History doesn’t often repeat itself but it often rhymes…
– Mark Twain
History provides a crucial foundation for understanding today’s increasingly complex world.
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.
Scott Bessent is reaching for James Baker’s Plaza Accord soft power, and missing. After a lost conventional war with Iran, sanctions without carrots collide with rising China–Russia “sharp power,” leaving markets to price stubborn inflation and higher US rates.
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.
Considered as a classic of 20th-century literature, Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 comedically told the story of a WWII bombardier named Yossarian who desperately wanted to be declared insane so he could stop flying increasingly suicidal missions. The problem was “Catch-22.”
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.
In 1831, a twenty-five year old French magistrate named Alexis de Tocqueville boarded a ship bound for America. He went, officially, to study the American prison system. But what he was really looking for was something far more personal and far more urgent as he was seeking answers and hope.
To say that American political life in 2026 under the Trump administration is unique may be an understatement for the ages and especially in the wake of a UFC fighting event that took place on White House grounds Sunday evening.