What's Really Going on?

Reshaping the world

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There’s a temptation, particularly among Americans, to see every global flashpoint as its own little theater: Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan—each lit separately, each demanding its own posture. But this is a profound misunderstanding of the moment we’re living through. History doesn’t happen in pockets. What’s happening in Iran right now isn’t a regional dispute. It’s the closing chapter of a global realignment that began in earnest with the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s subsequent decline to a second-tier regional hegemony, and now the death of its empire. This is now culminating in a new geopolitical shape for the world—one in which the United States no longer has to play Atlas and carry the world on its shoulders.

Russia was, for decades, the second pole in a bipolar and then sort-of multipolar world. Its war in Ukraine has broken the illusion that it is anything other than a regional power. Its military and core economy are being hollowed out by a war it cannot win, even if it wins. Even its client states—once tethered tightly by pipelines and paranoia—are side-eyeing the exits … and making trade deals with the United States (ohhhhh, you thought it was about tariffs?). As Russia fades from the world stage, it leaves a power vacuum in places where it once offered ballast to Western pressure: Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and critically, the Middle East.

But here’s where things are different. The United States isn’t rushing to fill that vacuum with boots and bases anymore. Instead, it’s reshaping the board entirely by making the regional leaders step up and do their part for world stability. We are doing so quietly, deliberately, and with a long memory.

By way of example, Iran has long served as the keystone in an anti-Western, anti-integrationist axis that stretches from the Strait of Hormuz to the Kremlin’s doorstep. Call them by whatever name you like—BRICS, the Unaligned Nations—these countries have had to chart a course between America and some other alternative, sometimes Russia, rarely the EU, and incredibly, China. In fact, these nations have more often been useful idiots to China’s bid for some kind of world leadership, and have proven to be its most convenient regional levers—economically, ideologically, diplomatically, and strategically. With extraordinarily limited naval power (its largest aircraft carrier was once a floating casino—no kidding), China depends on land-anchored partners to wedge open markets and pays them in corruption-infused infrastructure projects to resist American alignment. Iran is—was—the best of those partners. But a destabilized, diplomatically boxed-in Iran weakens China’s regional access and narrows its energy lifeline.

What’s unfolding right now isn’t about moral opposition to Iran’s regime or its constant attacks on Israel. It is about cutting off China’s reach without ever firing a shot in its direction and removing the last prop in the Russia-as-a-global-influencer matrix. China is being so hard outplayed here that they don’t even have a countermove. They can’t send in troops because they can’t get them there, feed them once they are there, or even be sure that they will stay Chinese given the opportunity to become something else. It’s a problem for them.

This is why the U.S. isn’t building new bases or launching full-scale invasions. Instead, it’s building arrangements: regional coalitions, economic corridors, energy compacts. The Abraham Accords weren’t the end of a deal—they were the beginning of a regional architecture that renders the need for American micromanagement obsolete. By encouraging local actors—Israel, the Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan—to align based on shared security and economic self-interest, the U.S. has created a framework in which the heavy lifting is done without our constant presence.

The same thing is being done in the Russia–Ukraine conflict. The United States has stepped back from the Cold War stance of saying, “Gosh that looks bad, here’s guns and money, figure it out and then we’ll step in if we have to,” and moved to a conversation with the countries in that region that says, “Damn, sux to be you. I’d take care of that if I was you before it becomes really bad for you. Good luck with all THAT!” Don’t you get that this is why Zelensky lost his mind in the White House and was then forced to fly around the world being burped like a baby by world leaders?

My readers know that I like saying the quiet parts out loud, and here it is: the United States is exiting the role of world policeman not because of moral exhaustion or isolationist drift—but because we no longer need to pay the cover charge to get into the club where we’ll probably have to fight the bouncer anyway.

We don’t need them. We never really did.

The U.S. is energy independent.

We are demographically healthier than nearly every major power, and many of the lesser ones.

Our trade routes are optional, not essential, and they are getting stronger with tariff-based diplomacy (fight me).

Our food, water, and essential manufacturing can’t be eliminated by military attack—something that no other country can say.

The world, in short, no longer offers us leverage—we are the leverage. And this is where our problem lies. We outspend what we collect to pay for a system that no longer benefits us. THAT is what is coming to an end. And it will be messy—and that’s what you’re seeing now, the messiness of the transition.

The future of American foreign policy will be less about firepower and more about positioning. But we won’t give up the firepower. We’ll guarantee trade routes we care about—and only them. We won’t actively disrupt the other ones, but they will shrink without access to our markets.

We’ll quietly ensure that no rival power ever achieves the scale needed to challenge us globally. Not by confrontation—but by attrition. By leaning into the geography, the demography, and the economics that already favor us.

But that’s only half the story.

The other half—the one whispered on the trading floors and murmured among the policy cynics—is that this realignment isn’t just about high principle. It’s about profit. When Iran is boxed in, when China is pinned down diplomatically, when Russia is bleeding resources by the hour—that’s when capital flows to the safe harbor. The U.S. isn’t just reshaping the geopolitical map. It’s quietly tightening its grip on the global ledger. What are you going to do, invest in Russia? The EU, with its anemic growth and lack of cohesive decisioning? The UK, with its whatever-the-hell-is-going-on-there? China, with its total lack of respect for anything not Chinese?

Oil, weapons systems, cyber infrastructure, currencies, debt issuance—it all flows back toward the U.S. and its allies when chaos is introduced into regimes that can’t play long-term. And that, whether we like it or not, is part of the calculus. Remove the need for constant security enforcement, and you don’t just free up soldiers—you free up capital. That capital gets reallocated. And right now, it’s coming home.

This is the hard truth: Americans got used to playing God on the world stage and forgot how to play builder at home. But that’s changing. Even lightweight minds like Ezra Klein realize that we can’t build anything in this country anymore because of the accretion of liberal anti-growth policies. Hat tip to my friend Robert Rodriguez for reading Klein’s book and explaining it to me, because I just couldn’t do it.

The old model—American power projected through permanent military presence—is giving way to a new one: American influence sustained through strategy, leverage, and the ruthless pursuit of outcomes that serve our long-term advantage, as a stand-alone country—not as the First Among Equals.

We don’t need to be everywhere anymore. We just need to make sure that no one else can be.

So don’t just watch it happen. Plant your flag in it.

The future isn’t globalized in the way the Davos class imagined. It’s fragmented, regionalized, still interconnected—but now on terms that no longer require the U.S. to be both sheriff and social worker. And if we’re smart, we’ll use this reprieve not just to cash in—but to rebuild at home: infrastructure, industry, borders, communities, families.

Let the others chase ideology. We’ll build outcomes.

The Achilles’ heel to all of this is the way that our elected bureaucracy spends money—and borrows to do so. I’ve written about it before. We are literally looking at another 300 years of hegemony in the world, except for the fact that we will probably suffocate under the weight of our own debt. Public spending has to be tamed, and to my knowledge, no empire (oops, did I say that out loud?) has ever done that successfully.