The research and thinking here is first rate. The analysis is chilling and doesn't require conspiracy to evoke the sense of revulsion at the lengths governments will go to to build and preserve power. Your projection section injected some relief, if only on the basis of conjecture.
The climate, though, may be the joker in the pack. The unpredictability of timing and the watering down of international reports all point to a climatic shock that could emerge without sufficient warning and upset the hegemonic chess board.
Alternatively, populations may get their shit together and forge a better way. I live in hope of the unexpected which is far more likely now than it has been historically.
Great analysis, I think they will try this but the net throughout just isnt there anymore to pull it off. The grid infrastructure is too complex to maintain for long.
"The U.S. has a continental economy and energy self-sufficiency through shale production…"
Except, it isn't, really.
Shale production produces light crude that is more like gasoline. I've read about oil workers putting shale crude right into their gasoline trucks!
But Permian shale crude doesn't make much diesel, and diesel runs the world. That's what the US has been getting from Canada at a steep discount, and why the US invade Venezuela — they both produce a very heavy crude that makes a lot of diesel. Plus, US refineries are tuned for heavier input than Permian crude.
Bottom line: the US exports a bunch of light crude it can't use and continues to be dependent on other countries for crude suitable for turning into diesel.
"The fire burns what depends on the grid. What is rooted in the land survives."
Do you think this is still true if hydropower is a local resource? I moved here specifically because we're a net electricity exporter. There's a 37 megawatt generator just one kilometre from me, but it sells all its power to California!
To me, getting one's power from a dam just three kilometres away seems pretty "rooted in the land"!
The US has five times the firearm violence as Canada and all other industrial democracies. US child violence is much higher than most other places. Economic violence is actively practised against the elderly, immigrants, and the young just entering the workforce. Corporate violence is practised in the food supply, which is largely implicated in four years of reduced lifetime over other industrial democracies — and the world's longest period (twelve years) of poor health before death.
Most people I know don't consider the US to be a very safe place at all. Unless you stay in your box.
Jan, I agree with your position that additional complexity needs to be held when considering U.S. energy independence, but I've got to side with Ali and then some.
Arguably (and I mean this in the sense that there are many valid reasons to disagree with me), we're a house of cards. But we're a house of cards for organizational, distributive, and social reasons. Not for resource constraints. The Gulf Countries cannot exist without massive imports of labor, technology, food, and more. Though it would hurt and could well collapse our government, if we closed off our borders, there is a shape of a State that could survive and be defensible against external actors.
And for the safety point, I will stand rather firmly by the position that the U.S. is, on average, much safer than a warzone. Nearly every one of our major cities has areas where, if you aren't from a neighborhood, and sometimes even if you are, it's perilous to the point of mortality to walk down the street. But those are exceptions. We are a hyper-violent and dangerous country when compared to any other country with per capita incomes even half our own, but we are not a warzone.
I would have to dig into sources and I'm at work right now --please feel free to fact-check and correct me if you have time --
If I remember correctly from the last time I had this conversation:
The U.S. is somewhere around 6-7 on violent death rate per 100,000 (all causes).
We have neighborhoods in St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, etc. that hit 40-60 per 100,000 (equivalent to a warzone)
And Afghanistan (national average) at peak violence was sitting around 50-80 per 100,000.
Ali, I appreciate this analysis. Nearly everything I encounter on U.S./Israeli aggression in the Middle East is actor-centric. Your system outcome orientation was refreshing.
A China question for you - though I agree that the system's outcome orientation is revealing for where we’re heading and where we came from in the Middle East, China has a strategic track record for planning in systems terms and their political/social structure allows them to plan and execute a 20-year project action; this in contrast to a 2-8 year cycle in the United States. Whether U.S. actions are the result of a system trajectory or brilliant and unseen actors, is there anything useful we can interpret from China's current action/inaction? If a trap is being sprung that galvanizes U.S. hegemony, why is China not making bigger waves?
China's inaction IS the action. Look at what China gains by not making waves:
It buys Iranian oil at a discount while everyone else pays $130. It positions Belt and Road as reconstruction infrastructure for after the war. It watches the U.S. burn through diplomatic capital, military resources, and allied goodwill. It lets the dollar get a short-term reprieve while the structural deficits underneath keep compounding. It maintains factory-of-the-world status because whoever wins still needs things built.
China plans in 20-year cycles, as you note. The U.S. plans in 2-8 year election cycles. A 20-year planner doesn't interrupt an opponent who is spending $5 billion every 96 hours on a war that degrades the opponent's own alliance network.
The trap you're describing works in the short term: chaos props the dollar, disrupts BRICS corridors, forces capital back to New York. But the medium-term math hasn't changed. U.S. debt-to-GDP at 123%. Interest payments over $1 trillion annually. Allies alienated. Trust eroding.
China's play is to let the short-term trap run, absorb the corridor disruption (painful but survivable for a continental economy with domestic demand), and position for the settlement phase. Whoever finances reconstruction owns the next architecture. China has the manufacturing base, the capital reserves, and the patience.
The U.S. is winning the quarter. China is playing the decade.
The structural question isn't why China is quiet. It's whether the U.S. can convert a short-term reprieve into a long-term position before the debt math catches up. That's the race. And China's bet is that it can't.
great piece, ambitious framing. I get the infrastructure-as-carrying-capacity framing and yes, it is easy to degrade a society by breaking down key physical support structures. Actually, Russia has been far better at a different method: breaking down societal coherence.
My problem is that you are assume these actors are a lot smarter and more coordinated than I think they actually are. The U.S., Israel, and Iran all executing coherent long-game strategies simultaneously? Maybe China is. In reality most are acting to hide their own mess. Don’t forget Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." Trump is a malicious clown who likes attention and does not want you to focus on the fact that he is a sick fuck. But ok, let's say he is the front man for Project 2025. Have you read it? It is pathetically shallow, no deep strategic thinking at all. Nothing at the level nearing your thinking.
Same goes for your climate section. I think the SDG framework was cooked up in Rio by honestly passionate people genuinely trying to turn things around, not as a control architecture. The reason extraction always wins over ecosystem restoration is much simpler: a solar panel factory has shareholders and a balance sheet, restoring rainfall in the Sahel doesn't. Capital goes where returns are predictable. No conspiracy needed, just markets doing what markets do.
You don't need a lot of conspiracy to produce chaos, just enough actors chasing short-term incentives with little brain and no knowledge of history, and the invisible hand will deliver it reliably, every time. Stupid as hell, but it works. Creating a future needs so much more intelligence than destroying one. Stupid is what stupid does. We are governed by monkeys not geniuses.
It sounds like you read the piece as a coordination argument, that I'm claiming these actors are smart enough to run a shared playbook. Is that right?
Because if so, I understand the pushback. That would be a conspiracy thesis, and Hanlon's Razor would be the right tool to cut it apart.
But that's not what the piece says. Layer 2 is titled "Convergent Destruction from Divergent Intent." It states explicitly that the argument doesn't require coordination. The observation is that stupid, selfish, uncoordinated actors produce convergent damage when they all hit the same coupled terrain. You don't need a chess grandmaster for that. You need geography and physics.
And it sounds like you actually agree with the mechanism. You said capital goes where returns are predictable, no conspiracy needed, just markets doing what markets do. That's the argument. Structural asymmetry does the work without anyone planning it.
So it seems like we're closer than either of us expected. The disagreement might be with a piece you thought I wrote rather than the one that's there. Worth a second read of Layer 2?
Reread it and yes, I overstressed the coordinaton element, but I was actually thinking of internal coordination of each of the monkeys involved, each with a different intent, all hitting the same wall from different directions for different reasons, still bringing it down.
I think both the US, EU, China and BRICS are all pursuing reserve currency dominance for obvious reasons. You are right that Iran accidentily is temporarily propping up the dollar. But I think the shift will happen, no matter what. What is now happening does not derail that process: the U.S. is running structural deficits that require the rest of the world to keep absorbing dollars. At some point the world says enough and the underlying set of relationships to work around the dollar are being built step by step. I think stupid U.S. policy is now actively accelerating the timeline towards a collapse of dollar dominance. The debt, the tariff chaos, the alienation of allies are all preconditions for a 2008 type disruption, but at a larger scale, with the US this time out of tools to restabilize (unless they have some crypto projects in mind). Who comes out on top? Actually, the mess will be global. China's fast electrification aims at energy sovereignty, needed to survive such an event. The US is the most energy sovereign but with a decaying grid. Pakistan, India and the EU are all very vulnerable. The Gulf states probably most of all. In the nexus food-water-energy, funny enough the US comes out on top again. With each of the parties having different vulnerabilities. I think your analysis of Iran's strength are correct however, they are very water vulnerable as you know. But the most reliable factor is humans getting too stressed and starting to create havoc, accelerating the disruption of all these underlying infrastructures and processes, needed to keep complex societies running. I stop here, rabbit hole, we all understand the situation will deliver massive disruptions, the how, how large and when are for us to find out in real time.
This is an endgame move. Back in December 2025 I published the Seven Stages of Systemic Collapse (Ehadnameh #65E), which mapped where the U.S. sits: late Stage 6. Buffers gone, legitimacy collapsing, debt mathematically unserviceable, multiple crises converging in the same quarter.
The Engineered Friction follows from that. It's what a late-Stage-6 actor does when it can't rebuild. Degrade the terrain around you. Not to recover. To make everyone else's position worse faster than yours deteriorates.
The dollar gets a temporary reprieve because chaos drives capital back to the one clearing system that still works under fire. But the structural deficits keep compounding underneath. Buys time. Burns base. Each cycle leaves less to work with.
Seven Stages predicted the behavior three months ago. Engineered Friction describes the mechanism we're watching now.
Very well structured analysis. I salutes you and will follow you.
The research and thinking here is first rate. The analysis is chilling and doesn't require conspiracy to evoke the sense of revulsion at the lengths governments will go to to build and preserve power. Your projection section injected some relief, if only on the basis of conjecture.
The climate, though, may be the joker in the pack. The unpredictability of timing and the watering down of international reports all point to a climatic shock that could emerge without sufficient warning and upset the hegemonic chess board.
Alternatively, populations may get their shit together and forge a better way. I live in hope of the unexpected which is far more likely now than it has been historically.
Great analysis, I think they will try this but the net throughout just isnt there anymore to pull it off. The grid infrastructure is too complex to maintain for long.
"The U.S. has a continental economy and energy self-sufficiency through shale production…"
Except, it isn't, really.
Shale production produces light crude that is more like gasoline. I've read about oil workers putting shale crude right into their gasoline trucks!
But Permian shale crude doesn't make much diesel, and diesel runs the world. That's what the US has been getting from Canada at a steep discount, and why the US invade Venezuela — they both produce a very heavy crude that makes a lot of diesel. Plus, US refineries are tuned for heavier input than Permian crude.
Bottom line: the US exports a bunch of light crude it can't use and continues to be dependent on other countries for crude suitable for turning into diesel.
"The fire burns what depends on the grid. What is rooted in the land survives."
Do you think this is still true if hydropower is a local resource? I moved here specifically because we're a net electricity exporter. There's a 37 megawatt generator just one kilometre from me, but it sells all its power to California!
To me, getting one's power from a dam just three kilometres away seems pretty "rooted in the land"!
Jan, agreed, but compared to the rest of the World, US is much better positioned and much more safer.
The US doesn't look "safer" from where I am.
The US has five times the firearm violence as Canada and all other industrial democracies. US child violence is much higher than most other places. Economic violence is actively practised against the elderly, immigrants, and the young just entering the workforce. Corporate violence is practised in the food supply, which is largely implicated in four years of reduced lifetime over other industrial democracies — and the world's longest period (twelve years) of poor health before death.
Most people I know don't consider the US to be a very safe place at all. Unless you stay in your box.
Valid points bit comparative. USA is safer than Gaza, Sudan, Tehran ...
It seems like "damning with faint praise" to say that the US is safer than a war zone!
Jan, I agree with your position that additional complexity needs to be held when considering U.S. energy independence, but I've got to side with Ali and then some.
Arguably (and I mean this in the sense that there are many valid reasons to disagree with me), we're a house of cards. But we're a house of cards for organizational, distributive, and social reasons. Not for resource constraints. The Gulf Countries cannot exist without massive imports of labor, technology, food, and more. Though it would hurt and could well collapse our government, if we closed off our borders, there is a shape of a State that could survive and be defensible against external actors.
And for the safety point, I will stand rather firmly by the position that the U.S. is, on average, much safer than a warzone. Nearly every one of our major cities has areas where, if you aren't from a neighborhood, and sometimes even if you are, it's perilous to the point of mortality to walk down the street. But those are exceptions. We are a hyper-violent and dangerous country when compared to any other country with per capita incomes even half our own, but we are not a warzone.
I would have to dig into sources and I'm at work right now --please feel free to fact-check and correct me if you have time --
If I remember correctly from the last time I had this conversation:
The U.S. is somewhere around 6-7 on violent death rate per 100,000 (all causes).
We have neighborhoods in St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, etc. that hit 40-60 per 100,000 (equivalent to a warzone)
And Afghanistan (national average) at peak violence was sitting around 50-80 per 100,000.
Looks like the US is the 81st most violent, at 6/100,000.
Canada is #139 at 1.6/100,000. The US is 375% higher than Canada. I'm glad I emigrated to Canada!
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/violence/by-country/
Ali, I appreciate this analysis. Nearly everything I encounter on U.S./Israeli aggression in the Middle East is actor-centric. Your system outcome orientation was refreshing.
A China question for you - though I agree that the system's outcome orientation is revealing for where we’re heading and where we came from in the Middle East, China has a strategic track record for planning in systems terms and their political/social structure allows them to plan and execute a 20-year project action; this in contrast to a 2-8 year cycle in the United States. Whether U.S. actions are the result of a system trajectory or brilliant and unseen actors, is there anything useful we can interpret from China's current action/inaction? If a trap is being sprung that galvanizes U.S. hegemony, why is China not making bigger waves?
John, here's my thought.
China's inaction IS the action. Look at what China gains by not making waves:
It buys Iranian oil at a discount while everyone else pays $130. It positions Belt and Road as reconstruction infrastructure for after the war. It watches the U.S. burn through diplomatic capital, military resources, and allied goodwill. It lets the dollar get a short-term reprieve while the structural deficits underneath keep compounding. It maintains factory-of-the-world status because whoever wins still needs things built.
China plans in 20-year cycles, as you note. The U.S. plans in 2-8 year election cycles. A 20-year planner doesn't interrupt an opponent who is spending $5 billion every 96 hours on a war that degrades the opponent's own alliance network.
The trap you're describing works in the short term: chaos props the dollar, disrupts BRICS corridors, forces capital back to New York. But the medium-term math hasn't changed. U.S. debt-to-GDP at 123%. Interest payments over $1 trillion annually. Allies alienated. Trust eroding.
China's play is to let the short-term trap run, absorb the corridor disruption (painful but survivable for a continental economy with domestic demand), and position for the settlement phase. Whoever finances reconstruction owns the next architecture. China has the manufacturing base, the capital reserves, and the patience.
The U.S. is winning the quarter. China is playing the decade.
The structural question isn't why China is quiet. It's whether the U.S. can convert a short-term reprieve into a long-term position before the debt math catches up. That's the race. And China's bet is that it can't.
I appreciate you Ali,
Your thoughtful approach is grounding, and it's becoming something I look for in a very packed inbox.
Dear Ali,
great piece, ambitious framing. I get the infrastructure-as-carrying-capacity framing and yes, it is easy to degrade a society by breaking down key physical support structures. Actually, Russia has been far better at a different method: breaking down societal coherence.
My problem is that you are assume these actors are a lot smarter and more coordinated than I think they actually are. The U.S., Israel, and Iran all executing coherent long-game strategies simultaneously? Maybe China is. In reality most are acting to hide their own mess. Don’t forget Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." Trump is a malicious clown who likes attention and does not want you to focus on the fact that he is a sick fuck. But ok, let's say he is the front man for Project 2025. Have you read it? It is pathetically shallow, no deep strategic thinking at all. Nothing at the level nearing your thinking.
Same goes for your climate section. I think the SDG framework was cooked up in Rio by honestly passionate people genuinely trying to turn things around, not as a control architecture. The reason extraction always wins over ecosystem restoration is much simpler: a solar panel factory has shareholders and a balance sheet, restoring rainfall in the Sahel doesn't. Capital goes where returns are predictable. No conspiracy needed, just markets doing what markets do.
You don't need a lot of conspiracy to produce chaos, just enough actors chasing short-term incentives with little brain and no knowledge of history, and the invisible hand will deliver it reliably, every time. Stupid as hell, but it works. Creating a future needs so much more intelligence than destroying one. Stupid is what stupid does. We are governed by monkeys not geniuses.
Best,
Rob
It sounds like you read the piece as a coordination argument, that I'm claiming these actors are smart enough to run a shared playbook. Is that right?
Because if so, I understand the pushback. That would be a conspiracy thesis, and Hanlon's Razor would be the right tool to cut it apart.
But that's not what the piece says. Layer 2 is titled "Convergent Destruction from Divergent Intent." It states explicitly that the argument doesn't require coordination. The observation is that stupid, selfish, uncoordinated actors produce convergent damage when they all hit the same coupled terrain. You don't need a chess grandmaster for that. You need geography and physics.
And it sounds like you actually agree with the mechanism. You said capital goes where returns are predictable, no conspiracy needed, just markets doing what markets do. That's the argument. Structural asymmetry does the work without anyone planning it.
So it seems like we're closer than either of us expected. The disagreement might be with a piece you thought I wrote rather than the one that's there. Worth a second read of Layer 2?
Reread it and yes, I overstressed the coordinaton element, but I was actually thinking of internal coordination of each of the monkeys involved, each with a different intent, all hitting the same wall from different directions for different reasons, still bringing it down.
I think both the US, EU, China and BRICS are all pursuing reserve currency dominance for obvious reasons. You are right that Iran accidentily is temporarily propping up the dollar. But I think the shift will happen, no matter what. What is now happening does not derail that process: the U.S. is running structural deficits that require the rest of the world to keep absorbing dollars. At some point the world says enough and the underlying set of relationships to work around the dollar are being built step by step. I think stupid U.S. policy is now actively accelerating the timeline towards a collapse of dollar dominance. The debt, the tariff chaos, the alienation of allies are all preconditions for a 2008 type disruption, but at a larger scale, with the US this time out of tools to restabilize (unless they have some crypto projects in mind). Who comes out on top? Actually, the mess will be global. China's fast electrification aims at energy sovereignty, needed to survive such an event. The US is the most energy sovereign but with a decaying grid. Pakistan, India and the EU are all very vulnerable. The Gulf states probably most of all. In the nexus food-water-energy, funny enough the US comes out on top again. With each of the parties having different vulnerabilities. I think your analysis of Iran's strength are correct however, they are very water vulnerable as you know. But the most reliable factor is humans getting too stressed and starting to create havoc, accelerating the disruption of all these underlying infrastructures and processes, needed to keep complex societies running. I stop here, rabbit hole, we all understand the situation will deliver massive disruptions, the how, how large and when are for us to find out in real time.
This is an endgame move. Back in December 2025 I published the Seven Stages of Systemic Collapse (Ehadnameh #65E), which mapped where the U.S. sits: late Stage 6. Buffers gone, legitimacy collapsing, debt mathematically unserviceable, multiple crises converging in the same quarter.
The Engineered Friction follows from that. It's what a late-Stage-6 actor does when it can't rebuild. Degrade the terrain around you. Not to recover. To make everyone else's position worse faster than yours deteriorates.
The dollar gets a temporary reprieve because chaos drives capital back to the one clearing system that still works under fire. But the structural deficits keep compounding underneath. Buys time. Burns base. Each cycle leaves less to work with.
Seven Stages predicted the behavior three months ago. Engineered Friction describes the mechanism we're watching now.