By Arta Moeini, Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, 4/9/26

Dr. Arta Moeini is Managing Director of U.S. Operations and Director of Research at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy.

Introduction

Few concepts in contemporary international relations are invoked as often, or with as little precision, as ‘multipolarity’. The term has become a universal description for the transition away from unipolarity and Pax Americana, more generally, yet it conceals more than it reveals. Beneath its surface lies the deeper reality of a civilisational shift—an epochal transformation not merely in the distribution of power but in the very conception of world order. The modern system that arose from the Enlightenment and was consolidated under Western hegemony after the Second World War is now dissolving, and with it, the universalist assumptions that shaped the collective understanding of politics, progress, and peace.

That postwar regime, popularised as “rules-based” or liberal international order (LIO), is facing a total reckoning, or to quote Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a “rupture” that is world historical.¹ While the liberal and legalistic framing of the postwar order helped mask the logic of power and the reality of Western globalism for decades, that illusion has now been shattered by the socio-political discontents of neoliberal global integration, the re-centring of the world’s key regions as autonomous geostrategic theaters in their own right, and the relative decline (and identity crisis) of the United States as the LIO’s principal guarantor and enforcer.

Embodying a secular iteration of a universalist Christian worldview, the LIO initially supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States—promoted an ideological and humanist view of international relations that was not only artificial and performative but also instrumentalised post-Enlightenment European ideas like democracy, human rights, and international law to formalise Allied victory into permanent global management. It aimed to legitimise the postwar order under the guise of sovereign equality while hiding the true reality of Western global dominance.²

As a product of the 20th century, the LIO discarded the openly imperial, racial, and martial language that had characterised Western hegemony in the 18th and 19th centuries, repackaging hegemony behind an ideational veneer and lofty aspirations, with a (racially-diverse and international) class of liberal internationalists and Atlanticists gradually replacing the Anglo-Saxons and the WASPs as its core managerial elite. As a result, this order minimised the lasting importance of power politics through a comforting (if flawed) fiction of a One World (cf. the “global village”) unified through the Second World War as its shared founding myth: while downplaying the structures of power and control, this contrived ontology also decentred the world’s natural diversity and the reality of global cultural plurality in an attempt to normalise its underlying universalist tendencies and desire for global homogeneity.³

The international order of the modern age rested on three intertwined paradigms: the liberal, the national, and the global. Philosophically speaking, each carried within it the same metaphysical presumption—that humanity could be ordered, engineered even, according to a single, rational, and universal model. Liberalism sought to universalise moral norms around Enlightenment ideals, nationalism to universalise the political form of the modern state tied to popular sovereignty, and globalism to universalise the world itself as a single, coherent system (both normatively and economically). Together, they consolidated the modern spirit into an ideational architecture, forming the superstructure of modernity. That structure, once sustained by hegemonic power, is now collapsing under its own contradictions. The “Rupture”, or what this author has called the Great Transition, marks this turning point, underscoring the return of history amid the human need for rootedness and difference.⁴

From this perspective, the emerging order is not a simple rearrangement of global power, but a reconstitution of political life around deeper and older units of human association: civilisations. It signals the reassertion of cultural sovereignty, the revival of regional orders centred on spheres of interest, and the restoration of multiplicity as the natural condition of humanity.

The Discontents of Modernity and the Myth of the Global

The universalist ambition of modernity was to dominate nature, obfuscate reality, and transcend history—to dissolve the multiplicity of civilisations into an integrated political and moral world governed by human reason, commerce, and shared norms and institutions. This was the promise of the “end of history”, modernity’s fatal conceit.⁵ The assumption that humanity could be unified under a single moral and political order denied the evolutionary reality of human plurality: that societies develop through distinct cultural complexes and civilisational traditions, each embodying its own distinctive vision of order, the good, and life itself.⁶

The world was never “one”; it was always a plurality of distinct regional spheres (a “pluriverse”) with different geographies, normative horizons, and forms of life. As jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt correctly observed, “The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe…the political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world.”⁷ This inherent multiplicity in human political and normative life would inevitably produce multiple, competing, and bounded “spatial orders” and “greater spaces” (Großräume) that would resist a single international legal or political regime.⁸

Yet the globalist bias that has permeated all modern paradigms—even those professing to be realist—treated the Earth as a single, interconnected, and rather mechanical system. It mistook the local as the universal and redefined security, order, and meaning not as particular civilisational achievements but as global constructs to be imposed on all. This mentality, rooted in the modern will to homogenise, produced both the alienation and the quest for recognition that have characterised our era.⁹

As realist scholar Christopher Mott explains, the ultimate blind spot for the postwar approaches to international relations is their failure to realise that, “Rather than a single international system that one nation could lead or dominate in a zero-sum fashion, the world is actually made up of multiple overlapping and different systems (in the plural sense) [emphasis in original] that are regionally defined.”¹⁰

The collapse of the postwar order and its “rules” is therefore not a temporary crisis but a long-brewing reckoning with the contradictions of modernity itself. From the United Nations (UN) to human rights, postwar institutions and values are increasingly ceremonial or exist only in form; their legitimacy has evaporated, and they lack genuine enforcement mechanisms. By underscoring the inherent anarchy of international politics, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are emblematic of this disintegration, exposing the limits of an order that once promised peace through abstract universality but instead delivered instability due to its hypocrisy, hubris, and hegemonic drive.¹¹

The Epochal Break: Post-Liberal, Post-National, Post-Global

The unravelling of postwar globalism marks a historical watershed more significant than the inevitable end of unipolarity. The modern state, the liberal subject, and the global system are all outgrowths of the same modernistic metaphysical impulse: the will to unify, standardise, and homogenise through systematic atomisation. Despite its technological facades, modernity is a form of theology with an insatiable appetite for converts, and, ultimately, our era of general discontent is fuelled by a crisis of faith in modernity and its paradigms. What is emerging in the wake of this collapse is not a simple return to classical Westphalian balance-of-power politics but the birth of a new paradigm—one that is post-liberal, post-national, post-global, and decidedly multi-nodal.¹²

The post-liberal orientation reflects the reaffirmation of multiplicity and the exhaustion of moral universalism. The liberal project’s claim to embody universal truths and a timeless code of humanist values has been undermined by its selective application and transformation into a tool of domination, not to mention the reemergence of contested interpretations of human virtue across various civilisations, including within the West itself.¹³

The post-national turn marks the precarity of the modern Westphalian system—a byproduct of internecine European conflicts and colonial expansion. The modern nation-state is hardly a natural form of human community but an ideological construct in which long-dormant sectarian fault lines, such as ethnicity or religion, were propagandised and instrumentalised to break up the once sizeable Eurasian empires and render them vulnerable to Western imperialism. Its proliferation under Wilsonian nationalism¹⁴ fragmented and balkanised older civilisational spaces and imposed a uniform political model upon profoundly different peoples and cultures.¹⁵ 

Under the cover of national self-determination and freedom, the Wilsonian model (cf. League of Nations) abstracted and reified a “people” to form new, smaller “democratic” republics. Under the pretext of resisting capitalism and emancipating the people from the bourgeoisie worldwide, Vladimir Lenin and the Soviets did the same in their own domain, effectively promoting nation-states as “socialist” republics within their internationalist framework.

Regardless of their adopted ideology, most of these artificial republics have enjoyed the veneer of sovereignty and autonomy. Still, their rhetoric of “self-determination” notwithstanding, they have, in practice, become thoroughly dependent on Western powers and entrenched in the liberal, United States (US)-dominated international order, advancing the global reach of modernity. Since 1991, modern nation-states like Ukraine have been the perfect tool to advance cosmopolitanism in the name of democracy and progress: far too weak to resist the onslaught of Western capitalism and globalisation, yet just strong enough (with foreign backing) to disrupt historical geopolitical anchors in their region and prevent civilisational and region-wide integration. As such, the nation-state system, far from guaranteeing stability, has become a vessel of fragmentation, moral confusion, and geopolitical conflict.

The post-global attitude represents the end of modernity’s greatest illusion: that the world forms a single, coherent system of politics and morality. The new epoch restores politics to its natural scale—the regional and the civilisational—and reaffirms difference as the foundation of order rather than its negation. Often organised as Middle Powers, the world’s great cultures and civilisations—Indic, Euro-Atlantic, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Arab—are both geographically and historically contingent and enduring modes of being, sacred yet dynamic worlds with their own outlooks and internal logics.¹⁶ They are older and more resilient than the modern, artificial nation-state and are more deeply rooted than the ephemeral global institutions that have sought to control and govern them.

It follows that liberal internationalism was always predicated on a fiction: that universal moral norms could be detached from cultural foundations, that a single civilisation’s historical experience could stand in for humanity as a whole. Such a project could endure only by American power and an abstractly universalist, if not missionary and apocalyptic, moral narrative (further bolstered by unipolarity). Thus, as American global dominance has waned, the universalist edifice it upheld has also crumbled, revealing the plural, unequal, and culturally diverse reality of the world beneath it.

The emerging global landscape is characterised not merely by multipolarity but by a multi-nodal configuration—an intricate constellation of civilisational hubs and regional systems existing concurrently without a substantively unified organising principle. All conventional modern ideologies and theories, including neorealism, exhibit a (Eurocentric) bias toward totality and ontological certainty—the presumption that security, prosperity, and legitimacy should be interpreted within a global framework rooted in fixed philosophical categories derived from modern Western philosophy.

However, borrowing the terminology of Japan’s Kyoto School, the new epoch repudiates this idealistic logic in favour of a “world-of-worlds” or a “multi-world,” wherein the formless and indeterminate emptiness (ku) of global space functions as the fabric or topological field (ba) for the concrete, creative, and authentic becoming of sui generis cultural worlds.¹⁷ By supplanting the totalising logic of the ideal with the concrete yet fluid logic of place, the post-unipolar world order thus realigns politics with its inherent scale: the civilisational and the regional.

Rejecting Bloc-Thinking and the New Manichaeism

In this transitional moment, many observers and policymakers have sought comfort in old paradigms. They would prefer to resurrect the familiar moral geography of the Cold War, casting the world once again into binary opposition: democracies versus autocracies, civilisation versus barbarism, the free world versus the axis of evil. These narratives share a Manichaean impulse—the need to impose moral clarity upon a world that no longer conforms to Western certainties.

Such dualisms are dogmatic, intellectually sterile, and strategically dangerous. They deny the complexity of the emerging world and reproduce the ideological rigidity that once plunged humanity into decades of containment, proxy conflict, and moral absolutism. The rhetoric of a “new Cold War” resurrects precisely the globalist and hegemonic mindset that the world is now outgrowing: a belief that security and legitimacy can only be achieved through global struggle between rival camps, rather than through dialogue, coexistence, and regional balances of power.¹⁸

This attitude also reflects a deeper anxiety within the declining liberal order. Unable to conceive of geo-cultural plurality and power politics without exceptionalism, moral absolutes, and permanent global hegemony, the waning Atlanticist establishment must reframe every assertion of cultural sovereignty or regional autonomy as a threat to “democracy” or “civilisation” itself. In this way, it conceals its own parochialism under the guise of universalism. Yet the moral authority of such claims has dissolved. Given the double standards in Gaza and Ukraine, the non-Western world no longer accepts that legitimacy flows from conformity to Western liberal ideals. A truly posthegemonic world will necessarily transcend such binary thinking and the coercive moralism it entails.

The new age demands the opposite: the cultivation of cultural realism, which accepts that (global) pluralism, (local) hierarchies, and contestation in human communities are not pathologies to be overcome. Rather, they are the normal conditions of human coexistence from whose dynamic interaction within specific territories emerge our various cultural complexes. As such, reducing the world into two antagonistic global blocs fails to reflect reality. It belongs to the past, and even then, it was always an aberration. The future lies not in the reconstitution of hostile ideological camps but in fostering a modus vivendi among distinct civilisational powers—a practical (valueneutral) ethic of coexistence grounded in restraint, reciprocity, strategic empathy, and mutual recognition.¹⁹

Cultural Realism and the Civilisational Foundation of Order

Cultural realism begins from an ontological premise: civilisations—not nation-states, international institutions, or individuals—are the fundamental and enduring units of human political life at the global level.²⁰ Rooted in a particular geography and organic cultural evolution, each civilisation constitutes a unique, albeit dynamic, normative and historical world with its own internal coherence—a distinctive vision of order, justice, virtue, and even reality within specified boundaries.

This civilisational world order is neither static nor universal, and the civilisations that comprise it—contrary to the Huntingtonian thesis²¹ —are neither essentialised categories abstracted from history and untethered from geography, nor reducible to religions destined for permanent hostility.²² Real-world civilisations are complex organisms, internally diverse, and telluric. They rise and fall, engaging in strategic competition with neighbouring realms over resources and territory. Nonetheless, given their multiplicity and continued historical survival, a natural balance exists among them despite disparities in power and size. As such, during normal periods, the order tends to favour an equilibrium that sustains global stability at any given epoch, without a global hegemon or enforcer. From a cultural realist perspective, therefore, the world is—strictly speaking—anarchic and rejects formal laws and structures; however, an underlying order—rooted in geography and historical continuity—persists, preventing both convergence and worldwide chaos.²³

The civilisational nature of the inter-state order reflects the reality of human life as a political, agonistic, and cultural animal. The civilisational order emerges from history and human cultural evolution as the natural global condition that mediates humankind’s inter-civilisational political conflicts. Given the incommensurability of civilisations, this global order neither prescribes nor is it based on universal morality. Still, it has a set of informal rules—an ethic derived from a heuristic process and millennia of diplomatic practice. Here are seven of the more fundamental of these realist principles, stemming from diplomatic history and the real-world requirements of inter-state relations:

1

Ontological Pluralism: Humanity consists of multiple civilisations, each a law unto itself, incommensurable, and irreducible to the others.

2

Cultural Sovereignty: Every civilisational state fights to order its moral and political life according to its own traditions and ways of life.

3

Regional Primacy: Global stability is best maintained by powers anchored in their civilisational spheres, rather than by transregional superpowers intervening to disrupt regional balances of power.

4

Realpolitik and Sovereign Realism: All civilisational states aim to maximise their security by aggregating power, prioritising their vital interests, and attempting to establish or maintain their sphere of influence in their respective regions.

5

Strategic Restraint: While war and conflict are inescapable, all powers benefit from recognising the geo-cultural limits of their spheres of influence and refraining from transregional ideological, religious, and imperial projects that would disrupt the fragile global equilibrium and mobilise other civilisational states against them.

6

Modus Vivendi: Convergence and ideological proselytisation are a recipe for global war. Sustainable peace requires true coexistence achieved through dialogue and diplomacy that affirms global cultural pluralism and exhibits strategic empathy for the true red-lines of rival powers.

7

Diplomatic Concert: An informal, pragmatic arrangement for constructive engagement and conflict mediation based on mutual recognition that reflects the privileges of civilisational states and their higher share of global power and influence.

By recognising the civilisational basis of the global order and its inherent relationship with power, cultural realism thus provides a concrete alternative to both the idealism of liberal universalism and the nihilism of power politics detached from meaning and the authentic experience of human life—both of which, in different ways, universalise the world and reduce it to a zero-sum battle-space for global hegemony.

The Concert of Civilisations

A cultural-realist framework regards the desire for global hegemony and ideological conformity as irrational and ultimately destructive to both the world and the states pursuing it. Instead, it perceives self-contained regional conflicts at the civilisational fault lines and a global equilibrium among civilisations as the natural condition of international politics, in the absence of the universalist compulsions of ideology and religion.

The practical expression of this worldview is not a rigid alliance system or a new universal organisation, but an informal concert of civilisations: a flexible architecture of coexistence among leading civilisational and regional powers. By promoting dialogue, non-interference, and mutual recognition, such a concert could sustain global stability without recourse to hegemony or an all-out war. Each civilisational power would exercise primacy in its region, assuming responsibility for upholding order and security in its own sphere while respecting the total autonomy of others. By adhering to realpolitik and sovereign realism while leveraging the balance of power through prudent diplomacy, these keystone states would manage the inevitable agonism of international life without recourse to global ideological crusades that could trigger nuclear armageddon.

The upshot would not be global disorder or power vacuums, but a pragmatic, peaceful coexistence (i.e., modus vivendi) that carefully preserves a pluralistic equilibrium—a world governed by tacit understandings rather than imposed universal values, by recognition rather than conceit, coercion, or convergence. The logic of containment, moral crusades, bloc-formation, and permanent alliances like NATO would give way to the more enduring logic of global coexistence.²⁴ In this sense, the coming order may prove not merely post-liberal and post-global, but decidedly post-ideological: an age that has learned from the exhaustion of both utopian cosmopolitanism and myopic nationalism and no longer abides Western parochialism.²⁵

Modelled on the 19th-century Concert of Europe,²⁶ its 21st-century iteration would accept hierarchy and differentiation as natural features of human existence: it would not aspire for universal and perpetual peace but for durable stability built on realism.²⁷ Interstate conflicts and disputes would remain, but they would be managed through the Concert and stopped from escalating into a global cataclysm. Such realism may appear modest by utopian standards of modernity, yet it is profoundly humane—for it is rooted in the tragic wisdom that peace among the many is only possible when no single power or ideology seeks to speak and decide for all.

The American Question

For the US, the challenge of the Great Transition is existential. America must adapt to the new multi-nodal world and rediscover its place within it as a lasting great power. To achieve this, Washington must recognise that it will no longer be the sole “indispensable nation” but one node among many such states: it must refocus its attention domestically and prioritise the American people.

The temptation to revive containment—whether against China, Russia, or any other perceived adversary in the old world—must be resisted. The decades-long projects of global hegemony, moral supremacy, and international social engineering by US Machtpolitikers²⁸ (cf. Boltonians), liberal internationalists, and neoconservatives have bankrupted the country and hollowed out its industries and the middle class while depleting America’s spirit and its republican virtues.²⁹ A sustainable and earnest American foreign policy must embrace the wisdom of sovereign realism: the art of aligning national interest with strategic restraint, while prioritising the collective security of its sphere of interest (cf. Großräum) in the North American continent.³⁰

So far, President Donald Trump’s effort to manage this transition has been paradoxical: the Trump doctrine accepts the logic of regionalisation and sphere of influence without shedding the trappings of empire.³¹ It has aimed, through the “Donroe doctrine”—an economic reinterpretation of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine that redefines great-power politics as a zero-sum competition over resources, technological superiority, and economic power—to refocus America on policing the Western Hemisphere rather than the entire world. Yet, it has continued to rely on old tropes such as American exceptionalism, coercive diplomacy, unrestrained military power, and imperial hubris, all in the name of nationalism.

Adapting to the new 21st-century realities is not to retreat in fear but to evolve—to exchange the hubris of global hegemony and an unchecked national-security state for the dignity of sovereignty and prudent national interest rooted in common sense. In a multi-nodal world of great and middle powers, America’s future influence will not derive from its ability to police the world, subordinate others, or demand maximalist compliance, but from its willingness to serve as one civilisational pole among others—a cultural and political model grounded in its own traditions, no longer an avatar for rootless universalism or an empty vessel for liberalism seeking to remake the world in its image. To recover its own cultural sovereignty and historical particularity is to allow others the same privilege. Only then can genuine dialogue and reciprocity among civilisational powers take root.³²

Since its founding, America has drawn strength and vitality from its self-conception as a singular cultural and moral community: America was neither meant to be a typical empire, nor a propositional nation forcing an abstract project of global governance. A return to sovereign realism as espoused by George Washington—a foreign policy rooted in strategic prudence, non-alignment, military restraint, and national renewal—would enable the US to coexist peacefully and honourably with other major civilisational powers.³³ The power of its example, not its military might alone, could once more serve as a source of inspiration.

Conclusion: Toward a New Nomos of the Earth

The now-unfolding epoch marks the end of modernity’s metaphysical illusions—the belief in universal progress, a single rational order of humanity, and the possibility of a global moral community. The smooth, borderless globe imagined by liberal modernity has shattered into a rich, textured world of regions and civilisations, each bound to its own geography, historical memory, and rhythm of life. What is emerging is not disorder, but the reassertion of the natural nomos of the Earth: a spatial and civilisational plurality that modernity had sought to suppress by force and ideology. The process has reconnected politics with the realities of space and territory, revealing that politics is fundamentally telluric and concrete. It has animated a re-politicised world in which distinct peoples and cultural complexes reassert their sovereignty against the flattening abstractions of global modernity and demand recognition.

To describe these fundamental transformations as a shift toward multipolarity is to misunderstand their essence. Multipolarity still presupposes a single integrated system—a world of distinct and equal “poles” competing within a common framework.³⁴ The Great Transition is something deeper: the disintegration of that framework itself. Power is no longer organised within one systemic model but diffused across multiple, discrete, and semi-autonomous civilisational domains, each with its own organising principles, historical trajectory, and conception of order.

The new nomos of world politics is thus better described as multi-nodal: a constellation of overlapping regional systems and civilisational spaces coexisting without a central authority or universal laws. It signifies the end of both the liberal internationalist dream of global governance and the nationalist illusion of atomised sovereignty. The modern nation-state, once celebrated as the universal political form, now yields to larger, more organic units of order—civilisational blocs and regional anchors that draw legitimacy from historical depth and cultural continuity rather than from abstract legalism and self-righteous moralism.

This reterritorialisation and thickening of politics is not a regression but a return to reality. It is the repudiation of the flattened politics of modernity: the recognition that order is always plural and nuanced, that justice is particular and contingent on both place and history, and that peace can only emerge from maintaining equilibrium and modus vivendi among distinct forms of life. Power in such a world means the capacity to preserve order within one’s sphere—not to impose it upon others. Sovereignty acquires a deeper connotation: the right of every great civilisation to live according to its own law and to guard its own horizon of meaning.

The 21st century will, therefore, not be defined by global integration but by regionalism and differentiated coexistence across civilisations; not by ideological struggle for universality but by pragmatic balance and the art of realpolitik; not by the Manichaean confrontation of blocs but by a concert of civilisations offering mutual recognition. This civilisational order will ultimately replace the moral abstractions of modernity with a tragic realism attuned to the dangers of idealism, the permanence of conflict, and the limits of human agency to dominate and recast the world as it wishes: the looming post-modern age thus affirms multiplicity and geo-cultural particularity, marking the reemergence of space anchored by civilisations as the foundation of world order.

This is the new Nomos of the Earth: a multi-nodal world that, having cast off the metaphysical trappings of modernity, begins to embody, at last, the inherent plurality of humankind as its elemental condition and seeks within it—not beyond it—the measure of order and human greatness.

By Alfred McCoy, Consortium News, 4/23/26

Writing more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian Plutarch gave us an eloquent description of what modern historians now call “micro-militarism.”

When an imperial power like Athens then, or America now, is in decline, its leaders often react emotionally by mounting seemingly bold military strikes in hopes of regaining the imperial grandeur that’s slipping through their fingers.

Instead of another of the great victories the empire won at its peak of power, however, such military misadventures only serve to accelerate the ongoing decline, erasing whatever aura of imperial majesty remains and revealing instead the moral rot deep inside the ruling elite.

There is mounting historical evidence that America is indeed an empire in steep decline, while President Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran is becoming the sort of micro-military disaster that helped destroy successive empires over the past 2,500 years — from ancient Athens to medieval Portugal to modern Spain, Great Britain and now the United States.

And at the core of every such ill-fated war-making decision lay a problematic leader, often born into wealth and prestige, whose personal inadequacies reflected and ramified the many irrationalities that make imperial decline such a painful process.

During that demoralizing downward spiral, imperial armies, so lethal in an empire’s ascent, can err by plunging their countries into draining, even disastrous “micro-military” misadventures — psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the loss of imperial power by trying to occupy new territories or display awe-inspiring military might.

Although such micro-militarism often chose targets that proved strategically unsustainable, the psychological pressures upon declining empires are so strong that they all too often gamble their prestige on just such misadventures.

Not only did such disasters add financial pressures to a fading empire’s many troubles, but in a humiliating fashion, they also invariably exposed its eroding power while exacerbating the destabilizing impact of imperial decline in the capitals of empire (whether Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, London or Washington, D.C.).

In our moment, when the bombs stop falling and the rubble is finally cleared from the streets of Tehran and Beirut, the impact on U.S. global power of such a de facto defeat will become all too clear — as alliances like NATO atrophy, American hegemony evaporates, legitimacy is lost, global disorder rises and the world economy suffers.

Let me now turn from the disasters of the present imperial moment to the lessons of history to explore the sort of lasting damage that Donald Trump’s micro-military misadventure in the Middle East might be inflicting on this country’s declining imperium.

The Defeat of Athens in Sicily

Destruction of the Athenian army in Sicily, 19th century engraving. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

The date was 413 BC. The place was ancient Athens, then the seat of a powerful empire, long dominant around the rim of the Aegean Sea but losing influence to a sustained military challenge by Sparta.

At the port of Piraeus, a “certain stranger,” as the historian and philosopher Plutarch recalled, “took a seat in a barber’s shop, and began to discourse [on] what had happened as if the Athenians already knew all about it.” Stunned by this stranger’s report of a military debacle in far-off Sicily, the barber “ran at the top of his speed to the upper city” of Athens, where the news sparked “consternation and confusion.”

What that stranger described was the greatest military disaster in the history of the Athenian empire. Two years earlier, in the midst of the protracted Peloponnesian Wars, the aristocrat Nicias — an indifferent, indecisive leader who used his inherited wealth to court popularity with lavish spectacles — persuaded the citizens of Athens to deliver a theoretically bold blow against a rival imperial power, Sparta, by attacking its ally Syracuse in Sicily in hopes of crippling the enemy, capturing riches, and recovering Athens’ ebbing hegemony.

Instead of victory, however, Athens’ vast armada of 200 ships and some 12,000 soldiers suffered a devastating defeat. Not only was the fleet destroyed (largely because Nicias proved “an incompetent military commander”), but his surviving soldiers were captured, confined on a starvation diet in a stone quarry and sold into slavery. Athens never recovered.

Within a decade, the city had been starved into submission by Sparta’s impenetrable blockade of a naval chokepoint in the Dardanelles Strait, stripped of its empire, and subjected to autocratic rule by a pro-Spartan oligarchy.

Portugal’s Debacle in Morocco

Detail from the 1629 work Miscelânea depicting the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, 1578, from the Museum of the Ponta da Bandeira Fort, Lagos, Portugal. (Georges Jansoone /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.5)

Our next date is 1578. The place is Portugal, the seat of a lucrative empire that had controlled commerce across the Indian Ocean for decades but now found its hegemony challenged by Muslim merchant princes allied with the Ottoman Empire.

In its capital, Lisbon, a headstrong young king, Sebastian, suffered from sexual impotence and a fiery temperament that made him a fanatical “captain of Christ.”

With the idea of striking a lethal blow in his country’s global war against Islam, the young king persuaded the flower of his nation’s aristocracy to follow him on a latter-day crusade across the Mediterranean Sea to Morocco. There, at the fateful Battle of Alcácer Quibir, Portugal’s army was slaughtered by local Muslim forces. Some 8,000 Portuguese troops were killed, 15,000 captured, and only 100 escaped.

The defeat was so devastating that it not only destroyed the king and his court but also precipitated the country’s incorporation into the Spanish empire for the next 60 years. In the aftermath of such reverses, the Portuguese Estado da India (or state of India) at Goa was reduced to selling permits to any ship captain who could pay, whether Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. With Portuguese commercial dominance removed from the Indian Ocean, Muslim merchants and pilgrims could once again move across it unimpeded.

Though the Portuguese empire would survive for another three centuries, it would never recover the commercial hegemony that had once allowed it to dominate the world’s sea lanes from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, across the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic to the coast of Brazil.

Spain’s Disaster in the Atlas Mountains

General Francisco Franco, at right, with Spain’s Prince Juan Carlos in 1969. (Anefo, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)

And now to jump several centuries, another significant date for imperial disasters is 1920. The place was Madrid, where Spain’s leaders were already reeling from the psychological stress of their country’s long imperial decline, culminating in the loss of its last colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898 with the rising United States.

Seeking regeneration through further colonial conquest, Spain’s conservative leaders reacted to that demoralizing defeat against America by expanding their small coastal enclaves in northern Morocco to establish a protectorate over the whole region and its arid Atlas Mountains.

Spain’s inept monarch Alfonso XIII, who liked to play soldier, cultivated a clique of military favorites who shared his passion for the recovery of lost imperial glory by pacifying that rugged terrain.

As resistance to Spanish rule by Berber Muslims escalated into the bloody Rif War of 1920, one of the king’s favorite generals led his troops into the Battle of Annual, where Berber fighters slaughtered some 12,000 of them.

Nonetheless, through the influence of the king and his military cronies, Spain clung desperately to those profitless Moroccan mountains. The Spaniards would, in fact, dispatch 125,000 more troops there, including its Foreign Legion led by the man who, in the 1930s, would become the leader of a fascist Spain, Francisco Franco, for a protracted pacification campaign that featured both mass slaughter and military innovation.

In a desperate quest for a victory that defied both economic and strategic rationality, Spain produced some 400 metric tons of lethal mustard gas to conduct history’s first aerial bombardment using poison gas, raining mass death down upon Berber villages.

And in military history’s first successful amphibious operation, the Spanish navy also landed 18,000 troops and a squadron of light tanks at Al Hoceima Bay in September 1925 to flank and soon defeat the Berber guerrillas there.

Such micro-militarism, however, not only plunged Spain into a protracted pacification campaign with soaring costs, heavy casualties, and mass atrocities, but also unleashed political forces that would destroy its struggling democracy.

As the masses protested that misbegotten war, King Alfonso backed a military favorite, General Primo de Rivera, in imposing a decade of dictatorship that finally gave way to a short-lived Second Republic.

In 1936, however, only a decade after the Rif War ended, General Franco flew his Army of Africa back from Morocco over the Mediterranean Sea, launching a Spanish civil war that would defeat the Republic and establish a fascist dictatorship that would rule the country for nearly 40 dismal years of economic stagnation.

The End of the British Empire at Suez

Smoke rises from oil tanks beside the Suez Canal hit during the initial Anglo-French assault on Port Said, Nov. 5, 1956. (Fleet Air Arm, Imperial War Museums, Wikimedia Commons)

Arguably, when it came to imperial decline, however, the most revealing date was 1956. The place was London, the seat of the once-proud British Empire, where the suffocating stress of a painful, protracted global imperial retreat had pushed British conservatives into a disastrous micro-military intervention at Egypt’s Suez Canal, leading to what one British diplomat would term the “dying convulsion of British imperialism.”

In July 1956 (as described in my recent book Cold War on Five Continents), Egypt’s charismatic president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, ending British colonial control there, electrifying the Arab world and elevating himself to the first rank of world leaders.

Although British ships could still pass freely through the canal, the country’s conservative prime minister, Anthony Eden, a vain aristocrat and determined defender of empire, would be deeply unsettled, if not unhinged, by Nasser’s assertive nationalism. Indeed, his leadership throughout the crisis would prove so unbalanced that senior Foreign Office officials would become convinced“Eden has gone off his head.”

In response to the news of the canal’s nationalization, an apoplectic Eden would immediately convene a council of war at 4:00 in the morning. Calling Nasser a “Muslim Mussolini,” a reference to the former fascist ruler of Italy, Eden ordered “him removed and I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.”

Making his meaning perfectly clear, Eden asked his foreign minister: “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him as you call it?” He then added pointedly:

“I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered.”

Nasser giving a speech in 1955 at the opening of the Suez Canal. (Zdravko Pe?ar/ Museum of African Art, Belgrade / Wikipedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)

With the British secret service MI6 failing in multiple assassination attempts, however, Eden’s government began plotting with the French and Israelis to launch a secret, two-phase invasion of the Suez Canal Zone.

On October 29th, the Israeli army led by the dashing General Moshe Dayan swept across the Sinai Peninsula, destroying Egyptian tanks and bringing his troops within 10 miles of the canal.

Using that fighting as a pretext for its own intervention (supposedly to restore peace), in just three days, an armada of six Anglo-French aircraft carriers smashed the Egyptian air force, destroying 104 of its new Soviet MIG jet fighters and 130 additional aircraft.

With Egypt’s strategic forces destroyed and its military virtually helpless before the might of that imperial juggernaut, Nasser deployed a geopolitical strategy brilliant in its simplicity.

He had dozens of rusting cargo ships filled with rocks and then scuttled them at the canal’s northern entrance, quickly closing one of the world’s main maritime choke points and so cutting off Europe’s oil lifeline to the Persian Gulf.

By the time 22,000 British and French forces began storming ashore at the canal’s north end on November 6th, their objective of securing the free movement of ships had already been snatched from their grasp.

By the end of that micro-military disaster, Britain would be reprimanded by the United Nations; its currency would require an International Monetary Fund bailout to save it from utter collapse; its aura of imperial majesty would have evaporated; and the once mighty British Empire would be on the road to extinction. In retrospect, the Suez Crisis would not only expose the full-scale decline of British power, but also show the world that the country’s ruling Conservative establishment, with its illusions of imperial and racial superiority, was no longer capable of global leadership.

America’s Defeat in the Strait of Hormuz

The Strait of Hormuz and the Musandam Peninsula on December 6, 2018. (MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)

Another date likely to prove all too significant when it comes to the history of imperial decline is Feb. 28, 2026. The place was Washington, D.C., home to what had been history’s most powerful imperial state that had dominated much of the globe for nearly 80 years through a mixture of military alliances, deft diplomacy, and economic leadership.

By then, however, cracks had distinctly begun to appear in its edifice of power as U.S. global hegemony faced an increasingly strong economic challenge from China, its massive military suffered two searing defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq and its economic globalization produced an angry populism at home.

After a populist campaign based on promises to restore both working-class prosperity and America’s global power, Donald Trump took office a second time in January 2025 promising a “golden age of America,” a “thrilling new era of national success” in which the country would “reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world.”

Born to wealth and privilege himself, Trump returned to office convinced of his unique “genius” for leadership and believing that “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Wielding raw economic and military might to compel obeisance from friend and foe alike, the president, inspired by a delusional sense of divine mission, began attempting to bend the world to his will. But during his first year in office, nothing seemed to work as planned. Indeed, most of his initiatives produced the sort of backlash that only served to show how far the United States had fallen from 1991, when the break-up of the Soviet Union made it the world’s sole superpower.

On April 2, 2025, on what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump announced a roster of punitive tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing largely from Chinese imports that faced an initial duty of 34% — later raised to a fully punitive 100%. But at their October 2025 meeting in South Korea, China’s leader Xi Jinping forced Trump to back down by cutting U.S. access to his country’s storehouse of strategic rare earth minerals.

In January, with his tariff initiative losing its luster, Trump plunged the NATO alliance into crisis by demanding that Denmark give him the island of Greenland, threatening to impose new tariffs on European allies unless they complied. Within a week, however, vociferous European resistance had led him to retract that threat at the Davos economic summit, claiming he was satisfied with NATO’s offer of a “framework of a future deal.”

On February 28th, 2026, with his tariff initiative failing and his Greenland gambit checkmated, Trump joined Israel in a seemingly bold strike on Iran that soon had the makings of the sort of fateful “micro-military” maneuver that appears to go with imperial powers in decline.

Residents in Tehran on the third day of U.S.-Israeli air strikes on March 3, 2026. (Avash Media/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)

In the first few days of war, U.S. and Israeli bombing killed Iran’s leadership, destroyed its navy, and eliminated its air defenses, leaving the country seemingly prostrate before the might of America’s air-power juggernaut. After a week of devastating bombardment that seemed to stun the world with its lethality and precision, on March 6th Trump demanded that Iran offer an “unconditional surrender” and signal its capitulation by “the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader.” In exchange, he promised that the U.S. would “work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction.”

But much as Nasser had done at Suez in 1956, Iran’s leadership reversed the war’s geostrategic balance by closing a critical maritime choke point in the Strait of Hormuz. By striking five freighters with drones in the first week of war, Iran’s leaders, taking a leaf from Nasser’s geopolitical playbook, effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic, cutting off gas, fertilizer, and oil shipments that plunged the world economy into an unprecedented energy crisis. By the end of March, Iran’s chokehold over the strait was so tight that it began collecting “tolls” from freighters to permit passage.

Blindsided by the Strait’s unexpected yet utterly predictable closure, on April 5th, Easter Sunday, an unsettled Trump posted a social media message saying: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” He added: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” Two days later, Trump threatened that, unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, he would attack its civilian infrastructure so severely that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

After the collapse of subsequent negotiations between the two sides at Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 12th, Trump plunged ever deeper into the Iran quagmire, orderingthe U.S. Navy to “begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” and “interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.” With characteristic bluster, he added: “We are fully ‘LOCKED AND LOADED,’ and our Military will finish up the little that is left of Iran!”

Even if Trump destroys Iran’s infrastructure or eventually negotiates a face-saving peace deal, by every metric that really matters, Washington has already lost its war with Iran. Like all weaker powers in asymmetric warfare, Tehran has been willing to absorb relentless punishment, while inflicting pain that the dominant power can ill sustain. The U.S. will soon run out of targets in Tehran, but Iran has a whole world of damage that its cheap drones can do to the elaborate, exposed petroleum infrastructure on the south shore of the Persian Gulf.

Like Britain at Suez in 1956, Washington will likely pay a heavy price for its “micro-militarism” in the Strait of Hormuz. Close allies, the bedrock of U.S. global power for 80 years, have refused any military support for Washington’s war of choice, prompting Trump to call them “cowards.” In response to his thundering threats of civilian and civilizational destruction (both war crimes), Trump has been condemned by world leaders. Oblivious to the dangers of war in a region that is the epicenter of global capitalism, Washington is now proving ever more dangerously disruptive of the global economy, making China look like a far more stable choice for world leadership. Moreover, while the U.S. military has proven its tactical agility in destroying targets, it clearly can no longer capture meaningful strategic objectives.

With its alliances in tatters, its world leadership forfeited, and its aura of military might evaporating, the only trajectory for U.S. global hegemony now seems to be downward (like so many great powers of the past). By the time Trump’s micro-military misadventure in the Strait of Hormuz is over, the decline of U.S. global power will have accelerated drastically and the world will be trying to move beyond the old Pax Americana toward a new, distinctly uncertain global order.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Dispatch Books). His new book, just published, is Cold War on Five Continents: The Geopolitics of Empire & Espionage.

This article is from TomDispatch.com.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

By Leon Vermeulen, Substack, 4/26/26

Recent statements in Russian strategic discourse should not be dismissed lightly. In a widely viewed interview on Russia-24, Sergey Karaganov articulated a view that is gaining traction within segments of Russia’s policy and intellectual elite: that Europe is no longer merely supporting Ukraine, but is becoming a direct participant in a broader war against Russia.

For many in the West, such statements are reflexively categorised as propaganda or escalation rhetoric. For many in Russia, they are increasingly seen as plain descriptions of reality.

This divergence is no longer just rhetorical. It is becoming structural—and it is dangerous.

Two Realities, One Escalation Path

From a European perspective, recent developments are framed as necessary responses to Russian actions in Ukraine:

increased defence spending

expanded military cooperation

support for Ukrainian military capabilitiesThese are seen as deterrence measures, intended to prevent further escalation.

From a Russian perspective, the same developments are interpreted cumulatively:

European defence industries producing weapons used against Russian territory

military planning scenarios involving Russian regions such as Kaliningrad

increasingly explicit discussions of nuclear deterrence within Europe

Taken together, these are not seen as defensive. They are read as preparations for sustained confrontation.

Neither interpretation is entirely irrational. But together, they form a mutually reinforcing escalation dynamic.

The Shift Inside Russia

The significance of voices like Sergey Karaganov lies not in their extremity, but in their growing resonance.

Several elements stand out:

1. Expansion of the Conflict Frame

The war is no longer described as limited to Ukraine. It is increasingly framed as: a broader conflict between Russia and the West, with Europe as an active participant.

2. Historical Reframing

References to Europe as a recurrent source of conflict—particularly invoking the legacy of the World War II—are becoming more frequent. These are not casual analogies. They:

elevate the perceived stakes

justify long-term mobilisation

normalise the idea of existential confrontation

3. Nuclear Threshold Reconsideration

Perhaps most concerning is the re-emergence of arguments that:

Russia may need to lower its nuclear threshold

limited or demonstrative use could be considered to “stop escalation”

Even when framed conditionally, such discussions shift the boundaries of what is thinkable.

Pressure on Leadership

In this environment, Vladimir Putin faces a complex internal dynamic:

On one side: the need to avoid uncontrolled escalation

On the other: increasing pressure not to appear weak or indecisive

As elite discourse hardens, the political space for restraint narrows—not only in Europe, but in Russia as well.

This is a critical point often missed in Western analysis:

Escalation risk is not only a function of capability—it is a function of perceived credibility under pressure.

Europe’s Parallel Constraint

Europe faces its own version of this narrowing:

Political systems reward firmness over flexibility

Media narratives increasingly moralise the conflict

Strategic planning assumes long-term confrontation

The result is a system in which:

de-escalation becomes politically costly

signalling becomes more explicit

and deterrence begins to resemble preparation for war

The Convergence Risk

What emerges is not a deliberate march toward war, but something more insidious:

a convergence of perceptions in which both sides believe they are acting defensively, while preparing for escalation.

This is the classic security dilemma—intensified by:

historical memory

media amplification

and the erosion of direct communication channels

The absence of meaningful diplomatic engagement between European Union states and Russia compounds the problem. Signals are increasingly transmitted through:

military posture

public rhetoric

and indirect interpretation

This is an unstable way to manage great-power tension.

A Warning, Not an Endorsement

The views expressed by figures like Sergey Karaganov should not be accepted at face value. But neither should they be ignored.

They are indicators:

of shifting elite sentiment

of widening perception gaps

of increasing tolerance for escalation

Dismissing them outright risks underestimating the trajectory. Embracing them uncritically risks legitimising escalation.

The Responsibility of Leadership

The current trajectory does not make large-scale war inevitable. But it does make it increasingly thinkable.

Avoiding that outcome requires deliberate action:

re-establishing channels of communication

restoring space for strategic ambiguity rather than constant signalling

resisting the political incentives that reward maximalist positions

Above all, it requires recognition of a simple but uncomfortable truth:

Deterrence without understanding can become indistinguishable from provocation.

Conclusion: Stepping Back from the Edge

The danger today is not that Europe seeks war, or that Russia seeks immediate escalation. It is that both are constructing systems in which:

mistrust is embedded

restraint is penalised

and worst-case assumptions become default

In such a system, disaster does not require intent. It requires only continuation.

If there is still time to step back, it lies not in winning the argument—but in slowing the trajectory.

Because once deterrence becomes destiny,

the path to catastrophe may no longer feel like a choice.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 4/30/26

Trump-Putin Telephone Call

Politico reports that in a telephone conversation yesterday with Putin, President Donald Trump projected confidence that a resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war would come “relatively quickly.” Putin told Trump about plans to call a temporary ceasefire to mark the Victory Day celebration in May. According to Politico, Putin also expressed a desire to play an active role in Iran, which Trump said he quickly rebuffed.

“He told me he’d like to be involved with the enrichment if he can help us get it,” Trump told reporters. “I said, I’d much rather have you be involved with ending the war with Ukraine. To me, that would be more important.”

Naturally, for Trump, this was a deeply deceptive claim. In a previous phone call in March, Putin had made it clear that Russia opposed the US-Israeli aggressive and unprovoked attack on Iran. Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov’s summary of the call said that the call was “business-like, frank, and constructive,” and also “friendly,” lasting over an hour. Putin supported Trump’s ceasefire extension on Iran, but warned of severely adverse consequences for Iran, its neighbors and the entire international community if U.S./Israel take further military action against Iran tand discussed mediation. Putin stressed that a ground operation would be particularly unacceptable and dangerous. On Ukraine, Putin proposed a May 9 Victory Day ceasefire, which Trump reportedly supported, while citing Russian advances on the front line. Ushakov stated Trump expressed interest in ending the Ukraine conflict quickly, with Putin confirming Russia’s readiness for a negotiated settlement. Putin’s spokesman Dmiry Peskov, asked about this, was skeptical that a single telephone call was going to do much to bring an end to such a complex conflict. Other things discussed included the global oil market, and maintaining regular communication.

Hypersonic Missiles Against Iran

In referring to the “concluded” phase of armed confrontation with Iran, Trump may have told Putin that he was not contemplating further missile attacks or ground operations. If so, this would leave open the possibility that the US intends to maintain the current blockade in the expectation that this alone may cripple Iran to the point that it would have to surrender. Judging by reports that Iran is losing half a billion dollars a day in oil trade, its currency badly depreciating, the rate of inflation having risen to 50%, and that Kharg Island is nearing storage capacity, forcing Iran to reduce oil production and forgo a further $170 million per day, and causing permanent damage to Iran’s oil infrastructure this does not seem implausible. But on this question, Larry Johnson cites a report that Iran’s Majlis speaker Ghalibaf is “ridiculing Scott Bessent’s wild claims that the blockade is going to destroy Iran’s ability to export oil. He clearly is not concerned and is mocking Bessent’s insistence that Iranian oil wells are on the verge of collapsing.”

News that the one of the three US aircraft carriers in the region, the Gerald Ford – the one most affected by recent difficulties involving a fire, plumbing problems and substandard food – is moving away, it is even possible that the US is pursuing the entirely different option of de-escalation and backing away, with a view to normalizing the Gulf and bring down oil prices (which as I write on April 30th have peaked at $114 a barrel, an improvement on yesterday’s $120 peak), and reducing the cost of the war (currently estimated at $25 billion, but probably much higher) to the US, as well as the ways in which the war has exposed deep deficiencies in US military and weapons preparedness.

However, based on reports as of April 30, 2026, the British Daily Telegraph, a pro-war outlet with respect both to Ukraine and Iran – and in the context of rumors that the US is planning another sneak attack on Iran, despite the ceasefire – the US Central Command (CENTCOM) has requested to deploy the Army’s Dark Eagle hypersonic missile system to the Middle East for potential use against Iran. The deployment is intended to target Iranian missile launchers that have been moved beyond the range of existing US systems, specifically to counter, or “strike,” launchers deep inside Iranian territory. The Dark Eagle system, also known as the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), is technically still under development and has not yet been declared fully operational, though it is nearing that stage. These missiles are designed to glide at speeds exceeding five times the speed of sound and can maneuver to avoid interception. This move comes amid ongoing tensions. While a tentative ceasefire has been in place since early April 2026, the request suggests the US is preparing for further military action. As of the latest reports, a decision on this request has not been finalized.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that, contrary to reports of hypersonic missiles, Trump has opted for economic warfare against Iran as it carried less risk, instead of resuming bombing or trying to exit the conflict. US President Donald Trump has instructed his aides to prepare for an “extended blockade” against the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cradle). But one problem with the political-economy of the US blockade, as argued yesterday by Larry Johnson on Sonar21 (Sonar 21) is that if the US stops an Iranian vessel and takes control of it, then the US Navy must assign one ship to accompany it to a location the US controls.

“The US does not have enough US Navy ships to carry out such a mission on a broad scale. All Iran needs to do is load up 20 tankers and send them to sea simultaneously. The US may be able to stop two or three, but the rest will penetrate the blockade and arrive at their respective destinations.”

Iran can allow ships heading toward friendly nations to pass through the Strait in numbers that will make it impossible for the US Navy to stop them. (Although insurers and ship owners may not be comfortable with the risks). Furthermore, Pakistan has opened six corridors with Iran to bypass the US blockade. More than 3,000 containers bound for Iran are being transited over land.

There are rumors to the effect that the US blockading effort could switch or extend to the Strait of Malacca. A Malacca Strait blockade refers to the strategic, hypothetical, or active disruption of the narrow waterway between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, which handles 25% of global trade and 80% of China’s oil imports. Often considered a critical vulnerability for China—the “Malacca Dilemma.”

The strait is the primary chokepoint between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Disruptions, such as a blockade, could cause oil prices to surge and cripple supply chains, specifically targeting China. China’s would have to find alternative routes through Pakistan, Myanmar, and Thailand. The U.S. and India hold stronger naval positioning near the strait compared to China, giving them the capability to enforce a blockade, but it is doubtful that India would be party to such an attempt. Further, it is doubtful that Indonesia, Malaysia or Singapore, all of which do substantial business with China, would be unfazed by such a development. Yet recent US efforts to intercept Iranian oil tankers have seen enforcement extend towards the Malacca Strait, creating friction over the right of “innocent passage” under international law.

The Ramstein War

Brian Berletic engaged in some useful reality checking in reminding Glenn Diesen yesterday that the US is still essentially in charge of the war against Russia over Ukraine, from the war’s command center under US control in Ramstein, Germany. The implication is, and I agree with him, that the significant drone attacks we are witnessing against important oil refineries and other assets in Tualse (for the third time, last week) and Perm (for the past two nights) are ultimately directed by the US, at the very least using US intelligence and satellite guidance.

It is, therefore, hardly accurate to say that the US has actually “abandoned” Ukraine, as apart from intelligence, mainly, it has merely instructed Europe to take over the day-to-day NATO management of the war so that the US can concentrate on Iran and the US broader war against China, of which the assault on Iran is part. Until such time as the US can refocus all its efforts on dismantling Russian, the single largest national territory on the planet.

Ramstein Air Base operates as a major hub for both the U.S. Air Force and NATO, serving as headquarters for U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and the Allied Air Command. The host unit is the 86th Airlift which handles air mobility, while the 435th Air Ground Operations Wing provides specialized support.

The Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG), commonly known as the Ramstein format, is the primary international platform coordinating military support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. The group acts as a central hub where Ukraine communicates its immediate and long-term battlefield needs, and partners, led by the United States, announce new military packages. Established in April 2022 and named after the U.S. Air Base in Germany where the first meeting took place, it has evolved into a coalition of over 50 countries that meet monthly to synchronize, expedite, and deliver weapons to Ukraine.

The U.S. has pressured both sides to reach an agreement, with a 20-point peace framework proposed by the Trump administration in late 2025/early 2026. While direct, large-scale financial aid from the U.S. has decreased, the U.S. continues to support Ukraine through targeted military assistance, such as the $400 million in funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) approved for 2026–2027. The U.S. has actively participated in trilateral meetings, such as the February 2026 meetings in Geneva, to discuss security guarantees, prisoner exchanges, and a possible, ceasefire.

By Simplicius, Substack, 4/25/26

We return back to the Ukraine war with a continuation of the ongoing series spanning the last few premium articles which covered broader battlefield evolutions rather than tactical developments. The reason for the continued broader look is that the front has continued to be stagnant, tactically-speaking, and there are not enough newsworthy developments to justify the usual indepth coverage, as it would simply bore most readers to read about a few meters of nameless territory being captured, and the like.

But first, let us review what ‘stagnant’ may possibly mean and give a brief frontline update. Here is a recent Russian control graph showing most of March being fairly low, but with April again beginning to show spikes and implying a return to higher Russian advancement and overall activity on the front:

Much of Russia’s recent activity has come in unexpected quarters, particularly in the Sumy and Kharkov regions:

This month of april 2026, Russia seized 117km2, of which 55% are located on the UKR-RUS 🇺🇦🇷🇺 border Since the start of the year, Russian northern corps expanded its infiltrations in Sumy and Kharkiv regions This strategy is forcing Ukraine to defend the border 🧵THREAD🧵1/15⬇️

As the analyst states above: “The strategy is forcing Ukraine to defend the border”, and there have been recent reports of Ukraine sending reserves from other fronts to Sumy where Russia has been showing increased activity and territorial gains.

They provide a pro-Ukrainian version of Russia’s recent territorial gains:

As stated previously, one of the things these advancements on the border buffer zones does tell us is that Russia appears to not view the situation as critical, but continues to invest in the long-term development of the war by stretching Ukrainian forces in non-critical areas.

If Russia was focused merely on wrapping up the conflict as soon as possible, it would bolster its forces in the key regions that Putin has outlined as the main objectives, i.e. around Donbass. The fact that forces continue to be deployed and committed to these ‘hinterland’ zones means Russia is signaling it is in no rush, and intends to prosecute the conflict step by step by continuing the boa constrictor ‘squeezing’ strategy against Ukraine.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about Ukraine doing “better than ever”, and Russia facing various imminent collapses of both the economic and military sort. But Zelensky’s very vocal proclamations appear made to conceal more dire internal developments. For instance, Zelensky continues to press for an in-person meeting with Putin for some reason, while the Russian side no longer seems to care what Ukraine or the West wants, with Peskov stating multiple times recently that Russian-US talks are “on hold” and not currently happening.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-22/ukraine-says-it-asked-turkey-to-help-seek-zelenskiy-putin-talks

Kyiv asks Turkey to arrange a meeting between Zelensky and Putin Ukraine is pushing for talks as soon as possible to give new momentum to diplomacy. “We have directly approached the Turks. But if such a meeting is organized in another capital — not Moscow or Minsk — we will take part,” said Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.

Why is Ukraine so urgently pushing for direct talks with Putin to end the conflict, if Ukraine is doing so well as its backers suggest? And why is Russia so unbothered by it all, if Russia is the one supposedly seeing reversals on the battlefield and a collapsing economy?

At the same time, we can’t stick our heads in the sand and simply ignore the elephant in the room that Russia has in fact stopped advancing at “expected” rates, and the battlefield appears to have undergone an epochal shift to some new phase that analysts are only just scrambling to understand and explain to their readers.

As such, that is what I personally believe is happening. To summarize in a nutshell: it’s clear—as stated earlier—that Russia is not seeking a quick “out” or off-ramp, otherwise it would not have continued investing so many resources to backwater non-strategic regions like Sumy and even Chernigov. But then, why has Russia slowed down?

Let us examine a few of the key facts:

Firstly, the slowdown is not from some vast amount of attrition that has exhausted Russian forces. How do we know this? Because Russia is not even conducting assaults at scale, so there is little to even attrit. And this is part of the new epoch-shifting strategy which we will get to soon.

Secondly, Russia continues to destroy Ukrainian armor and materiel at greater disparities. If you follow this thread down, you’ll see over the past few weeks, even pro-Ukrainian bean-counters like Oryx have continued reporting that Ukraine is losing more hardware each day than Russia:

The trend of Ukraine suffering more equipment losses continues.  I have noticed that almost always, a quarter of the Russian losses are only trucks, while Ukraine losses very few…

Russian and Ukrainian losses over the past 2 weeks, according to Jakub Janovsky, an account that updates Oryx. (Take it with a grain of salt) This has been a trend since the start of 2025. Even though Russia is on the offensive, Ukraine has been consistently losing more

The latest equipment loss sheet above shows 31 Russian losses versus 54 Ukrainian ones. The previous one showed 55 Russian equipment losses versus 166 Ukrainian ones—and this is from Oryx team member Jakub Janovsky.

Thirdly, even Ukrainian analytical sources have reported that Russian casualties are actually declining over the past year:

https://texty.org.ua/articles/117270/yak-zminyvsya-front-z-pochatku-2026-roku-detalni-karty-prosuvannya-rosiyan

They write:

The situation could be considered “difficult but controlled” if a faster advance resulted in greater enemy losses, that is, if the two lines were moving synchronously. So it was in 2024. Since January 2025, the situation has begun to worsen, with Russians moving faster and dying less.

They are in effect admitting that Russian territorial captures are speeding up while Russian soldier deaths are slowing down. They do claim that recently Russian losses have spiked a bit again but it’s too small an interval for them to get “excited about” yet.

Thus we can infer Russia is not taking inordinate losses which have “exhausted” its forces. Further confirmation of this comes from a new interview with pro-Ukrainian ‘expert’ Michael Kofman. He states the following, via Grok summary:

‘Light motorized tactics are not a sign of armor shortages—Russia actually has more armored vehicles now than at the start of the war, and its ground forces have grown over 50% larger. The real constraints are elsewhere (e.g., air defense degradation and manpower allocation).”

So what is truly happening?

Here is my take:

Strategic Shift

I believe that Ukraine’s strategy has worked to an extent: that being, the total focus on attritional drone defense, layered networks of entrenchments and traps, etc. It has created enough costs for Russian assaults that Russian command has simply heavily backed off on doing larger-scale vehicular assaults. I’m not referring to truly gigantic assaults like were seen in the opening days of the Battle of Avdeevka in October 2023—those have long gone. But even smaller scale ones, where columns of light vehicles mixed with motorcycles attempted to forcibly storm positions.

At first, these lighter assaults worked decently well, though with a certain casualty percentage built in. But they grew costlier and costlier, with several high profile disastrous results where most of the assault columns were destroyed over the past year or so. Russian commanders who continued such assaults developed a stigma and their reputations quickly tarnished. This led to the eventual decrease, and presumably a decree from general staff that such assaults have to be greatly minimized for the time being.

Granted, this also happened to coincide during winter where it was already assumed Russian forces would become more dormant, so many people still continue to believe Russia is simply “waiting out the weather”. But at this point, nearly in May it’s clear that something shifted beyond simple inclement weather related delays as in previous years. This is why, I believe it can only be a strategic decision to shift things into a different type of attritional approach. It’s no surprise that this coincided with the sudden increase in activity on the border regions, where Russia again began to double-down on the ‘boa constrictor’ strategy.

Kofman, from the earlier interview, mentions this:

“Russia prioritizes Donetsk but spreads pressure broadly (including flatter terrain in Zaporizhzhia) to tie down Ukrainian forces. It avoids major urban assaults on large cities but uses proximity to attrit them via fire, potentially rendering them non-functional without occupation (e.g., threats to Kramatorsk/Slaviansk via fiber-optic drone advances).”

In fact, he touches on a specific important detail of the new strategy which we are now witnessing: the lack of full-on assaults on major cities.

As most know, Russia now has several key strategic Ukrainian cities almost fully surrounded: Konstantinovka, Novopavlovka, Krasny Lyman, Kupyansk, etc. In the past, this would have entailed immediate Wagner-like assaults through both the outskirts and into the city centers. But for some reason, Russia has now completely abandoned these previous “frontal assault” tactics. This, I believe, is part and parcel to the new strategic shift.

As Kofman notes above, Russia has shifted toward bombing and droning them with only the barest infiltration of troops. Part of the reason could also have to do with Ukraine’s total shift toward Russian manpower destruction via drones as an attritional strategy. This may have created costs for advancing that are too large for now, and Russia is being increasingly cautious, leveraging more its broader war strategy of disabling Ukraine economically and politically, rather than simply territorial conquest.

I believe this to be a relatively temporary shift for the time being until further opportunities open up. This could be either 1. a new advancement or technological leap that would mitigate the drone threat just enough to enable previously acceptable casualty rates—i.e. let’s say 10-20% instead of 30%, or something along those lines. Or 2. further economic, political, and attritional weakening of Ukraine and its statehood to wear its armed forces down further before re-activating more “large-scale” style offensives.

The escalations with the situation vis-a-vis Europe and the Baltics could have played into the calculus here: i.e. Russia may have deemed the threat of true kinetic confrontation to be getting so close that more resources had to be redirected from the Ukrainian effort toward the effort of bolstering the strategic “rear” in case a true conflict with NATO breaks out, or the Baltics have to be taught a lesson via “boots on ground”.

Moscow is obviously privy to telegraphed plans far ahead of time, so much of the provocations we ourselves are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg of the fuller long-term plans that European elites are hatching in terms of provocations. This is most often seen via the official dispatches from the Russian SVR, which this year alone has announced various provocative plans which include transferring nuclear weapons to Ukraine from UK-France.

To summarize this section: I believe that for now, Russia has chosen to “bide its time” and essentially switch to a lowered-intensity style strategy favoring more the “constrictor” approach, as well as economic destabilization, over predominantly territorial capture. Keep in mind, it’s never been one or the other: we were first here in identifying the constrictor strategy from the onset, over three years ago now. But there are fluctuations in how strongly Russia leverages one approach over the other, and I believe for now we have seen a swing the other way, wherein for the time being Russian command is “playing it safe” so as to husband its forces and not lose manpower unnecessarily.

There is of course always the possibility they see something we don’t in the criticality of the Ukrainian situation, and know that pushing super hard and losing troops is not necessary as Ukraine may be facing enough dire prospects as to make the current approach satisfactory in achieving military objectives—i.e. defeating Ukraine—over the long term….