A century ago, T.E. Lawrence led an Arab Revolt on the strength of a British promise of independence, and Britain broke it with the colored-pencil borders of Sykes-Picot. Today the Houthis are using Lawrence's own asymmetric playbook against the West, and the lost Iran war may be ending the Pax Americana built on those borders.
Like Johnson’s 1968 credibility gap after Tet, a Trump administration that has declared “victory” over Iran sixty-plus times now faces its own reckoning, as censored reality, Hormuz risk, and Taiwan spillover threaten to shatter the market narrative that this war is contained.
Like a blowfish, Yemen’s Houthis have inflated far beyond their size, seizing Bab el-Mandeb and, with Iran’s hold on Hormuz, putting roughly $10 billion a day in global trade at risk. Their “overnight” rise looks sudden only if you ignore the long asymmetric apprenticeship that made it possible.
Given the vast resources involved in conjunction with the possibility that many jobs get eliminated in its wake; America is heavily invested in artificial intelligence (AI) and a tech led future. But while optimism abounds as to what new heights…
SCOTUS’s Trump v. United States ruling handed Trump a “get out of jail free card” and Lord Acton’s warning that absolute power corrupts absolutely now reads like a diagnosis. Dillon traces the Progressive Era’s reverse via Project 25 and DOGE, then ties unchecked power to an illegal Iran war and bond-market stress past Bessent’s red line.
The Greatest Generation defeated fascism, yet today’s rhetoric would brand those same patriots Antifa terrorists and “socialists.” Through his father’s WWII service and lifetime feeding hungry schoolchildren, Dillon shows how political labels dehumanize while ICE and a lost Iran war redefine what America stands for.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan’s Mecca defense pact is less a Mid East NATO than a quiet hedge against American unreliability—proof that after a bungled war with Iran, the region is already learning to move on without the United States, with higher rates and gold as the market tells.
A divided America benefits "special interest groups". If "we the people" are divided, our collective voice gets lost and splintered into social, demographic, class and geographic partitions that can be manipulated through social media and electoral maps which can then be controlled and manipulated by highly organized special interest groups…
America is so deeply politically divided at its 250th birthday that it needs two separate and distinct celebrations on its opposite coasts on July 4th to celebrate this seminal holiday. But political schism does not disqualify what remains as a noteworthy achievement in longevity for this still young political experiment.
Nations still prepare brilliantly for the last war while the next one reinvents itself, drones in Ukraine and Iran, and the terrifying question of what nuclear powers do when conventional tools fail.