March 13, 2026 Decoding Historian Turned Pundit Phillips Payson O’Brien Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Decoding Historian Turned Pundit Phillips Payson O’Brien

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Phillips Payson O’Brien is a historian who uses the past to strip the romance from the present. His work belongs to a tradition of materialist strategy that treats war as an industrial process rather than a series of heroic maneuvers. That position gives him a particular kind of usefulness right now, when wars in Ukraine and the Middle East keep exposing the gap between how analysts talk about conflict and how conflict actually works.
He frequently attacks what he calls the cult of the map. Traditional military analysts obsess over shifting territorial lines, but in his view a line moving ten miles in either direction is usually a distraction from the structural health of the underlying systems. He treats a tank not as a tactical asset but as a terminal point in a vast production and logistics chain. If the chain breaks, the tank is irrelevant. This lets him ignore short-term battlefield headlines and focus instead on whether a nation can sustain its losses over time.
His analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war, and of potential conflicts involving Iran, centers on systems warfare. Modern war, he argues, is a competition between high-technology production lines. That puts him in a coalition with defense technologists and advocates for cheap, mass-produced autonomous systems. While Washington think tanks focus on the prestige of carrier groups or advanced fighter jets, O’Brien runs the math on interceptor costs versus drone costs. The prestige platform loses that calculation.
That he teaches at the University of St Andrews gives him a specific kind of intellectual autonomy. He is physically and professionally removed from the Washington dinner circuit, where status often depends on not alienating future employers at the Pentagon or at major defense contractors. O’Brien carries none of those obligations. He can be aggressively critical because his career requires neither a security clearance nor a political appointment.
His sharpest and most sustained target is the Institute for the Study of War. He argues that ISW’s daily interactive maps, which track frontline trenches and village-level control, create a false narrative of who is winning. In his view, focusing on the line on the map is a relic of 19th-century military thinking. A side can retreat on the map while winning the war through the destruction of the enemy’s long-term capacity to produce and deploy equipment. He has made this point repeatedly about Russia and Ukraine, arguing that Western analysts misjudged Russian strength before 2022 because they were awed by the size of the Russian army on paper rather than the fragility of its systems.
He also targets the retired general class of commentators. Their experience in counterinsurgency or tactical maneuver leads them, he argues, to overemphasize human factors like will to fight or leadership, which he treats as secondary to the cold math of production. He was particularly vocal in criticizing anonymous Pentagon sources who blamed Ukrainian forces for failing to execute large-scale combined arms maneuvers during the 2023 counteroffensive. Those critics, he argued, ignored the absence of air superiority and treated war as a game rather than a material reality where equipment losses are permanent.
His recent book War and Power extends this critique to the Great Power framework itself. He argues that treating Russia as a Great Power based on landmass or historical reputation is a category error. True power, he claims, is full-spectrum, requiring deep integration of financial, technological, and societal resilience that Russia lacks. The book warns that the West consistently overestimates authoritarian states because it looks at the visible military parade rather than the invisible infrastructure: the sensors, the chips, and the logistics.
He shares more ground with Adam Tooze or Paul Kennedy than with the tactical biographers of generals. The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze examines the Nazi economy and argues that Germany was fundamentally mismatched against the industrial power of the Allies, an argument that runs parallel to everything O’Brien has built his career on. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy explores how economic strength and military commitments must stay in balance, providing the foundation for the idea that imperial overstretch is a mathematical reality rather than a political choice.
The rise of O’Brien reflects something broader in how the public consumes expertise. During the Cold War, the defense intellectual held specialized knowledge of nuclear throw-weights and grand strategy and served as a gatekeeper for that knowledge. The democratization of data, through satellite imagery, shipping manifests, and industrial reports, has changed that arrangement. A historian in Scotland can now challenge a general in Washington by pointing to the same open sources anyone can read.
O’Brien wins status not by proximity to the room where decisions happen but by claiming his model of war predicts outcomes better than the models used by the people inside that room. That claim has made him a figure of authority in the OSINT community and among tech-aligned analysts who treat modern war as a data problem. It has also made him a provocation to traditional defense circles who see his focus on production as deterministic and dismissive of the human art of command. Both reactions, in different ways, confirm that he has found a real pressure point.
In short:
The Washington strategists claim policy expertise.
The retired generals claim operational expertise.
The historians claim historical understanding.
The energy analysts claim market realism.
The restraint camp claims moral prudence.
The journalists claim narrative synthesis.

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Australia may be the most fuel-import dependent advanced economy in the world

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Australia is unusually dependent on imported fuel for a rich country. The vulnerability comes from three layers.

First, import dependence.

Australia imports roughly:

70 to 80 percent of its refined petroleum products
almost all of its jet fuel
most of its diesel

The country produces crude oil but exports most of it because it is not the type best suited for its remaining refineries. Then it imports refined fuel back from Asia.

Second, shipping concentration.

Most fuel comes from a handful of Asian refining hubs:

Singapore
South Korea
Japan
China

Tankers travel through a few key sea lanes:

Strait of Malacca
South China Sea
Indonesian archipelagic routes

Those are some of the most strategically contested shipping corridors in the world. In a conflict involving China or a disruption in Southeast Asian shipping, Australia’s supply lines could be affected quickly.

Third, storage.

Australia historically kept very small fuel reserves. The country relied on constant tanker deliveries rather than large stockpiles. For years it had far less than the International Energy Agency requirement of 90 days of reserves.

Because of that problem Australia started buying strategic reserves stored in the United States around 2020. Since then it has been trying to expand domestic storage as well.

The result is a system that works extremely well in peacetime. Fuel arrives cheaply from giant Asian refineries.

But in wartime or a shipping crisis, the country could face shortages faster than most developed economies.

This is why the Australian government now subsidizes its remaining refineries and fuel storage. The goal is not efficiency. It is resilience.

Strategists often describe the tradeoff this way.

Globalization made fuel cheaper.
But it also turned supply chains into a strategic risk.

Australia is one of the clearest examples of that tradeoff.

Australia used to refine a lot of its own petroleum. Over the last twenty years most of those refineries shut down. The basic reason is that refining in Australia became more expensive than importing refined fuel from Asia.

Three forces drove the shift.

First, scale. Modern refineries work best when they are huge. Asia built massive facilities in places like Singapore, South Korea, China, and India. Those plants process several hundred thousand barrels a day. Australian refineries were much smaller. That meant higher costs per barrel.

Second, labor and regulatory costs. Australia has high wages, strict environmental standards, and expensive construction. All of that makes operating a refinery costly. A refinery in South Korea or Singapore can run the same operation cheaper.

Third, geography and trade. Australia sits next to the largest refining hub in the world. Singapore is one of the global centers of petroleum refining and trading. Shipping refined gasoline or diesel from Singapore to Australia is cheap. Often it is cheaper to import finished fuel than refine crude locally.

Because of those pressures, several refineries closed.

Examples:

Kurnell refinery in Sydney closed in 2014

Bulwer Island in Brisbane closed in 2015

Altona in Melbourne stopped refining in 2021

Kwinana in Western Australia stopped refining in 2021

Today Australia still has two operating refineries:

Lytton in Brisbane

Geelong in Victoria

They survive partly because the Australian government subsidizes them to maintain some domestic capacity for national security.

That leads to the strategic concern. Australia now imports about 80 to 90 percent of its refined fuel. Most comes from Asian refineries. In a major war or shipping disruption, that dependence could become a vulnerability.

So the short answer is simple. Australia can refine oil. It just became cheaper to let other countries do it.

Not massively cheaper per liter. The difference is small on each barrel. But the scale advantage makes the economics decisive.

Typical numbers look like this.

Refining costs themselves are often only about $2 to $3 per barrel for efficient refineries.

But the margin refiners earn for turning crude into fuel varies widely. In Asia the benchmark refining margin is often $7 to $15 per barrel, and in tight markets it can spike to around $30 per barrel.

So the cost difference between an efficient Asian refinery and a smaller high-cost refinery can be on the order of $1 to $5 per barrel, sometimes more depending on labor, environmental compliance, and scale.

That may sound trivial. But do the math.

A refinery processing
100,000 barrels per day

If costs are even $3 per barrel higher, that is

300,000 dollars per day
about $110 million per year

That gap alone can wipe out profits.

The structural advantages Asian refineries have:

Size
Some Asian refineries process 600,000 to over 1 million barrels per day, while the biggest Australian refinery was around 146,000 barrels per day.

Integration
Asian plants are often integrated with petrochemical complexes, spreading costs across more products.

Labor and regulatory costs
Lower wages and less expensive environmental compliance.

Regional hub
Singapore acts as the pricing hub for fuel in the region, and Australian wholesale fuel prices are tied to that benchmark.

So the key point is this.

The cost difference per barrel is modest.
But because refineries operate on razor-thin margins and massive volumes, even a few dollars difference makes domestic refining uncompetitive.

That is why Australia shut most of its refineries even though the country obviously has the capability to refine oil.

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Why Do Elites Love Paralympics?

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Elites and journalists tend to love the Paralympics because it satisfies several incentives at once.

First, it provides an almost perfect moral narrative. The Paralympics offers stories of suffering, resilience, and triumph. Those are emotionally powerful and easy to communicate. For journalists this is gold. It produces stories that readers are unlikely to attack or criticize. Praising the Paralympics signals compassion without triggering political backlash.

Second, it allows status signaling at very low cost. Supporting disability inclusion has become a near universal moral norm in elite culture. When a journalist praises Paralympians, they are signaling that they belong to the compassionate coalition. There is almost no downside risk. Nobody accuses you of virtue signaling if the cause involves disabled athletes.

Third, it gives elites a way to celebrate human excellence without invoking controversial hierarchies. Elite sports like the Olympics involve uncomfortable discussions about genetics, national competition, and extreme specialization. The Paralympics reframes excellence in a way that feels morally uplifting rather than socially divisive. It shifts the focus from raw superiority to courage and perseverance.

Fourth, the narrative aligns with the professional incentives of media institutions. Newsrooms are under constant pressure to produce emotionally engaging content that is also morally safe. Paralympic stories perform well because they are inspiring and nonpolarizing. They generate engagement without creating ideological fights.

Fifth, the Paralympics reinforces a broader cultural script that elites like to promote. The script says society is becoming more inclusive and humane. Every Paralympic success story functions as evidence that modern institutions are expanding opportunity and dignity. That message flatters the institutions elites already inhabit.

Through the lens of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, praising the Paralympics signals loyalty to the “care and inclusion” coalition. The point is not that the admiration is fake. Many people genuinely feel inspired. But the enthusiasm is amplified because the topic perfectly aligns moral signaling, emotional storytelling, and coalition incentives.

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Iran Experts On The War

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Afshon Ostovar is an expert on Iran, the Middle East, and security issues—Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, and author of books like Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East. He says that Iran remains dangerous even when weakened. On March 12, he promoted his new Foreign Affairs piece “The Dangers of a Weak Iran,” writing: “Iran’s regime has remained unified and unbending. As Mojtaba’s first message signals, he’s a reflection of his father. No creativity, no foresight. Where does Iran go in the postwar with these guys in charge?” The article argues that despite devastating U.S./Israeli strikes (destroying much of Iran’s military, nuclear sites, navy, and leadership), the regime prioritizes survival, stays ideologically rigid under Mojtaba, and could pose greater risks through terrorism, proxy aggression, or even a nuclear dash—since a wounded Iran falls back on low-cost asymmetric tactics and may seek vengeance.
He’s pessimistic about creative change from the top, viewing the leadership as inflexible and reflective of past patterns.
Abbas Milani, the Stanford University historian and director of Iranian Studies (also a Hoover Institution fellow) says Iran’s regime is on the brink of collapse.
In a March 6, 2026, CNN Amanpour interview, he stated the Iranian regime has pursued policies making conflict almost inevitable for 47 years and is willing to pay the price with ordinary Iranians’ lives. He expressed profound sadness over innocent deaths but blamed the regime for the warpath.
Milani portrays the regime as responsible for escalation and suffering, increasingly illegitimate, with high public support for change (e.g., 88% cited), and the current war as potentially accelerating its downfall.

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NYT: ‘A Lot of Life Years Lost’: How NAFTA Shortened American Life Spans

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

The New York Times reports: “A study tracks how the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade competition with Mexico led to earlier deaths for American factory workers.”
Trade arguments usually center on GDP figures or consumer prices. This one focuses on mortality. In communities most exposed to Mexican import competition after 1994, life expectancy dropped sharply. For 45-year-old men in those areas, roughly three percent lost a full year of remaining life.
During the Great Recession, mortality fell in some areas because people drove less, which reduced accidents and cut pollution. The NAFTA shock worked differently. It did not spread pain broadly across the economy. It concentrated destruction in specific geographic communities built around manufacturing, and the damage spread through drug overdoses, alcohol-related illness, suicide, and chronic disease worsened by stress and the collapse of self-reported health. The “China shock” followed the same pattern after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The history of NAFTA shows how powerful alliances shape what counts as economic truth. In the 1990s, a coalition of multinational corporations, trade economists, and centrist politicians from both parties framed free trade as a near-universal good. The narrative stressed aggregate benefits: cheaper electronics, lower clothing costs, stronger North American competitiveness. It treated the destruction of local industries as a manageable transition, the kind of short-term disruption that efficient markets correct over time.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory helps explain why that framing held for so long. Coalitions develop narratives that justify their own interests while presenting those interests as universal moral or economic truths. The pro-NAFTA coalition had every incentive to emphasize diffuse gains and minimize concentrated harms. The concentrated harms happened to fall on communities that lacked the political and institutional power to force the debate. The anti-NAFTA coalition, built from unionized workers and industrial towns, developed a counter-narrative of betrayal and abandonment. For decades, the pro-trade side could answer that critique by pointing to aggregate welfare gains. This study makes that response harder. When the harm includes shortened life spans, cheaper televisions stop functioning as compensation.
The biological decline the study documents also reflects something Ernest Becker described in his work on hero systems. The manufacturing economy gave men without college degrees a coherent path to dignity. A factory worker supported a family, belonged to a union, earned respect through physical competence, and tied his identity to a specific place and community. That system stabilized marriage rates, kept addiction lower, and anchored civic life. When the factories closed, the collapse was not only financial. Men lost the primary pathway through which their culture recognized adult male worth. The professional class, whose own hero system runs on credentials, mobility, and global networks, often failed to see what that loss meant at ground level. From inside their framework, NAFTA looked rational and progressive. From inside the older framework, it looked like an erasure.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that the decline of manufacturing connected to rising opioid addiction and deaths of despair from alcohol, drugs, and suicide. This new paper gives that connection a harder econometric edge. The political staying power of anti-trade sentiment was never primarily about nostalgia or ignorance of economics. It persisted because the damage was biological and irreversible. Populist critics of NAFTA were directionally right that elite economists had been too optimistic, and the mortality data now backs that intuition. The deeper failure was institutional: the pro-trade coalition assumed adjustment would happen automatically, that workers would retrain and regions would diversify. That assumption ignored the social infrastructure of manufacturing towns. Economists measured GDP and consumer prices. They did not measure the erosion of the social order those towns depended on.

Further Reading

Given the war’s scope and its immediate effects on global energy and supply chains, the industrial policy dimension has become urgent in ways that would have seemed abstract just a month ago. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, oil prices have surged past $100 a barrel, and shipping lanes are being rerouted around the world. That changes the calculus on domestic production capacity, energy independence, and defense manufacturing in ways every serious reader should think through.
On Alliance Theory and minority security models, start with Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Olson argues that groups with concentrated interests organize more effectively than diffuse majorities, which helps explain why minority communities often build security infrastructure the broader population never needs. It remains the foundational text for understanding why diaspora communities do what governments cannot.
Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability examines how market-dominant minorities generate both prosperity and resentment in multiethnic societies. Her framework applies directly to Jewish communities in the diaspora and helps explain why the security question is never purely about crime or terrorism but about the structural position of a community within a larger society.
On the broader geopolitics driving the Iran conflict, John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics argues that states pursue security above all else and that conflict between rising and dominant powers is close to inevitable. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the book gives you a rigorous framework for thinking about why the United States and Israel calculated that a weakened Iran represented a window of opportunity rather than a moment for diplomacy.
Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate argues that physical geography shapes strategy more than ideology or intention. With the Strait of Hormuz now closed and Brent crude above $100, his argument about chokepoints and energy geography looks prescient.
On industrial policy, which the war has made the most pressing topic on this list, the essential starting point is Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths. Mazzucato argues that the state has historically driven the most significant technological and industrial breakthroughs, not private capital. She challenges the assumption that markets lead and governments follow, and her framework matters now because the war has exposed how dependent Western economies remain on imported energy and foreign supply chains.
Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind’s Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business makes the case that large industrial firms and deliberate state investment produce better economic outcomes than the small-business romanticism that dominates American political rhetoric. As defense spending accelerates and energy production becomes a strategic priority, their argument about the necessity of industrial scale feels timely.
Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America takes a different angle, arguing that the United States gutted its manufacturing base in pursuit of consumer prices and financial returns, leaving both workers and the country strategically exposed. The Iran war has made that exposure concrete: a conflict in the Gulf now threatens the industrial capacity of countries that no longer make the things they need.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This book documents how the decline of manufacturing and the weakening of unions led to a surge in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths among working-class Americans. It argues that the modern economic system has failed those without a college degree, creating a profound sense of hopelessness that translates into a literal loss of life.
The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik. This book argues that we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and full economic globalization. It suggests that by pushing globalization too far, we have undermined the national institutions that provide social stability and democratic legitimacy.
Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries by Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher. This book serves as a comprehensive reference for the return of state-guided economics. It surveys the successes and failures of industrial planning in major economies and argues that a strategic government role is necessary for national security and economic resilience in an era of global competition.
Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate by Dani Rodrik. This book offers a vision for a “new economics” that prioritizes the middle class and the green transition. It argues for place-based policies and a revitalized industrial strategy to repair the social fabric torn by decades of hyper-globalization.
Industrial Policy, National Security, and the Perilous Plight of the WTO by Petros C. Mavroidis. This book examines how national security concerns are reshaping international trade law. It argues that the rise of industrial policy is a direct response to a world where economic integration is no longer seen as separate from geopolitical survival.
Industrial policy debates in Washington do not follow a simple left-right divide. Several rival coalitions have formed, and they overlap in complicated ways.
The national security industrialists drive most of the recent policy shifts. Their core argument is that great-power competition has returned and that industrial capacity determines military power. They want the United States to rebuild domestic production in semiconductors, shipbuilding, rare earth minerals, batteries, and defense manufacturing. The National Security Council, the Pentagon, and defense-focused think tanks anchor this group. For them, supply chains are strategic vulnerabilities, and China’s state-driven industrial system represents a direct challenge that markets alone cannot answer.
A second group overlaps with the first but has a different center of gravity. Silicon Valley firms, venture capitalists focused on defense technology, and policymakers involved in the CHIPS Act and AI strategy make up what might be called the techno-industrial coalition. They care less about traditional manufacturing and more about semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and space technology. Their argument is that technological ecosystems, not factory floors, determine geopolitical power.
The traditional free-trade coalition once dominated policy from the 1990s through the early 2010s. Wall Street, multinational corporations, trade economists, and international institutions make up its core. Their argument for open markets and global supply chains has not disappeared, but their influence has declined since the China shock, the pandemic supply-chain crisis, and rising geopolitical tensions forced a reckoning.
The labor and domestic manufacturing coalition has gained ground in that same period. Industrial unions, regional political leaders in manufacturing states, and economic nationalists share a focus that differs from both the security hawks and the tech optimists. They want domestic employment rebuilt and industrial communities restored. Tariffs, domestic content requirements, and regional manufacturing subsidies are their preferred tools, and the political realignment of working-class voters has given them real leverage.
A fifth group has grown up around clean energy. Renewable energy firms, environmental policy groups, and progressive economists support industrial policy as a way to build domestic supply chains for electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and grid infrastructure. The Inflation Reduction Act reflects their priorities more than any other recent legislation.
These coalitions cross traditional lines. National security hawks and labor advocates sometimes agree on reshoring manufacturing. Technology companies and defense planners often find common ground on semiconductor policy. Climate strategists and industrial planners overlap around battery supply chains. But the tensions are real too. Free-trade economists warn about inefficiency and trade wars. Labor groups worry that high-tech industrial policy will not produce enough middle-class jobs. Defense planners worry that climate priorities might distort strategic ones.
American industrial policy is therefore not emerging from a single coherent doctrine. It emerges through a series of overlapping compromises, each coalition framing its preferred policies as serving the national interest while protecting its own. The next decade will likely determine which coalition becomes dominant, and that outcome will shape how the United States organizes its economy.

ChatGPT says: The literature on national security industrial policy has exploded in the last five years. The United States and its allies are rediscovering that wars and geopolitical shocks depend on industrial capacity, supply chains, and energy systems.

Chris Miller: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

This is probably the most important book on industrial policy written recently. Miller shows how semiconductor manufacturing became the foundation of military and economic power. Modern weapons, intelligence systems, satellites, and communications all depend on chips. The key lesson is that the semiconductor industry is not a normal market. It is a strategic technology ecosystem shaped by government subsidies, export controls, and security alliances. This is the clearest example of why industrial policy is back.

Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

Doshi explains how China has pursued a long-term strategy to displace American economic and technological leadership. His argument pushed many Washington policymakers to rethink laissez-faire globalization. The book shows how industrial policy can be a tool of geopolitical competition rather than just economic development.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy

Farrell and Newman explain how modern power operates through control of networks such as finance, payment systems, and technology supply chains. Their concept of “weaponized interdependence” is central. Countries that control key nodes in global networks can coerce others without firing a shot. Think SWIFT sanctions, semiconductor export controls, and rare-earth supply chains.

Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

Fishman describes how economic sanctions, export controls, and technology restrictions became central tools of American strategy. The key insight is that economic statecraft has replaced many traditional forms of military confrontation. Energy logistics are the hidden backbone of modern war. The Iran conflict highlights this because oil shipping lanes, refineries, and energy prices shape the global economy.

Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

Yergin explains how energy geopolitics is shifting with shale production, renewables, and great-power competition. The book shows why the Persian Gulf still matters even though the U.S. produces more energy domestically than it did decades ago.

Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History

Smil’s work is slower and more technical, but it explains the physical foundations of industrial economies. Wars are not won only with weapons. They are won with steel, fuel, electricity, fertilizer, and logistics.

The U.S. can design extraordinary weapons but often struggles to manufacture them at wartime volumes. Two books explain this problem well.

Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

This is about the U.S. industrial mobilization during World War II. It shows how government coordination with private industry turned America into the “arsenal of democracy.” The lesson is that wartime production requires institutional coordination that markets alone do not produce.

Alex Vershinin’s essays on industrial warfare

Vershinin writes about how modern wars are becoming “industrial wars” again. Ammunition production, drone manufacturing, and logistics capacity now determine outcomes as much as battlefield tactics.

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NYT: His Harvard Lab Was Thriving. Then Came the Cuts.

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Jenna Russell writes:

Will Mair, who studies aging, lost almost all his research funds when the White House cracked down on Harvard. He was wholly unprepared for the upheaval that followed….
In October, he traveled to Malta to lead a long-planned conference on aging — after nearly canceling the trip because he lacked the funds for airfare. Flying back home, grateful for the days immersed in dialogue with other scientists, he took comfort in knowing he would re-enter the county with the protection of his new U.S. passport.
Then, at Logan Airport, an officer pulled him aside at the passport control checkpoint and started asking questions: What kind of research did he do? Who were his collaborators? What countries did his postdocs come from?
His hands shook as he answered politely, hiding his disbelief and mounting anger. After about half an hour, they let him go.

The story illustrates a structural shift in how American science has been funded since World War II. For about eighty years the dominant model was simple. The federal government funds basic research. Universities perform the research. Private industry later commercializes the discoveries. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Department became the primary patrons. Universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UCSF built enormous research systems around that assumption.

The Mair episode shows what happens when that assumption breaks.

After World War II the United States created a system sometimes called the “Bush model,” after Vannevar Bush. The idea was that government should fund open-ended basic science because the private sector cannot tolerate the uncertainty.

Companies want projects that might produce a drug or product in five years. Basic biology often takes thirty years and fails most of the time.

That is why the scientist in the article tells the audience that companies cannot tolerate “all the weird, random science.” He is basically describing the economic logic behind NIH funding.

Ozempic is actually a good example. The drug ultimately emerged from decades of obscure metabolic research that no pharmaceutical company would have funded in its early stages.

Public health schools rely heavily on federal grants. The Harvard T.H. Chan School gets roughly 40 percent of its revenue from Washington. Engineering schools have more corporate funding and business schools rely on tuition and alumni donations.

So when the federal government cuts grants, public health labs feel it first.

That is why Mair’s lab suddenly had to operate like a startup. Instead of simply applying for NIH grants he is now pitching donors on Nantucket golf courses and consulting for a private longevity company.

The conflict in the story is not just Trump versus Harvard. It reflects a broader political shift. For decades the American science system assumed three things:

• Federal funding would grow every year.
• Universities would remain politically neutral in the eyes of government.
• International talent would flow freely into U.S. labs.

All three assumptions are now unstable. The federal government is increasingly willing to use funding as leverage over universities. Universities are deeply embedded in political conflicts. Immigration scrutiny now affects scientists and students.

When those conditions change, the whole ecosystem changes.

Most likely the funding model will diversify. More philanthropy from billionaires interested in specific fields like aging or AI. More university spin-offs and venture partnerships. Smaller labs with fewer permanent staff. More researchers moving between academia and private industry. You can already see that happening in fields like longevity research, where figures like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Altos Labs have poured billions into private research institutes.

Mair consulting for a longevity investment company is a sign of that shift.

The irony is that American science became dominant precisely because it was insulated from this kind of short-term funding pressure.

The NIH system let scientists pursue strange ideas for decades without needing immediate commercial payoff.

If that insulation weakens, the U.S. may become more like other countries where research is fragmented between government, corporate, and philanthropic patrons.

Some people think that will make science more efficient. Others think it will kill the kind of long-term discoveries that produced things like mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, and modern cancer therapies.

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NYT: The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Deborah Pearlstein, the director of the Princeton program in law and public policy, writes in the New York Times about her love of truth:

The state bar disciplinary system is far from perfect. Proceedings can drag on for years. Some bar authorities are reluctant to investigate Trump administration lawyers. Even disciplinary systems with the courage to move forward could have a tough time handling the sheer number of administration lawyers who have apparently lied. Still, coupled with other deterrents — the courts themselves and lawyers’ concern for their own reputations — the risk of state bar discipline remains a critical tool for protecting the truth-finding function of the federal courts. No wonder the administration is determined to go after them.
The move against state bars is of a piece with the administration’s broader strategy against universities, the media and law firms — any set of organizations capable of challenging the president’s power. And few things threaten it more than holding it to the truth.

Her article operates on two levels at once. On the surface, it argues a legal point: a proposed Trump administration rule would shield Department of Justice lawyers from state bar discipline, violating the McDade Amendment (28 U.S.C. § 530B), which requires federal lawyers to follow the same ethics rules as every other licensed attorney. The argument holds legal water, and the underlying facts she cites, the erratic briefing, the judges who have called DOJ lawyers liars, the wave of resignations, are all real. But the piece also works as coalition defense, and reading it as only a legal argument misses half of what it does.
Pearlstein writes from within the elite legal-institutional coalition. That coalition, federal judges, career DOJ attorneys, state bar associations, elite law schools, and legal academics, draws its authority from a set of shared norms: lawyers tell the truth to courts, courts can sanction misconduct, and no government is above the professional rules that govern the legal order. If those norms weaken, the coalition weakens. So when she frames the proposed rule as an attack on the “truth infrastructure” of the legal system, she uses language that does two things simultaneously. It describes a real institutional threat, and it signals to every lawyer who identifies with that coalition that the threat is existential.
The Trump administration’s incentives here follow a clear logic. Career DOJ lawyers have used professional ethics rules as a form of internal resistance, resigning rather than filing briefs they consider dishonest. Removing external discipline lowers the cost of staying for lawyers willing to work inside the new order. At the same time, de-emphasizing credentials and protecting lawyers from bar sanctions opens the door to loyalists who lack elite pedigree but carry fewer reservations. The administration moves disciplinary power from state bars, which answer to no one in the executive branch, to the Office of Professional Responsibility, which answers to the deputy attorney general. Todd Blanche, the current deputy, recently said the administration is at “war” with the federal courts. That is who would now oversee internal ethics reviews.
Pearlstein largely ignores the counter-narrative that animates the Trump coalition. From inside that coalition, the legal profession looks less like a neutral referee and more like a politically hostile guild. Career DOJ lawyers delayed or refused to execute policies they personally opposed. State bar authorities, at least some of them, show reluctance to pursue Trump-aligned lawyers for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits. Elite law schools and major law firms skew politically in a direction that makes them, in the coalition’s view, structurally adversarial to Republican governance. None of that makes the proposed rule sound policy, but it explains why the coalition treats the legal profession as an adversary rather than an institution worth protecting.
The framing of “truth versus authoritarianism” that runs through the column is coalition language, and not only in the cynical sense. Pearlstein believes it, and the underlying concern has real institutional weight. Courts depend on honest representations by counsel. If the executive branch can shield its lawyers from any external disciplinary review, judges lose one of the few tools they have to enforce the truth-finding function of legal proceedings. The Office of Professional Responsibility has historically operated like a black hole, and it has no subpoena power outside the department. State bar discipline, imperfect as it is, remains the only meaningful external check on DOJ conduct.
What the article finally reveals is less a debate about one rule and more a contest over who controls the machinery of American law. Three competing models of legal authority are in tension. Professional autonomy holds that lawyers regulate themselves through courts and guilds, independent of elected leadership. Executive populism holds that elected authority overrides professional guilds when they obstruct the will of the governed. Bureaucratic technocracy holds that career experts maintain continuity of legal interpretation regardless of who wins elections. The fight over the McDade Amendment is a proxy for that larger contest.

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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber is a book that many people find compelling because it names something real. Everyone has sat in a meeting that could have been an email, or watched a colleague generate reports no one reads. Graeber’s central observation has genuine force: automation did not deliver the leisure Keynes predicted, and a great deal of modern work feels hollow. The book’s emotional appeal rests on that kernel of truth, and for many readers it goes no further than needing the kernel confirmed.
The problem is that Graeber builds an enormous structure on a foundation of anecdote and polemic. He defines a bullshit job as work so pointless that even the employee cannot justify its existence, and then populates this category with his five types: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. The typology is catchy but slippery. Corporate lawyers and lobbyists appear as “goons,” which tells you something about Graeber’s politics but very little about whether those jobs are economically irrational or socially superfluous. The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony put it plainly: the categories are arbitrary distinctions that add little to understanding.
The empirical base is especially thin. Graeber leans on a YouGov poll showing that 37 percent of British workers felt their jobs made no meaningful contribution. But the same survey found that 63 percent considered their jobs personally fulfilling. Graeber builds a theory of civilizational crisis on the minority finding while ignoring the majority one. A reviewer in The Times also pointed out that the average British workweek fell from 56 hours in 1900 to 31 hours by 2018, which undercuts his claim that productivity gains never translated into real relief from labor.
The academic literature has been unkind to his hypotheses. A 2021 study published in Work, Employment and Society examined data from the European Working Conditions Survey and found that the proportion of workers who consider their jobs useless was low and declining, not growing as Graeber predicted. More cutting still, the workers in his designated “bullshit” categories, hedge fund managers, lobbyists, and the like, reported high satisfaction, while manual workers and cleaners often felt their work was meaningless. The study concluded that Graeber’s theory must simply be rejected. A 2023 American study found partial support for his framework, but only with regression controls and only in heavily financialized countries, a much narrower claim than Graeber makes.
His historical argument is more interesting. He traces the Protestant work ethic and its transmutation into a secular religion of productivity, drawing on Locke and the Puritan moral economy of suffering. This part of the book has genuine intellectual substance and connects to a real tradition of cultural criticism. Max Weber covered similar ground with more rigor, but Graeber writes with more energy. His observation that a citizenry kept busy with pointless work has less motivation to revolt carries a dark political logic worth taking seriously.
The solution he offers, a universal basic income, arrives without much argument. It appears almost as an afterthought, a political preference attached to a cultural diagnosis rather than derived from it. Graeber never seriously grapples with how UBI might be structured, funded, or whether it would actually address the psychological alienation he describes, since people might feel just as purposeless with money as without meaningful work.
What Graeber actually wrote, as Andrew Anthony noted, is not much more sophisticated than the 2013 essay that launched the whole project. The book adds anecdotes, extends the typology, and decorates the argument with historical passages, but it does not develop a theory. It confirms what a certain kind of reader already believes and flatters them for believing it. That is a commercially successful thing to do. It is not quite the same as being right.

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Everything Is Incentives: Antisemitism and the Organizations That Fight It

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

With Alliance Theory and his other papers, David Pinsof’s core claim is that behavior follows incentives. Not intentions. Not moral convictions. Incentives. He calls this incentive determinism, and he sets it against what he names likability determinism, the far more popular belief that good things happen when good people prevail and bad things happen when bad people do. Most of public life runs on likability determinism. Political speeches run on it. Cable news runs on it. So do most organizations that describe themselves as fighting hate.
To understand antisemitism in America right now, and to understand the Anti-Defamation League’s response to it, Pinsof’s framework cuts through a great deal of noise.
Start with the antisemitism itself. The standard account says it rises because bad people have bad ideas, and those ideas spread when weak or corrupt institutions fail to check them. The incentive account asks a different question: what do people gain by expressing hostility toward Jews or Jewish institutions? The answer has changed, and changed recently, and that change explains more than any catalog of individual bigots.
For several decades, the incentive structure around antisemitism in American public life was sharply punishing. The Holocaust sat near enough in cultural memory to make overt antisemitism radioactive. Jews had strong alliances with the civil rights movement. Both major political parties competed for Jewish support. The ADL and similar organizations maintained enough institutional reach that being labeled antisemitic carried genuine professional and reputational cost. In that environment, crossing certain rhetorical lines was expensive. Few people did it openly.
That structure has weakened on multiple fronts at once. The Israel question fractured the progressive coalition in ways that matter enormously here. Once a significant portion of activist culture began treating Israel as a colonial project, criticism of Jewish institutions became a way to signal membership in the pro-Palestinian coalition. The signal has value. It generates approval inside certain spaces. The cost of making it, in those same spaces, dropped toward zero. Pinsof would recognize this pattern immediately: the incentive shifted, and behavior followed.
On the populist right, a different shift produced a similar result through entirely different logic. Figures who built audiences by attacking elite gatekeepers discovered that the ADL, along with other major Jewish advocacy organizations, fit neatly into the category of institutions their audiences resented. Criticizing them became a way to perform independence from the liberal establishment, to show that you would say things others would not. The audience rewards that performance. The incentive is attention and loyalty, not theology or ideology.
And then the internet collapsed the old enforcement mechanism. In the legacy media world, accusations of antisemitism could move quickly and stick. Editors and producers acted as filters. Today those filters are gone. Online communities build their own interpretive frames. The cost of being labeled antisemitic dropped for anyone operating outside mainstream institutional life, and once the cost drops, more people test the boundary, and more people follow those who test it without consequences.
These three forces, progressive coalition signaling, populist anti-elite performance, and the collapse of reputational enforcement, do not share an ideology. They share an incentive structure that, in different ways, rewards attacking Jewish institutions. The result looks like a wave of antisemitism. Some of it is. Some of it is coalition positioning wearing the clothes of moral argument. Pinsof would say the two are nearly impossible to disentangle from the outside, and that the effort to disentangle them is often itself a form of coalition positioning.
Now apply the same lens to the ADL.
The organization’s stated mission is to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish civil rights. It does this through incident monitoring, policy advocacy, institutional partnerships, and law enforcement training. None of that is controversial to describe. What Pinsof’s framework adds is the observation that any organization that survives a century does so by aligning its moral language with its institutional incentives. The ADL is no exception, and recognizing that is not the same as calling it cynical.
Its annual audit of antisemitic incidents does several things at once. It documents a real problem. It also validates donor urgency, signals indispensability to policymakers, and reinforces the ADL’s authority as the definitive interpreter of the threat. An organization that publishes the most widely cited data on a problem does not have a neutral relationship to that data. The incentive favors finding that the problem is serious and growing. That does not mean the data is wrong. It means the data is produced inside an incentive structure, like all data.
The push for broad definitions of antisemitism, including the contested claim that certain forms of anti-Zionism constitute antisemitism, follows the same logic. Pinsof predicts that coalitions define norms in ways that protect their allies and disadvantage rivals. A definition that expands the boundary of antisemitism expands the rhetorical and legal territory the ADL’s coalition controls. Critics who see this as motivated reasoning are not entirely wrong. Defenders who see it as a sincere response to genuine blurring at the boundary are not entirely wrong either. The point is that sincerity and institutional interest tend to converge, which is precisely what Pinsof argues.
The coalition architecture the ADL built over decades, inside law firms, universities, tech platforms, and police departments, is exactly what Pinsof means when he says influence flows through alliances. Embedding an organization inside powerful institutions is not merely advocacy. It creates a structure in which the organization’s definitions and priorities become defaults across a wide range of institutional decisions. That is a form of power, and like all forms of power, it eventually generates resistance.
The backlash the ADL now faces from multiple directions at once is, on Pinsof’s model, entirely predictable. When an institution holds the center of a coalition and enforces norms aggressively enough, it accumulates enemies across the ideological spectrum. Progressives accuse it of conflating Israel criticism with antisemitism. Conservatives accuse it of selectively labeling right-wing speech while ignoring left-wing hostility. Tech companies that once deferred to its content moderation guidance now face counter-pressure from free speech coalitions that treat the ADL as a symbol of the old censorship regime. The organization has not become more extreme. The incentive landscape around it shifted, and new coalitions formed to challenge its authority.
Pinsof is careful to note that none of this means the beliefs people express are false or that the causes they advocate are wrong. The ADL does fight real antisemitism. Antisemitism is a real and persistent problem. The current wave of hostility toward Jewish institutions contains genuine prejudice alongside strategic coalition signaling. His point is structural, not cynical. Moral language is the medium people use. Incentives are what move them.
What this framework offers, and why it cuts deeper than most analysis of antisemitism and the institutions that fight it, is that it forces the question of who benefits from a given framing, not as an accusation but as a method. When criticism of the ADL surges, the useful question is not whether the critics have a point, though they may, but what incentive structure rewards the timing and intensity of that criticism. When the ADL pushes a broader definition of antisemitism, the useful question is not whether the definition is defensible, though it may be, but what coalition is strengthened by the expansion.
Pinsof ends his essay with something close to optimism. If awareness of incentive structures can itself change behavior, then thinking this way might matter. The catch is that awareness is also an incentive, and the feeling of having seen through the machinery is one of the most reliable pleasures available to anyone who writes or reads about how the world works. The framework is not exempt from its own analysis. Neither is this essay.

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Decoding Oil Analyst Javier Blas (Bloomberg)

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Javier Blas is an energy and commodities specialist whose reporting focuses on oil markets, commodity trading houses, and global supply chains, and that position gives him a specific lens on world events.
His real audience is the energy-financial coalition: commodity traders, oil companies, energy investors, government energy ministries, and macro hedge funds. Bloomberg Opinion draws heavily from market participants, so his columns signal less about moral narratives and more about practical information that affects oil prices and supply chains. In alliance terms, he coordinates the energy market coalition.
Blas tends to believe three things about the world. Energy markets are more resilient than pundits think. Politics matters less than physical supply constraints. Commodity traders quietly shape geopolitics. That worldview comes from years covering OPEC, oil majors, and trading houses like Vitol, Trafigura, and Glencore. He co-wrote a book about that shadow system. The World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy describes the history and influence of the billionaire commodity traders who buy and sell the earth’s resources. It argues that these private companies shaped the modern world by providing the fuel and minerals that industrial economies require, often by navigating the gaps between international law and local corruption.
So when a war breaks out, Blas asks one question: what happens to the barrels?
His columns often puncture the dramatic geopolitical story with a market reality check. You see the pattern in phrases like “not an energy crisis yet” or “the oil market is relaxed.” He tells readers that wars often look enormous politically but smaller in commodity terms. That is a market stabilization narrative, because traders need to know whether supply is actually disrupted.
On climate, Blas quietly pushes back against the more utopian energy transition narrative. He argues that fossil fuels will last longer than activists expect and that demand remains stubbornly strong, but he does it in a technocratic rather than ideological way. His tone is market realism, not culture war. His coalition is pragmatic energy elites.
Where a Washington columnist asks whether the regime is collapsing or what a conflict means for American power, Blas asks whether tankers are moving, whether the Strait of Hormuz is open, and how many barrels per day are offline. Those are the variables that determine oil prices and global economic impact.
His deeper contribution is that he consistently highlights the role of commodity traders, firms that operate in a shadow zone between governments and markets. They buy sanctioned oil, finance risky infrastructure, and move resources during wars. His argument is that these actors quietly stabilize the global economy when governments fail. That explains why he often sounds calmer about geopolitical crises than national security analysts.
The simplest frame: Ignatius writes about power. Think tanks write about strategy. Blas writes about barrels. His columns translate geopolitics into the physical economy.
Television analysts operate inside the geopolitical attention economy, where dramatic scenarios reward them with urgency and clicks. Energy traders operate under a different incentive structure. They lose money if they panic too early. So before reacting to any war, traders ask whether physical supply is actually interrupted, whether tankers are still moving, and whether alternative flows are available. Historically the answer is usually yes. When Iranian exports faced sanctions, crude moved through ship-to-ship transfers and shadow fleets. When Russia faced an embargo, India and China absorbed huge volumes and traders rerouted the flows. Political shock does not automatically equal supply shock.
Hormuz is often described as the most important energy chokepoint in the world, with roughly a fifth of global oil passing through it. But that story has two complications. Many Gulf producers have built bypass infrastructure, including Saudi pipelines to the Red Sea and a UAE pipeline to Fujairah that sits outside the Strait entirely. And closing Hormuz is extremely difficult. Iran could disrupt shipping with mines, missiles, or drones, but permanently sealing the waterway would require sustained naval dominance, trigger overwhelming American military retaliation, and destroy Iran’s own export routes. So Iran’s incentive is harassment, not closure. Temporary disruption raises oil prices and signals strength without provoking total war. Traders understand this pattern from decades of Gulf crises and rarely assume a full blockade.
Oil markets sometimes prefer wars to peace, and that is less counterintuitive than it sounds. Markets dislike uncertainty, but they also like tight supply. A limited conflict in an oil region often produces exactly that combination. The threat of disruption pushes prices higher, but production often continues, and that creates profitable volatility. The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s damaged infrastructure but never eliminated exports. Tankers kept sailing under naval protection. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 spiked prices initially, but markets stabilized once traders understood that other producers could compensate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not remove Russian oil from global markets. It reshuffled where the barrels went. Commodity traders thrive in these conditions because they can arbitrage price differences, arrange alternative supply routes, and finance shipments others avoid.
Geopolitical analysts focus on the dry map of territories and capitals. Traders focus on the wet map of sea lanes and port depths, and that map is much harder to break. Even if the Strait of Hormuz faces harassment, the global tanker fleet is an enormous floating buffer. Millions of barrels of oil sit on water at any given moment, providing a temporal cushion that the breaking-news cycle ignores. Politicians might announce a total embargo for a domestic audience while traders watch the cargo manifests and see the reality. Governments often quietly allow leakage to prevent a global economic collapse. The trader’s calm comes from the recognition that the world’s need for energy usually overrides its desire for a clean moral resolution to a conflict.

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