, national healthcare system. Yet, their defensive reaction masks a grim reality familiar to anyone living outside the capital of Nuuk: for Greenland’s remote and isolated settlements, access to that “free” healthcare is often a distant, and at times dangerous, illusion.

Just look at the dispararity in life expectancies in Greenland and Denmark: in Greenland, the average life expectancy is 69.3 years for men and 73.9 for women, while in Denmark it’s 79.9 for men and 83.7 for women—nearly a full decade of precious life longer for both men and women (for those lucky enough to have survived Denmark’s decades-long policies of Greenlandic population suppression). Outside of Nuuk, whose life expectancy numbers enjoy a boost from its high concentration of non-Greenland born residents, life expectancies are even lower by some three to four years.

While elite urban leaders lean into their ideological purity from modern, state-of-the-art “Potemkin” facilities, rural Greenlanders continue face severe doctor shortages, long transport times for emergencies, an ongoing specialist crisis, and heartbreaking levels of suicide. In a vast, Arctic nation where geography is the ultimate barrier to the practice of medicine, a floating, fully-equipped hospital ship is not an insult to sovereignty—it is a highly practical, life-saving solution to the undeniable failures of rural Arctic healthcare.

Anatomy of an Arctic Health Crisis

Greenland operates a universal healthcare system that is free at the point of use. However, equity in theory does not translate to equity in geography. For most of the island’s 57,000 residents—scattered across dozens of isolated villages accessible only by plane, helicopter, dog sled, or boat—access to basic medical care is akin to a lottery. The system is suffocated by an unsustainable reliance on short-term, rotational medical professionals traveling from Denmark. These practitioners rarely stay long enough to learn Greenlandic or understand local cultural nuances. This in turn exhausts the few permanent, bilingual local health workers, driving severe burnout and rapid turnover.

In the remotest of settlements, basic lifesaving tools like defibrillators are frequently absent. When emergencies strike, the territory relies on expensive, logistically complex medevacs. At a rate of 7.7 evacuations per 1,000 inhabitants every year, these flights drain tens of millions of dollars from an already strained public budget. Because preventive care is practically non-existent in the rural periphery, chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease and cancer are routinely diagnosed at late, terminal stages.

Compounding these structural challenges is a profound legacy of historical trauma. The revelation of protracted, forced contraception campaigns enacted by Danish authorities in recent decades has left deep scars. It has fostered a persistent, understandable distrust of institutional medical systems among Indigenous communities.

Washington to the Rescue

For decades, America’s relationship with Greenland has been transactional, anchored by the strategic outpost of Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base). However, in an era of renewed Arctic competition, hard military power is no longer enough to maintain durable alliances.

The Greenlandic government currently faces an estimated one-billion-kroner (US $150 million+) deficit just to modernize its clinical infrastructure and bridge the health equity gap between rural settlements and the capital, Nuuk. By actively intervening to help close this gap, the United States can deploy a strategy of medical diplomacy. This approach will alleviate human suffering while demonstrating that American partnership brings tangible, life-saving benefits to everyday Greenlandic citizens.

An Action Plan for American Medical Diplomacy

The United States possesses the exact technological, logistical, and clinical infrastructure needed to revolutionize rural health care in Greenland. To achieve maximum impact, Washington should deploy a targeted, three-tiered action plan:

1. Scale AI-Powered, Pan-Arctic Telehealth Collaboration

The greatest barrier to rural healthcare in Greenland is distance. Rather than trying to solve this in isolation, the United States should integrate Greenland into a broader, pan-Arctic telehealth network. By creating a collaborative digital medical grid between Alaska’s tribal health organizations—which have decades of experience in remote, sub-zero care—and Greenland’s regional clinics, providers can seamlessly share best practices, billing efficiencies, and translation strategies.

Crucially, this pipeline can be supercharged with Artificial Intelligence. American technologists like Elon Musk can help develop and deploy automated AI diagnostic software to rural Greenlandic nursing stations. These algorithms can instantly evaluate X-rays, spot early-stage oncological abnormalities on skin scans, and read basic blood work without waiting days for a specialist in Nuuk or Copenhagen. By pairing low-Earth orbit satellite arrays with AI triage tools, minor health issues can be resolved locally, stopping the financial bleed of avoidable medical evacuations.

2. Deploy Seasonal U.S. Hospital Ships for Direct Care

While digital health addresses daily care, Greenland’s immense surgical backlogs require physical intervention. The United States Navy maintains the world’s most capable floating medical platforms. Washington should institutionalize annual, seasonal deployments of U.S. hospital ships (such as the USNS Comfort or Mercy, or newly designed agile medical vessels) to the High North Atlantic and Arctic during the ice-free summer months.

Operating as high-profile medical diplomacy, these ships would anchor off regional hubs like Qaqortoq, Sisimiut, or Ilulissat. Over a multi-week deployment, American naval surgeons and dental corps could perform hundreds of elective surgeries, joint replacements, and advanced dental procedures that rural Greenlanders currently wait years to receive. This surge of direct, high-impact clinical aid would immediately relieve the strain on Greenland’s domestic budget while forging deep cultural goodwill directly with the populace.

Indeed, commissioning a new, dedicated medical icebreaker designed for maritime health delivery to Arctic coastal villages would provide a critical, helpful new layer to the region’s much-needed rural healthcare infrastructure. Geopolitical grandstanding aside, achieving this logistical breakthrough requires cooperation over pride. America can genuinely help by offering specialized maritime medical expertise and use of its hospital ships, but Denmark can and must do more too, leveraging its substantial wealth and sovereign responsibility to co-fund a permanent mobile care solution for the citizens it aims to protect.

3. Establish a High North Atlantic and Arctic Medical Scholarship Program

True healthcare sustainability cannot be imported; it must be grown from within. The U.S. State Department should launch a scholarship and residency pipeline inviting Greenlandic students to train at top-tier American medical and nursing schools, funded by allied donors who will all benefit from a healthier and more secure Arctic.

This program must place special emphasis on rural medicine, telehealth deployment, and culturally informed community health care. In exchange, graduates would commit to returning to Greenland’s rural clinics for a designated period. This initiative would systematically build a permanent, bilingual, and Indigenous medical workforce, directly dismantling the cycle of foreign medical dependency.

Rx for Change

True Arctic security is impossible to achieve when the region’s inhabitants are left vulnerable to preventable systemic health crises. The structural deficiencies in Greenland’s rural healthcare network require resources, technology, and logistical capabilities that Nuuk cannot assemble alone.

By stepping forward with an innovative blend of AI-driven pan-Arctic telehealth networks, seasonal hospital ship deployments, and long-term educational pipelines, the United States can help heal a profound humanitarian rift in the High North Atlantic and Arctic. In doing so, America will prove that its commitment to the Arctic is measured not just in military muscle, but in the health, dignity, and longevity of the people who call the Arctic home.

After Greenland’s Liberation: Inuit Sovereign Expansion

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , , , ,

Why Greenland and Nunavut Could Join Forces Under a U.S. Shield

June 21 — just two weeks away — marks not only the summer solstice, but in Canada it’s also National Indigenous Peoples Day, a day that celebrates the resilience of the Arctic’s original inhabitants. Yet, celebration without sovereignty seems in many ways premature and incomplete.  True self-determination for Inuit still requires a profound political transformation.

Indeed, the path to a strong, viable and unified Inuit state runs through Nuuk, Iqaluit, and Washington. By leveraging Greenland’s path to independence from Denmark and negotiating with President Trump, and then more tightly integrating Greenland and Nunavut under America’s defense and economic umbrella, Inuit can finally achieve a cohesive and sovereign Arctic state, an historic first.

The current geopolitical map fragments the Inuit nation across artificial colonial borders. Greenland operates under Danish self-rule, while Nunavut remains a territory within the Canadian confederation. Both face a shared vulnerability: vast geographic scale, small populations, and intensifying pressures from Arctic and “near-Arctic” neighbors Russia and China (and, 80 years earlier, Germany and Japan).

Neither Nuuk nor Iqaluit possesses the economic or military heft to secure the top of the world alone. A bold diplomatic realignment is required to bridge this divide. This alignment would not be entirely unprecedented, but rather an historic restoration.

During World War II, the United States stepped in as the de facto protector of both regions. Following the 1940 Nazi occupation of Denmark, Washington established a protective mandate over Greenland to secure its strategic cryolite mines and critical Arctic weather stations. Simultaneously, the U.S. Army’s Air Forces built a massive and vital airfield at Frobisher Bay — now modern-day Iqaluit — to ferry aircraft to the European front. This shared history of wartime continental defense laid the early structural and geopolitical foundations for a unified North American Arctic.

Greenland holds the key to unlocking this future. As Greenland moves closer to full independence from Denmark, it faces a gathering financial and security vacuum. Denmark’s annual subsidy cannot be easily replaced, and an independent Greenland cannot defend its massive coastline and vast EEZ. 

This is where strategic pragmatism meets historic opportunity. President Trump has famously viewed Greenland through a lens of immense strategic and economic value. Rather than resisting this interest, Greenlandic leadership should lean into it.

Instead of pivoting to Copenhagen’s familiar embrace, Nuuk could instead leverage its ongoing (if fractious) discussions with Washington to flip the script and directly negotiate a compact of free association with President Trump. Turning the table like this has been done before, and is a quirk of Trump statecraft: Just ask the Taliban, which eventually learned the frenemy of my enemy is my new best friend.

Under a COFA framework, Greenland could achieve full sovereignty and a seat at the UN, while granting the USA exclusive and perpetual military basing rights and a mandate over its external defense (powers America largely has already, through its bilateral defense treaty with Denmark, its leadership role at NATO, and its predominance at NORAD). 

This would solve Greenland’s security dilemma and inject massive American infrastructure investment into its domestic economy, replacing Danish financial dependence with American strategic partnership.

With a secure, America-protected Greenland established, the second phase of Inuit unification can begin: with its sovereign expansion and integration of Nunavut. Nunavut’s current status within Canada limits its economic autonomy and binds its security to Ottawa’s chronically underfunded, albeit newly reaffirmed, Arctic defense efforts. To break free of its stagnation, Nunavut could exercise its right to self-determination, secede from Canada, and merge with a newly independent Greenland to form a unified greater Inuit state.

This expanded Inuit state could logically find safety under a COFA negotiated by Greenland, and once Ottawa came to accept Nunavut’s secession, all parties could amicably remain part of reimagined NORAD. For Washington, extending its Greenland defense umbrella over Nunavut is logical and efficient. It would create a contiguous, secure North American Arctic buffer, streamlining continental defense under a single, unified command structure. 

For Inuit, it rejoins families, ecosystems, and resources separated for generations by western cartography. Nunavut could offer Greenland its distinct, multilevel governance model wedding its three decade-long settled Indigenous land claim treaty with its quarter-century of territorial self-governance, deftly balancing tradition and modernity. This would be transformative.

Critics may argue that trading Canadian or Danish oversight for an American protectorate merely swaps one master for another. But this misunderstands the nature of modern protectorates, such as Palau and the Marshall Islands. Under a COFA, an Inuit state would retain complete domestic sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and control over its natural resources while leveraging its new economic and educational links to America. The United States would handle the financial and logistical burden of defense, leaving the Inuit free to govern their homeland.

On the upcoming 21st day of June, a day infused with so much symbolic meaning across the North, we cannot forget that the Arctic is melting, and that a geopolitical scramble for its resources is accelerating. The status quo leaves the Inuit homeland divided, and exposed to global power struggles. On this year’s National Indigenous Peoples Day, let us look beyond symbolic recognition. 

A sovereign Inuit state, anchored by Greenland, expanded by Nunavut, and shielded by American power, is neither a radical nor imperial fantasy. It is instead a realistic pathway to enduring Arctic autonomy, and a true Inuit sovereign restoration.