$9 billion to degrade our biggest geopolitical rival, without a single American casualty, while strengthening NATO and signaling resolve to Beijing. That’s not waste. That’s the best return on a defense dollar this century. Radio Free Europe isn’t a Cold War relic. It’s $250 million for soft power infrastructure in a region where we’re actively losing the information war to Russia and China. Cutting it now is what losing looks like. Pax Americana kept us wealthy and made the world more prosperous than any previous hegemony. Soft power maintained that. Walking away from soft power is walking away from the order that made America what it is. Is that the trade you want?

There is hope in this world. Don’t let them divide us.

Stable genius forgot to do basic math before starting a war with Iran. Shahed drone costs a fraction of the Apache it took down. Pattern was there from the start. All we had to do was look.

In 1990s, I often heard adults in Russia say we have lost everything. Yet, it had a tremendous Soviet inheritance. And hope. Now, as an adult watching Putin dismantle that inheritance, I wonder, is there any hope?

1. People must live well. 2. People must live. 3. People must. The law was enacted after those edits.

Who does this remind you of? Autocrats are all alike. 20th century superpower arrogance. Ambition over domestic issues. Ego over critical thinking.

I’ve posted too cautious and boring posts about utility rates and mag-7. Let me be blunt and short. Utility rates are rising and the grid can’t keep up with what we’re building. Seven companies are 30% of the S&P 500. They added $4.8 trillion in market cap two months ago. Brighter people noticed this pattern before me. I’m not the first one calling it. Could I be wrong? Yep. Maybe AI delivers everything the valuations are pricing in and we get away with it. If so, great. I’ll be glad to be wrong. But as it sits, I’m smelling dot-com bubble. Calling it now so the receipt exists later.

Saying it again for the people in the back: how do you obliterate knowledge? Sounds great. Doesn’t work in practice. The knowledge is in people, not buildings. Take the peace deal. Yes, it favors Iran. They have the upper hand on terms. Take it anyway. February 28, we had the option for a covert operation to help organic regime change. We chose brute strength. Every bomb we’ve dropped since then handed the regime a rally-around-the-flag moment that delayed exactly what we said we wanted. Three months later the regime is still in power and the deal is on Iran’s terms. Escalation gets us nowhere. I stated why in prior posts.

January, I wrote: the play with Maduro was Germany and Korea, not Iraq and Afghanistan. The military execution was clean. The strategic follow-through wasn’t. May 11, I wrote about why we keep making this mistake: cultural arrogance dressed as strength. We didn’t understand the Vietnamese fight against French colonialism. We didn’t understand the Shia-Sunni-Kurd triangle. We didn’t understand Persian pride or qisas, reciprocal justice. We took their Supreme Leader. They want ours. March: Iran proved the diagnosis. Wrong tool, wrong understanding, no plan. Last Thursday, Trump on Cuba: “It looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.” The lesson isn’t whether to act. The lesson is whether you’ve picked the right tool, understood the people we’re acting towards, and thought through what happens after the military action is taken. I want America that has a plan. A strategy. A follow-through that doesn’t take military action that wastes our resources and puts military lives at risk for no predictable result beyond a hope in bolstering of approval numbers.

Today the consensus is finally catching up to what the receipts have shown for months: Iran is a strategic loss. Fine. Here’s what worries me more. The same pattern is queuing up elsewhere. Tariff fights with Canada, Mexico, the EU. The Greenland rhetoric. Venezuela without a follow-through plan. China posture without a credible industrial base behind it. Iran was the loudest miscalculation. It won’t be the last one. The system that produced it is still running. The question isn’t whether we lost this war. The question is what we learn before we start the next one.

Six weeks ago President Trump declared Iran “militarily defeated.” He repeated it March 17, March 24, March 26, and April 6, each time contradicted within hours by the next missile, the next blockade incident, the next emergency request to Congress. Today he’s negotiating with the country he keeps declaring defeated. Yesterday he called it “50-50” whether there’s a deal at all. $29 billion. 15 American dead. The largest Middle East deployment since the 2003 Iraq invasion. And we’re sitting at the table because Iran is still standing. Some people will disagree with what I’m about to say. If a deal lands, take it. Every week we stayed, the cost went up and the leverage went down. Let’s call it what it is: we started a war we couldn’t finish. The mission was never accomplished. We’re negotiating because we have to. Not because we won. I fear we’ll do this again somewhere else.

Following Tuesday’s utility post. Check your 401k. It’s mostly seven companies. Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla. Together about a third of the S&P 500. Up from a fifth in 2019. From an eighth a decade ago. They added $4.8 trillion in market value since April. They’re racing into AI with borrowed money against assets - chips, data centers, power contracts - that depreciate faster than the loans amortize. When the dot-com bubble unwound in 2000, the people who didn’t lose their savings were the ones who saw the concentration and the piling in. You’re not investing in the market. You’re underwriting seven bets. Are you watching closely?

In Trump’s America, the justice system has two important groups. Those Trump would like to put away - Democrats, journalists, dissenters, anyone he disagrees with. The kind of “justice” you find in China or Russia. And those who committed heinous crimes against the stability of the Union. The second group gets a $1.776 billion fund. The first group… I came from Russia. I know what this pattern looks like before it has a name.

I run a triplex in Indiana. The electric rate on the meter went from 14¢ per kWh in early 2024 to 19¢ this spring. About 30% over two years. The Citizens Action Coalition confirms it: Indiana electric bills jumped 17.5% statewide last year alone - the largest increase in 20 years. Duke up 19.8%. NIPSCO up 26.7%. CenterPoint up 24.9%. Meanwhile the utilities are preparing to nearly double their grid capacity for Amazon, Google, and Meta data centers. Ratepayers were promised they wouldn’t pay for that buildout. Even the Republican governor is now demanding answers. The bill doesn’t lie. Hoosiers are paying for a buildout we don’t yet have.

Trump called Xi “the greatest leader he’s ever met.” Xi runs a one-party state. No free press. No real elections. Term limits removed so he could rule for life. Trump came home to a free press he calls the enemy of the people, now treasonous. Courts he wants to control. Term limits he keeps musing about. A Justice Department he wants directing prosecutions. He’s not paying Xi a compliment. He’s telling you what he wants.

Everyone laughed at Trump telling Xi he’s “the greatest leader” he’s met. Fair enough. But while the cameras stayed on the handshake, Xi was doing something else in his opening remarks. He said the world has come to “a new crossroads.” He asked whether China and the US could “transcend the Thucydides Trap and forge a new model for relations between major powers.” He called for being “partners, not rivals” of “the new era.” Look up Thucydides Trap if you don’t know it. Then ask yourself which leader walked into that room with a framework, and which one walked in with compliments. Trump got a photo op. Xi got an opening statement that will be quoted back at us for years. One of them understood what this summit was actually for.