TLDR: The dominant view casts Trump as a chaotic destabiliser in the Middle East. This piece explores the opposite possibility: that what looks like disorder may reflect a deeper strategic process tied to a global transition driven by AI, energy, and information warfare. At stake is not just geopolitics, but which version of liberalism —if any — shapes the next system. Rather than pure breakdown, recent events may represent a form of “shadow work,” forcing liberal societies to confront internal contradictions around power, autonomy, and intervention before they are locked into a new technological order. From this lens, Trump is less an anomaly than a catalyst — either as part of a deliberate strategy or as a figure distorted by an information war.
The key risk is misdiagnosis: mistaking systemic adaptation for collapse, and responding in ways that make collapse more likely.
As popular consensus mounts against Donald Trump — portraying every development in the Middle East as the chaotic fallout of a half-baked, knee-jerk strategy — it’s the duty, if not the mandate, of a publication called the Blind Spot to examine if something far more strategic is at play.
So here is our case for why the opposite may be true.
We would like to add that if there’s interest, we are prepared to defend these arguments in a special one-off online presentation — mostly to discuss experience-based elements that are more difficult to set out fully in writing. Subscribers would get free access via a code; non-subscribers would need to purchase a ticket. Do let me know if this would be of interest.
But the thrust of the counternarrative is this.
Like it or not, what we are calling “World War 3” is as much an information and propaganda war as it is a kinetic contest over territory.
At its core lies a deeper struggle over which cultural rulebook will govern the global system once a new economic paradigm — driven by AI, quantum technologies, and high-intensity energy breakthroughs — rewires the existing order.
Because that rewiring is likely to be holistic, if not totalising, the stakes are unprecedented. What is being determined is not just who wins, but how much agency and autonomy individuals retain within the system that emerges — and whether that transition succeeds at all.
Failing to make the leap in a constructive, positive-sum way poses an existential risk to civilisation as we know it. At best, it could unravel decades of economic progress; at worst, it could tip the system into a new dark age — or even catastrophic nuclear conflict.
But even if we do make the leap, the harder question remains: how will the new system be governed, and by whom? Will it take a liberal form capable of preserving meaningful pockets of privacy and individual autonomy — even as the underlying technologies demand ever greater integration, interoperability, and surveillance? Or will it consolidate into a more illiberal, centralised order, requiring all participants to conform to a single dominant framework?
These stakes make it difficult to believe that the Pentagon, the architects at DARPA, or the JASON scientific advisory group — longstanding stewards of the liberal order — have simply been idle.
Even if liberalism appears to be under strain, the United States Constitution remains one of the most durable guarantors of individual liberty ever devised. The fractures and turbulence visible today, therefore, may not be external to that system, but expressions of it. Provided they do not escalate into outright fragmentation, they may represent a necessary phase of self-examination — an ongoing debate about what liberalism must become to remain viable in a new paradigm.
In many respects, this is the moment the United States was designed for: to ensure that whatever system comes next, individual rights are not surrendered. At the same time, it must confront a parallel challenge — how to place reasonable limits on a liberal framework that, thanks to technological breakthroughs, could concentrate unprecedented power in the hands of individuals.
After all, with awesome power comes even greater corresponding responsibility. Properly distributed, it could expand human agency to levels never before seen. Misallocated or abused, it risks enabling forms of domination equally without precedent.
In that context, the central question becomes this: is Donald Trump actively undermining America’s liberal foundations at precisely the moment they matter most — thereby reducing the chances of a liberal, positive-sum global order emerging from this transition? Or is he, in some counterintuitive way, helping to preserve them?
The first case is well documented and extensively argued. There is little value in repeating it. The second — that Trump may be an underappreciated, if unconventional, defender of American liberalism — is far less explored, particularly in mainstream and elite discourse.
Given it is far from a consensus view not only does it deserve exploring, it requires a starting point that asks why, if this is the case, does everyone then think the opposite?
There are only two satisfying answers.
One is that Trump is engaged in a wider “4D chess” strategy, potentially as a passive player or front figure, focused on ensuring liberalism prevails, but which, for operational reasons, must shroud itself in deflection, confusion, and chaos to get one up on the enemies of enlightenment. It’s easy to dismiss this idea as “conspiratorial”, but given the stakes and given the scale and power of the opposition, I don’t think it can entirely be discounted.
The other is that those who wish to arrest the rise of a liberal world order have seen fit to do so by muddying the information channels by distorting the picture, and turning liberals against each other. As a result, all the administration’s good intentions or accidental miscommunications, like in a failing marriage, have been interpreted in the worst possible way.
A combination of both is also possible.
Liberalism’s shadow work
But there are also liberalism’s own self-sabotaging fault lines to address.
Attending to the latter involves uncomfortable self-examination, also known as shadow work, a concept from analytical psychology developed by Carl Jung. It refers to the process of exploring, confronting, and integrating the “shadow”— the hidden, unconscious parts of one’s personality that you tend to reject, deny, or suppress because they conflict with the moral way you like to see yourself.
In liberalism, this must come in resolving the natural tension between the champions of negative liberty and those of positive liberty.
The argument we want to make is that the election of Trump can be understood as a kind of forced reckoning of liberalism’s entrenched conflicts.
In the context of rapid technological change, Trump’s election showed, for example, that the prevailing liberal order was operating with assumptions that no longer fully hold. Regardless of one’s view of him, Trump (and Brexit) acted as a catalytic disruption that made these tensions visible rather than latent.
In that sense, the moment functioned as a form of collective shadow exposure. It also exposed how technological systems complicate traditional assumptions about choice, influence, and power.
For a liberal democracy, this kind of disruption can be cathartic because it interrupts self-idealization. It forces a recognition that freedom is not self-sustaining, that autonomy depends on underlying structures, and that those structures must remain accountable to the people they shape.
Without that confrontation, liberalism would have risked clinging to abstractions at a critical juncture, when moving forward without actively engaging the population in these considerations would have been illiberal in itself.
At their core, these tensions reflect a fundamental divide within liberal thought — between positive and negative liberty.
The proponents of negative liberty argue that individual rights surpass those of the collective at all times, meaning the collective has no right to intrude on an individual’s autonomy, even if that autonomy is leading to self-harm, existential externalities for the collective, or has itself been hacked by the agents of illiberalism to push through autocratic structures.
Proponents of positive liberty espouse a more romantic view. This holds that liberalism should be as much about the right to take positive action to improve one’s autonomy through interventionist measures as it is about defending the right to resist external interference.
The culture wars have shown us that both standpoints, taken to their extreme, can lead to distorted outcomes. Negative liberty can harden into the belief that parental, expert, or institutional guidance should be disregarded in favour of one’s “own truth,” even where capacity or long-term consequences are at stake — seen in debates around gender transitions for children, or framing obesity purely as a matter of lifestyle choice. It can also justify reflexive non-intervention in foreign jurisdictions that oppress human rights, effectively excusing illiberal or authoritarian regimes abroad in the name of respecting sovereignty.
Positive liberty, on the other hand, leads to neocon-style forever wars, the belief that minorities have a right to terrorise the collective until it bends to their norms, and to the notion that the state — or self-appointed moral authorities or institutions — can justifiably override individual freedoms ‘for their own good’, even when those individuals do not consent, for example, in the form of lockdown.
These represent the moral inconsistencies embedded in a liberal system.
But it’s also the case that the culture wars have inadvertently educated us about where the acceptable boundaries and exceptions between both forms of liberty lie.
Among the “shadow work” learnings these past few years:
- Interventionist wars can be justified — and at times necessary — provided they are not driven by profiteering interests and remain limited in both scope and duration. In other words, not endless “forever wars.”
- An individual’s sexual preferences are their own and should be respected, so long as they are consenting, do not involve the abuse of children or the exploitation of childhood innocence. Such individuals should not be discriminated against. However, society has a right to resist the overt normalisation if not public promotion of lifestyles that cannot be sustained organically if they ever become majority norms, because of their second-order effects on demographics.
- Individuals have a right to hold religious beliefs — even those others may regard as irrational — and to live by conservative values. However, in a liberal democracy, limits arise where demographic shifts risk producing an illiberal religious majority, unless that religion remains open-ended and refrains from imposing its doctrines on non-believers.
- Migrants should be welcomed, provided the pace of migration allows for meaningful assimilation into core liberal values, and that migrants respect the host culture even as they contribute to its evolution and enrichment over time.
- Women should have equal access to all professions, but only on genuinely meritocratic terms. They should also not be pressured into the workspace through economic inducements. A desire to be a professional homemaker should be equally respected. At the same time, sexual liberation may have extended beyond stable social norms; consent remains essential, but so too do clearer, more structured courtship norms to reduce ambiguity and avoid situations that give rise to MeToo-type conflicts.
- Freedom of speech should be maximized, but not without limit. Reasonable constraints — such as those against libel and direct incitement to violence on mass platforms — are justified, whereas broader restrictions on so-called “hate speech” are not necessarily warranted.
- While one must never exercise propaganda on one’s own people, sometimes, if the stakes are high enough, being economic or deflective with the truth is justifiable, especially in the wider context of pointing out how influence and propaganda (amplification) works.
And so on. There are many others. The point here is not to pass moral judgment on these “learnings,” but to illustrate that the past decade has forced us to work through these distinctly liberal dilemmas — often imperfectly — in search of some form of workable common ground.
And, whether we like it or not, the Trump and Brexit effect (along with similar movements across other liberal democracies) has helped clarify where these cultural fault lines actually lie in the modern age — arriving, we might hope, just in time to inform how we train AI systems to understand how liberal societies negotiate such tensions. In that sense, the culture war itself has functioned as an inadvertent but essential training ground for AI about why certain assumptions cannot be taken for granted, while providing it with contemporary rather than legacy datasets dating back centuries at the same time.
Imagine how different this might have been had Trump not been elected, and AI had been rolled out without the voluminous discourse related to where the acceptable limits to some of these extremes lie?
Whatever the answer, the implication is the same: integrating the shadow requires a clearer understanding of the limits of both positive and negative liberty.
After all, the point of doing the shadow work and acknowledging our inner demons is that these traits often have adaptive value in moments of stress, conflict, or survival, and are not inherently pathological. The aim is not to eliminate them, but to bring them into conscious awareness so they can be used selectively and proportionately, rather than unconsciously and indiscriminately.
Applied to U.S. foreign policy—and to Iran in particular—this framing complicates the prevailing narrative. Afghanistan, Iraq, and, to some extent, Ukraine have underscored the dangers of excessive or disingenuous interventionism. But they do not settle the question entirely.
The shadow insight is that not all U.S. foreign interventions are necessarily unjustified, and that a blanket rejection of intervention can be as distorting as blind advocacy for it. The “hero’s journey,” in this context, lies in developing the judgment to distinguish between the two — recognising when the restrained use of power is warranted, and when invoking the shadow in a controlled, limited way remains consistent with, rather than contrary to, liberal values.
Parents of 6–8 year old girls will recognise that this is precisely the theme of the 2025 children’s blockbuster K-Pop Demon Hunters, where the hero, Rumi, ultimately discovers that defeating the demons is not simply a matter of rejecting or destroying them, but of confronting the darkness within herself and learning to integrate it.
Her arc mirrors the logic of shadow work: what first appears as something to be eliminated is revealed to be a source of strength when brought under conscious control. In doing so, she moves from reactive, one-dimensional heroism to a more mature form of agency — one that recognises that true balance lies not in denying the shadow, but in knowing when and how to wield it without being consumed by it.
In recognising this, she is able to reforge the Honmoon — the proverbial golden dome — not by purging the darkness, but by integrating it into a stronger, more resilient
Managed lustration
As Keynes might have put it in the digital age, you can be right about the underlying reality and still lose — if markets, or the media consensus, refuse to catch up in time.
In today’s encrypted-yet-leaky systems, the best weapon for those waging the type of war recounted above is arguably disinformation itself. Not to hide the truth entirely, but to render it so confusing that only initiates who truly understand the stakes of the battle can process it while the profane chase shadows.
This is why a seemingly minor signal this week — a tweet from Semafor founder Ben Smith — may be more significant than it first appears.
For those unfamiliar, Ben Smith, also formerly of Politico, is best known for his role in publishing the Steele dossier — the document that helped fuel years of Russia-collusion speculation.
That makes it notable that he, of all people, recently shared what he described as the “most convincing argument” that the Pentagon may in fact know exactly what it is doing in the Iran theatre.
The piece he pointed to — an Al Jazeera opinion piece — argues that the U.S.-Israeli strategy is quietly achieving its aims, particularly by degrading Iran’s military infrastructure, leadership, and capacity to project power through proxies.
It also claims that sustained pressure — military, economic, and strategic — is constraining Iran’s regional influence and limiting its capacity to advance nuclear and missile capabilities.
But the substance of the article is not the most important point. What matters is who is directing attention to it — and why.
Is this simply another turn in the information war between rival factions, offering a selectively favourable interpretation to reshape perceptions of Trump’s record? Or does it represent a quieter signal, aimed at those inclined to look beyond the prevailing narrative?
The former seems less likely given Semafor’s relatively niche public reach, despite its impressively elite audience and advisory board. The latter, while harder to prove, is more suggestive.
If so, it raises a more uncomfortable possibility: that some of the same forces that amplified the dominant anti-Trump narrative are now recalibrating — whether by shifting their own views, recognising the limits of agenda-driven framing, or, most strikingly, because they are slowly revealing they have always operated within a more complex layer of strategic signalling.
Let’s assume for a second, therefore, that this is indeed an existential fight for a liberal world order, and that everything is Sun Tzu. Let’s even go one further and suggest information war is not a sideshow to kinetic conflict but is the conflict.
As that conflict becomes more overtly kinetic, authorities may have little choice but to acknowledge the deflections and deceptions that have shaped the narrative over the past decade, if not longer.
The irony is that, if mishandled, this reckoning could prove to be one of the most significant democratic crises of our time. Hence, perhaps, the continuing fog of war and strange political shape-shifting, wherein those previously cast as villains — such as Joe Kent or Tucker Carlson — are suddenly celebrated as heroes by the very same people, as if the contradictions are being made deliberately visible to those willing to confront their own assumptions.
If that is the atmosphere we are in, the obvious question follows: what broader signs might suggest we have been living under something like a “Big Noble Lie” regime? If the Epstein network represented a shadow expression of liberalism’s darker impulses, is it conceivable that similar parallel structures exist — less visible, perhaps differently justified?
There have certainly been signals in plain sight between the rival factions that suggest not only that something deeper is afoot but that a wider reckoning may be coming.
Take venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s famous “a time for truth and reconciliation” oped in the FT in January 2025. When it was published, it broke the brains of many liberal readers of the FT, who could not understand why the paper would publish such an outrageous and seemingly sacrilegious thought piece. See the reader comments for yourself. And yet, somehow, it snuck through the editorial filter. I never got to the bottom of how.
In that piece, Thiel sketches out a broader theory of how power maintains itself at scale — less through overt coercion than through the quiet management of what can be said, thought, and believed. He frames the coming moment not simply as political upheaval, but as a kind of revelation: the gradual unravelling of a system built on the containment of inconvenient truths. As he puts it:
The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.
In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.
And as he concluded:
“The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.”
This lends weight to the idea that what we are witnessing resembles a more classical form of factional struggle — less a wholesale ideological rupture than an internal contest between rival camps over how that ideology should be adapted, enforced, or modernised. The dispute, in other words, is not necessarily about abandoning the system, but about who gets to define its next iteration.
In that sense, it may also reflect a deeper contest over elite succession: an older guard seeking to retain control, while a rising class of technological and digital elites pushes for a different approach to power — one shaped by new assumptions about security, privacy, and the management of information itself.
It is a pattern that appears to be repeating across the system—from Saudi Arabia, to Venezuela, and now most visibly in Iran, where war, succession, and restructuring are unfolding simultaneously.
As per the “big deradicalistaion deal” theory, this lens assumes that much of the transition has already been pre-agreed. However, for the deal to hold, it requires optics to align with popular sentiment. Put more bluntly, a formal ritual must be enacted for the optics, so that society at all levels absorbs the notion that something very significant has changed and the old order is no more.
Only this way will tit-for-tat reprisals be limited and the new system that is introduced hold for another 80 years.
For the most part this takes the form of a “managed lustration” process — the selective purging, exposure, or rehabilitation of individuals tied to the old regime in order to reset political legitimacy without collapsing the state.
The question is, how do you achieve the perfect lustration sweet spot? The theatrics mustn’t be so traumatic that they render the old organs of state inoperable, triggering social collapse that threatens failed statehood on a global level. At the same time, they mustn’t be so orderly — or so forgiving — that they allow the old ways to fester or revive within a few decades (or less), sustained by an underground continuum that never truly accepted the transition.
I’ve written a lot about lustration in terms of how it applied to Poland in the late 1980s. This is an example of a lustration that at first seemed highly effective. In retrospect, it may have erred on the side of being too forgiving.
The deal itself was carved out during open “round table” talks held under the full gaze of the world’s media, setting the parameters of the lustration process to follow.
The communist establishment was encouraged to acknowledge its failures, but meaningful prosecutions and removals were limited. At the same time, the incoming liberal-capitalist elite was asked to concede that certain features of the old system — however illiberal — had their own internal logic and could not simply be discarded overnight. The result was a compromise that helped Poland avoid the catastrophic economic dislocation seen in Russia.
Yet the settlement did not fully resolve the underlying tensions — it merely deferred them. By 2015, the PiS government argued that lustration had never truly been completed, and that the system required correction. But by then, the window had closed: too much time had passed for renewed purges to be framed as a necessary act of transition rather than a break with liberal norms. To a new generation, the logic of such measures was no longer obvious.
The reality is that no lustration model can be universally applied; each state confronting similar conditions requires a bespoke approach, carefully calibrated to its own cultural, historical, and institutional context if it is to endure.
Having absorbed the lessons of Poland — and of more chaotic regime transitions elsewhere — the Saudi shift in 2017 unfolded through far more controlled, and arguably more Machiavellian, means. The lustration that followed was neither gradual nor conciliatory, but coercive: marked by high-profile detentions, wealth confiscations, and the sidelining of rival power centres.
Within this framework, even events such as the killing of Jamal Khashoggi can be interpreted as part of a broader logic of consolidation — extreme, controversial, and widely condemned, but illustrative of the lengths to which a new order may go to secure itself.
In Venezuela, lustration required the intervention of an external actor, but — much like in Saudi Arabia — ultimately hinged on a relatively narrow, symbolic decapitation of the old order to unlock systemic change. What followed was not a wholesale transformation, but a recalibration opening the door to a credible narrative around the restoration of property rights and investor protections — particularly through the reopening of the oil sector to foreign capital and the introduction of arbitration mechanisms. Continuity, however, has been purposefully baked in even, allowing the state to retain decisive control over the broader economic architecture, ensuring that liberalisation remains selective rather than total.
For the principal axis-aligned powers, Iran, Russia and also potentially for China, a comparable process may currently be underway.
In these cases, however, any credible off-ramp from the existing order is likely to demand a far more dramatic set of accompanying theatrics to secure public acceptance. The transition, if it comes, may need to be staged through events that are not merely symbolic, but viscerally convincing — moments of rupture that signal, unmistakably, that the old system has been broken, and that a new one has taken its place. In some instances, that may even entail forms of sacrifice, whether political, institutional, or personal, to anchor the legitimacy of the shift.
Crucially, such a transition would likely demand reciprocal concessions and internal reckonings from the opposing bloc as well — particularly the United States, Israel, and the European Union/United Kingdom. This becomes even more pressing in a context where all parties are wary of any single actor achieving a decisive technological breakthrough and leveraging it to impose a new unipolar order.
The most constructive form of “lustration,” or multilateral deal, would incorporate a coordinated acknowledgement that critical technological capabilities can only advance in parallel, preserving a balance akin to Mutually Assured Destruction. Alongside this, they would negotiate a framework of mutual concessions and constraints — particularly during the sensitive phase of technological deployment — to ensure that strategic equilibrium is maintained rather than destabilized.
Such concessions would likely include the outright purging and/or sacrifice of members of the previous order on all sides who stand in the way of equilibrium — i.e., global peace — as well as the removal or neutralisation of weapons and facilities that obstruct the rollout of a new system.
In practice, this “decommissioning” can unfold under the cover of limited, controlled confrontations, particularly where plausible deniability or face-saving is required, and especially in relation to assets that lie beyond the control of the principal dealmakers. Recent history already provides examples that suggest the logic is not far-fetched. Many respectable observers have pointed to Iran’s retaliation against Israel last year — which de facto showcased the capabilities of the Iron Dome — as choreographed for “face-saving” internal propaganda purposes.
We hear only what we want to hear
Which leaves the final possibility: that the Trump administration has been upfront about what it is doing, but has failed to communicate its agenda clearly.
As an example, I draw on a recent dinner conversation I took part in with senior finance professionals where the subject of tariffs came up. I was asked to outline the thinking of the administration on the back of my recent interview former Trump economic adviser Stephen Miran.
From Miran’s perspective, I explained, tariffs are not random acts of protectionism, but rather a deliberate mechanism to redistribute the “exorbitant burden” of supplying the world’s reserve currency, while also reinforcing supply chains critical to national security.
Surprisingly, the logic immediately landed. But as soon as it did, confusion also set in.
“Why was this not set out more explicitly back in April?” a fellow diner responded. My response was simple: it was. The points were articulated repeatedly, in speeches, interviews, and policy justifications.
The reply came back: “Well, in that case they didn’t communicate it very well.”
And that, arguably, was the crux of the issue. From the perspective of the diners the Trump admin had failed to communicate its message effectively, so any political or market fallout was entirely its own doing.
There was little recognition that the fault may lie with a media structure geared for immediacy over accuracy, momentum over reflection, and fragmented snippets over sustained analysis. Or with our own tendency to hear only what we want to hear.
Sadly, the truth is that even highly literate, analytically trained individuals — people used to parsing complex financial data — find themselves routinely filtering out messages that don’t suit their sensibilities. The problem, thus, isn’t just corrupted transmission; it is reception and psychology.
Indeed, if this kind of breakdown can occur around something as structured as trade policy, it raises a more unsettling question: what happens when the subject is something far more ambiguous, like geopolitical conflict, where the first casualty is always truth?
Given that even domain experts are not immune to the pull of the “current thing” it would probably be a mistake to treat surface-level analysis as a reliable guide to what is actually unfolding within a given theatre.
During the media fog of Covid, many of us defaulted to the assumption that authorities understood the situation better than they did. This time — precisely because the underlying media dynamics remain unchanged — the error may lie in overly assuming the opposite.
