I need to get around 10 pages of script and probably one rough outline out the door today. I also have 3000 unread stories in my RSS reader! Most of me is ready to curl up somewhere with a book.
Currently rebuilding the board for the newsletter, which returns on 11 January 2026.
Many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.
A short grim book. It details how the world’s tyrants have formed a kind of dark web that insulates them against actions by liberal democracies, including the economic weapons derailed in CHOKEPOINTS. It’s grim reading – Applebaum is a coldly angry writer. There aren’t any laughs. But the details are really interesting.
In 2023, the FBI arrested two people for operating an illegal Chinese “police station” in New York City, a set of offices used by Chinese security officers to monitor Chinese citizens and dissidents. The Dutch government says it has uncovered two illegal Chinese police stations in the Netherlands as well, and there are accounts and rumors of others.
Love the detail of it, hating all the horror stories – including the Chinse cyber influence op that caused a social media mob that led a Taiwanese diplomat to kill himself. It’s important reading, but not happy reading.
Like the founders of so many other successful start-ups, the original investors in Wagner’s African operation appear to be contemplating the creation of a franchise. A team from Britain’s Royal United Services Institute has described the current Russian offer to sitting dictators and would-be dictators as a “regime survival package.” This bundle of aid can include personal protection for the dictator; violent assaults on his political enemies; help in fighting an insurgency; broadcast or social media campaigns that echo the themes of multipolarity and anticolonialism; kleptocratic contacts that help the elite hide money (and possibly benefit the Russians as well).
Many climate scientists call our current epoch the “Anthropocene” — the first human-driven climate era. Many technologists call it the “Information Age” or now the “Artificial Intelligence Age.” Some strategists prefer to call it “the Return of Geopolitics” or, as the historian Robert Kagan put it, “the Jungle Grows Back.”
But none of these labels capture the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics. They have set off an explosion of all sorts of things combining with all sorts of other things — so much so that everywhere you turn these days binary systems seem be giving way to poly ones. Artificial intelligence is hurtling toward “polymathic artificial general intelligence,” climate change is cascading into “poly-crisis,” geopolitics is evolving into “polycentric” and “polyamorous” alignments, once-binary trade is dispersing into “poly-economic” supply webs, and our societies are diversifying into ever more “polymorphic” mosaics.
As a foreign affairs columnist, I now have to track the impact and interactions of not only superpowers, but also super-intelligent machines, super-empowered individuals taking advantage of technology to extend their reach and super-global corporations,as well as super-storms and super-failing states, like Libya and Sudan.
I was musing about all this one day with Craig Mundie, the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft. I told him that in nearly every domain I was writing about lately, the old binary left-right systems were giving way to multiple interconnected ones, and, in the process, shattering the coherence of both the Cold War and post-Cold War paradigms.
At one point Mundie said to me, “I know what you should call this new era: the Polycene.”
Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that’s going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup …
I’m calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.
OPERATIONS: Moving on to new things today and pretending I don’t have two unfinished scripts on deck. And figuring out Adobe Sign again. STATUS: 8hrs 31m sleep, and it’s time to admit to myself that I have no scripting energy left. Inbox 87. Just had to ask the Echo what day it is. READING:THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jonathan Healey (UK) (US+) LISTENING:Too Tired to Say Anything (Went Ways)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
TheCBS News owner Paramount will acquire the Free Press, a media startup founded by Bari Weiss, and has appointed her editor-in-chief of the storied US news network.
Weiss, 41, has no experience working in broadcast television, though she has carved out a reputation as a heterodox opinion writer and burgeoning media operator.
Known for her attacks on liberal institutions and “cancel culture”, Weissfounded the Free Press with her partner Nellie Bowles in 2021 after she left the New York Times as a columnist, claiming that she was heavily scrutinized for her conservative views and criticism of the left at the paper.
CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman was really bloody good. It’s the story of how the US began to develop and deploy economic weapons – identifying chokepoints in other countries’ economies and strangling them. They did it to Iran, for example, and it worked really well. Economic weapons were very powerful warfighting tools right up until Putin went all the way into Ukraine.
…the Russian government underestimated the severity of the sanctions it would face. And deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act.
if it’s true that sanctions could never have deterred Putin, the West would have been better served by weakening Russia’s economy as much as possible before the invasion. The G7’s costliest error was to defer serious discussion of oil sanctions until after the war began, at which point it took nearly ten months to implement the price cap and the EU oil embargo.
And now we’re in a multipolar world again, deglobalising, and these weapons are going to stop working. The book is a wonderfully readable primer on economic weapons, where they came from, and where we’re heading now that they’ve been used.
We don’t yet know when the Age of Economic Warfare will end, but we can envision how. The trade-offs facing policymakers in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow can be thought of as an impossible trinity consisting of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Any two of these can coexist but not all three.
Don’t be put off by the list of acronyms in the front. I didn’t have to refer to it once, because Fishman takes pains all the way through to keep clarity and context. It is a really well written book, very readable, very well structured, very recommended.
