Benjamin Reed

American power succeeds only when it enters a conflict with limits, legitimacy, and a political end state already within reach, and it fails when it tries to invent those conditions at gunpoint.

China did not need to fire a shot in Ukraine to come out ahead; it only had to wait while the West bled will and capacity and Russia slid, predictably, into Beijing’s pocket.

As Patagonia burns and Argentina reaches for an old, familiar villain, Israeli backpackers are being cast as arsonists on the strength of rumor, recycled myth, and the comforting lie that disaster always has a single foreign hand behind it.

Mexico did not flinch because it cared about Maduro, but because his capture proved the United States had stopped negotiating with old assumptions and started enforcing new ones.

American power looks weaker because it is no longer theatrical, but it is still shaping outcomes through pressure and alliances while rivals burn men, money, and legitimacy trying to fight the modern world and their own limits.

Legal justification is the floor, not the ceiling, and this looks like a shooting that may clear the law while still failing the craft, because a step to the right could have ended the threat without ending a life.

The fall of a strongman does not end a regime so much as expose the machinery beneath it, where armed institutions, fear, and habit decide whether power reforms itself or hardens into something more dangerous.

A clean operation can remove a dictator, but it cannot erase the precedent that the United States is willing to decide, by force, who gets to lead.

Selective skepticism is not accountability; it is a loyalty test disguised as truth-seeking, and when veterans wield it against each other, credibility stops being a standard and becomes a weapon.

Adventure has its own discipline: it makes you earn every mile, read every piece of water, and accept that the best days are sometimes the ones where you catch nothing except the truth about why you came.

Between Myanmar’s bloodletting, the 2016 interference debacle, and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook stopped looking like a neutral town square and started looking like an accelerant that only reached for the fire extinguisher once the building was already burning.

Dick Cheney didn’t just steer America into war, he helped turn war into a business, and soldiers like me and my friends paid the bill in blood while he and his circle counted the profits.