Keith Crighton

Folks want to extrapolate outcomes continuously. Everyone wants to be Nostradamus. Pundits behave as if a large enough pile of facts can abolish uncertainty. The ideological pundits interpret everything through the same lens. No matter the facts, they arrive at the same outcome: the fall of Russia or Ukraine, the guaranteed pacifism of Trump. Then there is the moral layer as well. Everyone is more moral, more ethical, and if you do not agree with them, you are the immoral one. That has always been a recurring cultural error through history . What changes across eras is the vocabulary. The old world had augurs, oracles, court historians, theologians, and imperial strategists. We have pundits, influencers, historians, analysts, podcasts, models, data dashboards, intelligence communities, and panels. The conceit is the same: that command over information gives command over consequence and outcome , that one’s ego can extrapolate away obvious uncertainty. How many now declare Trump a failure and Iran the winner? How many declare China the winner, or the US the winner? Rumsfeld was useful on this because he understood that reality does not present itself as a closed system. Some things are known. Some things are known to be uncertain. Then there are the unknown unknowns: the forces, reactions, second-order effects, and concealed conditions that only reveal themselves in motion. If we want to ground ourselves in reality then uncertainty is part of that ground Rumsfeld made one of the more intelligent observations about political reality to come out of that era. The world is not a static brief. It is an unfolding field of interaction, a pinball machine more than a chessboard. History is full of elites mistaking situational awareness for predictive mastery. Croesus thought the oracle’s warning could be read cleanly and learned too late that interpretation is where ruin enters. Europe in 1914 believed mobilisation schedules, alliance maps, and industrial capacity gave them a rational grasp of war’s likely path. Instead they got slaughter, collapse, and a new century of disorder. Iraq showed the same pattern in modern form: rapid battlefield success, followed by consequences that the planners had neither contained nor really conceived. That is the delusion of our culture, though it belongs to many cultures before it. People imagine that if they gather enough facts, model enough variables, or speak with enough authority, they can turn history into a managed sequence. Yet history tells us the opposite. Facts and analysis matter. Serious people should know as much as they possibly can. But mastery of facts never produces mastery of outcomes. It gives you a better map of the terrain, but it won’t remove the fog, the friction, or the existence of forces you can’t even know are there. Nobody knows the outcome of Iran and the US. Pretending otherwise is part of the disease.

Pre-war Japan is a historical rhyme worth keeping in mind. Pearl Harbour came at the end of a tightening sanctions regime imposed by the West. Oil. Scrap iron. Strategic inputs. Each restriction narrowed Japan’s room to manoeuvre. Once a state concludes that the foundations of its economy and war machine are being closed off, the urgency of decisions change. Stability stops being the governing aim. The question becomes whether action now offers better odds than passivity under encirclement. If you want to understand the motivation, start there: fear of encirclement. That sits near the center of the moral question people are wrestling with now. Chinese control over critical minerals and industrial supply chains carries the same structure. If Beijing can place at risk the inputs required for American military production, grid expansion, AI systems, and industrial continuity, then the issue sits well beyond ordinary trade friction. It becomes leverage over the material basis of power itself. In that setting, dependency acquires a strategic meaning. A supply chain is no longer a market arrangement. It is a potential instrument of compulsion. It begins to register as a survival question. American conduct follows from that insight. Washington appears to believe that a future vulnerability must be arrested before it hardens into a permanent strategic fact. The issue is not mood or rhetoric. It is anticipation of future disablement. States act with force when they judge that delay will deepen exposure and narrow their remaining options. Israel’s view of Iran belongs to the same family of reasoning. A threat interpreted as maturing, entrenching, and approaching irreversibility produces a distinct political psychology. Restraint loses prestige. Preemption gains coherence. It starts to appear rational. History offers rhymes. Japan in 1941. Israel in 1967. Germany in 1914. Sparta facing Athens. A state perceives an adverse shift in the conditions of survival. Time ceases to appear neutral. Decisive action starts to present itself as necessary. The future is imagined as a worse bargaining position, a worse military position, a worse chance of endurance. Under those conditions, radical action begins to present itself as reasonable . Which is the deeper point. States become dangerous when threat attaches itself to material dependence, shrinking time horizons, and the real expectation of future weakness. At that moment, power makes a clean break in linear diplomatic terms. It thinks in windows, chokepoints, bottlenecks, and irreversible loss. Its perceived menu of options is radicalised by the structure of the threat itself. Those who read the United States as soft, irresolute, or indefinitely patient may be misreading the situation completely. A state that believes its future industrial base, military capacity, and strategic freedom are at risk won’t behave like a complacent hegemon. It behaves like a power trying to prevent encirclement before it becomes permanent. That is why the present moment has to be read through matter. This is where The Return of Matter comes back into view. The real contest is no longer about slogans, values, or even finance in the narrow sense. It is about control over the physical substrates of power: energy, metals, refining, grids, shipping, compute, and the industrial systems that make military and economic life possible. Once matter returns to the center, states stop speaking the language of frictionless markets and start acting in the older ancient language of survival. What we are watching now is that transition made visible: the progression of action under perceived material threat, the re-entry of physical constraint into strategy, and the collapse of the fantasy that interdependence had abolished coercion. With that realisation comes a grief for the passing of the old world. .