1–0 for the continentalists against the maritime world order.
When people picture American power, they picture hardware – 11 carrier strike groups, 750 bases across the globe, bombers, etc. That picture isn’t wrong, it’s just shallow — it’s the visible tip of something most people never think about, because the thing itself was built to be invisible.
America’s actual job — the one that made it a superpower rather than merely a large country with an enormous military — is this: it runs the global commons. The sea lanes, the global financial system, secures the handful of chokepoints through which nearly everything you own travels. The dollar that prices the oil that fuels the ships that carry the trade that feeds the dollar. The United States guarantees that the world’s goods and money keep moving, and in exchange it sits at the centre of the system and collects the rent of being indispensable.
I’ve attached the architecture of that system, because you should see it laid out before we bury it in words. Naval dominance. Trade-route security. The dollar as reserve currency. The web of alliances — NATO, the Indo-Pacific treaties, AUKUS. The forward bases. Underneath, the load-bearing chokepoints: Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil moves; Malacca, a third of global trade; the South China Sea; Suez, etc. What the whole apparatus delivers is freedom of navigation, the infrastructure of globalisation, and great-power peace since 1945. Pax Americana.
The New Iran Deal
This week, after three and a half months of a war with Iran, the Trump administration agreed to a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. On 28 February, the United States and Israel struck Iran with the stated aims of regime change and the destruction of Tehran’s nuclear and missile programmes. Iran’s answer was to close the Strait of Hormuz, which its Revolutionary Guard navy promptly did. The U.S. responded with a naval blockade of Iranian ports. Five weeks of fighting bought a ceasefire in April, and then two more months of brinkmanship over the strait — until, on 14 June, mediated by Pakistan and Qatar, the two sides announced a framework to be signed on the 19th.
Iran accepts a moratorium on enrichment and then resumes enrichment at low levels under inspection. Its highly-enriched stockpile is to be down-blended. In return: sanctions relief, the release of billions in frozen Iranian funds, and the gradual reopening of Hormuz in lockstep with the lifting of the American blockade. Then the detail that tells you who actually won: the UAE’s own state oil company says full flows through the strait won’t resume until 2027. WTO data already show tanker traffic through Hormuz down somewhere between 95- 99% since the war began. The price of fuel, food, and freight will outlast the shooting by years. Not week, or months. Years.
But there is another read, a strategic one, which is far less comfortable. The most powerful maritime nation in history could not reopen a maritime chokepoint by force. It bombed, it blockaded, it decapitated the regime, and yet, it still had to buy its way out. Iran, meanwhile, discovered a new weapon to wield: it can hold a fifth of the world’s oil hostage and charge a toll. Even after the ships move again, there will be a war-risk insurance premium — a tax collected, in effect, by the Revolutionary Guard. That money flows straight back into missiles, drones, and proxies.
None of this happened in a vacuum – while the chokepoint was being lost, the dollar fell roughly 10% over the year and its share of global reserves dropped to a 31-year low as central banks quietly diversified into gold and anything-but-Treasuries. Foreign central banks pulled an estimated 80+ billion dollars out of U.S. Treasuries in the weeks after the war began — some of the most aggressive official selling on record. Foreign ownership of the Treasury market sank to its lowest share since 1997. Three of the five pillars on that map — chokepoint control, the dollar, the alliances — took simultaneous structural damage in a single quarter.
This is what the death of a superpower looks like.
Continentalists (Elephants) vs Maritime Empires (Whales)
To understand why one deal can mean so much more than one deal, you need a framework — and the sharpest one available comes from the historian Prof. Sarah Paine, who spent two decades at the Naval War College teaching grand strategy to officers. She divides the world into two kinds of power: continental powers are elephants, maritime powers are whales.
Elephants live surrounded by neighbours, any of whom can invade across a land border at any time. So they organise the world around security and territory. They build spheres of influence, exclusive zones, buffer states. They take ground, and whatever they win, they keep — by force, by genocide if necessary, on the neighbour’s timeline. It is a negative-sum game by design: you fight over territory, and you wreck the territory in the fighting. Russia is the archetype. China is the rising one. Iran, in its neighbourhood, plays the same game.
Whales are different. Protected by water, they don’t lie awake worrying about invasion; they focus on prosperity. Their organising principle isn’t territory, it’s trade — and trade demands the opposite of exclusive zones. It demands commons — open seas, shared rules, predictable transit. This is why the founding father of international law was a Dutchman: Hugo Grotius, from a small trading republic that lived and died by the sea. In Mare Liberum he argued that the oceans belong to no one and everyone — not out of idealism, but because a trading empire needs the sea to be a safe, rules-bound commons where nobody pirates its cargo. The entire edifice of international law begins as a business model wearing the robes of a philosophy.
The Industrial Revolution turned that model global. Containerisation, the Suez Canal, the boring miracle of standardised shipping — together they collapsed the cost of moving goods to almost nothing and made the positive-sum logic of trade overwhelming. Wealth stopped being a function of how much land you held and became a function of how much commerce you could plug into. And after two world wars taught the survivors exactly what the elephant’s game costs, they built the insurance policy: the UN, the IMF, NATO, the institution that became the WTO, the project that became the EU. Insurance, against the day an elephant tried to trample the commons again.
However, the maritime order is invisible, while elephant’s game is visible — you can see the tanks, the captured cities, the dead, the ruins that stay ruins. Its objectives are positive: make this happen, take this ground. The whale’s game runs on negative objectives — prevent the blockade, deter an invasion, keep a chokepoint open. And you can never prove you prevented something. The war that didn’t happen builds no monument, because the chokepoint that stayed open writes no headline.
Taleb would call this via negativa — a system that works through what it stops, not what it does. Which is precisely why nobody defends it until it’s already gone. You don’t notice the insurance policy while the house is standing, you only notice it the morning after the fire.
The United States is the apex whale — the greatest maritime power in history, the guarantor of the commons. And the cruel thing about negative objectives is the way you learn they’ve failed, which in this case is with a chokepoint you can no longer open, and a deal you have to beg for.
Trump ft. Obama
Notice that’s featuring, not versus.
War Economy by Kris has been making this argument for a while, and it’s worth sitting with even though every instinct might rebels against it: Trump is Obama’s political twin. Your brain refuses the comparison because the packaging is a polar opposite. Obama was eloquent and charismatic. Trump is loud, crude, and stubbornly low-class. As a lifelong Dune fan I’ll confess the charisma always made me more suspicious, not less — Frank Herbert spent six novels teaching us that the charismatic messiah is the most dangerous man in the room. But character, at the end of the day, is nothing but theatre – if you look past the performance, at the policy level, the twins analogy makes total sense.
On Iran.
Obama went over the head of his own national-security apparatus to sign the JCPOA in 2015, unfreezing tens of billions of dollars — by some estimates approaching a hundred billion — of Iran’s own frozen assets in exchange for contested limits on its nuclear programme. The money went exactly where anyone with functioning brain knew it would go: into the IRGC regional proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, the Shia militias of Iraq and Syria. A decade of regional carnage traces back, in part, to that policy move by the Obama administration.
Trump tore that deal up in his first term, called it the worst agreement ever negotiated, and then — in 2026 — did what the Pentagon had wanted to do to the IRGC for years. Under heavy Israeli pressure, and one assumes Israeli assurances that Tehran would collapse like Caracas, he went all in. He bet on the American war doctrine: sanctions to starve the adversary, air supremacy to break it, superior intelligence to guide the strikes. That doctrine has one eternal flaw, and the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Ukrainians and now the Iranians all know it — no war is won without boots on the ground, and even boots are no guarantee. Khamenei is dead and his regime is still breathing. If anything, one could argue it is even more entenched.
Then Hormuz closed, the markets convulsed, and Trump folded — and began begging the IRGC for a deal. And the deal he came home with? Capped enrichment. Sanctions relief. Billions in frozen funds released. He went to war to arrive at the JCPOA.
On Russia.
In 2007 the Lugar–Obama Act extended the Cold War’s Nunn–Lugar logic — built to dismantle weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union — outward to conventional arms: small arms, ammunition, the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that Obama framed as a terrorist threat to be hunted down and destroyed. Lugar and Obama personally toured a weapons-destruction site in Donetsk — yes, that Donetsk — and pressed for the elimination of 15,000 tons of ammunition, 400,000 small arms, and a 1000 man-portable air-defence systems from the post-Soviet stockpiles. The instinct is the tell: surplus weapons in the contested marches are a hazard to be cleared, not a deterrent to be preserved.
Fast-forward to Crimea, 2014. The Pentagon wants to send lethal aid to Ukraine. Obama vetoes it and sends — this is not a figure of speech — blankets and rations. Crimea handed across without a shot fired, because after Washington destroyed the last piece of military hardware, they refused to send a single bullet. Moscow drew the only rational conclusion: the West will not defend the Ukraine. The result? Donbas followed, and then the full-scale invasion of 2022.
Trump, in his first term, inherited that war and — bored, uninterested, signing what the Pentagon put in front of him — let the Javelins through. Ukraine got some teeth Obama had denied them. And then in his second term the twin reasserts itself: Trump negotiates with the Kremlin and puts pressure on Kyiv toward what is essentially a surrender.
On the establishment.
Both presidents fought what they perceived (and instructed their voter base to perceive) as an enemy at home — the American national-security establishment. Obama, who rose to popularity on bashing the American military, went around it on Iran. Trump went around it on roughly everything. We’re trained to read these as opposite phenomena: the cerebral progressive versus the populist wrecking ball. They are the same phenomenon. Two presidents, fifteen years apart, each concluding that the cost of guaranteeing the commons exceeds the benefit of it, and each acting on that conclusion. Whether you deliver the retreat in a Nobel-laureate cadence or a midnight social media post with AI slop as a visual, is a question of style. The outcome is the same.
The Balkan Candor
I used to joke that the West Disneyfied its fairytales while we in the East grew up on the unedited Slavic versions. In our stories the good guy doesn’t always win — and even when he wins, the dragon has already burned the village, killed the wife, ate his children. The victory is real, but it arrives at a cost so total that there’s barely anyone left to celebrate it. Westerners find us grim for this and mistake it for pessimism. I’d argue it is not pessimism, but preparation – we have been rehearsing this exact moment our entire lives.
Every empire believes it is the last one. Not one of them ever is. What you are watching, in real time, in your own lifetime, is another Rome — the administrative truth that the centre can no longer guarantee the periphery. And here’s what the doomers get wrong: empires don’t vanish, they transform. Rome didn’t disappear per se — it became the Catholic Church and ran the Western mind for another thousand years on pure soft power. The British Empire didn’t disappear — it became the City of London and ran the world’s money long after the last flag came down.
So the real question was never whether the American superpower survives. It won’t — not in the shape on that map. The question is who picks up the commons? My gamble? The alliance. A Europe scrambling to rearm, East Asian democracies, the Pacific flank. Not one of them is a whale on its own – but a coalition can wear the maritime position no single member can, exactly as Paine says alliances always have, pooling enough ships and money and rules to keep the sea a commons for one more century. The next decade is them trying to seize the load-bearing pieces of the American order before it cracks under its own debt and exhaustion. It will be brutal. It will be expensive. It will not feel like a happy ending, because it won’t be one — only a survivable one, which in Slavic terms is the same thing.
So prepare accordingly. If you run a business, your supply chain just became a geopolitical instrument — price the chokepoints in, because the era of pretending they were free is over. If you’re an individual, understand that the cheap, frictionless, dollar-denominated world you were born into was never the natural order of things. It was an insurance policy. The premium just came due.
The maritime order is invisible by design — you can’t see the wars it prevents. But it can go invisible the other way too: the day it stops protecting you, and you can’t prove that either, because the catastrophe it used to hold off simply… arrives.
