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.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive review of Star Trek: The Next Generation, nor is it a deep dive take connecting it to political theory like I once did for Deep Space 9. This is simply an overview of what it was like to rewatch one of the defining shows of my childhood from start to finish (albeit with some skips) for the first time since it was being broadcast in real time back when I was in elementary school.
This was the first non-cartoon television show I ever got into (not counting Rescue 911, which was ironically hosted by William Shatner), being introduced to it by a babysitter in what I imagine was the fifth season at the time. The show would have one new episode per week with the rest of its slot time in the week being dedicated to re-runs. This made it easy to catch up on most of the older episodes within a year or so of starting.
Despite the fact that I demanded action in my sci fi entertainment, and always preferred the more violent episodes at that time, the Enterprise-D quickly became a kind of fictional idealized home, a place that one could imagine “Maybe when I am older I can do something like that.” Because of this, I pretty much ended up liking all the episodes. It also inspired me getting into Micro Machines because there were so many Star Trek ones out there.
I had all of these and even more. These days I only have one left in my possession. But if I told you which I would be letting slip what my third and probably final Star Trek post on here eventually will be.
When the show ended, the final episode went a bit over my 9 year old brain and I mostly focused on how cool the alternate future Enterprise with the third warp nacelle was. I wasn’t too broken up about the end as I had found a local public access channel (remember those?) that played The Original Series and soon pivoted to that, which at that time I liked just as much. I was still too young and DS9 was too serialized and too adult to grab me aside from the occasional episode and the later Voyager just did NOT work after I gave it a couple seasons, so I ended up moving away from the franchise for over a decade. Only returning to it in my senior year of college when, sick with the flu, I ended up finding TNG and DS9 both on some of the channels the university network had access to. At the time they were playing seasons 1-2. The next year I moved to the UK where, interestingly enough, the novelty rerun station Dave (yes, that was its name) was re-running TNG’s seasons 6 and 7. In this time my primary return-focus was DS9 and the TOS movies so this spotty partial rewatch was hardly comprehensive and missed most of the middle run of the show. Ten years ago I gave DS9 a full rewatch, and last year I gave TOS the same treatment. These past 3 months I finally came back to my first show and did the long overdue same for TNG. I also decided to rewatch the first two of the TNG movies but not the later two, as I rewatched all of these under lockdown and so had recent experience.
Let us break the following down into sections.
My streamlined rewatch guide:
Want to do a beginning to end watch but not see every single episode? I have some easy but loose guidelines for you. It is easy to skip episodes because the show has relatively little serialization (though more, bizarrely given the other show’s premise, than Voyager ever did).
I strongly recommend skipping the majority of Season 1. To say the show had yet to find its footing would be understatement. It comes across as a bad parody of TOS. “Encounter at Farpoint” is necessary but more for how it bookends with the final episode and introducing the character Q then for any reason of quality. “The Battle” and “The Neutral Zone” are key establishing episodes for important themes. You can watch Tasha Yar die to a stupid slime monster just to see the end of that character arc and Worf’s promotion to security chief. Otherwise, it’s best to zip through this one. Season 2 improves upon it and has more episodes worth catching, but is still very much not the TNG you remember qualitatively. There are stand outs though, especially including “Q Who?” which is the introduction to the Borg and is one of the top 10 episodes of the entire show. Be sure to skip the montage episode season finale though, it’s the worst episode of the entire show if not the entire 20th Century era franchise.
For the remainder of the show’s run I recommend watching the majority of the episodes. Yes, including in the more uneven Season 7. The show is firing on all cylinders from Season 3 through 6 with bad or even lackluster episodes being the outliers. Season 5 was the high point for me, and it contains the best single episode, “Darmok” (the meme language one that encapsulates all that is best with Trek as a franchise). My general guide to what is skippable is all Lt. Barclay episodes except for “The Nth Degree”, all Lwaxana Troi episodes save maybe Menage a Troi (for the ending Picard monologue), and all Alexander and Holodeck episodes save perhaps the funny “Fistful of Datas”, which paradoxically is both an Alexander and a Holodeck episode.
Season 7 is an extra-special season and so I have extra-special thoughts on it. I was most curious going into this what I would make of it on rewatch. I found that, for the most part, I liked it. The writers clearly knew (and later in interviews they would admit this) that they were running out of ideas and just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. This creates some truly awful episodes, chief among them “Sub Rosa” and “Force of Nature”, but also possibly the highest concentration of really stand out episodes such as “Phantasms”, “The Pegasus”, the so-bad-its-good “Masks” (you may hate but I KNOW you remember it), “Preemptive Strike”, and of course “All Good Things…” which is not just a series highlight perhaps the best show-ender of all time. Considering that most shows linger on well past their expiry date, I think it was great we saw just enough to want the show to end but not enough that it dragged. And what a finale! Upon rewatch I enjoy the ending so much more than I did as a kid. If only shows since had followed this path of ending on a high note.
And since I wanted to end the films too on a high note and not a mediocrity (Insurrection) or something outright vile (Nemesis- not even pre-fame Romulan twink Tom Hardy could save it)…so when it came to movies Generations and First Contact was the perfect endpoint for this rewatch. Generations is pretty mediocre in a lot of ways, but ends up just over the positive side for me on rewatch specifically due to its most criticized aspect: the offscreen and seemingly random death of Picard’s extended family in a house fire. This not only reminds us that in the relatively utopic future of the 24th Century life is still filled with unpredictable and random tragedy and how this can inspire both bad and good coping mechanisms for people. It also gives an emotional resonance to the main plot point of the film of people trying to recover an idealized past. Additionally, it is the end of the Enterprise-D and the Duras Sisters. Data getting his emotion chip completes his arc in a way, though whether you find it funny or annoying will vary with the observer. Plus, Malcolm McDowell. First Contact, meanwhile, is a great series send off because it is the best TNG film, introduces the beautiful Enterprise E, and completes the Picard Borg Arc by having a drawn out fight on a single ship, deck by deck and point blank range. Speaking of Arcs…
General Theme and Character Impressions
The Borg Arc is an example of how a not-very-serialized show can have a running theme. Hinted at only vaguely near the end of Season 1, encountered in a freak one-off in Season 2, properly confronted in the climactic “Best of Both Worlds” (and its PTSD follow up third part “Family”), then with occasional reference to a looming threat without overusing it. The drone Hugh is returned to the collective to sabotage it with individuality, which causes a single group to go rogue but otherwise does not remove the threat. Picard’s experiences with assimilation are clearly (but not directly) akin to a rape. They were aiming for a concluding confrontation in film form which is why I view First Contact as a necessary conclusion despite not agreeing with the introduction of the Borg Queen as an element in the lore. Also, we know now that this more restrained use of the galaxy’s ultimate threat was far more effective, with Borg episodes/movie being horror-lite forays into the dangers of techno-optimism which are needed to balance the general euphoria of the setting. Voyager would, of course, go on to totally ruin this by making the Borg almost a monster of the week, easily fooled and outwitted by a single ship. But Voyager was, of course, the beginning of the decline of the franchise as a whole.*
Something I found more interesting than before on rewatch were Prime Directive episodes. Starfleet’s first and foremost rule is to not interfere in the development of prewarp civilizations. I have seen a lot of hot takes, especially during our recently concluded Woke Era, by midwits online that this policy is somehow racist and bad. Implying that one cannot trust single-planet species with advanced technology. I think watching the show clearly should give the opposite impression- it is to protect weak powers from exploitation at the hands of great powers and safeguard the cultural diversity of cultures in or near Federation space. It is cool and good, the revisionists are wrong, and in the unlikely event we ever go into space outside of our own system ourselves and (even more unlikely) encounter sentient life, we should adopt a similar rule.
Prime Directive episodes, where inevitably the rule is broken, usually by accident in some way, thus became more interesting to me during this rewatch. “Who Watches the Watchers” is justly famous on this premise where contact must be initiated after an anthropological investigation is exposed to the natives. But even better is “First Contact” (the episode not the movie) where a race is deemed ready for contact by the Enterprise but the political situation quickly shows that it is not and the whole attempt has to be aborted and covered up, showing how contested these issues can be.
The astropolitical situation of the Alpha Quadrant is obviously something I was much more tuned into this time around. I know the actual explanation of things is that the writers were trying different races as regular arc-villians, starting with the Ferengi, mostly settling on the Romulans, and diving into Cardassians later as a hand off to DS9. But what this really shows in-lore is that the Federation is bloated, over-expanded, and needs to consolidate. It has too many cold wars ongoing, hence the need for an unfavorable peace settlement with a weaker power (Cardassia), perpetual fear of the peer-competitor of the Romulan Empire, and the need to hold the peace after the destruction of much of the Federation fleet in the first Borg invasion. Interestingly, this invasion did spark a revolution in military power, as seen by the ships we get in First Contact (the movie not the episode) and in DS9. And once again showing a realistic take on the unpredictability of power politics, most of these vessels would end up used to fight the previously totally unseen threat of the Gamma Quadrant’s Dominion, which would be the ultimate arc of DS9 if not the franchise itself. One cannot help retroactively fan-theorying that Q’s actual role was not to indirectly prepare the Federation for the Borg by forcing contact between the two- who were too distant from each other to immediately square up at full force- but rather to prepare them for the Dominion by way of a Borg-induced military upgrade. You thought the Alpha Quadrant was bad, you should see the other neighborhoods.
One theme I especially appreciated was to be found in “The Chase”, which might be the episode I have most upgraded from prior view to present estimation. An episode clearly designed to provide an in-universe explanation as to why most of the races of the galaxy live on the same type of worlds and all look the same save for different forehead ridges, “The Chase” does a great job providing a founding species myth to actually explain this otherwise improbable series of events. Sure the universal translator shows why everyone can talk to each other (even apparently when one party has it only) but the actual shared genetic heritage of the species shown via an archeologically themed thriller episode is great fun and ends on a poignant note with the Cardassians and Klingons rejecting the findings out of racism while the Romulans and Humans quietly nod respectively at each other and wonder when the galaxy will be ready to accept this knowledge of a common origin. At least now we know why different species can breed with each other, though billions of years of divergence still makes this…improbable to say the least.
Another great episode that lacks the fame of the typical “best of” lists (the rightfully famous episodes everyone talks about like “Yesterday’s Enterprise” “Darmok” “The Inner Light” “Best of Both Worlds” “Chain of Command” etc) is “Phantasms”. My personal favorite (after Darmok) episode and the one I always like more every time I see it. Data learning to dream and finding the dreams are utterly bizarre and an indirect portal to the subconscious is interesting enough, but as a person with intense and often utterly unhinged dreams myself it really speaks to me. It also has the best scene in the show. You know the one I mean.
My character impressions are as follows. Wesley is still annoying, but probably not as bad as you remember. The character was an expy for Gene Rodenberry’s self-insert instincts, whose death freed it to become less annoying. Ensign Ro was a way better helmswoman though. She was my favorite character as a kid despite appearing in only 6 or so episodes but that is mostly because she was my first crush. (Such is the power of Michelle Forbes that she convinced me from elementary until halfway through high school, no mean feat- It was only another science fiction film, Pitch Black, that would awaken reversal of the trend years later). Interestingly, the most impressive pilot and person who seems to appear most in the role is a character with maybe one speaking line in the entire show’s run, and who is only referred to by name about twice- Ensign Gates. Talk about the true unsung hero of TNG.
Geordi…uh…comes off way worse on later rewatches. He is just such an incel. One of my favorite characters from childhood is now, in my minds eye, the Ship’s Creep. Your spine will not survive watching “Galaxy’s Child”, I can tell you that much. Ah well, at least he’s an engineering genius!
My least favorite character as a kid was Counselor Troi, called by my entire family at the time “Counselor Cleavage” due to her amazingly unprofessional early show attire. It is interesting how the writers made her better once Captain Jellicoe made her put on a real uniform. We went from “Captain, I sense anger” in response to some enemy ship threatening to fire on the Enterprise to actually being one of the funnier (intentionally) characters in later seasons. Even so, true 90s kids know Marina Sirtis’ best role was actually as Demona. Plus, her office perfectly encapsulates the nostalgic vaporwave interior of the Enterprise-D.
The D was never my favorite Enterprise on the outside, being beaten by the A-refit of the TOS movies and the E, but its interior is like a warm dreamy cruise ship ready to bathe you in slowed down reverb elevator music. Perhaps it is nostalgia from childhood, but I swear there is something to the D-interior that just makes it the kind of place you could happily live in even while facing mortal peril once on average of every week for seven years.
W E L C O M E T O B Σ T ∆ Z Σ D P L A Z A
Another character who grew in my esteem was Dr. Crusher. Not just because it’s funny when Picard pronounces her given name as “BEBALY”, but because she has a habit of flying any ship she is in charge of into the nearest star. This happens more than once. She deserves to be captain one day just because it is hilarious.
Though if one wants to mark a real scene-stealing character who is not part of the main cast it has to be Gowron. This is a bit of a cheat because he has an even larger role in DS9, but TNG was his start as High Chancellor of the Klingon Empire and what can I say, the eyes have it. I would have also liked to have seen more of Commander Tomalak from the Romulan Empire as well, as he was a great foil for Picard. Denise Crosby coming back to play the half-Romulan Sela was not a full replacement for his presence, though I do maintain that Sela should have been used in DS9 as the primary Romulan character. That was also a wasted opportunity.
Conclusion
My concluding thoughts are that the show is not as euphoric as I remember. Its vision of the future is optimistic unabashedly but Trek is best when grappling with difficult ethical questions. Despite being an “End of History” era show on broadcast, it actually gave far more nuance than even the politicians and media entities of its time could towards exploring the future. Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama were singing the praises of a society that had beat all challengers and could happily auction off the roots of its success to international finance capital, laying the seeds of terminal decline at the height of triumph. As the Chinese strategist Su Shi once said “It is at the point of victory that the greatest danger lurks”. Despite being a product of this era, Star Trek: The Next Generation did not do this. Its post-scarcity future was still one of messy compromise. Living standards could expand and knowledge could grow, but the wrestling with what it means to make difficult calls in the face of the unknown remained. Even if the future is nicer, it would be any better at providing simple absolute answers.
Sure it is a fun nostalgic show from a more hopeful time. Perhaps it would seem to modern audiences as quaint even. But it still makes for interesting and entertaining viewing today. And for me in particular as someone who finds television by far the worst form of entertainment media, being both passive for the audience and lacking the singular vision of film, it takes a lot to get me to watch, even re-watch, a long running series. TNG has that appeal.
Star Trek, despite the protestations of its fans, is definitely NOT hard science fiction. Its technobabble is a contrivance to engage in high space fantasy. Its exploration episodes are fun from a visual perspective but usually empty or only half-explored. Its strength, and Picard’s strength as captain in TNG, is in how it covers diplomacy. How the inevitably flawed compromise that decides the fates of millions is almost always for the better. How it is usually more desirable to show restraint than to dive headfirst into a crisis. And how, even with all of this, one will still fail and will need to take risks. But the inevitable failures to come do not diminish the effort it takes to keep the peace, to meet new people, and find new constructive ways to work with them.
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* My personal theory is that the reason the massive Borg Collective only sends two one-ship attacks on Earth is that the Collective experiences lag between ship communications. The cube that attacked in Best of Both Worlds was a reconnaissance vessel responsible for the earlier destruction in the Neutral Zone (meaning it was already there before the first encounter of the Enterprise elsewhere) that gradually became sucked into an armed recon in force towards the heart of the Federation. Meanwhile, I think the lone cube with experimental time weapons we see in the First Contact movie was the originally encountered cube from “Q Who?” that had been effectively chasing the Enterprise’s direction of retreat for years and years, finally arriving perhaps with little detailed knowledge of what happened to the previous Alpha Quadrant assigned cube.
I beg and cried for legions to save me from Boudicca’s evil reign. They heer my cries and take pity to free me and my island from bad woad-paint men. I then beg Alaric to save my family from evil Roman slavery which makes us sad and takes away our toys. I walk through time to find happy life but sometimes bad people rob happiness and make sadness. This bring tear to my eye. So I beg for freedom all around the world to be safe.
When my name was Ala’bama Texarkana, bad men came and burned my family’s house, letting our property run away from cötton field and leaving us poor with nothing. I begged Meester Palmerston to free us from Tyrant Lincoln but he did not heer my poor cries. I knew then that Meester President was stronger than Meester Prime Minister, so from then on this is who I beg.
I became Belgian Leetul Girl, where The Hun keeled my life and friends. I beg, Mr Weelson save us now! And so he did. Everyone lived happily ever after, forever.
I then hide in dark scary Bosnian basement I beg Meester Cleentön to save me from Evil Serb. He say yes but only if his wife can dreenk a little blood from seester first. I am brave so I say yes. I have not seen her since but they tell me she is happy living good life in magical place called Whitewater.
I live good and happy life in Aleppo, where I became Banana Allahbed. My new skin feels soft and warm, but even so sadness came when tyrant Assad keeled all my good friends including Last Clown I love and tore up all the beautiful black flags. I beg Meester Praizident to pleez pleez save us but it take so long. Finally he does and now my country lives in peåce and freedom and everything is nice. There are nice men in town now who took away my neighbors and live in their house. They have pretty blue star as their flag.
I then moved to Vuvuzela because I like instruments. There is no little girlflesh that is open to me here, so I fall into big scary adult body. Thees is good though because now I can earn degree. They even give me Nobel Peaze Prize! I say, “Meester Praizident, it is time!” Once again you must free me from Bad Bus Driver. He sends drugs everywhere everyday. His fentanyl zombies roam the streets making us inject even though I say JUST SAY NO like once you told me. We all cry and sob and weesh for GBU 43/b Massive ordinance Blast to reign down to free us from the flesh prison of Vuvuzela.
Maybe soon my wørk here is done. Soon I think I move to your country. Do you too yearn to be free?
Since high school I have wanted to go to Uzbekistan. Mongolia was the first priority and I did that mere weeks after graduating. Somehow, however, Uzbekistan kept getting delayed even after I filled out my travel to-do list with so many other things.
But it finally just happened. I spent in particular time in the ancient trading cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. Samarkand has the top sites, but they are spread out between a modern and very lively city. Bukhara is smaller and more modest but much more cohesive as a continuous historical entity. This kind of makes Samarkand a Silk Road Boston and Bukhara a Silk Road Providence in feel.
The kind of man made places that I like are like this: layers of history, distinct eras interacting.
Amir Timur’s mausoleum. Masoleum section of Samarkandcentral square of Bukhara with the Karakhanid Era Kalyan Minaret. Inside Ulugh Beg’s observatoryRegistan Square, Samarkand
I was mere days from writing up a piece titled ‘Make Asylums Great Again’ when the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or specifically the response to it by the media, had necessitated a slight change of focus. But only a slight one. I have nothing to say about that case individually save that physically attacking the commentariat, loathsome as they often be, for their opinions is the height of moronic adventurism, undermines the ability to have a vibrant society, and risks martyring a partisan midwit class hardly deserving of such laurels. Michael Tracy sums it up well enough that I need not go further. Actors such as Palantir and the FBI love events like this, I am convinced, as it makes selling mass surveillance easier.
What I originally wanted to state before all of this is that a vast untapped market of support exists for those who wish to pivot the past failed mass incarceration around drug use into something more constructive: the rebuilding of the asylum system. Dismantled by Reagan (of course) with the help of social justice do-gooders who had watched too much One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, America’s once large asylum system kept streets clean and safe and provided housing and food for the mentally ill. In order to reduce societal alienation, atomization, and build communal solidarity it becomes imperative that public space be free of the nonfunctioning and often violent mentally ill. This system, which was filled with abuse, it cannot be denied, was still a vastly superior alternative to letting the crazies roam free. When they do so others do not go outside or participate in healthy public life. The schitzolumpen ruin society by being out and about, and their own quality of life is lessened too. The right ignores the role a lack of social spending plays in letting these people out, their own casual cruelty fueling the very things they despise about city living, while the left, stuck in the mentality of being forever fifteen and riddled (often by their own identarian admission) with mental illness, reflexively defends the worst of lumpen behavior and seeks to redirect criticism from the real and visceral into the nebulously structural. They may be right on the big picture, but they ignore the reality on the ground to get there.
People who are less likely to go outside are more likely to spend extra time online, in turn. A process fueled by the outside being less pleasant. There they might find another type of schtizolumpen. Less a public transport ranter and more of soap box grandstander type. The hyper-politicization of everything seems to have turned your average shut-in into Frances E Dec. Knowing (correctly) that the old established world views are wrong and have led us here, they are trying (and so far failing) to come up with new ones. And much as the old school moral panic about television rotting peoples brains was untrue about entertainment but was true about the news, so too does the internet’s entertainment not really fuel this problem so much as social media’s bombardment of contextless current events seem to act as fuel for those on the precipice of mental breakdown.
What we see, especially with domestic terrorists, is nothing that really makes sense to the rational. Therefore we get a lot of commentary that it must be nihilistic. I contend that incoherence is not nihilism, it might be far from it actually.
There is a tendency to conflate what nihilism actually is, the rejection of universal moral principles, with the more teenage understanding of it as ‘nothing matters but my feelings’. The first is effectively a realist position of living in a chaotic world which I myself share, the second is an enraged lashing out that seeks validation through catharsis. The first is more likely to take a bemused, indifferent, or dethatched perspective on life. The second aggressively searches for meaning in action, often through joining conflicts far from any rational concept of their own self-interest.
When one is familiar with extremist recruitment techniques, which I am from having once studied and worked in the countering violent extremism field, it becomes apparent that ideologues and cult-builders prey specifically upon those who are downwardly mobile and clearly seeking a purpose and meaning greater than themselves. It is a way to transcend both death and irrelevance in the eyes of those who see themselves destined for something great but with no means to achieve it. We are used to seeing this manifest in racial supremacist movements, cults, Jihadist networks, and general messianic views. It flatters the true believer inside the dejected. It tells them “You really are the protagonist all along, join us and change the world by taking part in the battle of good against evil.”
One can say that what we see now is garbled nonsense, culture war for its own sake rather than a coherent goal. So far that is the case, but it is (dare I say) earnestly trying to be something more. It is constructing its own mythology from the ground up where its followers can be heroes. As a notorious zoomer-hater when it comes to all things cultural I am hardly sympathetic to this, but I do understand it. But, much like so much of the public space, it is dominated by the schitzolumpen and nothing positive can possibly come from it as long as that remains so.
There needs to be an internet commons and a healthy internet subculture too, the both separate yet playing off each other. Like how a city’s downtown and underground music scene should work. But to have either there needs to be a holding tank for the lumpens that ruin everything. The asylums should not just be rebuilt for violent vagrants, but for the agoraphobic goblins as well. Needless to say, these asylums will not have access to the internet. It really is time to invest in public mental health, so Make the Asylums Great Again should be a rallying cry for people across the spectrum.
I am aware of the danger of what could easily become politically motivated diagnosis. Just look at the Soviet experience with Sluggish Schitzophrenia to see such a thing in practice. I would want this purely based on the quality of public behavior rather than the nature of the views expressed when doing so. But the fact is those who can’t keep their crazy in check are dragging everyone else down. In so doing, they actually become the new monoculture they think they are rebelling against.
T.S. Elliot’s oft quoted line from “The Second Coming” sums it up well: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” You do not get passionate intensity from nihilism, it comes rather from idealism, however thwarted or redirected it might be. Such idealism could be constructively channeled, but it needs to kept far away from those who promise a quick fix through grand battles of darkness against light.
I was at the vomitorium the other day with my esteemed colleagues of the Centralae Faction of the Senate, when the inevitable unfortunate reality of the Little Booted Emperor reared its ugly head in discussion. Most of the company was aghast of course that the Blonde Bumbler would declare his horse a member of our esteemed institution. I recommended offering a compromise: That we accept the top half of a horse instead, rather than the entire thing. This was met with sage approval and the counter-proposal will go out at our next assembly.
The fact that our august institution must be so debased as to humor Emperor Caligula’s merest and most erratic whims goes far further than this, however. Did you hear he is planning to declare war upon Neptune and the very sea itself? Madness! Such an action is not a real war, and a real war is what we need right now to remind people of the power of our ancient Roman institutions. As well as their continuing relevance in a world beset by peril.
Have the people forgotten World Punic War II? When the forces of the underworld strove to conquer the world and were only repelled by the forces of Jupiter’s light? Have they forgotten when Hannibal was reincarnated to challenge Roman law again in the forms of Mithradates VI, Philip V, Amanirenas, Arminius, and Boudica? In each of these battles we reaffirmed that the Pax Romana was the only way of being; a true and Platonic path towards an end of history. Everything was going just fine until Little Boots came along and singlehandedly ruined everything.
If we do not confront the Parthian King Gotarzes II NOW all of this will be in peril. The very legitimacy of international Roman Law is on the line in Arabia Petraea. It was Parthia, after all, that installed Caligula as their puppet ruler, enabling them to spread an anti-Roman coalition to Nubia, Armenia, and Dacia united under one principle: their hatred for our laws and freedoms. This Axis of Zoroastrianism now plots to extinguish our way of life once and for all. They plot to conquer the entire world, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Kingdom of Punt. All will thus bend the knee to Persian tyranny.
But the solution is clear: the mobilization of 50,000 legions driving into Mesopotamia will quickly topple the regime and restore our interrupted destiny, finally bringing about the Platonic unity which has been so rudely interrupted by the current embarrassment on the throne. It will be of no consequence to restructure Parthia into a law-loving republic where the name Socrates is on the lips of every upstanding citizen in lieu of the name of Zoroaster. Eternal peace will then reign for both of our people, as the sensible precept administrators we refer to as the Yglesiaii assure us.
Otherwise there will only be more Caligulas, forever, as the laws of our institutions are sacrificed in another modern Battle of Cannae. Tell me Citizens, are you with the New Hannibal, or are you with Scipio? The moral arc of the timeless forms is with us if we just pick up the gladius once more.
Titus Aenus Probusfistus is a Senator, chairman of the Humane Slavery Society, and Senior Citizen at the Anti-Cincinnatus Foundation.
“Guten tag kameradens. Haff you met meine daughter, Rapunzel Bustilda-Honecker?”
I just finished Katja Hoyer’s book “Beyond the Wall” recently. The book attracted an insane amount of criticism for telling the 40 year history of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) in a remarkably unbiased and even handed way. Neither laudatory nor condemning, the book gave a history that understood the context of both why the little state had so many defectors it had to build a wall to keep people in, as well as why there were many people who were intensely loyal to it and still have fond memories of it to this day. This, apparently, was controversial. Because nuance is the enemy of the contemporary commentariat, be they right, center, or left.
I personally have often been historically attracted to the DDR because of its awful reputation in the west and its very real (though heavily frontloaded) achievements. It was a state that was outnumbered and outsized by its West German rival, had to pay enormous reparations to the Soviet Union, including in the form of its own surviving postwar industry, and occupied the most resource-poor sections of the former singular Germany. Stalin didn’t even want it, preferring to see a unified and neutral buffer state between the victors of World War II. Even its geography on the North European Plain was the opposite of defensible. Then there was American-aligned West Berlin right in the middle of it. By all rights the state should have failed immediately. And yet despite everything and the inevitable garrison paranoia that took over its political culture, it still managed to deliver massive achievements in land redistribution, women’s rights, education, technical training, and mass producing the coolest modern helmet. Filled with community events and impressively low crime rates, one can see the appeal just as one can see the massive downsides of its closed off mass surveillance state. A state where you give up freedom for a kind of egalitarian stability is a good deal to many. The kind of bargain many might settle for if given the option in today’s world of perpetual capitalistic instability.
Having read previous works on other Eastern Bloc Soviet states, one thought that I always return to is how much these societies end up resembling not so much the initial Marxist dream of proletarian triumph, but rather a different version of the paleoconservative vision of society. While paleoconservatives (pre-neoconservative and restraint oriented right wingers) claim to want a small state, most of their goals under contemporary conditions would require a strong state. Their view of a pro-family, pro-community, and low crime society is simply a church goer’s version of something many communist states actually achieved, at least compared to their capitalist rivals. The foreigners are kept out or to a minimum with strong border security, the avant-garde bourgeoisie are viewed with a deep suspicion, the for-profit motivation is castigated as being an attack on civil society, and the common working person is held up as an ideal. The communist experience may have been a long term failure in most countries that tried it, but it delivered this combination longer than postwar America arguably did, if at a more modest level. Probably because housing costs were, per Hoyer, 4.4 percent of the average family’s income. Compared to over 20% in the west (and think about what this would be now). No wonder some in the east want to turn back time.
Paleoconservatives, of whom I am very aligned on certain issues, especially foreign policy, miss the social forest for the trees. They often think if only people went back to church they would find some magical answer to the problems of an out of control neoliberal modernity. But church now, as it did then, can only offer moralistic platitudes to those who do not take it seriously on its open terms. It has little to say about how power is used to deliver real material results in the actual physical world. Its use as a social connection, while very real, can be easily replaced by other institutions, as the communist experiment often proved with its pioneers, associations, and streets mostly free of crime.
You could say that the traditional (pre-neocon) conservative objectives of a particularist, anti-globalization, safe, family friendly society has come the closest to being in the last half century through communism.
I want to state for context; if this was the 1920s, I would have been the biggest anti-communist ever. Sure, I would have had problems with capitalism and liberalism, especially coming off of the horror show of Woodrow Wilson, but something with messianic claims about some mythic teleology of the human race centered around a project of building a ‘better man’ is basically custom tailored to trigger every warning bell that could possibly exist in the brain of any alternate history version of myself. The real world, regardless of what anyone thinks of it, is cyclic, amoral, unconcerned with human rights, and philosophically pagan. (I probably would have been a reluctant left-Brooks Adamsite with a mixed yet fascinated relationship with Spengler in this time). So long as Trotsky was part of the communist equation there would have been that whole fighting for the world revolution aspect to it as well. I would have been disgusted by this. It sounds like secularized slave morality.
The nice thing about history, however, is that we can look back on things with hindsight, and in so doing challenge how we think about the present. Knowing how the Euro-communist experiment turns out enables us to see it as it really was, rather than what it claimed to be. And it was ultimately not the missionary quest of world transformation that it claimed to be, but rather a rebellion against capitalist hegemony. An alternative that in the end would challenge the capitalist powers to increase their social safety nets lest they face revolt and efection. A faulty experiment in many ways, sure, but one based on the correct desire to resist global homogenization pushed both by business and ideologies. An alternative way of being. A new version of the paleoconservative dream.
Attacked relentlessly both directly and indirectly by British and American intelligence and military proxies, this way of being rapidly adjusted to competition with, rather than conversion of, the capitalists. In so doing it lasted longer than it would have under conditions of perpetual open war. It turned war-shattered and post colonial societies into divergent, rather than convergent, models of differentiated modernity (a concept with which I am fascinated in any context), and provided the space for a social solidarity that looks almost impossible under today’s unchallenged reign of neoliberal terror.
And if this seems quixotic I would challenge you to look outside of Europe. Asia was where it really seemed to work. Uninterested in subsuming everything into some kind of nonsense ‘Hegelian Dialectic’ many Asian states easily adopted Marxism to preexisting cultural forms with no contradiction. Ancient traditions met modernization and created interesting and still successful hybrid regimes such as China and Vietnam. From at least Deng Xiaopeng onwards China disavowed the typical leftist war with the historical past for a merger of the past with the present and future. Or, as Lao Tzu might have put it, going with the flow. The Platonic and Christian societies of Europe struggled to pull this off, seeing the world as one of simple moral binaries. But outside of the Occident, people knew better. They could selectively harvest the successes and failures of the Soviet and allied experiments with a pragmatism worthy of the august term realist. Whatever alternative to global capitalism that now arises, it will not look like the experiments of the past…but it will have learned from them.
And these new societies, like the earlier more questionable communist experiments before them, focus on different things than the clearly unstable capitalist order wants. Social mobility, clean streets, a public culture held above and beyond both the individual and the profit motive. All without insisting other countries adopt their model nor prioritizing its diplomacy around anything but national interest. I have no idea if it will succeed, and am sure that like all things success would be temporary, but right now it exists, and in doing so shows that humanity desires an alternative to neofeudal atomization.
And if this new experiment perturbs paleoconservatives, I will simply ask them this…If you think you can do better, this is your challenge. Break with the priorities of the old economic order and come up with something new and appealing. Rebuild the communities you claim to love so much by rejecting the financial globalism you claim to decry. If the communists, despite their original intentions, could do it, why can’t you. The future should learn from the past but it will not be found in simply retvrning to it. Divergence from a powerful status quo requires a future oriented effort. Once upon a time, the communists had this. They clearly do not anymore. But someone has to do it.
And communists, you failed to become the globalizers in chief. It is for the best. Nothing lies down that path but ruin, hubris, and shattered dreams. Learn from the paleoconservatives. find your regional distinction. It was, in the end, what you ended up being good at after all. Imagine how much better the whole experiment would have been had it given up dreams of world revolution and stuck consistently to national liberation with unique and historically rooted basis, be it from the empires, the international finance, or the perpetually fruitless quest to shape the world around a singular vision.
I often think about the late 90s anti-globalization protestors, now so often forgotten. When Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader supported roughly the same side, and the bipartisan elite opposed them. It was a promising moment buried by the shock of the War on Terror and the congruent evangelical-vs-woke cultural battles that ensued after. It makes me wonder what opportunities could be open to the unorthodox of all types going forward. Those who, above all, are willing to seek a modus vivendi at home and abroad.
Besides, anyone that knows liberals knows that it drives them even more nuts to own them from the left than the right.
Mild spoilers for my future self-made adventure module.
It has been a long time since my formerly semi-regular tabletop rpg reviews and analysis on this site. Serendipity struck recently with my desire to acquire a new system with an explicit space-sci-fi focus coinciding with the arrival of the 25th anniversary remaster of System Shock 2, one of my favorite games of all time. This kicked off a rewatch of all the salvageable Alien movies (the first two being perfect top tier films of all time and canonical, and 3 and Romulus being the acceptable fanfiction entries, of course) and a determination to rewatch Sunshine and Event Horizon soon. Sci-fi Horror was my first true love, dating back to seeing Alien when I was only 8 years old and this no doubt leaving an impression. Its position at the pinnacle of subgenres would only become surpassed by one other, the Dying Earth subgenre, when I was in my mid-twenties.
So let’s boot up those retrotech systems and get going:
I have heard Mothership talked about for a few years now, but avoided it specifically because the primary game I both run and play in my life so far has been Call of Cthulhu. For this reason, and also because of my desire to find a space system that matches well with a preexisting setting I have made which is the one I use for much of my creative writing, I was holding out for something without so much of a horror focus. The problem was that none of those systems ever grabbed me in terms of mechanics. When I finally got around to looking at Mothership though, inspired by the confluence of factors above, I found that it was everything I wanted, and, being culturally adjacent to the Old School Renaissance type of gameplay style I so like, was easily modifiable to fit different setting-style beats. This is something I always look for when shopping for a new mechanical system as I almost never use pre-made material for adventure and setting.
Though Mothership does not count as one of the D20s-centric retro D&D clones, it shares the design philosophy of the OSR movement more broadly. Rolls are asked for in only the most contested of situations. Player cleverness and advantage-seeking is encouraged, and the deadliness of the game is accentuated by a quick and dirty pace with often decisive outcomes. Its system is kind of a simplified Call of Cthulhu for base mechanics, with a roll-under D100 for skill checks and saves, and a roll-over D20 for less common panic table outcome checks. This panic table comes into play when either something truly shocking happens or a critical fail is rolled on another check, and has one roll against accumulated stress. Stress accumulates with every failed skill check, so these rolls become progressively more dangerous over the course of a session, providing a mechanic for heightening tension. Most will average against the player, whose skills, with the exception of one or two specialties, end up below the halfway threshold in most cases. This brings the stress mechanic and panic check element in with relative rapidity.
Mothership’s character building is so simple the very character sheet can explain to new players how to do it. If one has not done it before it would take five minutes. If one has, two or three. It has a three-tiered tree of advancing skills whose primary mechanical effect is adding bonuses to stat checks. There are only four starting classes in the base game, though each player is given a large amount of leeway in how to allocate skills.
Ship combat is just as simple as ground combat, with range/position and skills determining phases and equipment determining skillsets. The difference is that crew members serve as adding bonuses to different checks and the whole party acts as the ship itself in a singular form. I have seen a lot of criticism of this aspect of the game online, but to me it retains the OSR feel in a way that feels distinct for a space setting and so I personally like it.
Rather than get to into the weeds on mechanics, as this particular game has become quite popular recently and so multitudes of deep dives on it can be found, I am more interested in turning now towards its immaculate rendition as a horror sci-fi toolset. I have (and am only reviewing) the core set. This is made up of multiple small booklets that come in one box break. They include the players guide (really the only thing that is necessary to run), a Warden’s (GM) guide which is possibly the best example of that often superfluous book I have ever seen, especially for new game masters, a ship guide (personal favorite of mine for the retro-jank designs), a de facto monster manual, and a single adventure module. Taken together, the quality of all of them is excellent and leads me to believe this would be one of the best first-time games for someone new to the hobby. The format is well-organized and concise. There is one of the better screens I have come across included in this pack, as well as cut out figurines for ships and characters.
As it comes to the setting, it is as minimal as possible, once again drawing from OSR sensibilities. I see this as an advantage, allowing whatever influences you wish to graft on flowing with the simple and easily modified rules. The overall influences on the game are included in a sidebar in the Warden’s Operation Manual and they are pretty much exactly what I suspected as I had been reading up to that point. Interestingly, they mention Alastair Reynolds’s book Diamond Dogs (reminding me I still had yet to read that one) only and not Chasm City or Revelation Space, which I would have thought of as strong examples for this kind of game. The aesthetics are Alien, especially in the kind of hazard pay working class used universe vibe, but the overall tone, especially in its equivalent of the monster manual, is definitely more on an arc that stretches from the grounded Ad Astra to the Hellraiser in space that is Event Horizon.
This adaptability around a fun mechanic is exactly what I wanted. But, as I mentioned earlier, my intention is to graft it onto my own pre-existing setting, which is not quite a horror-first focused one. To show the adaptability of the game, all that is required for me to make them compatible with my more Jack Vance inspired view of humanity’s anthropological and cultural potential in space is to make the panic check table less foreboding in outcome (proportionally speaking, not in the absolute) as well as add a +1 to the amount of wounds characters or ships can tank before dying. The biggest change in addition to this is a new custom class that fits the primary theme of my pre-existing and quite Machiavellian setting, that of the diplomatic agent.* This did not require adding any new skills, as the linguistics->psychology-> sophontology and art->mysticism trees already exists in the game, but it did require making different starting bonuses for this fifth new class that effectively gives a large boost to intellect, a minor one to speed, a slightly improved sanity save, and a mandatory starting skill in linguistics/psychology plus one optional trained skill of the players choice. I am also considering adding a kind of ‘ethnicity’ element to my currently under construction campaign module, given my setting’s focus on cultural and biological divergence on different worlds after human settlement, but any stat changes here would be very minor. After more playtesting we can look into that further. Who knows, I might end up posting the finished module here when its done and tested.
My overall impression is this: I went looking for a system to compliment my regular rotation games with a space sci-fi element. Mothership is both adaptable and worthy. It further adds value to one’s shelf if one is interested in collecting the art of the OSR aesthetic. It will now join the ranks of Call of Cthulhu, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Pelgrane’s The Dying Earth, and Old School Essentials as a regular and recurring element in my game running.
And remember: if something catastrophic happens to a ship or station while you are running a game, you are obligated to suddenly and without warning whip this out and have it play in the background at the critical moment for all of your players:
*Technically I need to add two, with assassin/bounty hunter being the other, but a very interesting game expansion is coming that deals with this so I am leaving it out of this post for now. I may jerry-rig my own though in the meantime, but I have yet to do so as of the time of this writing.
I have a chapter in an edited book coming out this week about how structural reform works best in national and localized contexts, rather than internationalist or teleological contexts. Additionally, next year I will have another book chapter about the evolution of early American neutrality in foreign policy. Because of this I feel only a short and informal July 4th thought is necessary for the moment.
I was a kid during the fever pitch of American exceptionalist ideology in the 90s. We were told that America was not so much a place as a global aspiration. A future direction for the world. A mission, in the very religious sense of the term. This idea become so pervasive that its opponents even adopted it, finding all things American to be uniquely evil. The conservative dad vs the rebellious teenager dynamic.
A certain Anglophillic subset of liberals even adopted a strange pro-British Empire world view where the American colonists rebelled to steal land from Natives and keep their slaves (things the British Empire was already doing and would continue to do later elsewhere if under different guises- their abolitionist movement only starting to take off when they no longer had the Carolinas, their land theft never abated until the empire collapsed). The tragic history of European invasions of the Americas were already a done deal however, the demographic balance had already shifted into European triumph as an inevitability by the early 18th Century. It has always been telling to me that affluent white liberals will often gurn about July 4th while Mexican immigrants will set off firecrackers and party all day. They come from places with independence days too, they know what was really at stake.
So the war should really be seen as a struggle within the English speaking world between global empire and global markets based around London versus a unique Western Hemisphere direction for people in North America. This is the same dynamic that would later be replicated in Latin America a few decades down the line. While there are obvious differences between Anglo-Western Hemisphere and Latin-Western Hemisphere, they both chose to divorce themselves from Europe and seek a new path. In this way I regard them as more historically related to each other than any of them are to their once-mother countries. Only Canada stuck with its mother country through today, and that is more from fear of being swamped by its larger and more successful southern neighbor than anything else.
For all of these younger states this was an undeniably good thing. If one is not a specific place with specific interests around that place one is a slave. Be it to an faraway colonial master or to some unrooted ideology.
America is not and never was this thing I was sold it as when I was a child. It is a place that decided to go its own way and do its own thing. First this was political and economic independence from Britain, then it was diplomatic independence from the European alliance system which caused a massive rupture with France whose significance, future publications of mine will make the case, is almost as important as the Revolutionary War itself.
The United States had a bold new and, yes, for its time, revolutionary government. But this was not meant for export nor world-transformation. It was meant for itself. Its first formal relations were with countries like Morocco, where George Washington ensured the government there that while the U.S. wished no kings of its own, it held no hostility towards foreign kings or religions. America was a self-improvement project, not a missionary. Other countries would have to have their own distinct self-improvement projects.
So long as some element of this governing philosophy held sway, the United States was at the forefront of the world in human development and economic growth. But then the worst thing happened, after a score of rivals had self-immolated on their own incompetence, clearing the field for unprecedented American influence, the enlightenment and particularist founding of the nation gave way to its older, darker, pre-revolutionary past. The Puritans returned, and they had a mission not just at home but abroad. In alliance with them, arguably funding them, were the forces of rapacious capital and the military industrial complex. Development would no longer be at home, it would be solely in defense and abroad. Things were no longer to be made locally, but made abroad and purchased to create a global network of independence that was loyal to no place or people but shareholders. The American Republic had become the British Empire after all. And with that change came all the delusions of hubris and dreams of Making the Whole World England/America.
It failed of course, as these things always do. The further empires go from their core base territory the more strained their logistics, the more hostile their neighbors, the less enthusiastic the population for more expansion.
Now the empire the Americans must declare independence from in order to thrive is their own.
Whatever your feelings are on the United States, and mine certainly are complex, it is a real thing as of the time of this writing. A specific place with topography, history, and a civil compact. You can ask someone to invest in a real thing because it is tangible and they interact with it on a regular basis. The same thing does not apply for such intangible and downright mythical concepts such as “The Liberal International Order”, “Western Civilization”, “Christendom”, “The Free World”, “The Global Market”, or “Progressive Society”. None of those things have a specific place really, most of them disavow it in favor of treating the entire Earth as a cosmic battlefield for Platonic ideals.
Perhaps I am the outlier here but I would never ask someone to show loyalty to an abstract concept. Only a place can declare independence from the actors who insist the whole world must be remade around their interests. Only a place can cultivate a nuanced sense of tragedy to help guide a rational path forward.
The one and only downside about leaving academia for first the policy and then the policy analysis community is that almost everything has to be framed as in the American interest. Now, since I wish to change my own country’s policies, this is hardly a bad thing on the whole. But boy does it ever make me long for times when I studied other countries’ strategies on wholly their own terms.
I wish to do that now, in what I am sure will be a scandalous exercise to centrists and journalists everywhere. Good thing its just my personal site and I will also be writing about concepts indecipherable to those still stuck at a 5th grade reading level.
Though many years have passed and the differences in details are now many, I have made the case before that Iran would most likely be a tough nut to crack for the U.S. and especially Israel. This is no half-failed Arab state with arbitrary borders drawn from a colonial office in Europe. At the same time, I want to acknowledge that the government is deeply unpopular with young people, is a ridiculous theocracy, and the government subordinating so much of its own national interest to the cause of Palestinian liberation has been a disaster for its own self-interest. I also don’t think (edit: more on this here) the toppling or weakening of a single government could knock a proud civilizational state out of commission for more than the short term. A better government would probably end up an even more potent regional rival to Tel Aviv in the end.
That aside, let us look at the short term. We now exist in a situation where either Israel will continue striking Iran unilaterally (no doubt with American assistance in intelligence and logistics) or will bring in America either partially or full force on Israel’s side. With the exception of some logistical support across the Caspian, I do not expect Russia or China to meaningfully intervene. China is happy to stay out of the region and let its rivals bury themselves in loser-wars. Russia is bogged down due to its own over-extension. So let us assume that Iran has to do this basically on its own.
Israel on its own can be stalemated, hence Tel Aviv’s desperate quest to ensnare Washington.
A full-blown U.S. intervention on Israel’s behalf represents the worst possible scenario for Tehran. There will be no choice but to withdrawal to extreme defense as a national war of survival. Though Iran’s networks would enable it to offensively unleash indirect chaos elsewhere, especially in Iraq and Yemen. These could exacerbate population migration pressures and alienate Europe. Inevitable casualties and cost for fighting such a turtled foe would grind down the American public and its low-morale military which has seen nothing but ruin in the Middle East. This would be a repeat of North Vietnamese strategy in a sense, though with a far less robust home front. Iran would itself be in danger the longer the war went on, as its own popular support would be strictly relegated to that of national defense. Either way, the only winner of this exchange is Turkey, who would gain in the region at everyone else’s expense and possibly even up as the peacemaker to the conflict.
Nothing too interesting yet, but lets turn to what might be the most likely scenario…a primarily Israeli war with US supporting air and naval assets in direct action but no ground war. Here is where Tehran’s opportunity lies.
Israel launched this war either knowing the US would be in on it, or assuming it could be forced into it by seizing the initiative. Tensions now exist within the alliance. The majority of the US public is opposed to military action. This might tick up as populations are fickle when bombs fly, but overall skepticism reigns. Israel seeks to lure Iran into attacking US forces in order to ensure greater American involvement. Iran would be foolish to fall for this trap. It should so thoroughly avoid doing this that should anything happen to US forces, many will suspect Israeli false flag operations or a repeat of the USS Liberty incident.
Most importantly, if the US strikes Fordow or any other target with its air force, Hypothetical Iranian Strategist Me would take the no doubt internally unpopular position not to retaliate…on the US. But there would be retaliation…on Israel.
This would be the crux of the plan: Every US attack invites a massive missile barrage on Israel as well as increased Hezbollah activity against the Israelis. The more the US acts, the more Israel is punished. The messaging would be that Israel had started the war and was trying to dogwalk the US into it. It would resonate with many parts of the public because it would be self-evidently true. If Fordow goes, so goes Haifa. If Isfahan is hit, so will Tel Aviv.
US logistics would still be strained by this as Israel ran out of interceptors and other equipment. The lack of American casualties would increase the antiwar voices in American media at the expense of the pro-war ones when discussing the threat Iran poses to the US. The Houthis, after all, already do a form of this with Israeli ships but not most other people’s traffic. Discontentment with Netanyahu would grow at home and abroad. He would have failed to bait the US to go fully in. His cities would be under attack, the economy of the country suffering. The Israelis will demand more from the US, ever more histrionically, and the US may often refuse them. Questions will arise, third parties will demand a negotiation. The Israeli elite would have to rethink the present government, whose justification for continuity is entirely based on Netanyahu’s proven record at manipulating America. If he has that, he has nothing. Domestic antics ensue. And then the Israeli public figures it out…more American support means more attacks on them.
In a scenario where Israelis die but not Americans, the rest of the world will shrug and point to Gaza when confronted with Israeli Exceptionalism/Chosen People Syndrome. It is at this point the Iranians state that they will allow their nuclear program to be observed by a neutral international commission if given full security guarantees against Israeli attack by international agreement, with the caveat being that they will fully reactivate nuclear development if Israel attacks them again. Trump, ever mercurial, might just want to claim a win and move on at this point. Israel, running low on supplies, would at least need a breather.
Such would be my strategy anyway. I don’t envy Iran’s position though. Attacked by some of the most duplicitous actors abroad and governed by some of the wackiest boomers on Earth at home, they have to navigate this security dilemma on the backfoot.
The Trickster's Guide to Geopolitics 