My 2008 book, Breaking the Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic, is a comprehensive study of indigenous rights, land claims, and governance in the Western Arctic and Alaska. Drawing from my decade of field research and residency in the region, it explores how native populations transformed from marginalized groups into powerful, central actors in Arctic governance.
The core themes and arguments of my book include:
1. The Shift to Tribal Sovereignty
I chronicle how the “age of land claims” evolved from basic real estate and economic disputes into a profound political movement. Rather than just winning back territory, indigenous peoples—such as the Inuit of Northern Canada and the Native populations of Alaska—successfully leveraged comprehensive land claim agreements (LCAs) to establish concrete structures of self-governance and tribal sovereignty.
2. The Clash of Modernism vs. Traditionalism
A major focus of the book is the tension native communities faced when integrating into modern, westernized legal and corporate frameworks.
The Conflict: For many Alaskan Natives, there was a deep sense of alienation when forced to adapt to corporate structures mandated by settlements like the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).
The Resolution: I argue that instead of losing their identity, these communities effectively used co-management systems, corporate development, and regional self-government to bridge the gap between ancient traditions (like subsistence hunting and fishing) and modern globalization.
3. Peaceful Negotiation as a Model
Unlike many global indigenous struggles that resulted in protracted violence or systemic legal deadlock, the Arctic transformations were achieved largely through peaceful, sophisticated political negotiation. I frame the Arctic experience as a highly successful model of how state governments and aboriginal populations can reach stable, dual-citizen governance models.
In Breaking the Ice, I introduce the concept of “sovereign duality” (often referred to interchangeably with hybrid sovereignty) to describe the unique, layered political landscape that has emerged in the Arctic. Rather than viewing sovereignty as an all-or-nothing, absolute power held exclusively by a central national government, I argue that the Arctic has pioneered a model where sovereignty is shared, cooperative, and distinctively split.
The core pillars of “sovereign duality” include:
1. ‘Dual’ Citizenship and Authority
Under this model, indigenous peoples in the Far North do not have to choose between being tribal citizens or state citizens; they are fully actualized as both. They maintain localized, independent tribal sovereignty over their ancestral lands and cultural practices, while simultaneously participating as active, influential citizens in the broader Westphalian (nation-state) political framework of Canada or the United States.
2. The Merging of Two Worlds
Sovereign duality bridges the gap between two traditionally clashing systems:
The State Framework: Modern, Westernized legal systems, globalized corporate structures, and national security interests.
The Indigenous Framework: Traditional tribal structures, historical autonomy, and an economy rooted in subsistence (hunting, fishing, and deep interconnectedness with the land).
Through comprehensive land claim agreements (LCAs), these two frameworks form a hybrid system. For example, instead of relying on standard government regulation, the Arctic utilizes co-management boards where state officials and indigenous leaders hold (largely) equal authority to manage wildlife, resources, and environmental protection.
3. Integration Through Collaboration, Not Conquest
I highlight that this dual sovereignty was not born out of military conquest or systemic assimilation, but through sophisticated, peaceful political negotiation. The state essentially consolidated its own Arctic borders and sovereign claims by empowering and embedding indigenous self-governance into its constitutional fabric. Sovereign duality rejects the classic idea that a country has one single, absolute ruler. Instead, it creates a post-modern, “layered” sovereign reality where indigenous nations and federal states co-exist and co-rule, proving that local tribal security and national sovereignty can strengthen one another rather than compete.
As climate change thins the Arctic ice and draws global economic and military interest to the region, I argue that indigenous peoples are no longer passive bystanders. Through their hard-won land claims, they have secured a permanent seat at the table to collaboratively manage both environmental preservation and sustainable economic development in the Far North. Tribal polities like regional and municipal government levels may be constitutionally subordinated to the national government level, but they are locally and regionally predominant and are thus political elites and sovereign partners in collaborative governance, and thus neither marginalized or excluded.
Breaking the Ice highlights a few key differences in how “sovereign duality” took shape on either side of the US-Canada border. While both regions used comprehensive land claims to empower indigenous communities, they used notably different legal, economic, and structural vehicles to get there.
The core differences it identifies include:
1. Salient Vehicle of Sovereignty: Corporations vs. Public Government
The biggest distinction is how power is structured and held.
Alaska (Corporate Model): Under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, land and monetary compensation were transferred to regional and village for-profit corporations owned by Alaska Native shareholders. This initially caused a sense of “alienation” as traditional tribal cultures were forced to adapt to Western corporate governance, though it ultimately became a powerful mechanism for economic self-sufficiency and regional development.
Canada (Public Government Model): When Canada negotiated modern land treaties across the Arctic, it built upon and revised the Alaskan model. Instead of relying primarily on corporate structures, Canada integrated structures of Aboriginal self-governance and co-management directly into the treaty structure. A prime example is Nunavut, where a vast territorial government was established (via secession from the NWT) under a public government structure heavily dominated by the Inuit majority.
2. Tribal Resurgence vs. Structural Planning
Because of how the two systems were set up, the path back toward local autonomy looks different:
In Alaska, the purely corporate setup of ANCSA originally omitted explicit tribal governing powers. This oversight triggered a powerful resurgence in tribalism as Alaskan Natives fought to reclaim local political and judicial control outside of their corporate boards, ultimately resulting in co-management and subsistence protections in 1980 with ANILCA, and 1993 with federal tribal recognition.
In Canada, co-management, self-government, and land claims were increasingly tied together from the start of the modern treaty era. The treaties granted the Inuit title to roughly one-tenth of their traditional land base alongside formal, state-recognized governing authority and co-management boards.
3. Co-Management Integration
While both regions eventually developed co-management systems to handle environmental and wildlife resources, I point out that Canada’s later treaties integrated these boards more seamlessly into the constitutional fabric of the state. These boards served as a direct bridge between traditional subsistence living and modern federal oversight, whereas Alaska Native communities had to fight harder to protect their subsistence rights against competing state and federal jurisdictions.
I view Alaska as an economic and corporate trailblazer that had to actively fight for political tribal recognition, while Canada took those lessons and created a model where co-management (and, increasingly political self-governance and territorial control) were woven into the land claims from day one.
Two decades ago, the first of what has evolved into a full baker’s dozen of my published books went under contract, marking a shift from my prolific writing of articles and book chapters to much longer-winded and more in-depth and nuanced format for theoretical reflection. While I started out my life of scholarship as an IR Theorist, it was my field-based works on Arctic geopolitics, international relations and multilevel governance that came to press first, and which in turn deeply influenced my approach to IR Theory (as discussed previously in “My Realist Journey.”) Below, I will explore the chapter of my life of scholarship that emerged from my Arctic journey, away from the groupthink of Cold War-era IR Theory, as informed and inspired by the Arctic as a distinct and alternative model for world politics and IR Theory.
In this retrospective journey through my books on Arctic international relations and multilevel governance, “My Arctic Journey,” I extract and develop a comprehensive macro-theory of international relations (IR) and geopolitical order based on my decades of research in and on the Arctic. Across my oeuvre of published books and articles, I present a shift away from top-down, state-centric and (IMHO) overly fatalistic Westphalianisn toward a bottom-up model of collaborative sovereignty and stability. My work in IR Theory discussed above (“My Realist Journey”) bridges the gap between raw, material realism and identity-driven constructivism through Constructive Realism, which informs my understanding of Arctic IR and multilevel governance, rooted in the durability and salience of tribal polities in world politics, yielding what I call Fourth Image Theory, an innovative framework that explains, describes and predicts how sub-state actors ultimately anchor global politics.
The literature and core concepts I have developed follow an interconnected trajectory across my oeuvre of published works:
Breaking the Ice (2008): In this book, I establish the historical and theoretical foundation of my work, examining how indigenous populations in Alaska and Northern Canada transitioned from marginalized groups into central actors in Arctic governance. I introduce the concept of sovereign duality (or hybrid sovereignty) to show how comprehensive land claim agreements (LCAs) allowed native communities to balance ancient traditional frameworks with modern Westernized corporate and public government systems without losing their cultural identity.
On Thin Ice (2009): Transitioning directly to international relations theory, I use this work to introduce my “Fourth Image”—the tribal or sub-state indigenous level of analysis—to correct a structural blind spot in Kenneth Waltz’s traditional three-image framework. Using the rapid geopolitical changes of the polar thaw, I illustrate the successful synthesis of tribe and state, highlighting how a nation’s Arctic sovereignty relies heavily on continuous indigenous occupancy and co-management systems. I also issue a warning regarding the potential for “Inuit fundamentalism” if socioeconomic gaps widen between indigenous corporate elites and remote local communities.
Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom (2009/2010): Here, I shift to a macro-level evaluation of the geopolitical impacts of climate change, presenting the melting ice cap as a structural double-edged sword. I contrast the “Doom” of ecological and cultural disruptions with the “Boom” of newly exposed maritime routes and oil reserves, framing the thawing Arctic Ocean as a “New Mediterranean” transit basin where resource-rich indigenous corporations have the leverage to become the new “Saudi Royals” of the polar world.
Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (2024): In this recent update, written in the wake of the post-2022 freeze of the Arctic Council, I mount a robust, realist defense of the Arctic as an enduring zone of peace. I argue that the region’s hostile environment makes unilateral conflict logistically prohibitive, naturally forcing states toward cooperation. I also critique southern defense establishments for “threat inflation” and for executing a performative “staged Great Game”.
Additionally, across a prolific mix of theoretical essays, such as “Tribe, State, and War: Balancing the Subcomponents of World Order,” book chapters, and multi-volume book series (such as my States of Mind project in addition to my books on the Arctic), I formalize my theory of Constructive Realism as well as Fourth Image Theory. From these, I deconstruct world order into a taxonomy with three key pillars: the Organic (natural cultural/kinship foundations), the Synthetic (artificial administrative frameworks), and the Ethereal (ideational or spiritual doctrines).
Upon this structural foundation, I define the various entities that emerge when these components interact, contrasting brittle, artificially engineered regimes (ESSLEs, or Ephemeral Synthetic State-Level Entities) with cohesive, historically aligned nation-states (POSLEs). Ultimately, my work culminates in the concept of Persistent Organic Sub-State Entities (POSSEs, or Persistent Organic State-Level Entities)—a highly resilient, self-defending unit (such as an Arctic indigenous corporation or a localized tribal matrix) that fuses all three subcomponents to survive a “State of Siege” and anchor fragile national institutions from the ground up.
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, exploring 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 but the continuation of business 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.
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:
Attribute
Conventional Warfare
Information-Age Netwar
Organizational Structure
Strict military hierarchy
Decentralized, flat network cells
Primary Center of Gravity
Capital cities, industrial hubs, formal militaries
Shared ideological narrative, digital nodes
Operational Speed
Linear, dependent on supply chains
Rapid, swarm-based, digitally synchronized
Resource Requirements
Immense industrial capital and state revenue
Low-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 introduce 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:
The First Image: The Individual (human nature, psychology of leaders).
The Second Image: The State (domestic political and economic structures, democracy vs. authoritarianism).
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.
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:
The transition from sail to steam propulsion.
The replacement of wooden hulls with iron and steel armor plating.
The evolution from solid shot to explosive shells and rifled ordnance.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
FrontierEthos: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
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.
The sovereign power resides in the people, to be exercised through their elected representatives and direct democratic referendums.
The official national languages are Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) and English.
Article II: Bill of Rights and Liberties
Fundamental Rights: Every citizen is born free and equal in dignity. No law shall discriminate based on race, ancestry, language, or creed.
Freedom of Expression: The right to free speech, a free press, and peaceful assembly shall not be abridged.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Legislative power is vested in a unicameral parliament, the Inatsisartut, consisting of 31 members elected by proportional representation every four years.
It has sole authority to pass domestic laws, levy taxes, approve national budgets, control and restrict immigration, and ratify commercial treaties.
All laws concerning the extraction of critical mineral wealth require a three-fifths supermajority vote.
Article IV: Executive Branch (The Presidency)
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.
The President serves as the Head of State, Head of Government, and Commander-in-Chief.
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
The judicial power is independent of the executive and legislative branches, vested in a Supreme Court and lower regional courts.
The courts interpret the laws of the Republic, integrating western common law with traditional Inuit customary justice.
Article VI: Amendment and Ratification
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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
Sarcasm aside, I think it is worth revisiting why Trump’s foreign policy turn towards a radical sort of imperialist interventionism is so evil and unsurprising. I was confident back in 2016 that he was always going to be an old-school imperialist who uses US military conquest purely for resource extraction in a way that would be far worse than neocon warmongering. I wrote at the time, following Zach Beauchamp (who continues to emphasize this point), that Trump’s foreign policy was neither the neo-conservative interventionism of the Clintons and Bushes of the world, nor the principled anti-interventionism of libertarian scholars like Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall, nor even the nationalist isolationism of paleoconservatives like James Buchanan. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy has always (quite consistently, since he was still a pro-choice democrat in the 90s) been about advancing inchoate national economic and political interests—which really just means the interests of the politically connected.
But I do not want to revisit Trump’s imperialist foreign policy just to gloat. I also want to revisit and restate why this foreign policy is unbelievably unjust and self-destructive. What I wrote back in 2016 is still worth reposting at length:
First, Trump’s style of Jacksonian foreign policy is largely responsible for most of the humanitarian atrocities committed by the American government. Second, Trump’s economic foreign policy is antithetical to the entire spirit of the liberal tradition; it undermines the dignity and freedom of the individual and instead treats the highest good as for the all-powerful nation-state (meaning mostly the politicians and their special interests) as the end of foreign policy, rather than peace and liberty. Finally, Trump’s foreign policy fails for the same reasons that socialism fails. If the goals of foreign policy are to represent “national interest,” then the policymaker must know what that “national interest” even is and we have little reason to think that is the case, akin to the knowledge problem in economic coordination.
… This is because the Jacksonian view dictates that we should use full force in war to advance our interests and the reasons for waging war are for selfish rather than humanitarian purposes. We have good reason to think human rights under Trump will be abused to an alarming degree, as his comments that we should “bomb the hell out of” Syria, kill the noncombatant families of suspected terrorists, and torture detainees indicate. Trump is literally calling for the US to commit inhumane war crimes in the campaign, it is daunting to think just how dark his foreign policy could get in practice.
To reiterate: Trump’s foreign policy views are just a particularly nasty version of imperialism and colonialism. Mises dedicated two entire sections of his chapter on foreign policy in Liberalism: The Classical Tradition to critiquing colonialism and revealing just how contrary these views are to liberalism’s commitment to peace and liberty. In direct opposition to Trump’s assertions that we should go to war to gain another country’s wealth and resources and that we should expand military spending greatly, Mises argues:
“Wealth cannot be won by the annexation of new provinces since the “revenue” deprived from a territory must be used to defray the necessary costs of its administration. For a liberal state, which entertains no aggressive plans, a strengthening of its military power is unimportant.”
Mises’ comments on the colonial policy in his time are extremely pertinent considering Trump’s calls to wage ruthlessly violent wars and commit humanitarian crises. “No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism,” Mises argued. “Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified.”
Trump says the ends of foreign policy are to aggressively promote “our” national interests, Mises says “[t]he goal of the domestic policy of liberalism is the same as that of its foreign policy: peace.” Trump views the world as nations competing in a zero-sum game and there must be one winner that can only be brought about through military conquest and economic protectionism, Mises says liberalism “aims at the peaceful cooperation between nations as within each nation” and specifically attacks “chauvinistic nationalists” who “maintain that irreconcilable conflicts of interest exist among the various nations[.]” Trump is rabidly opposed to free trade and is horrifically xenophobic on immigration, the cornerstone of Mises’ foreign policy is free movement of capital and labor over borders. There is no “congruence” between Trump and any classically liberal view on foreign policy matters in any sense; to argue otherwise is to argue from a position of ignorance, delusion, or to abandon the very spirit of classical liberalism in the first place.
…Additionally, even if we take Trump’s nationalist ends as given, the policy means Trump prefers of violent military intervention likely will not be successful for similar reasons to why socialism fails. Christopher Coyne has argued convincingly that many foreign interventions in general fail for very similar reasons to why attempts at economic intervention fail, complications pertaining to the Hayekian knowledge problem. How can a government ill-equipped to solve the economic problems of domestic policy design and control the political institutions and culture of nations abroad? Coyne mainly has the interventionism of neoconservatives and liberals in mind, but many of his insights apply just as well to Trump’s Jacksonian vision for foreign policy.
The knowledge problem also applies on another level to Trump’s brand of interventionism. Trump assumes that he, in all his wisdom as president, can know what the “national interest” of the American people actually is, just like socialist central planners assume they know the underlying value scales or utility functions of consumers in society. We have little reason to assume this is the case.
Let’s take a more concrete example: Trump seems to think one example of intervention in the name of national interest is to take the resource of another country that our country needs, most commonly oil. However, how is he supposed to know which resources need to be pillaged for the national interest? There’s a fundamental calculation problem here. A government acting without a profit signal cannot know the answer to such a problem and lacks the incentive to properly answer it in the first place as the consequences failure falls upon the taxpayers, not the policy makers. Even if Trump and his advisors could figure out that the US needs a resource, like oil, and successfully loots it from another country, like Libya, there is always the possibility that this artificial influx of resources, this crony capitalist welfare for one resource at the expense of others, is crowding out potentially more efficient substitutes.
For an example, if the government through foreign policy expands the supply of oil, this may stifle entrepreneurial innovations for potentially more efficient resources in certain applications, such as natural gas, solar, wind, or nuclear in energy, for the same reasons artificially subsidizing these industries domestically stifle innovation. They artificially reduce the relative scarcity of the favored resource, reducing the incentive for entrepreneurs to find innovative means of using other resources or more efficient production methods. At the very least, Trump and his advisors would have little clue how to judge the opportunity cost of pillaging various resources and so would not know how much oil to steal from Libya. Even ignoring all those problems, it’s very probable that it would be cheaper and morally superior to simply peaceably trade with another country for oil (or any other resource) rather than waging a costly, violent, inhumane war in the first place.
Having said all that, there is plenty I got wrong in picturing Trump as an old-school imperialist. During Trump’s first term, I underestimated the extent to which institutional constraints would stop him from acting on his worst nationalist and imperialist impulses. But this term, those constraints are gone. The Mattises, Tillersons, Boltons, and Pences of the world have been replaced with the Vances, Noems, Rubios, and Hegseths. As a result, thinking of Trump as an old-school imperialist and nationalist is becoming more accurate since he is allowed to act on his irrational, deranged impulses.
Second, I failed to distinguish sufficiently between resource extraction through indirect means of violent regime change, tariffs, weapons supply, and 19th-century colonialist-style direct annexation versions of it. I do still think that if Trump really did what he most consistently wants he would do quite a bit of annexation and old school colonialism (see his comments on Greenland and Canada), but he seems a bit more content than I projected back then to use military force to install stooges and puppet regimes for resource extraction (as he has sought to do in both Gaza and now Venezuela). Which, to your point, is not as different from the Nixon/Bush/Clinton/Reagan type intervention as reactionary centrists would have you believe, but the nakedness of the extractive nationalist motivation does mark a difference that encourages even more brazenly cruel, more illegal, and more strategically incoherent and unpredictable interventionist warmongering.
After all, it doesn’t matter so much the character of public officials as the institutional incentives they face. But in matters of foreign policy problems of temperament and character do matter because the social situation between foreign leaders in diplomacy can often make a huge difference.
I did hedge that by allowing that Trump may be a uniquely unfit person so as to constitute a sui-generis case. But I should have been more emphatic about that: Trump really is a uniquely world-historically dangerous monster, and he has gotten more and more incoherent and impulsive over the years with his cognitive decline.
Finally, the biggest miss in my analysis of Trump’s foreign policy back then is that I put far too much emphasis on Trump’s focus on material goods, thinking he really just thought of geopolitics like a 12-year-old approaches a turn-based strategy game like Risk in just accruing more stuff. But in reality, his approach is far more disturbing and vile than even that. It is not simply about getting oil for US oil companies. In the case of Venezuela, oil execs do not seem so gun-ho. As one private equity investor told the Financial Times last week, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.” Indeed, the political risk is so big there Exonn’s CEO has called Venezuela “uninvestable” and Trump is trying to force oil companies to misallocate capital to Venezuela.
Narrow left-wing materialists’ critiques like mine misfire because they treat material resources as the main thing. It is not the oil per se that Trump wants, but what the oil represents. He is instead approaching international geo-politics like an 8-year-old driven by malignant narcissism: he wants symbols of nationalist masculine domination. Indeed, when asked why he wanted Greenland, Trump was quoted as saying:
Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.
Indeed, the fact that Greenland looks big on a Mercator projection of the earth has as much to do with why Trump wants it as the oil. As Trump continues his authoritarian assaults on individual liberty domestically and pursues semiotic nationalist domination internationally, one can only vainly pray that something keeps his dark, demonic, twisted sadist fantasies in check without devolving into a true civilization-level threat.
Note: This is the third in a series of essays on public discourse. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2
Three years ago, I started this essay series on the collapse of public discourse. At the time, I was frustrated by how left-wing and progressive spaces had become cognitively rigid, hostile, and uncharitable to any and all challenges to their orthodoxy. I still stand by most everything I said in those essays. Once you have successfully identified that your interlocutors are genuinely engaging in good faith, you must drop the soldier mindset that you are combating a barbarian who is going to destroy society and adopt a scout mindset. For discourse to serve any useful epistemic or political function, interlocutors must accept and practice something like Habermas’ rules of discourse or Grice’s maxims of discourse, where everyone is allowed to question or introduce any idea to cooperatively arrive at an intersubjective truth. The project of that previous essay was to therapeutically remind myself and any readers to actually apply and practice those rules of discourse in good-faith communication.
However, at the time, I should have more richly emphasized something that has been quite obviously true for some time now: most interlocutors in the political realm have little to no interest in discourse. I wish more people had such an interest, and still stand by the project of trying to get more people, particularly in leftist and libertarian spaces, to realize that when they speak to each other, they are not dealing with barbarian threats. However, recent events have made it clear that the real problem is figuring out when an interlocutor is worthy of having the rules of discourse applied in exchanges with them. Here is an obviously non-exhaustive list of such events in recent times that make this clear:
Even the Supreme Court, the institution that ostensibly is most committed to publicly justifying and engaging in good-faith reasoning about laws, is now giving blatantly awful, authoritarian opinions so out of step with their ostensibly originalist and/or textualist legal hermeneutics and constitutionalist principles (not to mention the opinions of even conservative judges in lower courts). It certainly seems the justices are just as nakedly corrupt and intellectually bankrupt as rabble-rousing aspiring autocrats. Indeed, the court is in such a decrepit state of personalist capture by an aspiring fascist dictator that they aren’t even attempting to publicly justify ‘shadow docket’ rulings in his favor. One can only conclude conservative justices are engaging in bad-faith power-grabs for themselves, whether they intend to or not. Although this has always been true of statist monocentric courts to some extent, recent events have only further eroded the court’s pretenses to being a politically
All these were obvious trends three years ago and have very predictably only gotten more severe. You may quibble with the extent of my assessment of any individual example above. Regardless, all but the most committed of Trumpanzees can agree that there is a time and place to become a bit dialogically illiberal in times like these. Thus, it is time to address how one can be a dialogical liberal when the barbarians truly are at the gates. The tough question to address now is this: what should the dialogical liberal do when faced with a real barbarian, and how does she know she is dealing with a barbarian?
This is an essay about how to remain a dialogical liberal when dialogical liberalism is being weaponized against you. This essay isn’t for the zealots or the trolls. It’s for those of us who believed, maybe still believe, that democracy depends on dialogue—but who are also haunted by the sense that this faith is being used against us.
Epistemically Exploitative Bullshit
I always intended to write an essay to correct the shortcomings of the original one. I regret that, for various personal reasons, I did not do so sooner. The sad truth is that a great many dialogical illiberals who are also substantively illiberal engage in esoteric communication (consciously or not). That is, their exoteric pretenses to civil, good-faith communication elide an esoteric will to domination. Sartre observed this phenomenon in the context of antisemitism, and he is worth quoting at length:
Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather, his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.
What Sartre says of antisemitism is true of illiberal authoritarians quite generally. Thomas Szanto has helpfully called this phenomenon “epistemically exploitative bullshit.”
One feature of epistemically exploitative bullshit that Szanto highlights is that epistemically exploitative bullshit need not be intentional. Indeed, as Sartre implies in the quote above, the ‘bad faith’ of the epistemically exploitative bullshitter involves a sort of self-deception that he may not even be consciously aware of. Indeed, most authoritarians (especially in the Trump era) are not sufficiently self-aware or intelligent enough to consciously realize that they are deceiving others about their attitude towards truth by spouting bullshit. As Henry Frankfurt observed, bullshit is different from lying in that the liar is intentionally misrepresenting the truth, but the bullshitter has no real concern for truth in the first place. Thus, many bullshiters (especially those engaged in epistemically exploitative bullshit) believe their own bullshit, often to their detriment.
However, the fact that epistemically exploitative bullshit is often unintentional, or at least not consciously intentional, creates a serious ineliminable epistemic problem for the dialogical liberal who seeks to combat it. It is quite difficult to publicly and demonstrably falsify the hypothesis that one’s interlocutor is engaging in epistemically exploitative bullshit. This often causes people who, in their heart of hearts, aspire to be epistemically virtuous dialogical liberals to misidentify their interlocutors as engaging in epistemically exploitative bullshit and contemptuously dismiss them. I, for one, have been guilty of this quite a bit in recent years, and I imagine any self-reflective reader will realize they have made this mistake as well. We will return to this epistemic difficulty in the next essay in this series.
To avoid this mistake, we must continually remind ourselves that the ascription of intention is sometimes a red herring. Epistemically exploitative bullshit is not just a problem because bullshitters intentionally weaponize it to destroy liberal democracies. It is a problem because of the social and (un)dialectical function that it plays in discourse rather than its psychological status as intentional or unintentional.
It is also worth remembering at this point that it is not just fire-breathing fascists who engage in epistemically exploitative bullshit. Many non-self-aware, not consciously political, perhaps even liberal, political actors spout epistemically exploitative bullshit as well. Consider the phenomenon of property owners—both wealthy landlords and middle-class suburbanites—who appeal to “neighborhood character” and environmental concerns to weaponize government policy for the end of protecting the economic rents they receive in the form of property values. Consider the similar phenomenon of many market incumbents, from tech CEOs in AI to healthcare executives and professionals, to sports team owners, to industrial unions, to large media companies, who all weaponize various seemingly plausible (and sometimes substantively true) economic arguments to capture the state’s regulatory apparatus. Consider how sugar, tobacco, and petrochemical companies all weaponized junk science on, respectively, obesity, cigarettes, and climate change to undermine efforts to curtail their economic activity. Almost none of these people are fire-breathing fascists, and many may believe their ideological bullshit is true and tell themselves they are helping the world by advancing their arguments.
The pervasive economic phenomenon of “bootleggers and Baptists” should remind us that an unintentional form of epistemically exploitative bullshit plays a crucial role in rent seeking all across the political spectrum. This form of bullshit is particularly hard to combat precisely because it is unintentional, but its lack of intentionality in no way lessens the harmful social and (un)dialectical functions it severe.
Despite those considerations, it is still worth distinguishing between consciously intentional forms of aggressive esotericism and more unintentional versions because they must be approached very differently. Unintentional bullshitters do not see themselves as dialogically illiberal. Therefore, responding to them with aggressive rhetorical flourishes that treat them contemptuously is very unlikely to be helpful. For this reason, the general (though defeasible) presumption that any given person spouting epistemically exploitative bullshit is not an enemy that I was trying to cultivate in the second part of this essay series still stands. In the next essay, I will address how we know when this presumption has been defeated. However, for now, let us turn our attention to the forms of epistemically exploitative bullshit common today on the right. We have now seen how epistemically exploitative bullshit can appear even in technocratic, liberal settings. But that phenomenon takes on a more virulent form when fused with authoritarian intent. This is what I call aggressive esotericism.
Aggressive Esotericism
The corrosiveness of these more ‘liberal’ and technocratic forms of epistemically exploitative bullshit discussed above, while serious, pales in comparison to more bombastically authoritarian forms of it. The truly authoritarian epistemically exploitative bullshiter aims at more than amassing wealth by capturing some limited area of state policy. While he also does that, the fascist aims at the more ambitious goal of dismantling democracy and seizing the entire apparatus of the state itself.
Let us name this more dangerous form of epistemically exploitative bullshit. Let us call this aggressive esotericism and loosely define it as the phenomenon of authoritarians weaponizing the superficial trappings of democratic conversation to elide their will to dominate others. This makes the fascistic, aggressive esotericist all the more cruel, destructive, and corrosive of society’s epistemic and political institutions.
It is worth briefly commenting on my choice of the words “aggressive esotericism” for this. The word “esoteric” in the way I am using it has its roots in Straussian scholars who argue that many philosophers in the Western tradition historically did not literally mean what their discursive prose appears to say. Esoteric here does not mean “strange,” but something closer to “hidden,” in contrast to the exoteric, surface-level meaning of the text. We need not concern ourselves with the fascinating and controversial question of whether Straussians are right to esoterically read the history of Western philosophy as they do. Instead, I am applying the general idea of a distinction between the surface level and deeper meaning of a text, the sociological problem of interpreting both the words and the deeds of certain very authoritarian political actors.
I choose the word “aggressive” to contrast with what Arthur Melzer calls “protective,” “pedagogical,” or “defensive” esotericism. In Philosophy Between the Lines Melzer argues that historically, philosophers often hid a deeper layer of meaning in their great texts. In the ancient world, Melzer argues, this was in part because they feared theoretical philosophical ideas could disintegrate social order (hence the “protective esotericism”), wanted their young students to learn how to come to philosophical truths themselves (hence the “pedagogical esotericism”), or else wanted to protect themselves from authorities for ‘corrupting the youth’ (as Socrates was accused) with their heterodox ideas.
As the modern world emerged during the Enlightenment, Melzer argues esotericism continued as philosophers such as John Locke wrote hidden messages not just for defensive reasons but to help foster liberating moral progress in society, as they had a far less pessimistic view about the role of theoretical philosophy in public life (hence their “political esotericism”). Whether Melzer is correct in his reading of the history of Western political thought need not concern us now. My claim is that many authoritarians (both right-wing Fascists and left-wing authoritarian Communists) invert this liberal Enlightenment political esotericism by engaging—both in words and in deeds, both consciously and subconsciously, and both intentionally and unintentionally—in aggressive esotericism. Hiding their esoteric will to domination behind a superficial façade of ‘rational’ argumentation.
Aggressive esotericism is a subset of the epistemically exploitative bullshit. While aggressive esotericism may be more often intentional than more technocratic forms of epistemically exploitative bullshit, it is not always so. You might realize this when you reflect on heated debates you may have had during Thanksgiving dinners with your committed Trumpist family members. Nonetheless, this lack of intention doesn’t cover up the fact that their wanton wallowing in motivated reasoning, rational ignorance, and rational irrationality has the selfish effect of empowering members of their ingroup over members of their outgroup. This directly parallels how the lack of self-awareness of the technocratic rentseeker ameliorates the dispersed economic costs on society.
Aggressive Esotericism and the Paradox of Tolerance
Even if one suspects one is encountering a true fascist, one should still have the defeasible presumption that they are a good-faith interlocutor. Nonetheless, fascists perniciously abuse this meta-discursive norm. This effect has been well-known since Popper labelled it the paradox of tolerance.
The paradox of tolerance has long been abused by dialogical illiberals on both the left and the right to undermine the ideas of free speech and toleration in an open society, legal and social norms like academic freedom and free speech, and to generally weaken the presumption of good faith we have been discussing. This, however, was far from Popper’s intention. It is worth revisiting Popper’s discussion of the Paradox of Tolerance in The Open Society and Its Enemies:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right even to suppress them, for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to anything as deceptive as rational argument, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, exactly as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or as we should consider incitement to the revival of the slave trade.
His point here is not so much to sanction State censorship of fascist ideas. Instead, his point is that there are limits to what should be tolerated. To translate this to our language earlier in the essay, he is just making the banal point that our presumption of good-faith discourse is, in fact, defeasible. The “right to tolerate the intolerant” need not manifest as legal restrictions on speech or the abandonment of norms like academic freedom. This is often a bad idea, given that state and administrative censorship creates a sort of Streisand effect that fascists can exploit by whining, “Help, help, I’m being repressed.” If you gun down the fascist messenger, you guarantee that he will be made into a saint. Further, censorship will just create a backlash as those who are not yet fully-committed Machiavellian fascists become tribally polarized against the ideas of liberal democracy. Even if Popper himself might not have been as resistant to state power as I am, there are good reasons not to use state power.
Instead, our “right to tolerate the intolerant” could be realized by fostering a strong, stigmergically evolved social stigma against fascist views. Rather than censorship, this stigma should be exercised by legally tolerating the fascists who spout their aggressively esoteric bullshit even while we strongly rebuke them. Cultivating this stigma includes not just strongly rebuking the epistemically exploitative bullshit ‘arguments’ fascists make, but exercising one’s own right to free speech and free association, reporting/exposing/boycotting those, and sentimental education with those the fascists are trying to target. Sometimes, it must include defensive violence against fascists when their epistemically exploitative bullshit manifests not just in words, but acts of aggression against their enemies.
The paradox of tolerance, as Popper saw, is not a rejection of good-faith dialogue but a recognition of its vulnerability. The fascists’ most devastating move is not to shout down discourse but to simulate it: to adopt its procedural trappings while emptying it of sincerity. What I call aggressive esotericism names this phenomenon. It is the strategic abuse of our meta-discursive presumption of good faith.
Therefore, one must be very careful to guard against mission creep in pursuing this stigmergic process of cultivating stigma in defense of toleration. As Nietzsche warned, we must be guarded against the danger that we become the monsters against whom we are fighting. I hope to discuss later in this essay series how many on the left have become such monsters. For now, let us just observe that this sort of non-state-based intolerant defense of toleration does not conceptually conflict with the defeasible presumption of good faith.
In the next part of this series, I turn to the harder question: when and how can a dialogical liberal justifiably conclude that an interlocutor is no longer operating in good faith?
Peloponnese in Southern Greece features one of the most spectacular rack trains in the world, “Odontotos”. The short route connects a seashore town (Diakofto) with the mountainous Kalavryta plateau (700m altitude), up and through the impressive Vouraikos Gorge. Visited it for the first time recently. I kind of knew that railways were built in 1880s/90s? Something like that. The relatively young Greece acquired the large Thessalia flatland in the north at the time, putting integration via transport into perspective. Government was frantically trying to develop inter/ intra-national trade routes and at the same time bring forth a late to the party industrial mojo. Railway became a smoking symbol of this endeavor.
The initial expansion from Athens to the Peloponnese makes sense: Apart from the obvious pros (accessibility, speed, safety, mass character, for natives and visitors alike) of the railway, there were some major ports and established trade houses there, while agricultural production was also of note. The rails formed a curve around the northern/ western coastal line of Peloponnese and cut through its mainland in the southern/ eastern sides, in order to form a ring of sorts:
This is the 1882 plan, which mostly went through. The network was constructed in a “regular” manner, albeit with rails less wide than the international standard ‘cause cost, including cities, towns, ports and a couple of special sites (i.e., Olympia). And then we have the green-circled outcrop, the rack rail. The recent trip there left me perplexed. Why decide to undertake such a difficult task in rugged terrain, that needed expertise and special rails (different from those of the rest)?
Surely, Kalavryta was (and still is) a place of national significance. The Greek Revolution of 1821 is said to have started at a monastery (Agia Lavra) there, where the local Metropolitan blessed the gathered leaders of the upcoming war. A celebratory 1896 edition, on the occasion of the first modern Olympic Games (hosted in Athens that year), even chronicles the Peloponnese railway saga. Regarding the rack train, it references the exquisite natural environment, Agia Lavra and another historical monastery as good reasons to give it a ride. Fair enough, but still somewhat vague. What else was there that made that region stand out from the others? Here the rationale gets a step up.
Kalavryta was home to a wealthy, powerful family. It happened that a member of the family served as Member of Parliament when the railway project was on fire. This man persuaded the PM of the vital role a railway connection was to play in the development of the surrounding areas. Provided that a scion of the same family serves in the current Greek Parliament, too, this “local interest cuddling” reasoning gets some traction, in my view.
Even if the decision was just that, local patronizing, it still held some more rational economic – political water: Back then, the cost of sending wheat from the (fertile) plateau down to sea level was twice as high the cost of shipping said wheat from fucking Russia to Greece (compare 22km to, dunno, 2200km). And why not just import the dang thing then? Well, Greece had had the “honor” to be at the receiving end of a naval pacific blockade by the era’s great forces in 1886, so it perhaps had reached the conclusion that food security was something to be pursued.
The rack train project was initiated by law in 1889 and (after absorbing 3x the envisaged cost plus 5x the scheduled time of completion, effectively cutting short any ideas of expanding it further towards Tripoli) began its inaugural journey in, well, 1896.
It turns out that the whole railway affair was overhyped and demand for train services did not to really stretch that far to meet supply, not to mention the appearance of competitive means of transport (steamboats and roads). The rack train, however, remained the sole anchor of reliable transport till the 1970s, when roads proper were built. In the meantime, it also became a traveler’s sensation, too, confirming the positive light that celebratory book shone on it 120+ years before.
During my long traveling over Europe this summer, among other areas, I ventured to Albania, a country where houses frequently do not have numbers and where I located the building where a friend of my youth now lives by a drawing on a gate. This is a country where the so-called oriental bazaar is buzzing everywhere, where towns literally hang on cliffs, and where one easily runs across the ruins of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman legacy of the country and the “archaeology” of the recent communist past (small concrete family bunkers, tunnels for the former communist nomenklatura, monumental sculptures and mosaics in the socialist realism style).
It was interesting to see how this country, which lived much of the 20th century under the most vicious communist dictatorship (1944-1990), is now trying to live a normal life. To some extent, Albania is very similar to present-day Russia: decades of the negative natural selection under communism killed much of self-reliance, individual initiative, and produced the populace that looks up to the government for the solutions of their problems. For the past thirty years, a new generation emerged, and things did dramatically change. Yet, very much like in Russia, much of the populace feels nostalgia for the “good” old days, which is natural.
According to opinion polls, 46% of the people are nostalgic for the developed communism of dictator Enver Hoxha (1944-1985), an Albanian Stalin, and 43% are against communism; the later number should be higher, given the fact that many enterprising Albanians (1/4 of the population) live and work abroad. During the last decades of its existence, Albanian communism slipped into a wild isolationism of the North Korean style. Except for Northern Korea and Romania, all countries, from the United States, Germany, UK (capitalist hyenas) to the USSR, China, and Yugoslavia (traitors to socialism), were considered enemies. Incidentally, Albanian communism was much darker and tougher than the Brezhnev-era USSR. Nevertheless, as it naturally happened in Russia and some other countries, in thirty years, the memory of a part of the population laundered and cleansed the communist past, and this memory now paints this past as a paradise, where everyone was happy and looked confidently into the future, where secret police and labor concentration camps existed for a good reason, and where the vengeful dictator appears as a caring father.
In the hectic transition to market economy and with the lack of established judicial system, there naturally emerged a widespread corruption, nepotism. But, at the same time, small business somehow flourishes. The masses and elites of the country aspire to be united with neighboring Kosovo since both countries are populated by Albanian majorities. On top of this, Kosovo is the birthplace of Albanian nationalism. However, unlike current Russia, which is spoiled with abundant oil and gas resources (the notorious resource curse factor), corrupt Albanian bureaucrats that rule over a small country exercise caution. Although that small country is too blessed with oil, natural gas, chromium, copper, and iron-nickel, they do not waste their resources on sponsoring geopolitical ventures and harassing their neighbors. For themselves, the Albanians resolved the Kosovo issue as follows: we will be administratively two different states, but de facto economically and socially we will be tied to each other, and all this makes life easier for people, preventing any conflicts. Not a small factor is that, unlike, for example, Russia or Turkey, Albanian nationalism is devoid of any imperial syndromes, and therefore there is no nostalgia for any glorious lost empire. The fact that Albania is a member of NATO also plays a significant role, which forces the Albanian elites behave. Acting smartly, instead of geopolitical games, they decided to fully invest in the development of the tourism business, believing that, in addition to mining their resources, this is the best development option.
Notes On Liberty 