Theory: There is No Specifically ‘Male Reading Crisis’

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment

My growing but so far unsubstantiated theory is that there is no ‘male reading crisis’ at all. At least, not in a way separate from the growing proportionate trends towards societal illiteracy at large that one sees in both the very old and very young. I have done no empirical research on this topic, nor is it important enough for me to do so. However, simply wallowing within the osmosis of multiple communities who read constantly, as well as generally averaging over 50 books read a year myself, I have a tentative theory I would like to put forward.

What you are seeing is the hostile takeover of mainstream bookstores by Corporate Memphis People, the majority of whom are progressive women. This drives all other reading traffic either fully to niche e-reader subjects or to old used bookstores. Since journalists and other members of the low information commentariat never enter these places (they might see something not from Current Year and thus PrObLeMaTiC after all) they have no idea such places are thriving. They just walk into the nearest Bookslop, marvel at the pastel colors, see the endless shelves of Antiracist Baby, White Fragility, Ravished By Sasquatch, What Happened, and The Anne Applebaum Coloring Book, and thus assume that these are the only books anyone is reading. A quick surface level search in sales figures seems to confirm this.

But this ignores the less exact and often cash dominated used book market. Those dark and moody stores with art collections, old volumes, lots of nonfiction, and DAW paperbacks. These stores on average are doing better now than they did when Barnes and Noble were trying to take over the market. Oh how times have changed.

My old haunt, Armchair Books, in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket.

If you frequent these places you will see that the clientele is as male dominated as the Social Justice-Gentrified mainstream bookstore is female dominated. They often even have their own smut sections which replace prose about being held captive by the cast of Monster Mash with vintage highbrow erotica. The amount of physical media moved is less overall but of such a wide and diverse nature across genre and interest that one can’t help but suspect the shadow cash economy is far larger than assumed.

Some element of this probably extends to ebooks. The overall sales are not counted as drastically relevant because they are far less concentrated and far less connected to large trends. Books about naval battles or popular physics or biographies of Richard Feynman or whatever don’t cluster like the new big thing that is doomed to be forgotten like a has been era marker (James Frey, The Alchemist, The Da Vinci Code, 50 Shades of Gray, etc). 

This is anecdotal, of course, but even in fiction the explosion of the New Weird that has revitalized horror for the last 15 years is very real, but also extremely decentralized and, with one or two possible exceptions, rarely elevated a singular author to the charts noticed by the commentariat.

While the Corporate Memphis Bookstore has gentrified far too many shops to the point that many think this ugly, samey, rigidly tone policed bubble is the primary culture of readers today, the mythical modern audience chased by clueless consultants in other fields, it has a role in the ecosystem. Namely, it serves as a holding tank for the kind of people whose prim sense of delicacy and perpetual taking of offense can be safely quarantined away from actual culture within a realm of teapots, doilies, and wall hangings with fakespirational text on them. What any of these things have to do with reading I have no idea, but rather than seek the destruction of all such places, they merely need to be culled into more manageable numbers. That way they can allow the monoculture of the shrinking violets to hold its precious and brittle cargo far away from the real places that might actually contain unique and unexpected finds. 

The vulture’s eye of the priggish scans the horizon constantly for heresy, but can be easily distracted by shiny baubles. As such, there is still a vast ecosystem of people, men included, reading but not seen by the best sellers list following crowd. They just aren’t reading the stuff that appears with the godawful samey book covers that has taken over the front-facing side of the hobby. The undercurrent of bookselling is now large enough that is fundamentally distorts the narratives that rely on official figures.

Or so goes my theory. I would be interested in evidence or anecdotes, pro or con about this phenomenon. 

I do wonder if there is a proportional Zoomer reading crisis across the board. However, even this is most likely panicked and overblown. The majority of people have been opting out to be couch potatoes since Boomers were raised with/by television. Millennials might be the only partial exception to this trend and even that is very compromised by the dominance of YA in an increasingly ageing yet ever-twee demographic.

A Decade Plus of Engaging With Speculative Realism

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment
Raven’s Nest by Preston Singletary

When I first started this site back in 2015 it was my intention to only write about geopolitics on it as a way of getting non-academic work out there as well as serving as a kind of online resume to support my journey out of academia and into the policy world. Not too long after this pivot, however, I got a job with the government and not too long after that began regularly publishing non-academic work on foreign policy anyway. This led to me branching out what I examined here. Probably the biggest topic for me of the late 2010s was my growing fascination with the thinkers downstream of the 2007 conference at Goldsmith’s College that brought together the thinkers Graham Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, and Quentin Meillassoux in order to combat the ultra-idealist and anti-material domination of continental philosophy by who they presciently dubbed ‘the correlationists’, or those who believe reality and all interpretation of such is downstream from human thought. The German Idealist and Postmodern schools would obviously serve as the best examples of correlationism and also the main reason (both the conference attendees and myself would contend) so much of contemporary philosophy had spun out into self-indulgence, narcissism, anti-science delusion, and obfuscatory hedging.

I was not at this conference and nor was I even aware of this trend until the team, having made their core shared point, went their separate ways. Yet, as a graduate student in the UK from 2008-2014 I was constantly subjected to correlationism and resented it from day one. To believe in the centrality of human thought, even as a human, for engaging with the natural world always struck me as the pinnacle of hubris. A reborn young earth creationism but for the trendy academic set. Being mostly rooted in materialist, Taoist, or Ibn Khaldun-influenced thought at that time (as I still am), I did not need to refute the trendy postmodern drivel on its own terms, however. I only became interested in arguments against it from inside the continental tradition once I became aware of their existence. As such, I have never needed speculative realism myself, but am fascinated by it anyway. It is a way to engage with a cluster of philosophy I otherwise wouldn’t and so my 2015-present relationship with it has served a useful purpose in my own development.

Back in the early days of this site I ended up reading all the main works except one, and, having just finally gotten around to Brassier’s Nihil Unbound at this much later date, I think its time to loosely and informally collate my thoughts on the overall experience. I would be open to doing a longer and much more professional write up later if the desire strikes, but for now a simple collection of observations will suffice as I am extremely busy with other things this month.

Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude should probably be read before anything else. I did not do this, but I feel I would have benefited from starting there. I find the book far too euphoric and optimistic, bordering even on scientism with its attitude towards math (a form of language if a more precise one), but it is foundational and begins the key distinction of how fossils of extinct animals and our engagement with them undermines correlationism.

I have heard people mock speculative realism by dismissing it as the “fossils disprove Kant” trend. But the funny thing about reductionist arguments is that if they are true they should be embraced. Fossils do in fact disprove Kant.

Graham Harman is the author I have read the most of, as he is quite prolific and also I find his fixation on withdrawn objects a fascinating thought experiment with actual real world implications (he is quite popular with artists and architects, including my own father who I introduced to his work when he was doing his MFA). Harman however tilts a bit too Platonic for me, and in my experience Platonists, despite their origin, always tend to tilt towards the singular rather than a plurality, but Harman’s thought to me naturally works with polycentrism where there can be no ultimate singular monad but rather a plethora of interactions based around varying poles. Object Oriented Ontology is his best book.

Ian Hamilton Grant’s thinking is to me the most opaque and hard to get around. I think this is because he is committed to salvaging idealism from within the speculative turn. It just really doesn’t work for me.

Ray Brassier is both the most quotable and the most sloggish to read. I know he considers Nihil Unbound to be a flawed work and wants to do something else, but I think his core conclusion in it was fundamentally correct. While most of the book is a literature review, the final chapter is a real banger and it ends with a bold and accurate statement:

“Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal, since it coincides with the external objectification of thought unfolding at a specific historical juncture when the resources of intelligibility, and hence the lexicon of ideality, are being renegotiated. In this regard it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible. Thus, everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constructive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears.”

A lack of universal meaning is the objectively correct position. Rather than be feared it should be embraced to continue the project of the enlightenment and more objectively see reality among us. Realist that I am (in the political sense) I can only endorse this point. Speculation freed from moralism adds to what philosophy can examine, not detracts.

Perhaps most interesting to me are the spin-off thinkers. Not as foundational as the above, they have inspired others who arguably go much further in directions I am interested in. I have reviewed the works of some of these people here. See Matt Rosen’s Speculative Annihilationism for a further deep dive into the utility of extinction-thought and Levi Bryant for taking Harman’s OOO into a (what I think of superior) new direction of interactive and replaceable component parts rather than eternal Platonic essence.

Probably the best overall summary of this school of thought and its differences and overlaps can be found in Leon Niemoczynski’s Speculative Realism: An Epitome. It might be a good idea to read that early on when exploring these topics too.

So, has speculative realism outlived its usefulness as both a category and a cohesive movement? Despite what it might seem, I would argue not. Correlationism seems to dominate the humanities even now, albeit in weakened and unpopular form as part of a dying Boomer-Millennial Hipster establishment. Presentism and escapist fantasy seems to rule the culture, making pondering extinction and realism necessary in all their forms. Time is fleeting and resources finite. The fact that so many of SR’s pioneers have gone in so many different directions just proved they opened up new vistas to explore. If obsolescence is what they have met it is only because they made their point against postmodern navel-gazing so effectively that one can simply move on. A service well rendered.

And thus postmodernism and German idealism do not just have to ponder the extinction of species, but also the coming extension of their own school of thought, too.

One final thought occurs to me…I often use art from Pacific Northwest indigenous people when I talk about subjects like this. There was no conscious choice behind it save that its one of my favorite types of artwork and it seems to just jive with philosophical subjects…but I now think I know why it came up subconsciously. Art from communities like the Haida, Tlingit, and others has an intrinsic layering to it. There are creatures within creatures in the stylized patterns. It resembles Harman’s ideas on how objects contain each other in mergers while still being ‘withdrawn’ enough to retain distinction even so. In the native art of Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington State we see a great visual depiction of the symbolic and both physically real and and situationally divergent without compromising its embeddedness in physical context. Perhaps most tellingly, it is traditional to allow outdoor forms of this art like totem poles to decay naturally rather than maintain them, as meeting their end is considered a natural path for art just as it is for living beings.

The Peasants Yearn for the Fields

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment

I have recently completed a ton of research on the structure of the Tokugawa Shogunate in preparation for an upcoming (still far away) publication. It is a subject I have written about before here less formally so I will spare the details, but one thing that has always struck me is how the reclusive state intentionally worked to keep the general people ignorant and removed from government while also allowing a large amount of social mobility within the literati, enabling a government culture with remarkably frank and honest discussions that put most modern states to shame. This was happening at a time when growing stability led to increased prosperity in much of the country and massive increases in living standards from before.

Preceding the above is also my long-standing view that economic populism is good and necessary but that other forms of populism are usually terrible, reactive, and uncreative, and often a net negative on society. I have come to the conclusion that this is not a contradiction at all- it is merely noting the correct way to combine different aspects of society for the best overall outcome.

Economic populism is meritocracy. It is understanding that the circumstances of one’s birth are not what should determine their ultimate fate and that large wealth gaps are destructive to social cohesion and communal interest. It is also the acknowledgement that those who suffer most from economic policies are more likely to know about the actual results of said policies than the ivory tower midwits who craft elaborate theories about what *should* happen. The demos is actually quite well informed of economic policy, even if the terminology of the profession is still alien to most of them.

This is not true for many other issues. Foreign policy especially, which requires a knowledge of the world and a resistance to media-driven propagandized narratives, is naturally closed to most of the provincialized demos. Even in our present dire circumstances of being ruled by an out of touch foreign policy elite which makes every hubristic error imaginable as it commits arson around the world, the point should be to replace this class of ruinous court eunuchs with a new and better elite, not remove the existence of an elite entirely. And I have ideas on how to start doing that.

But I think it is worth considering where one is most likely to come across low-information rhetoric, be it populist or not: social issues. Or, perhaps more contemporary in labeling, culture war. This is the field that most infects everything else under our present rule by the cultural demos, turning Steve Bannon’s assertion that politics is downstream of culture into a self-fulfilling prophecy on behalf of the worst people in society. It does not matter which particular tribe one is speaking of, woke or reactionary, feminist or manosphere, postmodern of religious, this is the feverish dream-cosmos of the lumpenprole, the addictive and destructive delusion of moral battle on behalf of principle rather than an analysis of power. Civil society seen as a playground for those too stupid or too lazy to study actual networks and the real physical logistics behind them.

And it is here we see why economic populism should be divorced from cultural populism. There are fools with a peasant mentality who were born into wealth and power who should be demoted to the peasantry, and there are people capable of cultivation of lowly birth who should be promoted. This is very real. But it should not come at the cost of having to promote those who have a naturally peasant mentality. It is not just bad for the rest of society to have to tailor cultural output around the easily manipulated and stridently ignorant, it is bad for them too. They were mentally happier illiterate and in the fields before, and others were happier in turn to leave them there. The natural inclination of the mental peasant is rage and horror when confronted with anything from outside of their narrow comfort zone- so why remove them from said zone?

I suspect this is a major reason why social media drives so many people insane. Most were not ready to be exposed to other ways of being and the psychic damage it seems to do to their pre-Copernican protagonist syndrome where their limited ability to parse events was then confidently projected onto places and times far different from their own with no understanding of circumstance.

The peasants of old stayed toiling in a relatively small areas separated from discussions of the learned. Parochial as it was, it spared the simple from psychological breakdown while also sparing the more intellectually inclined from the unthinking mob. Its worst feature was its suppression of merit and talent, but it also suppressed fanaticism and memetic stupidity. Here was localized culture that could integrate the salt of the Earth without forming a Great Salt Lake. Art could be made without it becoming enslaved to a for-profit market that values only buckets of slop with no distinguishable flavor to be enjoyed by everyone without a palette. The key element in determining who has or does not have a peasant mentality is who is comfortable with there being many ways of being, even those wildly divergent from their own, against those who cannot.

So I think the question for economic populists who want to live in a rational society not prone to massive meltdowns every few months should be how to go forward in a way that uplifts all who contribute but does not uplift *everyone*. In fact it should actively seek to keep the intellectually incurious and the fanatical down, as well as eject them from the upper cultural crust via demotions to peasant status. Peasant and cultured status will have no economic and blood lineage markers as it would be a merit based designation only. But it would determine who can govern and who can serve in the media as analyst. While I would not trust the state to determine who gets this and who does not, I do believe a parallel institution could exist which would exert behind the scenes pressure to keep the bloviators and the ignorant out through a sort of subtle social pressure targeted around potential for output. Kind of like an artisan guild. The reintroduction of peasant status is thus no longer an economic tier of society, but rather a social one.

Naturally this Designated Peasant class, so resentful of having their simple world robbed from them, will need something to do. This is easy. Farmhands are needed and mass immigration too destabilizing to still be popular. Another option would be a new Works Progress Administration, where teams of people can assist rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. Good economic populist that I am, they get paid as much (or more, critical nature of the work depending) as the intelligentsia. Its a cost well worth paying to keep a certain kind of person’s head empty and hands busy.

It should be obvious, however, that such a fair yet tiered system would struggle to exist under capitalism. It is well past time that conservatives give a second thought as to their political priorities on economics anyway. Communism, ironically for a system that began as globalist in its goals, did a better job protecting local communities from globalization. And leftists need to learn to divorce negative forms of hierarchy, like family entitlement, from good types of hierarchy like proven contribution to society, erudition, and ability to see beyond current ephemeral fads and panics. There always has and always will be an elite. The question is simply how it is chosen.

The peasants unwittingly yearn to return to the fields, and I say let’s help them do it.

The Second Death of Redneck Chic

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment

At the tail end of my childhood was when the United States formerly entered its decline arc. It was the response to 9/11 and everything that emerged from that which let loose the ravenous pack of entropy. Sure, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton had already laid the economic foundations for long term immolation, but the Bush Junior Administration really lit a match to that giant pile of kindling.

The Capitol Hill cafeteria changed french fries to Freedom Fries and many obnoxious small business owners followed suit for the gimmick. This was in protest for France correctly opposing the Iraq War. Legions of midwestern church ladies were quick to both capitalize on 9/11 as the foundational event of their lives while excoriating the very coastal states most likely to face further attacks as traitors for not loving the remarkably stupid failson of a President who was unfolding an unprecedented surveillance state at the same time he was waging an aggressive culture war to teach creationism in public school and ruin public education forever with No Child Left Behind (the ultimate tragic source of Zoomer intellectual degradation). 

The media played along. Despite being owned and operated by centrist liberals who usually cater to the other partisan tribe, they saw the cultural zeitgeist as one of right wing rage. Rural Americans were depicted as ‘real’ Americans in touch with the heart and soul of the country. Coastals were gay-married Islamosexual Communazis who Hated Our Freedumbz. The trucker nut adorned humvee was the mark of a REAL MAN. Toby Keith was everywhere conflating the definition of Americanism with endless war. CNN and MSNBC competed with Fox for the only audience they thought mattered: conservatives. It is often forgotten about now, but MSNBC once tried to outflank Fox on the right, firing Phil Donahue for opposing the Iraq War and hiring theocrat lunatics like Alan Keyes to host their own shows on the network.

Where did all this patriotastic pablum go? Down the toilet with W. Bush’s approval ratings into the 20th percentile after endless war sold on lies, natural disaster, economic recession, and growing suspicion of the surveillance state. And with its death came the era of liberal smugness. The rural rubes who were such a large percentage of Bush’s support became not the stars of the cultural show, but its rejected failures. The punching bag, the lumpen symbol of everything that had gone so wrong after the strong show of unity in the country after 9/11. No one was more ideological discredited in the late Bush Era than the ‘base’ of the GOP. And the revenge was to become the opposite of what they had been just years before- the most widely scorned broad base demographic. This was the first death of Redneck Chic.

They deserved it, frankly. And I say that as someone who (and the archives of this site and my outside publications can attest to this) finds dunking on yuppie libs far more proportionally entertaining. The liberal’s pretense to knowledge and objectivity while being effectively an urban-redneck in an equally hermetically sealed media consumption bubble is actually much funnier to poke holes at. That their favored intellectuals hold actual credentials while still descending into the madness of Timothy Snyderdom is objectively hilarious. With the actual rural lumpenprole, however, it almost seems too easy. Like bullying and punching down. Indeed, I offered a quantified defense of these people when Trump won the first time as effectively misguided rubes but ultimately motivated by real anger and understanding that the political establishment had screwed them. This defense was contingent, however, on them having learned their lesson about neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, evangelism, the billionaire class and the like. 

Now here they are, the only demographic in with the Boomers on another stupid, unnecessary, self-destructive war. Conducted on behalf of the bipartisan elite they claim to hate and for a foreign country whose priorities couldn’t be further away from ‘America First’. Their cries to not be forgotten gave them a brief second wind in the limelight, but now all we want is to make sure this astroturfed lament is the last time anyone ever has to hear of it.

They did put on a big show of moving away from endless interventionism, and I think many did and still do mean it, but not  nearly enough. Now, here in 2026, it is obvious like never before that MAGA is a cult of personality first and foremost and will bend with the wind following the mercurial moods of its Cholesterol Caligula. And how fitting a reality tv star who appealed to the tasteless would be such a totem of veneration. The midwestern and Appalachian desire for less foreign commitments still appears to survive in many quarters…while the bellicose bloviating of the lowlands southeastern Southern Baptist convention and the histrionics of the mountain west does seem to show that there are definitely many different rural mega-regions at play. It would be foolish to conflate them. But the redneck is less a specific place or even lifestyle today than it is an anti-aspirational mindset that can be found in disaffected losers anywhere. A form of identity politics not unlike a tumblr neogender. Something declared not so much as an actual culture but rather an ideological lifestyle. Perpetual grievance weaponized as a form of pride in being a loser. A cult of victimhood.

Sure, the return of the GOP to neocon-mode doesn’t make this any different from the Cheney Democrats who ignored Obama’s many foreign policy disasters and then tried to sweep U.S. involvement in the Gaza War and pretend Ukraine is the front lines of some global struggle against a vaguely defined ‘authoritarianism’, but if you are going to posture as against the establishment it might make sense to realize that a wealthy real estate developer is intrinsically part of said establishment. And this current president is the personal prostitute of Benjamin Netanyahu. Just as Biden was, and probably even more than Harris would have been…maybe.

But of course, that is part of the problem. Israel is the Holy Land to so many of these people, and they need it to justify their apocalyptic fantasies of making The Road real so they can be raptured to heaven or whatever. Hell, I would feel pretty down on real life too if my cultural surroundings were strip mall megachurches and Waffle Houses too. The thing is they are speedrunning the death of the Era of Chud. It took us 10 years to fight through the horrors of the Woke Era, but we (collectively) seem to be ready to emerge from its backlash in barely over a year after Trump’s deranged return to office and the rural-and-subruban grievance machine that still swears fealty to him. 

By swearing fealty to Trump above actual policy and priorities, MAGA, the largest organized faction of redneck gnosis, has betrayed almost everything it claimed to care about and shown clearly that it has no inner core save spiteful rage and daytime television gawking at fame. If one cannot maintain the scorn for an elite when it switches from D to R then one’s scorn never was anything but a branding exercise in optics. 

There was a golden opportunity by ‘the base’ to show they of all people could be better than the myopic libs they hate so much. They could have had a consistent critique that transcended partisanship. Some of them, like Thomas Massie and those who still appreciate him, do. But it is often these consistent ones who are attacked by the true party loyalists, happy to have their standards of living decline so long as the people they hate for media-heightened grievances suffer just as much. They live not to govern, but to own the libs. But the real lesson here (and I speak as someone who loves owning the libs) is that the best way to own them is to beat them at making constructive policy.

With such rapidly collapsing cultural cache I think it can be stated with strong confidence that, much like the late 2000s, the second death of redneck chic is now upon us. Having given them the benefit of the doubt 10 years ago on their supposed redemption arc, only to end up here, I can now clearly say I have no more interest in sympathy or mercy. Let us make it so that this particular demographic is never allowed any kind of sway over the cultural zeitgeist ever again. And, to cover all bases, let’s also make sure that unlike last time we don’t let the smuggest and most out of touch urbanite liberals be the primary ones who benefit from the great Good Ole Boy Self Immolation of 2026. To ascend away from this low-information culture warrior hellscape requires rejecting all of its dumbest adherents. 

I am an economic populist for social stability and meritocracy reasons, but have always been strongly anti-populist on pretty much any other issue. It is one of the reasons I like the Federalist Party more and more over time. Anti-monarchy, Anti-demos, anti-alliance, pro-neutrality, pro-material development, scornful of rubes. They (at least at first) understood that no matter how much one might share a just hatred of an entitled elite, the point is ultimately to replace said elite with another better one. Not to let the drooling provincials wage a popularity contest to elevate whatever carnival barking snake oil salesman flatters their hayseed sensibilities. They were American Kemalists before Kemalism was even a thing. But if we don’t do something to get those priorities back we will end up ruled over by Çomar-backed grifters again and again.

Local Pennsylvanian Legend, Appalachian Winter Drops New Album

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment
THREE new songs mark the completion of Wintermountains Rise!! Also, a sneak peak at what comes next!

I mentioned them at least once before, back in this post about the rise of North American atmospheric black metal.

I can only describe the sound of this album as CARVERNOUS. This stands alongside, if not beyond, Winter Always Returns in the discography. Quiet moments interspersed inside resonant walls of sound where nature and bleak vistas meet.

Siren Call of the Unholy Land

/ geotrickster / 5 Comments

A predictable outbreak of debate and reaction has washed over the United States and many of its allies in light of the joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran that is presently unfolding. This includes debates over what percentage of the Iranian people want to see their government overthrown against how many would fight against foreign attack, what the damage done to diplomacy in the region will be, and how dangerous the Iranian and Israeli nations are to the Middle East. What all of this is often missing, however, is geography itself. And when looked at through the lens of geography- so core a concept to understanding geopolitics that it is part of the name- something becomes apparent:

The Middle East is not a particularly vital region of the world for those who live far outside of it.

My perspective is based in North America, but much of this applies to other regions of the world too. Many countries have pivoted away from fossil fuel dependence on the Persian Gulf. The United States in particular is now the world’s largest oil and gas exporter. There is no major world power based in the Middle East nor is there one (as the endless War on Terror seems to be showing) capable of utterly dominating it. Locally rooted middle powers are the most dominant long-term actors, and they have the capacity to outlast the imperial flirtations of more outside powers with global interests.

For profit defense contracting is certainly a major influence, keeping an unbroken stream of revenue pouring in from endless conflicts, and made especially lucrative by both the United Arab Emirates and Israel’s constant addiction to behaving as interventionist powers in their near abroad. Such honeypots in turn fuel media advertisement which in turn purchases favorable coverage and lobbying. But perpetual conflicts also exist in Myanmar, the Congo, the Sahel, and, albeit frozen, the Korean Peninsula, and in none of those places is there such a drive to intervene and to internalize the struggles of various peoples as there is for the Middle East. There is a genuine and seemingly at least partially organic push by many to see the safety and even outright expansion of Israel as some kind of existential virtue on behalf of some grand civilizational struggle. Likewise, amongst opposition to this consensus, the struggle of the Palestinians has become a moral litmus test in a way few other causes are touted. How Iran is governed internally also has become interwoven into these local struggles that so many insist on making global. The push for an Israeli regional supremacism is generally given far greater credence in mainstream commentary than its inverse doppleganger. Up to and including the Wall Street Journal’s editorials salivating for the next war for Israel against NATO-aligned countries before the present is even finished.

What accounts for this constant return of the U.S. and others and the comparative enthusiasm it receives from many despite often dismal results? I would argue that it is religious identification. Numerous sects of Christians, usually Protestant in denomination (and almost always evangelical variants) view Israel as a chosen land governed by a chosen people. In alliance with the equally ideological objectives of the neoconservative movement, which is almost monomaniacally fixated on the support of Israel, they seek to disseminate a narrative of prophecy and apocalypse- a final showdown for the entire planet at the ancient battlefield of Megiddo. The Jews were chosen by the Abrahamic God to be a special people on Earth, even if Evangelicals effectively view them as a human sacrifice to usher in the Book of Revelation’s promise to bring about a final war of all that is good against all that is evil. The True Believers, who make no secret of their intentions to use the United States military as their crucible of prophecy, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and the rest of us evildoers will be cast down into Hell where we can no longer remind The Elect about such pesky principles such as nuance, balance of power, and the fact that geopolitics at its most rational is ultimately not about morality or absolutes. A calculation that would inevitably turn up a dim view of outside powers being involved in local Levantine power struggles.

This is an even more unhinged-albeit clearly related- version of the liberal-humanist world view of an ever-advancing wave of democratic-capitalist societies putting on the ‘right side of history’. Both, however, share a total disregard for any sort of sustainability and see human lives as expendable in the face of some grand globalist ideological project. As it is, many supposedly secular people from outside of the Middle East have still adopted a Middle East-centric world view as a kind of automatic cultural inheritance. The time to critically interrogate this baggage is now well overdue.

The monomaniacal fixation of being involved in smaller regional wars on the other side of the planet from one’s home has exposed the dangers of universalist ideology. And no part of the world seems to attract this ideology quite like the Middle East, the place where it was first born. The Abrahamist world view taught that the local and situational was to be disdained for the existential and the absolute. A world whose only distinctions were moral, not geographic or cultural. From U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee to the Mullahs in Tehran, to the wailing snake-charmers surrounding the present President in the Oval Office, all agree; the fight for the soul of the world lies in the disposition of this dry and dusky land once known as the Fertile Crescent.

The spatial focus that should be at the center of all policy priorities is rejected, and countries like the United States, who should be rooted in the Western Hemisphere or, at most, the Pacific and Atlantic littorals as an offshore balancer, is once again dragged by the baggage of someone else’s history into wading into a strip of land no more valuable than any other on the far side of the world. In the heads of the Christian Zionist, the pro-Israel activist, or the global jihadist, the center of the world lies in the Levant. Therefore, their priorities remain fixated first on what they consider the ‘Holy Land’.

But the U.S. (and many of its allies) are secular countries. The First Amendment declared that the state would have no established religion, likewise the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli explicitly disavowed that religious traditions of other nations were of interest to American diplomacy. Knowledge of the horrors of 17th Century Puritanism has prepared the new ruling class in America for the dangers of an overly ideological foreign policy. George Washington himself was primarily motivated by a non-ideological spatial conception of national interest– a legacy that would influence an entire century of U.S. foreign policy after him.

Looking forward, I would urge those who live far from the Middle East to reconsider what the concept of a Holy Land is or should be. Rejecting the cause of universal telos and apocalyptic revelation, all rational foreign policy analysts must know they should not be in the game of rapture-making but rather supporting the stability and prosperity of the homeland. Any world view that advocates for a focus on a distant land over that of one’s own home is one that engaged in a kind of treason against any rational concept of the national interest (something that must be wrestled with first as domestic politics) on behalf what is effectively a globalist mythology of eternal cosmic battle amongst abstract and otherworldly ideals.

The deserts and scrublands of the Middle East are a far cry from North America’s varied natural splendor. If I needed a holy land, this ancient and biodiverse land that contains everything from temperate rainforest to swampy bayou to wide open plains does perfectly fine. Its centrality in its own geospatial mandala must not be sacrificed to those who live amongst its abundance and yet would still place the fables of the Dead Sea above it in importance. Those who live elsewhere may come to a similar conclusion about their own lands and thus they too must resist the siren call of yet more interventions in a distant and utterly unholy land.

Learning to Eat the Meat Buffet: The Liao-Song Detente

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment
Photograph of Khitan Liao coffin lid paintings I took in the Princeton University Art Museum

If you don’t know me personally or have never read my book you probably would never guess that my favorite state(s) in history are the two successive Khitan empires. The Liao Dynasty and its differently located sequel the Kara-Khitai Khanate are to me the most fascinating combination of nomadic frontier and settled agrarian statehood. Their practical and flexible government system even survived full state collapse, being taken on horseback west after an unexpected fall caused by a Jurchen rebellion, and set up all over again in majority Turkic and Tajik Central Asia where it would survive for another century until annexed by the rising Mongol Empire.

Founded by a tribe of perpetual peripherals, the Khitans were a nomadic proto-Mongolian people who spent centuries hanging around the northeastern frontiers of the Tang Dynasty as sometime vassals and sometime foes of said government. Nothing was particularly noteworthy about them even as they began confederating into proto-statehood save that they generally got the worst of many of their contests with other powers. 

That was until the Tang collapsed. The Khitans, having much experience with great powers, stepped into the role well. Yelu Abaoji unified the tribes and drove south, conquering new territories to provide tax revenue and manufactured goods from areas primarily settled by Chinese farmers. While China was divided, the Khitans built the Liao Dynasty. A unique government that sought the best of both worlds by governing settled and nomad differently. Nomads were ruled by a Khan, settled farmers an Emperor. They were, of course, both the same person. There was a courtly bureaucracy and a migrating capital, the elite grew up in the saddle but learned poetry and the arts too. Powerful dowager Empress’ served as guardians of tradition against the temptations of Sinicization. 

And, in a rarity for large imperial nomadic states, it was an empire of restraint, with a comparatively minimal appetite for foreign interventionism once it was established. There was no sustained drive to fully dominate China, only to balance factions in that country so that none could conquer the Liao. The Khitan elite understood that too many Chinese subjects would bring about assimilation, just as they understood that alienating or losing what Han subjects they had risked a large hit to their tax and administrative base.

Khitan “Inshore Balancing” (see my book) tactics only worked so long however, for the Song Dynasty would eventually come to reunify the country south of their borders in time. That left only the Tangut Xi Xia Kingdom to the west and the Liao to the north. The Liao and Song entered into decades of an again off again warfare over a contested border zone. During a climactic-in-scale campaign in 1004-5, the two powers realized neither could achieve decisive victory over the other.

The build up to this peace treaty and its aftermath can be found in many books on Chinese history, my personal favorite being FW Mote’s Imperial China 900-1800. What came after is harder to find in English. There are a few books on this subject, and I own almost all of them, but one that I only just came into possession of after a long time of coveting is “From War to Diplomatic Parity in Eleventh Century China” by David Curtis Wright. This is a book intended for the longtime fan of this place and time, as it doesn’t even have much of a prelude about pre-Liao origins of the Khitans. What it does have, however, is all the gritty details about why the two parties agreed to settle in a century long peace, how this was justified to the Song, and what the nature of their rivalry was once it had become one of diplomatic, rather than military, games.

Khitan cavalry armor, from the China In Pictures account on X

The Song were a ‘unified’ dynasty, and back then the fiction that China’s natural state was one of perpetual unity was almost as strong as it is today. The Song, having to forgo reconquering the parts of northern China ruled by the Liao, had to excuse being part of a bipolar system of legal equals where a “Northern Court” and a “Southern Court” managed affairs as peers. 

Reliant as it is on Song sources more than Liao (understandible given subsequent historical events and the different nature of the Khitan script) the book gives us endless examples of SinoCope. Elaborate excuses as to how the Khitans won their place as a civilized peer while still trying to get away with sending junior level diplomats in a passive-aggressive way to not quite admit it. Song annual tribute payments to the Liao were written off as investments in a secure border. Song diplomats moaned about the climate and reacted in horror when diplomatic meals with the nomads degenerated into drinking contests or when the primary course was just a pile of grilled meats from various unspecified animals. Oftentimes, the Song envoys would write emo-ish poetry about the hardships of the journey but it was mixed with pride in the necessity of keeping the peace, for example the diplomat Wang An-shih wrote:

His majesty issues a royal appointment;

The Son of Heaven indulges the Xiongnu.

Though you reply that the ways of the barbarian are vile,

You understand the distinction of being an envoy for the Han.

At night the border signal towers have long been unused;

In autumn the watchmen are still and free of worry.

What need is there to be cruel like swallows

And smear the livers and brains of living beings on the battlefield?

The primary source detail in the book is great, and being about the neglected side of this relationship- the one of a long standing peace- becomes all the more interesting. Also of interest is the chapter on the ‘Mid-Century Crisis’, when there was a war scare between the two powers 40 years after the treaty. This was due to the rising power of the Tangut state. Far from as powerful as the other two, the Xi Xia kingdom nevertheless had a potent military capable of inflicting massive defeats on Song frontier forces. The Liao used this to threaten intervention on the side of the Tanguts unless they received an increase in the annual tribute payments. After much wrangling, the proposal was accepted. 

The Song would have their revenge over a half century later when the Jurchens rose in revolt. Collaborating with them, the Song thought the Jurchens would be easier to deal with than an integrated peer power. Instead, the Jurchens attacked them much more relentlessly than the Khitan ever had, causing the loss of yet further territory and a perpetually simmering state of war for the next century (and beyond when counting the Mongol conquest of the Jurchen Jin Dynasty). Oops! Probably would have been better off keeping the balance.

Sure, this is a topic I appreciate solely on its own terms. But it is hard not to think of other examples of a domineering major power really struggling to adapt to the return of natural multipolarity. The U.S. replicates Song passive-aggressiveness by referring to modern day China as a “Near-peer” rather than peer. The British after World War I badly underestimated how much relative power they had lost to the U.S. and Japan on the world stage, and of course the Qing Dynasty’s inheritance of Middle Kingdom syndrome made it woefully unprepared for the arrival of the European expansion on their own shores. 

Perhaps more importantly, sometimes it’s just better to leave a good enough situation as is, even if you have to eat from the randomly assorted meat pile from time to time. I always like a culinary adventure, myself. It usually beats a geopolitical one. 

A Polycentric World Rejects the Missionary Mindset

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

I recently spoke at an event in Berlin to inaugurate the first issue of the Global Geopolitics peer reviewed journal. For a variety of time and pacing reasons I ended up cutting significant portions of my already-written speech from my actual delivery, so I just wanted to put the entire text here in its original form. When video of the roundtable forum goes up I will add it to the links on my publications tab on this site.

…..

George Santayana in The Birth of Reason once wrote: 

“The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.”

I believe that in diplomacy, especially in multipolar diplomacy, this quote summarizes something of critical importance to understand going forward.

It has become customary to begin these types of speeches with a declaration that Francis Fukuyama was wrong, that history has returned. But this doesn’t go far enough. History never ended or even paused in the first place. What happened was that the hubris of teleology, of ideology as policy, takes root in complacent and decadent elites because it flatters their self-conception as the protagonists of the story. A hangover of the Book of Revelation, human history is held to be some kind of a moral fable leading inexorably to a singular outcome where good and evil are judged by universal standards- with the imperial administrators, of course, as jury. 

And when this Young Earth Creationist version of geopolitics inevitably fails, the prophets of doom descend. Heaven, having failed to arrive, has been replaced by Hell. We are to be tormented in a pit of fire forever for having come up short of our supposedly saintly potential.

This counter- vision is just as ridiculous and idealist as the one in which it replaces. 

The unipolar moment was, ultimately, a freakish occurrence. Other powers like the Mongols and the British came close, but the inability to leave the Eurasian landmass of the former and the continued existence of proper peer rivals in Europe of the latter meant not even they reached the heights that the United States enjoyed for a brief moment after the fall of the Soviet Union. 

And yet we hear constantly from so much of the commentariat that the supposedly reasonable options are either somehow restoring the 1990s consensus by voting the right way in a singular election or to live in a world of perpetual world war. But the first is now materially impossible due to rising capability of other power poles, and the second is so undesirable that only a conspiracy of true ideologues or incompetents would seek to bring it about. Sometimes, when I look at the foreign policy elite on both sides of the Northern Atlantic, I genuinely fear that the second is a very real possibility. Much like how a cult can pivot from a failed prophecy to mass suicide as compensation.

So the question arises: if we understand that 99% of human history was effectively ‘multipolar’, then how do we most constructively learn to be normal again after having bathed in the mentally stultifying lies of a universal human destiny? I would argue that the key lies in seeing things less as multiple poles contesting a shared future and rather as true polycentrism. There is no shared political journey whatsoever. The future will be as divergent as the past was. With strategic foresight this could even be a good thing.

An assumption we have inherited from the discredited liberal international order that should be fought is that to acknowledge political divergence is to embrace a kind of zero-sum expansionism. If one group doesn’t have something, it loses it. All or nothing. But the majority of stable and lasting power politics in diplomatic history is not this at all, it is the creation, maintenance, and navigation of the balance of power. Creating no doubt temporary islands of calm in the chaotic tempest of stormy seas. And the successful balance of powers of history, from Westphalia to the Postwar Era, were all ultimately based on accepting and even affirming different paths of governance. Different religions or ideologies between peers, even rival peers, might color the rhetoric but they would not prevent them from dealing with each other first and foremost as sovereign geographic entities.

Liberal internationalism, in its quest to become the universal arbiter of morality as a kind of Fourth Abrahamic Religion, forgot that once upon a time its greatest asset was that it acknowledged many forms of being. Its rise in political thinking was in reaction to the horrors of the religiously tinged and unrestrained nature of so much of 17th Century warfare, with philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes openly validating the concept of many different kinds of regimes having by necessity to exist with each other. As the philosopher John Gray put it in his book The Two Faces of Liberalism:

“One of the paradoxes that comes with accepting that there are incommensurate values is that tragic conflicts of value can sometimes melt away. If there are many incommensurable ways in which humans can flourish, choices among them need not be tragic.”

And just because liberal internationalism is dying out after decades of hubris and overreach need not mean that liberalism itself will die out. The reality of polycentrism is that the future promises diversity, not uniformity. Russian dreams of being a kind of messianic counter-liberalism are just as delusional as the very thing they claim to be countering as they order the planet away from the accommodation of a Modus Vivendi and into an artificial binary camp inspired by Platonic ideals. But multitudes, not binaries, now reign.

If the United States is the premier liberal state, it was not founded as a messianic or missionary power. That came much later. In fact, it originally was done as an experiment not just in political distinction, but in geographic distinction as well. To break with Britain was to break with putting the global empire’s needs over its own growing core. It is less well known today how after allying with France to break away from Britain, and feeling an immense euphoria and vindication with the rise of the French Revolution shortly thereafter, the U.S. turned against France when the new fellow enlightenment republic began to pressure the young nation to join it in waging global war. Indeed, the U.S. Navy itself was originally founded to combat attempts to force ideological solidarity by a once beloved ally. The first naval battles in American history would be against France, the only other enlightenment republic. So much for democratic peace theory.

Today the Trans-Atlantic shoe is on the other foot, with U.S. belligerence towards, of all countries, Denmark. Mercurial shifts in domestic policy cause the mask to fall and unequal relations once referred to as partnerships are now exposed as vassalage networks between an imperial core and subalterns. Denmark, which stood beside the U.S. for so long, who sent its armed forces into Afghanistan at American behest, now gets its thanks in terms of thuggish and short-sighted demands for Greenland. Trans-Atlanticism has a far worse record on both sides of the Atlantic than its biggest defenders would ever admit. Much as communist solidarity in the Cold War could not survive the Sino-Soviet Split, the ideological alliance has been shown time and time again to be the most overrated concept in geopolitical history. The needs of the alliance have also ironically harmed liberalism at home on both sides of the Atlantic, as frank discussions of what the national interest of these different regions have long been buried in exchange for a gargoyle of globalism which yokes vast regions together under the promise of some unproven ultimate ideological or global market based outcome.

And yet the states of Eastern Europe rightly fear Russian power and intentions towards them too. But this is not an either-or choice, it is a challenge. Can European states form an independent bloc that can stand up to both the U.S. and Russia? I would argue yes, but they must drop the ultimate conceit of universalism which they have inherited first from the Age of Discovery and then from the subsequent Victorian periods. No longer in the cockpit of history, they must contend with what they were before Columbus: Asia’s westernmost peninsula. A region like any other. But this could be a liberation rather than a curse. Free of the delusion of being missionaries of global telos, Europeans can now rediscover the imperative virtue of having a specific geographically located interest. They can have, as Phil Cunliffe would say in his excellent book on The National Interest, an actually comprehensible internal debate on what is feasible and what is not. An open contestation between citizens and politicians of what is in their collective best interest. It is something they seem to have forgotten how to do, so reliant on American power to maintain the illusion of continued global tastemakers as they have become. 

They should also be cautious that their first instinct, especially here in Germany if recent history is any guide, could be to become a kind of Saudi Arabia of militant humanism. An exporter of a universalist world view as a “moral conscience” that retains its purity in light of Big Bad America’s descent into overt gangsterism. This would be a massive mistake. Strategic autonomy comes not from posturing and pontification, as domestic politics are likely to change what is ideological fashionable on a whim, but rather it comes from a rooted geographic interest that emphasizes the local- and hence anti-universal- over that of any abstract global cause. People will rally to defend their homes in a way they never would to defend the idea of a global governance that was and will always be used to justify whatever the strongest powers, upon whose whims it relies on, wish to do. 

This brings us to the question of the smaller states in polycentrism. Great powers must learn to live with each other or face ruin. Middle Powers are likely to make huge gains under polycentrism as their freedom of action opens up in their immediate near-abroad, at least so long as they avoid making revisionist bids for hegemony beyond their means. But the future could well be bleak for the smaller nations of the world, or the ones without favorable geographic defenses. Some will have to reach an accord with a dominant regional power. Others risk being contested in clashing spheres of influence. It might be tempting for them to ask that someone save them, but this cannot be guaranteed either. 

I would contend that these countries too must learn to embrace difference and distinction. Even if the great powers hopefully learn to live with each other and put a halt to grand ideological battles, they will almost certainly try to affirm their contested frontiers with projects of ideological dross. Religious and racial chauvinism, clash of civilizations, left vs right, etc. For countries that wish to avoid becoming the playthings of others it becomes doubly important that even if one wishes to reach a subordinate security arrangement with a great power it must combat missionary activity from the outside world lest it risk foreign fueled civil strife at home. 

The polycentric world could be made stable and its worst excesses curbed. But only if the accommodation reached between the powers is one of a Modus Vivendi that explicitly eschews grand ideological projects or the conversion of others along cultural, religious, political or economic universals. Otherwise, whatever benefits there are of returning to the core bedrock of stability- geography and negotiated interest- will be immediately squandered by supremacist factions who are uninterested in long term stability.

All orders are temporary and become obsolete, of course. This is the humility that those of us opposed to treating history as teleology can affirm. But it is worth looking at the results achieved by the most aggressively anti-missionary state in history: The Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. Founded in an internal coup against a then reigning newly-unified government who saw its primary purpose as increasingly fruitless expansion abroad, the Shogunate knew two things: 1. Spanish and Portuguese missionaries were destabilising society at home and possibly paving the way for future integration as a vassal or colony in their growing empires, and 2. Attempting to displace the Chinese as masters of East Asia by force had been a failure. 

So what did they do? They played to their geographic strengths as a large archipelago and closed the country. They expelled or exterminated the missionaries and invested everything into building a distinct state separate from both the Chinese tribute system and the European empires. Edo, now Tokyo, became the largest city in the world. Infrastructure expanded. The world’s first government mandated national forest preserves were set aside. And above all, a country that had known nothing but war for over a century now would know peace for well over 200 years. The order had its excesses, of course. In time it would become obsolete and in need of replacement. But it still stands as an example of what a country can do when it utilizes its unique geographic gifts to cultivate a specific sense of self-interest separate from the schemes of greater powers and divorced from delusions of being “on the right side of history.”

The context of the Eurozone today is vastly different from 17th Century Japan or 18th Century America, of course, but that is my point: the contexts are always regional and different. In the 21st Century the European states are economically subordinated to U.S. interests in a way that harms their capacity for independent action but so integrated that it will take cautious long term planning to make a pivot away from dollar dependence and security networks. I suspect we will see a variety of paths from different states unfold, and doing so will be a boon to social and political science research if nothing else.

We may have little control over the vast bureaucratic entities of the modern state and the chaos of events, but by purging ourselves of the missionary mentality we could begin the process of making the world more habitable and conducive to diplomacy. Caring about the physical space around us goes far further than caring about abstract universal idealism ever could. The energies of activists and reformers could be spent responding to their actual constituents. Change starts at home.

Every country with remotely natural or defensible borders has now been given the opportunity to find divergent ways to secure their sense of self and security. Many will fail, but the more that embrace localism and anti-universal paths to security, the more viable the non-aligned buffer state becomes. Perhaps more relevant to us social scientists, the more interesting case studies we have to test theories on as well. This would be riding the tiger of polycentrism, in a world of many shrines to different genus loci it is best not to adhere to a universal church. Psychologically, the North Atlantic may be the least prepared region of the world for this shift today, but if they want to avoid future calamities they would be wise to prepare themselves. 

But this quest for reasoned distinction is not alien to the North Atlantic, merely to its moderns. If I may close by quoting at length from George Washington’s “Farewell Address”, which was as good advice for a new and young republic then as it is for those disoriented by the end of unipolarity today:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? 

In short, reject Baerbockism, embrace circumstantial realism.

The Successful and the Compromised Civilizational Restorers

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

I just completed a quite excellent biography of the Emperor Diocletian, “Diocletian and the Military Restoration of Rome” by Lee Fratantuono. The author tells the story of what had to have been, adjusted for circumstances, one of the most successful emperors in Roman history. 

After the crisis of the 3rd Century, with the empire constantly torn between domestic upheaval, civil war, and foreign invasion, a military commander who was of lowly birth (either a freed slave or a descendant of slaves) named Dioclecian was the most successful of numerous bids to the throne in a time of yet another imperial deposition. The empire having been subjected to generations of turmoil at this point, security and restructuring were in order. Diocletian went on to have a remarkably successful reign as an imperial restorer. Pushing back barbarian tribes, taking Persia down a notch, and restoring stability to the Nubian frontier. 

His domestic record would be more mixed, but still impressive given his difficulties. Understanding, presciently as we know with the benefit of hindsight, that the empire was too large and unwieldy to be ruled by a single emperor and court, Diocletian set up an interesting experiment in government with the Tetrarchy: a division of the empire into four administrative units under two senior emperors more focused on running the state (Augustus) and two junior emperors (Ceasars), one under each of these, handling the field and frontier priorities. 

Diocletian also turned towards the internally divisive rise of Christianity, which he tried to stamp out in the army and public life after multiple public disorders had been caused in its name. Interestingly, his concerns with the religion seemed to be in line with the much later history written by Edward Gibbon, that they were a force disruptive to Roman unity due to their unwillingness to put the interests of society at large over the interests of their ideals. 

20 years of largely successful reign led to Diocletian retiring (the first emperor to voluntarily do so) to his seaside villa (which still exists today) to grow produce and live in post-political quiet. When people would ask him to return to power later he would famously remark: “If you could see the vegetables I grow with my own hands, you wouldn’t talk to me about empire.”

The Tetrarchy worked so long as everyone involved in it knew each other and had worked to save the empire together. Without Diocletian it began to decay, and would fall apart after his death. The experiment had worked in an initial crisis but it had no lasting power. Likewise, Diocletian’s persecutions of Christianity came too late to be effective. Despite their unprecedented size, they could not check the growth of the religion. Ironically, his administrative saving of the empire would facilitate the rise of Constantine and the beginning of the triumph of that religion, fundamentally changing Rome, though not in a way that would ever stop even the long-lived eastern half of it from being in a state of longform decline. Alternatively, it seems quite possible to me if Rome had collapsed during the Crisis of the 3rd Century that the religion would have been far less successful, having no hegemonic power to facilitate its propagation. But the Emperor was a patriot and he probably valued the saving of the state above that of the saving even of Hellenic culture.

I thought of two other historical figures while reading this book as comparison points. One, Tokugawa Iemitsu, I have already sort of written about and likely will write about more next year in a more professional capacity. Another, and one already ancient when Diocletian was reigning, was Horemheb, of New Kingdom Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. 

Like Diocletian, Horemheb was a commoner who had risen up the ranks of the military from a nobody to a scribe and an army commander. He had witnessed the rise of Akhenaten and the attempt by the royal court to impose Atenism, arguably the first known incarnation of monotheism, upon the state. Though the push to convert the kingdom ended after Akhenaten’s death, his possibly sickly son Tutenkhamun, most famous today for being so forgotten about no one even remembered to rob his tomb, did not exactly live long enough to reverse what had happened under his father’s cultural revolution. Replaced by the elderly administrator Ay, who in turn died leaving Horemheb the opportunity to claim the throne as a usurper, it was Horemheb who would complete the counter-revolution against Atenism. In due time he would initiate large scale legal and administrative reforms as well, bringing, as Diocletian would do a millennium and a half later, welcome stability after a time of upheaval. 

But whereas Diocletian’s reforms would bring only temporary reprieve in his various projects, Horemheb’s would lay the groundwork for the eventual greatest height of Egyptian power and prestige- despite the fact that he did not have any living descendants and represented the effective end of the 18th Dynasty. It would be the 19th that would reap most of the long term benefits of his rule. 

The similarities of Horemheb and Diocletian are obvious: both were outsiders who earned their way to power through skill, bravery, and cunning, rather than inheritors. As such, following the Khaldunian (or Howardian) path of an outsider who more clearly sees the problems of a decadent state than its entrenched establishment does. The differences, I would argue, was twofold: 

1. Horemheb reversed top-down changes, Diocletian attempted to reverse changes coming from the bottom up. Though a majority of the Roman population was pagan (and many would remain so for generations after Constantine) it was not yet something affiliated with the dying empire, but rather a response to its many past crisis. The Atenist experiment in Egypt, however, was undeniably tied to the government and its self-creation was a crisis which previously did not exist.

2. The geography of the late Roman Empire was a bloated mess with often hard to defend borders requiring a massive military presence in almost every region. Without the unprecedented regional unipolarity and prosperity of the situation from Octavian through Marcus Aurelius, unified policy on domestic matters was difficult. Egypt was far more rooted in a specific geographic context, even counting the New Kingdom’s expansionism compared to previous eras. To command the religious establishment to revert to more localized cults reflecting thousands of years of polytheism was not only easier, it could be done without fear of splitting the state or creating schism.

When these two differences are noticed, one conclusion jumps out at me; it is easier to renew a society without compromising its identity and cultural legacy if said society is restrained and regional, rather than having pretensions to universalism and perpetual hegemony. The Romans would eventually see in Christianity a continuation of their empire, a single creed to rule over all. The Egyptians, more ancient and secure and never having left the Nile as their core, held on to their already aeons-old sense of self for another 1500 years, only losing out later because it was a province of Rome. The two went down together, but it was Egypt that held the line of continuation far longer. In a world where everything eventually dies, this is all the more impressive.

I was reading this book on Diocletian for my own historical reasons, not for any contemporary reason. And yet the dropping of the White House’s 2025 National Security Strategy coincided with this activity which explicitly talks about the failures of hegemony, idealist interpretation of foreign policy, and the importance of civilizational states. Parts of it read like I could have written it myself. I still have some major disagreements with it, and think the present administration’s idea of what a civilization actually constitutes is undercooked and misguided, but this is a discourse I have been preparing for in the past few years. Rather than chasing a trend, it has been my goal to be ahead of and independent of them and I look forward to more of this. As it is, I am presently at work on a co-authored project for professional release early next year on the geographic nature of civilizational states. As such, it is always worth considering how large unwieldy empires can adapt to a necessary bloat-cutting phase of strategic reappraisal and retrenchment. Understanding why some could and others couldn’t accomplish this in a variety of times and places in history is key to assembling a full picture. 

So expect more on this front in the future. If civilizations are the core of large powerful entities, and there are to be more than one, as there always is, then it is not a famous ‘clash’ of values that should be sought, as the crusader wing of the political right wishes to conceive it, but a Metternichish concert of civilizations who disavow dreams of the universal empire or values for coexistence in balanced polycentrism. It is a future someone like Horemheb would have a better chance at understanding than our current missionary-elites, as he patronised not just temples to Amun, but also to Isis, Horus, and Set. All of whose temples existed at the same time along the ever-flowing Nile River. All of them were already ancient in the time of Akhenaten and had still yet to exist for long after his memory had been erased.