We are in a geopolitical recession, defined as a period where the underlying balance of power no longer fits with the rules of the road, institutions, architecture, priorities, and policies that governed the previous order.

A majority of Americans increasingly do not support the global leadership role that America fashioned for itself after World War II, opposing the US as global sheriff, global free trade architecture promoter, and promoter of democracy and rule of law abroad, and are instead demanding other countries pay for their own defense, industrial policy, subsidies, and closed borders.

Trump is a symptom of the geopolitical recession, not the cause of it, but he is a beneficiary and accelerant of it while also having unique qualities of unfitness that cause additional uncertainty.

People are angry and scared about AI because they're also wildly anti-corruption and anti-privilege, and they don't differentiate between Trump's crypto interests, Elon's AI interests, and traditional tech companies like Google and Microsoft.

In the US-China AI competition, America's biggest asset is creative destruction and the opportunities and innovation that come from it; China's biggest asset is the longer-term strategic orientation of the system.

The digital order is set to become the dominant geopolitical order in a comparatively short period of time, and this transformation will be experienced within our lifetimes.

By 2028, at least one major US presidential candidate will be heavily driven by populist backlash to AI, assuming traditional party structures hold, likely the Democratic candidate.

Russia was not brought into the West after the Soviet Union collapsed; NATO did not include Russia, the EU did not expand to include Russia, and Russia was excluded from important G8 meetings, leaving them angry and acting as a revisionist rogue state allied with North Korea and countries like China and Iran.

It's plausible that tech companies could have the same advantages as China's surveillance state in containing social backlash through repressive measures and coercive control, allowing them to grab more attention, eyeballs, and data without facing consequences.

China was integrated into the global economy and WTO with the Western presumption that as China became more powerful and wealthier, their political and economic system would align with Western advanced democracies, but instead China remains state capitalist, authoritarian, and is seen by most Western nations as a competitor and adversary rather than having become Western.

China is facing very serious economic problems despite rising in absolute power and making investments in many technologies: their economy is not growing very fast, unemployment is way too high, many sectors are wildly unproductive and indebted with bad debt they're not addressing, and demographics are disastrous.

The DoD should be making decisions about where Starlink is shut on and off, not SpaceX; the company should provide the technology, the government buys it, and government should make the decision about deployment.

We are in uncharted territory because we are about to see an entire new group of geopolitical actors—non-state actors that are technology companies and AI companies—which has not happened since the beginning of the Westphalian system, and these actors will transform not just geopolitics but society and humanity as a whole.

Xi Jinping and the current generation of world leaders—Trump, Putin, Xi, and others in their 70s and 80s—are arrogant, out of touch with young people, have no interest in giving up power, and people would not want them responsible for the future of society and global order, yet the fact that this will change and people want something different is a promising development.

Tech CEOs and their business decisions provide more geopolitical insight on where the world is going than talking to heads of state of major countries, based on what they're doing, who they're talking to, how they're deploying capital, and what their business model is.

Sovereign AI is not a lost cause if middle powers think about it differently: identify components of AI they can compete with (e.g., energy for Gulf states, nuclear power for France) and build alliances with tech companies as strategic partnerships with leverage over business models and operations in their territory.

The US operates on a model where the private sector captures the regulatory environment through a 'coin operated democracy' where two tiers of power exist: one for those that can lobby and pay for policy outcomes, and one for everybody else, with the current US president able to do this for himself and his family in unprecedented ways.

In China, the state really captures the corporations and determines what is and what is not patriotic behavior, where money should be invested, and what sorts of things are out of bounds.

If France acts alone on its nuclear data center deal without European coordination, it leaves other EU members in a much weaker position to negotiate similar deals with AI companies, creating fragmentation in Gzero that strengthens tech companies' position.

Elon Musk decided to cut the Russians off from Starlink literally with the snap of his fingers, and no government made the decision; he made this decision with no oversight, fundamentally changing the Ukraine war—the Russians went from being able to effectively fight a drone war to losing it and falling a year behind in unmanned vehicles and drones.