ODESA, Ukraine — The American Century is ending, with external adversaries outmaneuvering the United States in critical strategic contests worldwide, while internal extremists destroy American leadership.
Whether one believes — as American officials say they do — that the purpose of U.S. power is to enforce a “rules-based” liberal international order and defend human rights, or whether one believes — as Russian President Vladimir Putin and his friends say they do — that the U.S. uses its espoused ideals as cover for rapacious empire-building, it’s clear Washington is capable of doing neither effectively.
Watching C-17s packed with fleeing Afghans take off from Kabul in the summer of 2021, this was easy to understand.
Certainly America’s adversaries understood. Less than three years later — and two years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — authoritarian regimes are tearing apart America’s strategic projects. Washington’s response is paralysis, the gears of its political machinery seized, corroded by partisan malice.
“The breakdown of the U.S.-led global order is the underlying cause of what we are seeing,” says Ian Morris, a professor of history at Stanford and author of Why the West Rules — For Now, adding that the trend since the end of the Second World War has been a narrowing of technological and economic disparities between “the West and the rest.”
“We shouldn’t be unduly surprised that, as the strategic gap narrows with the relative decline of the American global position, we see people becoming more and more willing to challenge the superpower,” Morris says.
Of the 27 active global conflicts tracked by the Council on Foreign Relations, 17 are now characterized as “worsening” — including four that could have a “critical” impact on the United States.
In Ukraine, war is bursting out of the cage in which U.S. policymakers hoped to keep it contained. The continuing loss of towns like Avdiivka after protracted fighting incentivize Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia, while Moscow increases pressure on NATO trying to break up the alliance supporting Kyiv. There is talk of nuclear war with rhetoric that would make Nikita Khrushchev blush.
The Biden administration can no longer help Ukraine defend itself, thwarted by former President Donald Trump, who has seized control of the Republican Party while claiming he will let Russia “do whatever they want” with American allies.
The MAGA movement has gone all-in on backing Russia, with billionaire Elon Musk providing money and a platform for nativist agitators like Tucker Carlson to advance Putin’s agenda, while House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and GOP Sens. J.D. Vance (Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (Ala.), and Mike Lee (Utah) run interference. Together they spread the lie that halting aid for Ukraine will stop the war, when in reality it will only help a tyrant continue murdering an oppressed people.
President Joe Biden has also handed adversaries a propaganda coup by helping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embark on a months-long campaign of violent retribution in Gaza after a massive terror attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, which is deepening divisions over foreign policy and shattering claims of moral standing. As a result of all this, American allies now view Washington as more an agent of geopolitical chaos than stability.
The timing couldn’t be worse. An ad-hoc authoritarian alliance — including Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea — is coalescing into “a mosaic of overlapping strategic interests,” willing to use all available means to destroy the global order, grab territory, and achieve hegemony.
To make matters worse, it’s working. Putin is inserting himself directly into the Gaza conflict by inviting Palestinian factions — including Hamas — to meet in Moscow on Feb. 26, while Tehran just revealed it is helping Russia attack Ukraine by supplying hundreds of ballistic missiles. The current U.S. showdown with Iran is itself the result of a decade-long cooperative effort by Iran and Russia to challenge American military supremacy.
After more than 30 years of Middle East military intervention, the U.S. has not only failed to achieve its strategic goal of containing Iran — Tehran’s influence is peaking. This is seen in the cycle of violence that began when Israel responded to the Oct. 7 attacks with a war that has claimed thousands of lives, most of them civilian.
Over ensuing months, the conflict grew: Israel bombed Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian targets in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza; the U.S. hit Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq; Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen fired missiles at ships in the Red Sea; the U.S. and U.K. bombed the Houthis; Iran carried out missile strikes in Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan; Pakistan carried out air strikes against Iran; Turkey bombed Kurds in Syria and Iraq; Jordan bombed Iranian-backed “drug dealers” in Syria; even Somali pirates are getting in on the action.
Despite signs neither Washington nor Tehran is keen to escalate, the trouble with proxy wars is proxies aren’t easily managed. If Iran and the U.S. do fight a broader war, it will likely start somewhere most Americans have never heard of — and couldn’t find on a map.
On Jan. 28, three American soldiers were killed and dozens wounded in a drone attack on a military base called Tower 22, near the ancient Baghdad-Damascus highway, close to the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian border.
On Feb. 2, American strategic bombers responded, launching 125 missiles against 85 targets in Iraq and Syria.
Their primary target was Kataib Hizbollah, which is “the premier militia in Iraq, operating under Iran’s direct command,” according to researchers at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The militia claimed responsibility for the attack on Tower 22, but Kataib Hizbollah has been killing Americans since 2007 — part of Iran’s shadow war against U.S. forces in Iraq.
That illustrates an uncomfortable truth: American policy in the region is a checklist of failures, including the decision to invade Iraq under false pretenses in the first place. While the U.S. military became skilled at finding and killing HVTs — high-value targets — in Iraq, Washington never developed a strategy that didn’t rely on using high explosives to solve complex problems.
This inability to master political dynamics left the door open for others working on longer timelines toward concrete goals. As one military leader from an allied Arab state told his Marine counterpart in 2009: “All America is doing in Iraq is handing it over to Iran.”
The U.S. Air Force is now hitting “the same strategic locations we were hitting back in my time,” says Col. Steve W. Davis, the retired commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team-2, who ran counterinsurgency operations in the Iraqi city of Al Qaim, across the border from Syria, from 2005 to 2006. The city was a Sunni insurgent redoubt, run by militants and smugglers with overlapping tribal allegiances, “but there was no Iranian influence that me or my team was aware of when we were in Al Qaim.”
During and after Davis’ deployment, the Marines worked to stop Al Qaeda-linked fighters flowing into Iraq. They spent years developing relations with tribal leaders, partnering with government forces and compiling intelligence about criminals and insurgents operating in the area.
But America grew tired of this. It withdrew, leaving a weak Iraqi central government entangled in sectarian strife. Security forces jockeyed for influence against Kurds in the north and Shia militias — some backed by Iran — across the country. Al Qaeda and other extremists became an afterthought.
The Syrian Civil War began in 2011, the same year the U.S. ended the Iraq occupation, and with its onset, Al Qaim became a conduit for fighters traveling to Syria to battle the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
The result was a disaster: Sunni militants declared the Islamic State in 2013, and swept across Iraq and Syria. The U.S. and its allies openly sought to oust Assad — with Washington secretly backing generally ineffective rebel groups to do so — but the Islamic State now became a more critical threat.
“Safe back in the States, we watched with great disappointment how quickly [the Islamic State] took territory and caused Iraqi army formations to disperse,” says a Marine officer who served in Al Qaim. “What could we have done? Not withdrawn prematurely. Nobody wants ‘forever war’ — but this work takes years.”
The Obama administration assembled an international coalition to fight the Islamic State — downplaying that Washington helped create the power vacuum in which the group flourished — putting planes in the air, boots on the ground, and throwing resources at Iraqi security forces, Kurdish peshmerga, and Syrian rebels.
America now shared an enemy with its enemies: Russia, Iran, and the Assad regime also wanted to fight the Islamic State, while Moscow and Tehran hoped to retain a friendly government in Damascus.
As the Islamic State grew, the Marine officer says, “we were in the strange position of rooting for the Shia” to take control of Sunni territory and oust the militants.
Iran obliged, flooding the region with advisers, fighters, and weaponry to stop the spread of the Caliphate — and expand Tehran’s influence, part of its strategy to oppose the Israeli-American alliance.
But Iran lacked the firepower needed. So in July 2015, Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force — the clandestine and extraterritorial operations unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — met with Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Moscow, hashing out a deal to coordinate operations in Syria.
Soleimani’s trip laid the foundation for military cooperation in Syria, says Dr. Nicole Grajewski, an expert in Russo-Iranian relations and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The relationship became a lot closer than it used to be, and many of the contacts were institutionalized.”
By September, Moscow sent a naval flotilla, thousands of soldiers and advisers, and dozens of bombers, attack aircraft, and helicopters to Hmeimim Air Base in Latakia, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. At its height, the Russian mission involved perhaps 6,000 military personnel — a surprisingly light footprint to save an ally.
“The Russian intervention in September 2015 provided decisive air power to Syrian and Iranian-backed ground forces, expanding Assad’s territorial control and solidifying the regime’s hold on power,” Grajewski says. “In short, the Russo-Iranian partnership in Syria succeeded in achieving its main goals. The Kremlin saw this as an opportunity to contest U.S.-led interventionism.… But for Iran, Syria is much more important. It’s part of the ‘axis of resistance’ against U.S.-Israeli power.”
While the U.S. and its coalition succeeded in dismantling the Islamic State, they failed to oust Assad. Iran, on the other hand, had effectively created a “ground line of communication” all the way to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.
By 2017, Al Qaim had been retaken by Kataib Hizbollah, opening the border and Euphrates corridor to Iranian proxies. And American soldiers were in the middle of the growing Iranian shadow state in eastern Syria.
The U.S. forces deployed to combat the Islamic State were subsumed into America’s strategy to contain Iran. That the Islamic State could resurge provides a shield with which to ward off accusations of “mission creep” on Capitol Hill. But American forces in the region are primarily engaged in combat with Iranian proxies, rather than Islamic State dead-enders.
This is why Tower 22 was attacked by Kataib Hizbollah. And although the U.S. assassinated Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020, the enduring legacy of his mission to Moscow can be seen in the Iranian-designed drones exploding in Ukrainian cities.
Despite bungling its “regime change” strategy in Ukraine, two years after the invasion Russia holds much of the territory it seized. Moscow is weathering economic sanctions and a flood of Western weapons provided to Ukraine. Iran is giving Russia drones, technology, and armaments — as are China and North Korea.
For decades, Russia was the world’s second-largest arms exporter, after the United States. The war in Ukraine has effectively turned the flow around: Now, Moscow is buying back weapons from its former customers.
Meanwhile, the coalition Washington rallied to Kyiv’s cause is fractious, unable to deliver promised guns and money amid internal bickering and lack of political will.
Moscow continues to test Western resolve with aggressive provocations. Russia’s missiles and drones wander into Polish and Romanian airspace, while its planes routinely fly with their transponders off over the Baltic Sea, sending NATO aircraft scrambling to intercept — more than 300 times last year.
In the Black Sea, Russia’s sea mines and missiles have hit foreign-flagged commercial ships, its fighters intentionally downed an American drone, and it threatened to shoot down manned French patrol aircraft. The Kremlin carries out frequent cyberattacks and electronic warfare targeting NATO members. It is fomenting violence and discord in the Balkans between its ally Serbia and independent Kosovo, where 4,500 NATO soldiers are deployed to keep the peace.
Moscow recently added Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas to a wanted list, another sign Russia is laying the groundwork to use the Baltics as a wedge to pry NATO apart. Danish officials delivered a sobering assessment, saying Russia could attack a NATO member within three years.
The Kremlin is also challenging America in the Pacific, conducting naval exercises with China in the Bering Sea, while hardliners claim Putin issued a decree last month “voiding” Imperial Russia’s treaty selling Alaska to Washington. Even Norway is alarmed at Russian-Chinese cooperation, warning the two have a “revisionist agenda in which they seek to reshape the international order.”
Russian officials now regularly shuttle between Tehran, Beijing, and Pyongyang on a quest for sanctions-busting deals. By creating a self-sustaining “axis of the sanctioned,” Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China have found an effective way to blunt the impact of Western tools of economic coercion.
Amid all of this, Pyongyang is increasing missile testing in the Sea of Japan, while China grows aggressive in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, with experts seeing a crisis this year as likely. One U.S. official told me: “Don’t underestimate the level of coordination in all of this.”
As Russian forces advance in Ukraine, Washington is deadlocked. The Biden administration, neutered by Trump loyalists, is unable to execute meaningful foreign policy as the country approaches what could be the most consequential election since 1860.
That there is a rabid core of diehard isolationists on the right is nothing new: What’s surprising is that MAGA has so effectively compromised America’s international position, even with the movement’s leader out of office.
Unfortunately, American isolationism is no more intellectually consistent than is American exceptionalism. Even as some denigrate Ukrainian resistance to Russia as another “forever war,” they urge direct military action against Iran. The trauma of George W. Bush-era incompetence in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) sent the right careening down a path that whipsaws between total strategic disengagement and violent interventionism bordering on sociopathy.
The left spent the past 20 years caught between hawks living in a neoconservative fantasyland where dropping bombs on the Taliban might create a better future for Afghan women, and a coolly naive internationalism where dictatorships could be turned into democracies through the seductive force of TED Talks. Mainstream Democrats have been happy to support just enough militarism to avoid being called peaceniks, while whispering to themselves, “If we close our eyes, our peer adversaries can’t see us.”
Even as Barack Obama dispatched Reaper drones to shoot Hellfire missiles at Yemeni wedding parties and bombed Libya like a born-again Reagan, he let Putin have his way in Crimea — and kept “turning the corner” in Afghanistan until it was Biden who ultimately decided to end decades of failure in the Graveyard of Empires.
But Washington never forsook its love for GWOT. So when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Biden gave Netanyahu the greenlight to indulge the same counterproductive bloodthirst America embraced after Sept. 11. As Israeli forces kill thousands of civilians in Gaza and Biden earns the moniker “Genocide Joe” from his critics, the White House must have found it a relief when the Houthis joined the fray, giving the U.S. Navy targets for Tomahawks, relatively unencumbered by Palestine’s moral complexities.
None of it equates to a coherent strategy. In its unhinged War on Terror, America lost the understanding that a firm voice and a holstered gun often keep the peace better than a loudmouth brandishing a nightstick. Live, laugh, launch cruise missiles: So long as America is doing something, why worry about the end game?
“In reality, everything is heading towards the use of nuclear weapons and possibly the destruction of humanity,” writes Alexander Dugin, the sage of Russian neo-imperialism.
If nuclear saber-rattling doesn’t work, the authoritarian crowd is happy to leverage technology and potent identity politics to wrench apart democracies through active measures. Even as Starbucks socialists rally in support of Islamic extremists and post TikToks praising authoritarian regimes’ “anti-imperialism” in the name of intersectionality, far-right propagandists mix anti-liberalism with antisemitism, Islamophobia, and White Replacement Theory — until many social media platforms seem more Beer Hall Putsch than digital town square.
It is revealing that Dugin is particularly pleased that MAGA and Marxists alike are aligned in opposition to American aid for Ukraine: “Together, they are committed to dismantling liberal dominance.”
Although ideologues have been easily suckered by adversaries packaging actual wars as extensions of the culture wars, a clear majority of Americans understands these conflicts as threats to the national interest. For Republicans to embrace the idea that America should only unsheath its sword to serve a global protection racket, while Democrats prove themselves inept at besting any military challenge that can’t fit in the back of a Toyota pickup, it’s understandable many of my security sources have begun embracing a fashionable nihilism. But nihilism is a weak peg on which to hang the future.
Lost amid American torpor is the reality that conflicts don’t always just work themselves out. From the Sahel to the South China Sea, security crises are expanding into major multinational conflicts. One of the deepest fears of the national security establishment for generations, that the U.S. could again face two “major theater wars,” no longer seems a Cold War-era fantasy.
Far from the bombs falling on Gaza, rockets landing in Israel, drones flying into Ukrainian cities, or cruise missiles hitting Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, Americans can indolently ponder: What are U.S. soldiers doing in Syria? Will bombing the Houthis work? Is there an Israeli-Palestinian future that doesn’t involve genocide? Will America aid Ukraine? Will China invade Taiwan? Will NATO fight Russia?
The answer: “We have no idea.”
But don’t worry if America doesn’t have a plan.
Vladimir Putin surely does.
The Rise of the Digital Oligarchy
On Jan. 11, 1994, I drove to UCLA’s Royce Hall to hear Vice President Al Gore deliver the keynote address at the Information Superhighway Conference. I was in the early stages of building Intertainer, which would become one of the first video-on-demand companies. The 2,000 people crowded into that auditorium did not know it, but they were crossing a threshold. The roster of speakers read like a who’s who of industrial power: TCI’s John Malone, Rupert Murdoch, Sony’s Michael Schulhof, Barry Diller of QVC. These were among the richest and most commanding figures in American communications. Today, their combined force and fortunes are a rounding error beside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Andreessen. The world the Hollywood moguls walked back out into would not, in any meaningful sense, be the world they had left.
Gore’s UCLA speech now reads like a confident moment in the early‑Clinton fantasia of managed modernization: the assumption that a lightly guided market, properly “incentivized,” could be coaxed into building a new civic commons. He framed the whole project as a public utility constructed with private capital, insisting that “the nation needs private investment to complete the construction of the National Information Infrastructure. And competition is the single most critical means of encouraging that private investment.” What is striking, in retrospect, is not the technophilia but the blithe certainty that “competition” would safeguard pluralism and access, that state‑designed market rules would prevent the emergence of bottlenecks and private tollbooths. The actual trajectory of the internet — toward a stack dominated at each layer by a handful of firms from carriers to platforms to ad brokers — renders the scene almost allegorical: an administration hymning competition as the guarantor of openness while midwifing, in practice, the consolidated, quasi‑monopolistic order that would eventually narrow and privatize the very public sphere it imagined itself to be creating.
For 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, Americans had trusted that science and technology would bind the nation together, just as railroads and the telegraph had once compressed its continental distances. The historian John P. Diggins observed that “whereas the very nature of politics in America implied division and conflict, science was seen as bringing forth cohesion and consensus.” That faith was about to be tested to destruction.
Within two years, Gore and Newt Gingrich collaborated to pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and buried inside it was a provision — Section 230 — that would prove more consequential than anything else in the bill. It granted the new platforms a liability shield unavailable to any other business in America: immunity from responsibility for the content their users generated, moderated, or amplified. The effect was to hand the architects of the digital age a license to build without obligation. Welcome to the Wild West; the platforms own the sheriff.
What followed was an era of rapacious accumulation. In 1994, the largest company in America by market capitalization was Exxon, valued at $34 billion. Today, Google is worth $3.7 trillion. And when Donald Trump took the oath of office in January 2025, flanked by the very technocratic elite whose fortunes had grown beyond all precedent, the possibility loomed that the preceding 10 years was crystallizing into a name: techno-fascism — an authoritarian, corporatist order in which a narrow caste of technocratic elites deploys digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence to automate governance, intensify surveillance, and erode democratic accountability, all while presenting their dominion as the neutral application of expertise.
For the past decade I have written about the almost theological divide between two competing creeds. The gospel of nostalgia promises to “make America great again” — its default logic being that the America of the 1950s, when white men’s assumptions went unchallenged by people of color, women, immigrants, or queer individuals, was a more stable and legible world worth recovering. The gospel of progress, as Andreessen has written, holds that “there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.” Its default logic is simpler: stop complaining. Flat wages, rising social media–induced mental illness, falling homeownership, a warming planet — perhaps, but at least we have iPhones. But the philosopher Antonio Gramsci had foreseen this dialectic in 1930: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.”
After the Republican midterm disappointments of 2022, Thiel called for a party that could unite “the priest, the general, and the millionaire”— a formula that reads, with hindsight, as a precise blueprint for Trump’s second administration: Christian nationalism, military force deployed at home and abroad, and a financial oligarchy powerful enough to steer the state. By the election of 2024, the gospel of nostalgia and the gospel of progress had concluded a short-term bargain to elect Trump. The result is the rise of an oligarchy of fewer than 20 American families.
The Copernican Moment
A deep unsettlement runs beneath our society today. Just as Nicolaus Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, we are now displacing the human from the center of consciousness. New discoveries about cognition in other animals and organisms — octopuses dreaming, bees counting, trees retaining memory of drought — suggest, as Michael Pollan has written, that thought and feeling are not human monopolies but properties of life itself. The first Copernican revolution humbled our astronomy; the second threatens to humble our very being.
Yet the revelation carries its twin anxiety. If mind is no longer our exclusive inheritance, what becomes of that inheritance when machines begin to mimic it? Artificial intelligence poses not merely a technical challenge but a metaphysical one. It asks whether consciousness can exist without vulnerability — without the pulse and jeopardy of a life that can be lost. The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us that the brain evolved to serve the body, that consciousness begins in feeling. Machines, however elaborate, know no hunger, no pain, no desire. To be conscious in the human sense is to participate in necessity — to be held by one’s own fate.
The real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable. A people habituated to passivity and optimized for consumption may eventually forget the work of building a world together. What once belonged to politics — the imaginative labor of collective destiny — has been quietly surrendered to the corporate logic of the algorithm. The result is not enlightenment but enclosure: a society awake to everything except itself.
This interregnum, then, is not a pause but a rupture — a suspended time in which institutions still stand yet no longer persuade, in which the future arrives in forms no one quite intended. What began for my generation as the optimistic dream of a communications revolution has matured into a general condition of American life: a digital oligarchy adrift between orders, armed with enormous power but uncertain whom, or what, it serves. Some of us glimpsed the terrible risk when it was still only a risk — that the principles of kleptocracy would become America’s own. That grim vision is now arriving, in real time, in the person of Trump. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, “The brazenness of the self-enrichment now underway resembles nothing from any earlier White House, but rather the corruption of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial state.” And the techno-fascist oligarchs are at the trough, waiting to be fed.
The Age of Surveillance and Simulation
The first clear sign that the promise of the digital commons had curdled came with Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013, when Americans learned that Google and Facebook had opened their back doors to the security state. What had been marketed as an architecture of connection revealed itself also as an infrastructure of monitoring.
By the mid-2020s, the fear had hardened into habit. A 2025 YouGov survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans admitted to censoring their own posts or messages for fear of being watched or doxxed. Surveillance no longer needed a knock at the door. The mere awareness of a watching eye did the work. What had been a public square had become, almost imperceptibly, a panopticon of self-restraint.
Into this apparatus stepped a new class of private overseers. Palantir, the data-mining firm Thiel co-founded, grew from a counterterrorism instrument into a generalized engine for correlating personal information — tax filings, social media traces, the bureaucratic exhaust of ordinary life. Insiders warned that data citizens had surrendered to the IRS or Social Security for basic governance could be recombined for far more intrusive purposes. The point was not simply that we were being watched, but that we were being rendered legible — sorted, scored, and classified in ways invisible to us. As Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times, the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is effectively nullified by AI:
It is not illegal to put cameras around everywhere in public space and record every conversation. It’s a public space — you don’t have a right to privacy in a public space. But today, the government couldn’t record that all and make sense of it. With AI, the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say: This person is a member of the opposition — and make a map of all 100 million. And so are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?
We are witnessing the first serious moral battle of the AI era, and its front lines run straight through the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Anthropic drew them first. The company refused to allow its systems to be turned on the American public in the name of security and declined to let the Pentagon wire its AI into autonomous weapons capable of identifying and killing without human authorization. To the Defense Department, accustomed to purchasing compliance along with contracts, the idea that a vendor might set moral limits on military use was borderline insubordinate. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security. President Trump, on Truth Social, called the company “radical woke” and ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology. Anthropic had been, in effect, blacklisted for conscience.
What happened next revealed something important about the moral landscape of the AI industry. OpenAI, which had publicly positioned itself as sharing Anthropic’s red lines — Sam Altman insisted his company, too, opposed mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — moved swiftly to fill the vacuum. While Anthropic was being frozen out of Washington, D.C., OpenAI quietly negotiated and signed a deal of its own with the Pentagon, granting the Defense Department access to its models for deployment in classified environments. OpenAI then published a blog post with a pointed aside: “We don’t know why Anthropic could not reach this deal, and we hope that they and more labs will consider it.” The company that had stood shoulder to shoulder with Anthropic in principle had, in practice, used Anthropic’s exclusion to capture the contract.
The backlash was swift — and came from inside the house. Caitlin Kalinowski, who had led OpenAI’s hardware and robotics teams since late 2024, publicly announced her resignation. Her statement, posted on X and LinkedIn, was brief and precise: “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people.”
The formulation was careful, almost scrupulously fair to her former colleagues. But the substance was damning. A senior technical executive, one who had spent her career building the physical systems through which AI meets the real world, had concluded that OpenAI had crossed lines it had publicly promised not to cross — and had done so without the internal deliberation those lines deserved. Some users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions in protest. Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, became the number-one free app in the Apple App Store, displacing ChatGPT. The market, in its way, had registered a verdict.
What the episode exposed is the hierarchy of pressures operating on every AI company at this moment. Altman’s public statements and OpenAI’s private negotiations inhabited different moral universes, and the gap between them is a measure of how quickly principle buckles under the combined weight of government contracts, competitive anxiety, and the intoxicating proximity to power. Hegseth and Trump have sent the clearest possible signal: Companies that draw lines will be punished; companies that erase them will be rewarded. The outcome of this first moral battle of the AI era will do much to determine the shape of every battle that follows.
But erasure, in this case, is not incidental — it is the business model. The questions that seem separate — who controls the weapons, who watches the citizens, who owns the culture, whose labor trains the machine — are in fact a single question, asked of us all at once: whether humanity will remain the author of its own story, or be quietly written out of it.
The Technocracy’s Bargain
Artificial intelligence functions in this landscape not only as a tool, but also as an ideology. The systems that now summarize our news, grade our tests, and generate our images are built entirely from accumulated human expression, yet are heralded as replacements for the slow, wayward work of thought. By design they remix rather than originate; they automate style while evacuating risk. The consequence is a flood of synthetic prose and imagery that feels like culture but carries none of the scars of experience. Anyone with a prompt can simulate the surface of artistry, further collapsing the distinction between the crafted and the merely produced.
We need to insist on the human self as something more than a flicker of circuitry or an echo of stimulus — to hold that our consciousness is not reducible to mechanism, that our art, our music, our capacity for beauty and sorrow carry a dignity no machine can counterfeit. We need to imagine a future in which humanity still governs its own creation — not as the object of its inventions, but as their author and their measure. A world that offers consumption in place of purpose courts a different and more corrosive kind of unrest.
The outlines of that unrest were already legible by the middle of the decade. In labor reports and think-tank bulletins one could trace the quiet unmaking of the white-collar world. Young graduates, credentialed and deeply indebted, were discovering that the jobs they had trained for no longer existed in familiar form; whole categories of administrative and creative work were being absorbed by AI or retooled around its efficiencies. Commentators spoke of an “AI job apocalypse” not as metaphor but as demographic fact — an educated stratum slipping downward, its ambitions collapsing into precarity. History offers a warning: When a surplus of the educated meets a scarcity of opportunity, turbulence and unrest follows. The clerks and interns of the knowledge economy can become the dissidents of a new era.
But many of the technocrats already sense what is coming and prefer to prepare their escape. They buy compounds in New Zealand, secure airstrips in remote valleys, fortify estates on distant islands stocked and wired for siege. The gesture betrays everything: They, too, expect the storm. They simply mean to watch it from a safe distance — beyond the reach of the graduates, the strivers, the displaced millions who will inhabit the world their machines made. In that distance — the gap between those who build exits and those who have nowhere to go — the interregnum takes on its most recognizable shape: a society waiting, with gathering impatience and anger, for a new settlement that has yet to arrive.
Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, said something recently about AI and labor that hangs in the air like a change in pressure: For once, those who have never known economic danger are about to feel what it means to be exposed — to live without insulation from the market’s weather. According to The New York Times, “The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year.”
For 30 years, the country has drifted ever further from the world of things. The old economy of matter — of tools, factories, and physical production — was gradually exchanged for an economy of signs. We learned to believe that the future belonged to those who trafficked in abstractions: the managers of systems, the manipulators of symbols, the custodians of information. That belief became the moral core of the professional class. To think was noble; to make was obsolete.
For decades, the professional class watched the industrial world hollow out and mistook the spectacle for confirmation of its own permanence. It confused exemption with destiny. Now, the correction is arriving — not from the shop floor, but from the circuits.
This is one meaning of the interregnum: a pause in which the old class myths no longer align with material reality, and no new story has yet cohered. In the space between, people who once felt like authors of the future are discovering that they were also characters, written into a script whose logic they did not fully control.
Yet another path exists, if we can summon the imagination to take it. Rather than waging a doomed Luddite resistance, we might seek a grand bargain with the architects of the new order — entering into direct negotiation with Big Tech over the political terms of the transition. The question is not whether AI can be stopped; it cannot. The question is whether its spoils can be shared.
How much of the immense stream of revenue flowing through the platforms and hyperscalers could be redirected toward a sovereign fund, a common dividend for those whose labor has been displaced? Anthropic’s Amodei has suggested a tax of three percent of AI revenues to seed the sovereign fund. It is a moment that calls less for purity than for negotiation — an uneasy but deliberate partnership between humanists and technologists, aimed at keeping a frustrated graduate class from becoming the raw material of a larger revolutionary breakdown.
Marshall McLuhan believed that new media were creating “an overwhelming, destructive maelstrom” into which we were being drawn against our will. But he also believed in a way out. “The absolute indispensability of the artist,” McLuhan wrote, “is that he alone in the encounter with the maelstrom can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the awareness to tell us what the world is made of. The artist is able [to give] … a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity.”
Our great inquiry now must be: How do we quit the politics of national despair — a maelstrom that our own ingenuity has created? It will be hard, because a vast media industry depends on your engagement with its outrage. Three companies — X, Meta, Google — monopolize the advertising revenue that flows from that outrage. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say these social media companies hold too much power. To break the spell, we need to understand the roots of the phony culture war they have cultivated — and remember that America has had a real promise. Only when we recover that memory can we begin to imagine what the new promise of American life might look like.