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Trump’s foreign policy now resembles a champagne party staged on the deck of a carrier: chandeliers swinging over grey steel, tuxedos catching the rotor wash, and a band playing fit to drown out the sea.

He wants the world to see grandeur; imperial confidence with a gold-leaf crust. He wants two victories at once, because one victory is never enough to feed the void. So he attempts to run the empire on two fronts: the Caribbean, where Venezuela is done over like a debtor in a back alley; and the Middle East, where Iran is treated as a prop in a morality play written by men who only know one kind of punctuation.

But history doesn’t stay impressed for long. History is a bartender in a doomed coastal town: polite, exhausted, already wiping down the counter because the storm has a name, and it’s coming in fast.

The comedy, dark enough to bruise, lies in the mismatch between the swagger and the arithmetic. War on two fronts isn’t just illegal or immoral or reckless. It is, at base, a logistical problem. Ships can’t be in two places at once. Crews are not infinite. Readiness is not a vibe. Even empires hit the ceiling when they try to do everything, everywhere, all at once. Especially empires.

And that is where the real innovation appears; not in any carrier group’s wake, but in the glow of a screen.

The Caribbean: where “law enforcement” comes with helicopters

The Caracas smash and grab raid is sanitised to make a hit job and kidnap seem a moral responsibility: “interdictions,” “operations,” “counter-narcotics.” Words borrowed from cop shows. But the hardware drifting through tropical waters is not the equipment of a traffic cop. A nuclear-powered carrier is not a polite suggestion. It is a floating steel cathedral built to make other nations feel small.

The spectacle peaks in a scene so surreal it feels like a fever dream: the removal of Venezuela’s president, narrated like a courtroom drama with gunships; an act presented not as war, but as “justice.” In the new imperial dialect, abduction becomes procedure, and procedure becomes righteousness. The helicopters are subpoenas. The raid is paperwork. Reality, as ever, is expected to cooperate.

Congress, meanwhile, performs its familiar role: the worried stagehand who briefly steps forward to warn that the set is on fire, then gets shoved back behind the curtain, so the show can continue. The empire is too invested in the drama to permit anything as boring as restraint. And it’s beyond desperate.

So the Caribbean front remains alive: ships, posture, menace; an oceanic flex meant to be seen from the shore, meant to enter the nervous system of a region and remain as a permanent tremor.

Iran: brinkmanship as performance art

Then there’s Iran, where orchestrated protest and crackdown turn the streets into a pressure chamber. Here, Trump’s foreign policy becomes what it always becomes: a performance in which moral outrage is used as accelerant and “options” are mostly variations of the same blunt instrument.

The rhetoric runs hot; warnings, threats, declarations of strength delivered as if strength is something that exists in words alone. Sound omnipresent, omniscient, inevitable: the empire as a deity with a short fuse.

But omnipresence costs money and metal, and the metal is already booked.

This is the two-front blunder in its purest form: the desire to posture everywhere collides with the fact that resources are finite. The empire, like an ageing magician, discovers it cannot pull endless rabbits from an increasingly threadbare hat. The audience can smell the desperation. The illusion starts to falter.

And when the old methods strain, the new methods rush in.

The third front: the empire becomes an operating system

This is the part that looks like genius if genius is defined as the efficient administration of coercion.

Palantir, the data-fusion behemoth co-founded by Peter Thiel, has been steadily converting governance into a searchable field. Not just abroad, not just in war zones, but at home: systems that treat people as entries, movement as metadata, association as suspicion that can be summoned with a query.

The logic is elegant in the way a guillotine is elegant. Instead of a prison with walls, build a prison made of air: a mesh of databases, sensors, feeds, and interfaces that turns life into a trail. The bars are invisible. The locks are contractual. Freedom becomes conditional; less a right than a setting that can be toggled.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s high priest of coercion, does not need to personally chain anyone to anything. In the modern dispensation, the chain is digital. The chain is the system. The chain is the policy that makes the system necessary, the procurement that makes it permanent, the political theatre that makes it popular with the kinds of voters who like their cruelty neatly packaged as “order.”

And behind it all sits the Thiel doctrine, the billionaire catechism: democracy is messy, regulation is theft, oversight is a nuisance, and “innovation” is what happens when rich men are allowed to build the future without being interrupted by the poor. The state becomes the client. The citizen becomes the dataset. The contract becomes the constitution.

This is how the empire compensates for the limits of ships: when hardware can’t cover every corner, software fills the gaps. When carriers can’t be everywhere, the database can. When the spectacle risks embarrassment, the system ensures continuity.

War gets an interface and conscience gets outsourced

The same logic applies to killing.

Modern war has always been partly a problem of perception: how to keep violence efficient while keeping the moral cost off the books. In earlier eras, this was done with distance; high-altitude bombing, drone strikes, euphemisms. Dresden. Hiroshima. Cambodia. Now it is done with interfaces.

AI-driven targeting and battlefield data platforms compress decision loops. They make the “kill chain” faster, smoother, cleaner. They turn uncertainty into something that can be “managed” by a model, and they turn moral judgment into a checkbox embedded in workflow.

The result is not only speed, but insulation. Death becomes a product of process, stamped and routed and approved. The screen absorbs the horror and returns a recommendation. Power feels less like a decision and more like a system doing what systems do.

The empire doesn’t just want to win. It wants to win without feeling. You hear it every time Stephen Miller is interviewed.

The mercenary halo: privatised coercion waiting in the wings

Around this apparatus drifts a familiar shadow: the privatisation of force, the subcontracting of brutality, the steady conversion of state violence into a market.

In this ecosystem, coercion becomes modular; outsourced, franchised, packaged as “security” or “enforcement support.” The line between government muscle and private muscle blurs, not through ideology but through invoices. The system doesn’t require literal hired killers standing by the door; it requires something more durable: a world in which violence is always available as a service, plausible deniability included.

The genius here is not the gunman. It is the architecture that makes the gunman unnecessary most of the time, and deniable the rest of it.

The real fiasco: Trump is fireworks, the oligarchs are wiring

This is the deeper joke of the Trump era: he is the loud host with the braying laugh at the party, sweating at the entrance, insisting everyone is having a wonderful time. But the party no longer depends on him being competent. It depends on him being useful; an accelerant, a distraction, a permission slip.

He provides the spectacle: the threats, the bravado, the two-front bluster. Behind him, the billionaires and their systems provide the continuity: the databases, the contracts, the enforcement logic, the privatised extensions of state power.

Trump wanted two fronts because one wasn’t dramatic enough. What he’s helping build is something more lasting: a governance model where coercion is automated, privatised, and normalised—where the wealthy rule not only through money but through infrastructure, and the rest are processed as a manageable population.

Coda: the future arrives as a software update

There is a scene that fits this era better than any map room.

A warship offshore, lights humming on the water. A podium somewhere inland, a man making threats into microphones as if microphones were missiles. A contractor in an office park updating a dashboard. A bureaucrat approving a purchase order. A database quietly remembering a face.

No sirens. No dramatic announcement. Just a system tightening.

The brave new world doesn’t arrive with jackboots. It arrives with a software update.

And once it’s installed, it doesn’t need a genius. It only needs a user.