Sublime

But overall the profession does not excel at seeing trouble ahead and unlike engineering disciplines it doesn’t have a branch of forward-looking failure-mode analysis or of post-crash forensic analysis.

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands.

Perilous Options: Special Operations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy (Vandenbroucke 1993).

Ray Dalio put out a (somewhat euphemistic) model of how the US order could fall to an external competitor, and Peter Turchin put out a (less euphemistic) model of how the US could fall into internal disorder.

No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.

The balance of powers has become unhinged.

In a second scenario, it is Europe that would forge ahead and tackle the new institutional challenges without relying on the US anymore. But this scenario is uncertain at best. As world leaders and experts look at Europe, what they see is a continent in disarray—one that is “disappearing into itself”, as it was once put by Kevin Rudd, the former