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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Jan 7

A History of the Present

🧵1/6: For nearly all of human history, the world made sense at the scale of a face, a voice, a shared meal. Then our systems grew faster than our biology. This essay traces how abstraction, acceleration, and scale reshaped civilization—and how institutions built to serve humans slowly became forces humans now struggle to understand, govern, or escape. The future is still open. But the margin for error is thinning.

Civilizations rarely collapse all at once; they fail when the systems that once made sense no longer fit the humans living inside them.

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open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

2/6: It has become common to describe the present as a moment of crisis. The word appears everywhere—attached to democracy, climate, technology, and war—until it begins to lose its force. What distinguishes this moment is not simply the number of problems we face, but the way so many of them appear to be failing at once.

Institutions that once absorbed stress now amplify it. Technologies designed to increase efficiency generate instability. Systems built for growth strain under their own scale. What feels like chaos is often something more specific: institutions now operating at a scale humans were never built to navigate.

What is at stake is not whether the world will change—it always has—but whether the systems shaping daily life remain legible, governable, and aligned with human needs.

For most of our existence, that misalignment did not exist.

For the vast majority of the roughly 300,000 years that anatomically modern humans have existed, people lived in small, interdependent groups.

Social life was intimate and legible. Survival depended on cooperation, shared memory, and trust reinforced through daily interaction. Technology changed slowly. Knowledge accumulated locally. Life was often dangerous and materially constrained, but it was socially dense.

Meaning was not abstract or optional; it emerged naturally from belonging, contribution, and mutual reliance.

That long equilibrium shaped the human nervous system. We evolved to read faces, track social cues, respond to immediate threats, and calibrate behavior within small communities. We are not built for constant global awareness, anonymous competition, or systems that operate faster than human comprehension.

open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

3/6: The first major rupture came not from ideology, but from structure.

Early economic exchange in many societies relied on forms of barter and direct reciprocity. Such systems work in small groups, but they become inefficient as scale increases. They require a coincidence of wants and consume time—time spent negotiating value rather than producing it. As scale grows, these frictions accumulate.

More importantly, they discourage deep specialization. When every exchange is costly, individuals cannot afford to focus narrowly on a single task. Without specialization, surplus remains limited. Without surplus, sustained scientific inquiry becomes difficult.

A scientifically driven culture requires slack: people who can observe, experiment, and theorize without immediately producing food or shelter. While anthropologists continue to debate the precise pathways through which early economies evolved, small-scale reciprocal systems consistently struggle to support that kind of intellectual labor at scale. The constraint was not moral. It was structural.
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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Jan 6

The January 6 President

January 6 was not the end of a crisis—it was the moment America chose to postpone accountability. Five years later, the cost of that delay is no longer theoretical. It is political reality, and it is still unfolding.

🧵1/6: January 6, 2021 now belongs to a short list of American dates whose meaning no longer requires explanation. December 7, 1941. September 11, 2001. These were moments when the country learned—suddenly and irrevocably—that what it assumed to be permanent was not. January 6 belongs among them.
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-january-…

2/6: It was the day a sitting president, having lost an election and failed in court, turned against the constitutional order itself. Five years later, the most unsettling fact is not that it happened. It is that the man who caused it was never decisively stopped—and must now be understood by what he tried to destroy.

President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election. That fact has never been in serious dispute. He and his allies challenged the result repeatedly, across states and jurisdictions. Those challenges failed—often quickly, often unanimously, and often for lack of evidence. Judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats rejected the claims. State officials certified the results. The legal system functioned as designed.

…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-january-…

3/6: What followed was not confusion. It was escalation.

As the courts closed their doors, the effort shifted away from law and toward pressure. Trump publicly and privately demanded that state officials “find” votes, refuse certifications, or intervene in processes the Constitution had deliberately insulated from partisan control. The claim of a stolen election ceased to function as a legal argument and became something else entirely: a mobilizing myth.

By the time January 6 arrived, the extraordinary had already been normalized. Supporters were told that democracy itself was being taken from them, that every legitimate avenue had been exhausted, and that only direct action remained. The crowd that gathered in Washington did not believe it was attacking the system. It believed it was rescuing it.

That belief did not emerge on its own. It was cultivated, reinforced, and rewarded.

January 6 was not a protest that spun out of control.

It was not a misunderstanding that escalated too far.

It was the logical endpoint of a campaign that had failed in the courts and turned, deliberately, toward extralegal force. When the mob breached the Capitol, it was acting on a premise it had been taught to accept: that elections need not be honored, that courts could be dismissed, and that force could substitute for consent.

The damage was not abstract. More than 140 law-enforcement officers were injured. Some suffered traumatic brain injuries, broken bones, and psychological harm that will last for decades. People died. The peaceful transfer of power—so routine it had once seemed unremarkable—was physically attacked in its own chamber.

Yet the most consequential events of January 6 unfolded after the violence ended.
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The Intellectualist

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Jan 5

A Republic In Name Only: How Republics End Without Officially Dying

“A republic has a longer life and a greater stability than a principality, because it can adapt itself better to the diversity of circumstances.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Discourses on Livy, Book III, Chapter 9
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🧵1/7: When President Donald Trump shared images purporting to show Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in U.S. custody, the moment carried a warning larger than the image itself. It suggested a form of power that no longer waits for law, deliberation, or institutional consent to act.

History offers a name for this condition.

Republics do not always collapse when authority escapes their institutions. Sometimes they endure—courts speaking, legislatures meeting, elections proceeding—long after the rule of law has become ceremonial, and power has learned to operate beyond it.
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-republic-i…

2/7: When President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social images purporting to show Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in U.S. custody—eyes and ears covered, the scene framed as a completed capture—they functioned less as information than as proof. They did not explain a process, establish jurisdiction, or argue a case. They presented domination as already accomplished.

Whatever their factual or procedural status, their purpose was unmistakable: not to persuade, but to render authority legible by staging power as a visible fact.

What mattered was not accuracy but effectiveness. The image was not governance on display, but power performing itself. Its audience was domestic. Its message was simple and old: authority works, enemies can be subdued, and strength can be condensed into a single, graspable scene. Complexity disappeared. What remained was the assurance of capacity: we did this; we could do it again.

This instinct—to convert domination into visibility—is not a modern invention. It is a political technology that predates mass media and survives every change in communications infrastructure. Wherever republics hollow without collapsing, authority learns to announce itself not through deliberation or law, but through scenes that present outcomes as settled before any institution is asked to speak.

Rome understood this logic long before algorithms or feeds. It learned that domination no longer requires persuasion once it can be seen, and that a single image of subjugation can do the work of a thousand arguments. The ancient world had no screens, but it had crowds—and Rome knew how to feed them.

When Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls, he paraded their leader, Vercingetorix, through Rome in chains before executing him as the culminating note of a triumph. It is difficult, from a modern distance, to reconstruct what that meant to a Roman crowd. It was not a policy debate. It was not even an argument. It was proof. A conquered man made visible is a conquered future made believable.
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-republic-i…

3/7: Caesar’s conquest did not weaken Rome economically—it flooded the state with wealth—but it broke the Republic by concentrating military loyalty, money, and legitimacy in one man. Even if the damage was not immediate, Gaul marked the point at which Rome learned that unchecked victory made republican governance structurally untenable. A republic can survive mediocre leaders and routine corruption. It cannot survive a permanent engine that manufactures men larger than the state itself.

This is the first mechanism by which republics end without ending: the slow displacement of institutional legitimacy by personal legitimacy, until the institutions remain—named, staffed, ritualized—while the decisions that matter migrate elsewhere. This transfer of authority away from offices and toward individuals is the central dynamic of republican erosion: legitimacy migration.

Modern readers sometimes imagine propaganda as a uniquely contemporary disease, a byproduct of mass literacy, broadcast networks, or algorithmic feeds. Rome had none of these, but it had public space, rumor networks, and a political culture that treated visibility as authority. Pompeii’s surviving walls make this plain—electoral notices, endorsements, insults, rivalries—politics on plaster, as recognizable as any modern comment thread.

The triumph converted violence into legitimacy. It taught the public what power looked like, who possessed it, and what obedience should feel like. It was governance by demonstration: not persuasion, but registration.

What Caesar learned in Gaul was not merely how to conquer territory, but how victory itself could relocate legitimacy away from institutions and into the hands of the man who delivered it. And once legitimacy migrates, it does not easily return.

By the time Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, the Roman Republic was already structurally hollow. Decades of civil war, elite paralysis, and widening inequality had eroded trust in senatorial governance. Caesar’s conquests had concentrated military loyalty, wealth, and legitimacy in a single individual, and his murder removed the man without restoring the institutions his rise had eclipsed. The Senate could eliminate Caesar. It could not retrieve the authority that had already slipped from its grasp.

That failure mattered more than the murder itself.

The conspirators believed that removing Caesar would restore the Republic—that the system, once relieved of a tyrant, would reassert itself through custom, law, and precedent. What they failed to grasp was that Caesar had not overthrown the Republic so much as exposed its incapacity. Killing him did not reverse that exposure. It made it undeniable.

Caesar remained widely popular even as he dismantled republican norms. To Romans exhausted by corruption, debt, and instability, he appeared less as a destroyer of institutions than as their corrective.

He delivered land to veterans, relief to debtors, visible results to the urban poor, and victory to a society that equated conquest with greatness. Constitutional erosion mattered less than outcomes that could be seen and felt. What the Senate experienced as the collapse of republican governance, many Romans experienced as the restoration of order and pride.

Institutions fail first.

Legitimacy erodes second.

Power consolidates only afterward.

The error of the conspirators was to treat Caesar as the cause rather than the consequence of institutional failure. Once legitimacy had migrated to a single figure, removing that figure could not return it to the Senate. It could only reveal how little authority the institutions retained.

The aftermath confirmed the mistake. Rome did not rally around the Senate. It fragmented. Violence resumed. Alliances hardened. The vacuum left by Caesar’s death did not invite restoration; it invited competition. Power, once personalized, does not depersonalize itself voluntarily.

In the years following the assassination, Rome entered a brief and illusory interregnum. Mark Antony—Caesar’s closest political ally—and Octavian—his adopted heir—initially feared a decisive response from the assassins. When none came, they turned instead on those they believed threatened them. The result was not a return to republican deliberation but the Second Triumvirate: a legally sanctioned regime of violence that deployed proscriptions—state-approved political killings paired with mass confiscation of property.

Terror was not an aberration. It was a tool, normalized through law.

The Republic still existed on paper. Magistracies were filled. Laws were passed. Rituals continued. But authority no longer flowed from deliberation. It flowed from force, and from the promise of protection against that force. The institutions had become a shell—still standing, still named, still ritualized, but no longer sovereign.

The question after Caesar was no longer whether the Republic could be restored. It was who would learn to rule a system whose authority had already migrated beyond its forms.

…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-republic-i…

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Jan 3

January 3, 2026, and the End of the Rules-Based Illusion

🧵1/4: President Donald Trump’s decision to take Venezuela’s leader into U.S. custody lands amid what Poland’s prime minister has described as a pre-war era.

As Ukraine grinds on and Taiwan braces for coercive pressures, the return of spheres of influence and nineteenth-century balance-of-power diplomacy revives the logic that once carried Europe—and then the world—into catastrophe.
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2/4: This morning, January 3, 2026, the world became more dangerous—and less governed by the rule of law.

President Donald Trump ordered the United States to take Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s sitting leader, into U.S. custody. According to international reporting, Maduro and his wife are expected to face criminal charges in federal court.

For many observers, the reaction was immediate approval.

Maduro presided over the destruction of one of Latin America’s most resource-rich countries, ruled with open contempt for democratic norms, and ruined the lives of millions of Venezuelans. The moral indictment against him is overwhelming. Supporters argue that extraordinary regimes require extraordinary measures, and that accountability long denied can justify exceptional action.

What is not morally simple is what this act now means.

Maduro remains the sovereign leader of a recognized state. Sovereignty is not a moral endorsement; it is a structural constraint—the rule that has historically limited how power is exercised across borders.

When sovereignty holds, diplomacy is possible, deterrence is legible, and escalation can be contained. When it erodes, power begins to justify itself.

When such systems fail, it is not great powers that absorb the immediate costs, but smaller states and civilian populations whose legal protections are the first to erode.

When the world’s most powerful state takes the leader of another state into custody unilaterally—without multilateral process, without clear congressional authorization, and with no public indication of prior consultation with allies—the lesson absorbed elsewhere is not about justice. It is about permission: about what is now possible.

The timing matters. Trump’s decision lands amid what Poland’s prime minister has publicly described as a pre-war era. Ukraine continues as a grinding conflict in which external powers test weapons, doctrines, and resolve, while Taiwan faces mounting military pressure from a China increasingly willing to demonstrate force. Across Europe and Asia, allied leaders have publicly acknowledged the need to adjust to a more unpredictable American role.

In this context, the return of spheres of influence and nineteenth-century balance-of-power diplomacy revives the logic that once carried Europe—and then the world—into catastrophe. It is the revival of Concert of Europe logic: a system in which great powers bargain over spheres, small states are treated as variables, and stability is enforced through coercion rather than law.

This did not begin today.

…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/january-3-20…

3/4: The post–World War II legal order has been weakening for decades, its authority punctured most visibly by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which bypassed collective authorization and normalized exceptionalism by the system’s chief architect. Since then, violations have accumulated. Each was justified. Each was absorbed. What once shocked became familiar. The system did not collapse in a single moment; it thinned.

To be clear, the detention of Maduro does not, by itself, abolish international law. No single act could. What it does is confirm—clearly and publicly—a trend already underway: the steady collapse of confidence that law meaningfully restrains the powerful.

In international politics, perception often matters more than legality.

Governments do not parse indictments; they observe precedent. They ask what actions are now usable, and what protections can no longer be relied upon.

This confirmation arrives alongside a broader narrowing of American strategy. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has pursued a vision of U.S. power that is smaller in scope but harsher in application—a United States focused primarily on the Western Hemisphere, less invested in global stewardship, and more willing to coerce allies as readily as adversaries.

Public pressure directed at Canada, Denmark over Greenland, Mexico, and Colombia has reinforced the impression that alliance status no longer guarantees insulation from coercion. This is not isolationism. It is retrenchment paired with unilateralism.

Underlying this posture is an old idea revived with new urgency: that global stability can be managed through great-power bargains. In Trump’s apparent view, the United States can accommodate Russia in Europe in order to concentrate on China—peeling Moscow away from Beijing through a return to nineteenth-century diplomacy.

The problem is that this theory no longer corresponds to reality.

Russia does not possess leverage over China; China possesses leverage over Russia. Sanctions, energy dependency, financial isolation, and diplomatic reliance have rendered Moscow increasingly dependent on Beijing’s underwriting. Russia retains military capacity, but it lacks strategic autonomy. It is not an independent counterweight; it is a subordinate actor. A bargain premised on Russian independence is therefore incoherent.

When the United States abandons restraint while pursuing a strategy built on that false premise, it signals not strength but confusion. Confusion is dangerous because it invites miscalculation. When sovereignty appears conditional, law optional, and process secondary to outcome, restraint becomes irrational. The question shifts from whether rules should be followed to why anyone should bother pretending.

This logic is most dangerous in East Asia.

From Beijing’s perspective—however historically contested—Taiwan is not a sovereign state but a rebellious province. That claim is rejected internationally, but belief, not correctness, drives state behavior.

Consider a hypothetical scenario: Chinese authorities frame Taiwan’s elected leadership as criminals under domestic law, citing sovereignty claims and legal continuity.

Such an argument would not need to persuade the world to be dangerous; it would only need to be usable. This is not a prediction. It is an illustration of how precedent operates once sovereignty is treated as discretionary.

Ukraine already offers a warning of how such systems fail—through the choices of its people and the limits imposed upon them.

Like the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, it has become a site where external powers learn what will be tolerated before a wider conflict erupts. The Spanish conflict did not cause World War II; it revealed that the guardrails had already weakened. Ukraine plays a similar role today.

It does not make wider war inevitable. It shows that the system meant to prevent one is no longer functioning as designed.

The return to nineteenth-century diplomacy is not stabilizing. That system produced World War I. Its unresolved failures produced World War II. The post-1945 order was built precisely to escape that logic—to replace balance-of-power bargaining with law, institutions, and restraint by the strong.

Leadership credibility matters profoundly in such an environment. Trump’s legal troubles, historical unpopularity, and repeated impeachments are not merely domestic concerns; they shape perceptions abroad.

Deterrence depends not only on force, but on confidence that commitments and rules will be upheld. When that confidence erodes, ambiguity fills the gap.

Pre-war eras are not defined by explosions. They are defined by rationalizations—by the slow normalization of actions once thought unthinkable.

January 3, 2026, may ultimately be remembered not as the day war began, but as the day the world stopped believing the rules would stop it.

“‘Silent enim leges inter arma’—‘for the laws fall silent amid arms’—was written by Cicero in 52 BCE during the collapse of the Roman Republic, a thinker closely studied by the American Founders as they confronted the problem of preserving the rule of law under crisis.

…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/january-3-20…

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Nov 26, 2025

The Great Betrayal: How a U.S. Envoy Helped Russia Shape a Plan Against an American Ally

Steve Witkoff’s guidance to Vladimir Putin’s top adviser reveals a foreign-policy process captured by private channels, Russian influence, and the abandonment of an ally at war.

A U.S. envoy coached a senior Russian official on how to influence an American president into embracing a plan that advantaged an aggressor and weakened an ally fighting for its survival as a sovereign state.
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🧵1/4: A betrayal rarely arrives as a dramatic gesture. It accumulates through process—through choices that elevate an adversary’s interests while diminishing those of an ally, through private conversations that displace public commitments, through the quiet reordering of whose voice is heard first and whose is heard last. What occurred in October 2025 was neither an ideological shift nor a sudden rupture. It was something more deliberate: the migration of American power away from an ally fighting for survival and toward the autocrat attacking it.

On October 14, as Bloomberg reported, Steve Witkoff, the newly appointed special envoy, placed a five-minute call to Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s senior foreign-policy adviser. He did not present an American position or outline U.S. red lines.

Instead, he coached Ushakov with an ease that would have been notable even in peacetime. According to the Bloomberg recording, Witkoff offered no deterrent message.

Rather, he advised a senior Russian official on how best to flatter and influence an American president whose sensitivity to praise has been extensively documented in U.S. and foreign reporting.

He urged Ushakov to schedule the call before President Volodymyr Zelensky’s October 17 White House visit, ensuring that Moscow—not Kyiv—would reach President Donald Trump first. He proposed beginning with congratulations on the Gaza agreement, describing Trump as a “man of peace,” presenting Russia as cooperative, and invoking the “20-point” Gaza plan as a model. He even encouraged Putin to reference earlier “Steve and Yuri” conversations to signal rapport.

(This article is free to read, but if you value independent journalism, please consider supporting us with a paid subscription.)
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-great-be…

2/4: This guidance did not come from Moscow’s political operatives. It came from a U.S. envoy—advice that helped an adversary prepare for a conversation with the American president at a moment when Ukraine depended on U.S. backing for its survival.

In American diplomacy, envoys do not serve as communications consultants to foreign leaders, especially not to adversaries engaged in active war. AFSA guidance, State Department protocol, and the White House’s “One Voice” doctrine all define envoys as extensions of the Secretary of State, charged with advancing U.S. policy rather than refining an adversary’s messaging.

Yet a U.S. envoy prepared a Kremlin adviser for a call with the American president before America’s ally had even been heard. In alliance politics, sequencing is not ceremonial; it determines influence.

The first speaker sets the frame; the second must work within it. By advising Russia on timing, tone, and approach—by helping an adversary craft a calibrated appeal to a president whose reaction to praise is a matter of public record—Witkoff granted Moscow advantages alliances normally reserve for partners. Ukraine—under attack and reliant on American military and intelligence support—entered the conversation only after the adversary had already shaped its outline.

This inversion was not procedural noise. It was, in operational terms, a form of betrayal: an American envoy equipping an adversary to shape his own president’s perceptions while the ally under attack received no comparable preparation in a moment that cannot be replayed—the initial framing that guides all subsequent decisions.

Two days later, as Bloomberg documented, Putin followed the guidance closely. He opened his two-and-a-half-hour call with Trump using the congratulatory tone, Gaza framing, and conciliatory posture Witkoff had outlined. The overlap between the coaching and Putin’s talking points was unmistakable in the recorded evidence.

Within days, Axios and Bloomberg reported that Witkoff met in Miami with Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and long identified by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a Kremlin-linked backchannel to Trump-aligned networks. By month’s end, Axios reported that Dmitriev and Ushakov were discussing how far Russia should press its “maximum” terms.

This was not coincidence. It was structure.

Dmitriev is a Kremlin-designated backchannel operator; Ushakov is Putin’s top foreign-policy aide. Both participated before Ukraine saw anything resembling a plan. The pattern was unmistakable: the adversary brought into the room early, the ally relegated to reacting after the framework had already taken shape.

The result was a shift in negotiating power toward the aggressor—before the victim state had been invited to the table.

Ukraine eventually received a 28-point peace proposal—unsigned, unattributed, and far from what Kyiv expected from a major ally. AP and Axios reported that the language displayed hallmarks of Russian bureaucratic drafting: legalistic verbs, administrative cadence, and syntactic patterns associated with Russian state memoranda rather than American diplomatic documents. Ukrainian officials recognized these features immediately. The text did not resemble something produced in Washington. It resembled something shaped in Moscow.

The damage lay not only in authorship, but in form.

A peace proposal is a trust-bearing document: an ally offers it to safeguard another’s sovereignty. Here, Ukraine received a plan labeled as American—expected from the country supplying its weapons and intelligence—only to discover linguistic traces of the state invading it.

This was not a minor irregularity. It was a procedural breach: Ukraine received, under an American banner, the conceptual architecture of the aggressor—a plan demanding concessions and long-term constraints that originated not in Washington but in consultations with the invading state. Few signals could more deeply erode confidence than a document bearing an ally’s label and an adversary’s fingerprints.

This is why the proposal alarmed Ukraine and Europe. It was not only the terms. It was the realization that the voice inside the document did not sound like Washington’s.

When Ukraine examined the plan, it found demands that, according to AP, Axios, The Guardian, and Politico Europe, would formalize Russian territorial gains without requiring Russia to withdraw or disarm.

The proposal required Ukraine to recognize Russia’s control over Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk; withdraw from additional territory Russia had not taken by force; accept frozen front lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia; renounce NATO membership; and limit its troop levels and long-range weapons. Russia, meanwhile, faced no reciprocal force caps, no withdrawal, and would receive phased sanctions relief.

These provisions were not theoretical. They would have redrawn Europe’s map, weakened Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself, and rewarded Russia’s invasion in concrete terms. They would codify gains achieved by force while constraining only the victim.

Perhaps most revealing were the proposed “security guarantees.” AP reported that they were non-binding, dependent on the political choices of future U.S. administrations, and voidable if Ukraine used certain U.S. weapons. Ukraine was being asked to trade territory and sovereignty for assurances the United States could reverse easily.

The historical record—Helsinki in 2018, the 2019 Ukraine aid pause, public statements suggesting NATO allies deemed “delinquent” might be left vulnerable, and the 2025 suspension of military and intelligence support—shaped how Kyiv evaluated those guarantees. These events, reported by CBS, PBS, AP, UPI, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, formed the context through which small states assess reliability.

When AP reported that U.S. officials warned Ukraine its intelligence support might be affected if it refused to engage with the plan, the structure clarified. Pressure flowed only toward the state under attack.

Ukraine—dependent on U.S. intelligence for air defense and targeting—was told its essential tools might be limited if it resisted a framework that advantaged the invader. Russia faced no equivalent pressure. The process resembled not negotiation but the management of Ukrainian concessions, shaped in part by early Russian input.

This dynamic aligned with longstanding Western intelligence assessments: Russia sought not only territory but enduring leverage over Ukraine. Any settlement leaving Ukraine militarily inferior or barred from NATO would invite renewed assault. Those assessments, reiterated by NATO, the European Commission, and multiple Western intelligence chiefs from 2022 to 2025, warned that a weakened Ukraine and discretionary guarantees would create conditions for future aggression—not prevent it.

European partners reacted quickly. The Guardian reported that EU leaders deemed the plan a “non-starter.” Several noted the irregularity of learning about it through press leaks rather than coordinated briefings. Allies were treated not as participants but as recipients of a nearly finished document—observers rather than stakeholders in a process that affected their security.

Ukrainian officials recognized the pattern immediately. As The Guardian and AP reported, they described the proposal as “capitulation,” “absurd,” and incompatible with sovereignty.

One adviser repeated a line held since the invasion’s first hours: “Sovereignty is not negotiable. Survival is not negotiable.” These assessments were not rhetorical; they reflected the lived experience of a country repeatedly forced to endure decisions made beyond its borders.

Historical analogies can mislead, which is why precision matters.

Munich is often invoked reflexively, but the 2025 process bears little resemblance to Chamberlain’s world. Britain entered the crisis militarily unprepared, guided by incomplete intelligence, and constrained by constitutional machinery that governed its diplomacy. Chamberlain acted within that system—defending his policy before Parliament, accepting its verdict when support collapsed, and transferring power peacefully. In a 1939 letter, he wrote, “I act as the Constitution prescribes, and I shall abide by it,” a line reflecting both his temperament and the institutional limits within which he operated.

The United States in 2025 faced none of those guardrails. Several key actions surrounding the Ukraine proposal unfolded outside the diplomatic and interagency channels meant to protect American foreign policy—under a president who had been impeached twice, first for pressuring Ukraine to advance his domestic political interests and later for encouraging a mob to disrupt the transfer of power; who was subsequently convicted in New York on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in a scheme prosecutors argued—and the jury agreed—was intended to influence the 2016 election by concealing a sexual encounter with adult film actor Stormy Daniels; and who repeatedly challenged core elements of the constitutional order.

He was also the first U.S. president ever found liable for sexual abuse and for defaming the woman who reported that abuse, in civil trials decided by two New York juries.

Those challenges included publicly encouraging his supporters to disrupt Congress’s certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021—an assault in which more than 140 police officers were injured, several subsequent deaths were later attributed to the attack, and rioters vandalized the Capitol, including smearing human feces in hallways and offices; refusing to accept certified electoral results; proposing that parts of the Constitution be “terminated”; and publicly deriding Daniels—including in a 2018 tweet in which he called her “horseface.”

None of this resembled the constitutional discipline within which Chamberlain operated. It reflected a political environment in which the safeguards normally governing American foreign-policy decision-making had been weakened or bypassed altogether.
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-great-be…

3/4: The more revealing parallel is the Molotov–Ribbentrop logic of 1939. The method of the 28-point proposal—an aggressor engaged early, an ally excluded until the end, and borders discussed without the participation of the state affected—echoed the architecture of the secret protocols, in which larger powers negotiated the fate of smaller states without their presence.

The contexts differ, but the structure does not. When decisions are shaped with the aggressor before they reach the intended beneficiary, they signal that sovereignty is being bargained in rooms the endangered state is not permitted to enter.

Seen as a sequence rather than isolated acts, the meaning becomes unmistakable. A U.S. envoy coached a Kremlin adviser on how to influence an American president.

Russian officials shaped the early contours of a peace plan. Ukraine received an unsigned document bearing Russian linguistic features. The plan weakened Ukraine and strengthened Russia. The guarantees were structurally unsound. Pressure fell on the ally, not the aggressor. Allies were briefed late or through the press. None of this is moral inference; it is grounded in procedural facts.

Diplomacy depends on predictable architecture: allies consulted early, adversaries managed carefully, proposals vetted through institutions. October 2025 inverted that architecture, treating Russia as a drafting partner and Ukraine as an impediment. It constructed a parallel diplomatic track that bypassed the systems designed to guard against foreign influence and preserve alliance integrity. It replaced transparency with informality, expertise with improvisation, and collective security with private negotiation.

In that sense, this is betrayal in its precise meaning: a structural reordering of obligations. It occurs when an ally becomes the last to know and an adversary becomes the first to shape; when institutions built to protect democratic partners give way to backchannels with those seeking to weaken them.

Such moments do not vanish when the documents fade or the actors depart. They endure because they reveal not only what was decided—but whom the decision was made to serve.
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-great-be…

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Sep 6, 2025

Trump Seeks Control of 9/11 Memorial After Years of False Claims About Attacks

🧵1/5: Donald Trump is seeking federal control of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, a site built from the grief and labor of families, survivors, and New Yorkers. The move would strip authority from the nonprofit that has raised three-quarters of a billion dollars in private funds and operated the memorial since 2014.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

2/5: Trump frames it as a national honor, but his long record of false claims about 9/11 raises fears of politicization. Local leaders argue the memorial belongs to those who endured the attacks, not to Washington. At stake is whether Ground Zero remains a covenant of memory or becomes a conquest of narrative.

His own record underscores the concern.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

3/5: His own record underscores the concern.

On 9/11 itself, Trump went on television to boast that Trump Tower was now the “tallest” building in Lower Manhattan because the Twin Towers had just been destroyed. He later spread the long-debunked story that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the attacks.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

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