The Hamfisted Hegemon, or… How To Irreversibly Squander A Century’s Hard-Won Privileges For Fun And Profit

“There goes another domino”, I thought upon reading an FT piece covering Spain’s “noooooooop” to the US’s F-35 in favor of a European-made option. Just days earlier, similar rumblings had emanated from Switzerland as Trump slapped punitive tariffs on them. And, zooming out, we see Portugal also edging away from the F-35, citing a need to consider the “predictability of our allies”, echoing prior German suspicions of an embedded “kill switch”.

Maybe there is such a cartoonish “switch”. I have no idea, but I would certainly hope not, as such vulnerabilities don’t merely facilitate the casual manipulations of an abusive “friend” — China and Russia would love to discover and exploit such weaknesses. Yet “kill switches” come in many forms, generally far more mundane than software backdoors, and with effects far less binary than the “YOINK!” of throwing a switch. Just ask the Ukrainians who at the outset of Trump’s second term found themselves locked out of certain intelligence during a crude and cruel bout of international arm twisting.

Modern weapons systems, despite their dazzle, rely on a complex web of mundanities spanning spare parts, maintenance expertise, operator training, specialized munitions, supporting intelligence, comms gear, and vehicle fuel, just to name a few. We reap improved unit economics, elastic scalability, fault tolerance, and global reach when we foster interoperability and shared doctrine across partner countries. An F-35, however, is about as far as you can get from the simple elegance and consequent reliability of an AK-47 and so to bring one into your armada as a partner to the US entails an enormous amount of trust — trust that the US is rapidly undermining, to the detriment not just of its erstwhile allies but also itself.

To fairly assess the broader meta-problem, though, we should acknowledge that such cavalier indifference to secondary and tertiary consequences transcends domains and spans administrations. Take, for instance, Biden’s weaponization of the SWIFT payment system to implement sanctions against Russia in the wake of its Ukraine invasion — brutally effective in the moment but potentially corrosive to ongoing dollar dominance of the global economy. Small wonder, then, that twitchy countries soon began to advocate for alternative exchanges to clear transactions with renminbi. This is surely not the path to sustaining one’s own currency as the world’s preferred reserve currency, a reckless gamble for a country already staring down a debt and deficit crisis.

One of the crowning achievements of my career involved leading the creation of a command-and-control system in an intelligence gathering domain while co-shepherding the evolution of the containing higher-order system-of-systems. The slog from obscurity to real impact was long — the better part of five years. The journey to an ecosystem sustainable enough that I could move on without feeling it a dereliction of duty was longer still — three more years. At many junctures, had circumstances unfolded just a touch differently, everything might have come undone, the whole affair requiring not just the sweat and brilliance of a rare cohort of patriots but also an unbroken series of lucky dice rolls at deciding moments. The odyssey, in hindsight, seems preposterously precarious, and so my head spins to think of the absurdly good luck required for the US to establish the post-WWII order we now seem to be taking for granted — and aches at the thought of how carelessly we might throw it all away.

I keep hearing David Sacks — PayPal Mafia member, All In podcast co-host, pugilistic Putin apologist, and now Trump’s AI And Crypto Czar — go on about the importance of the world running on an American tech stack. This seems right — the benefits, as earlier noted, are legion. And so I am continually perplexed at the litany of ways we appear engaged in self-sabotage.

How quickly we have gone from affirming our relationship with NATO and exalting the Five Eyes intelligence gathering partnership to cozying up to Russia and casually intimating that we would really enjoy annexing Canada. You can bet that our northern neighbors, long one of our staunchest allies, are drawing back from more than just purchasing our aircraft, doubtless slapping NOFORN on an increasing amount of intelligence. One might forgive them, given recent developments, for considering a new Four Eyes consortium of their own to rival the Canada-excluding variant recently proposed by Nutjob Navarro, presumably floated as crass leverage to squeeze a few more points from a trade deal. How can we expect anyone to want to run on American tech — military or financial — in the wake of behavior so feckless, mercurial, and transactional?

America’s freewheeling nature has rendered it an unparalleled innovation powerhouse. Its technology and finance companies — the crown jewels of the private sector — rightly garner the envy of the world. Yet they also present many difficult choices. Wielding these assets judiciously provides enormous leverage in the creation of lasting American influence in a world that broadly shares in their benefits. In the wrong hands, however, they offer a dark temptation for abusive, myopic, and ultimately self-defeating behavior. Wisdom, then, lies in knowing the difference, and precious little of late inspires much confidence in this staggeringly complex dog-eat-dog world, one characterized by shifting alliances further muddled by a tech explosion whose accelerating pace leaves governments everywhere reacting more out of stark desperation than shrewd intent.

Attentive readers will note that in 2025 much ink has been continually spilt on the topic of US cloud providers and European data sovereignty. In one corner we have European consumers of technology fretting over how readily they can, should a deteriorating world order dictate, migrate away from US cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who collectively control two thirds of the market. In another corner we find the US Government who benefits from massively lucrative tax revenues, outsized influence on the world’s technology standards, and the irresistible temptations of subpoena powers. And, because this is more Battle Royale than boxing match, in two additional corners we variously see European governments, struggling to balance GDPR strictures against access to technology, and said American Big Tech companies, saddled with the nearly impossible task of placating all three.

How fitting, then, that in June, under oath in the French Senate, Microsoft France’s legal director, Anton Carniaux, conceded his powerlessness to refuse the requests of US Government Agencies made under the auspices of the 2018 US CLOUD Act. Goodbye “The Internet”, and hello “The Internets”, plural, as irreconcilable differences channel us toward an increasingly fragmented world, one where not just China has isolated itself behind a Great Firewall, but even nominal western allies can’t play nicely together.

Perhaps the hyper-scalers will navigate this conundrum by increasingly providing air-gapped or otherwise segmented deployments, but this creates substantial friction that reduces the total value that the technology brings to the world. Much of the promise of public cloud systems — reduced latency, increased availability, elastic scalability, shared standards — comes of pooling distributed resources and so is inevitably lost when we insist on playing negative sum games that strand us all in sad little sandboxes.

Let us turn, finally, to the realm of soft power, and consider the adventures of Chainsaw Elon and his best bud Big Balls at USAID, a tale not just of unspeakable cruelty inflicted on the world’s most vulnerable populations by the world’s richest man with the help of his unswerving and unsupervised junior zealots, but also an unprecedented own-goal against long-term U.S. strategic interests.

Suppose for a moment that you possess a heart sufficiently hardened not to care for The Lancet’s analysis that USAID has likely prevented 91 million deaths over the course of its existence and that its shuttering threatens to gratuitously kill 14 million people by 2030, a sentiment echoed by multiple news sources. Imagine, further still, that you can America First your way through every decision, pretending that sowing goodwill throughout the world doesn’t blunt the resentment that leads to ideological extremism and international terrorism, stalwartly shouting “LALALALALALALA WUUUUUUHHHHT I CAN’T HEAR YOU” to drown out arguments that pulling up stakes around the world leaves a vacuum to be filled by characters far less savory.

Set all that aside and still you must contend with our inhabiting a globalized world where we all live just one airplane ride downwind of the next pandemic. Still you must deal with a world where the next migrant wave is a single drought, flood, or warlord fomented famine away.

How did an administration — one so nominally concerned about immigration — Leeeeeeroy Jehhhhhnkins its way into gutting FEWS NET, the Famine Early Warning System Network, thereby blinding us to imminent refugee crises? How did this same administration, led by the person faced with the outbreak of the last global pandemic, so gleefully tee us up for the next one?

You already know the answer, but I’ll say it again — by appealing to the electorate not with a message of Hope but of Fear, and by assembling a cabinet with an approach that prioritizes loyalty over competence, vengeance over ethics, and ideology over mission.

Surely the only thing more foolhardy still than winding down our military outposts abroad would be doing the same for our humanitarian ones — even if one’s foreign policy creed begins and ends with “what’s in it for me?”. Sadly, however, not nearly enough people seem capable of intuiting this, and thus we embark on a No-Limit game of Fuck Around Find Out.