Dr. Sarah Paine: Why The World Is Turning Away From America

What It Covers

Geopolitical historian Dr. Sarah Paine analyzes the collapse of the post-WWII rules-based world order, explaining how simultaneous conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, driven by what she terms "continentalist" leaders including Putin and Trump, are fracturing Western alliances, incentivizing nuclear proliferation, and pushing the world toward a third global conflict with cascading economic consequences for ordinary citizens.

Key Questions Answered

• •Continentalism vs. Maritime Order: Two competing world systems define current conflicts. Continentalists like Putin, Xi, and Trump view land as the currency of power and pursue territorial expansion. Maritime order nations compound wealth through rules-based trade, where a credit card works globally and small businesses keep their earnings. When the maritime order collapses, even the billionaires funding continentalists lose their wealth-generating infrastructure. Recognizing which system a leader operates under predicts their behavior accurately.
• •Pivotal Error Framework: A pivotal error permanently forecloses better options that previously existed. Putin's Ukraine invasion exemplifies this — he could have slowly destabilized Ukraine after taking Crimea and Donbass, but instead unified Ukrainian national identity and burned through Russia's Cold War arsenal. The U.S. Iran war similarly destroyed the alliance system irreversibly. Identifying pivotal errors early matters because no reassessment later recovers the original, superior options that existed before the mistake.
• •Unlimited vs. Limited Objectives in War: Wars with unlimited objectives — regime change or genocide — place enemies on "death ground," where fighting becomes the only survival option. Putin's stated goal of eliminating Ukrainian culture and leadership guarantees maximum Ukrainian resistance. The U.S. Iran war similarly set unlimited objectives against 90 million people, a population comparable to post-WWII Germany, which required 1.5 million occupation troops. Unlimited objectives make wars unwinnable at affordable cost and incentivize adversaries to acquire nuclear weapons.
• •Situations vs. Problems — Managing vs. Solving: Not every geopolitical threat is solvable; some are only manageable. The Cold War generation correctly identified the Soviet Union as a situation requiring management, not a problem to solve. Their strategy combined sanctions to shrink Soviet economic growth, maximized allied growth, and used accurate information campaigns. A 2% reduction in an adversary's growth rate extends their doubling time from 23 years to 71 years — a compounding strategic advantage achieved without military conflict.
• •Russia's Economic Collapse Indicators: Russia's war economy shows measurable deterioration: defense spending consumes roughly 40% of the national budget, interest rates exceed 20%, 300 billion in central bank reserves are frozen, the European energy export market is lost, and Ukraine's drone strikes have eliminated up to 50% of Russia's oil refinery capacity. China exploits this by purchasing Russian resources at heavily discounted prices while charging full rates for components Russia needs to manufacture missiles, effectively draining Russian wealth.
• •Lies Destroy Economies — The Soviet Precedent: The Soviet Union collapsed because its centrally planned economy ran on systematically falsified data. Every manager overstated needs and understated inventory to game the allocation system. Aggregated across an entire economy, this produced catastrophically misallocated capital and labor that metastasized undetected until collapse. Normalizing lies in any system — political or economic — produces the same cascading misallocation. The U.S. current environment of normalized disinformation follows this same structural pattern with predictable long-term consequences.
• •Negative Objectives and Democratic Accountability: Governments primarily succeed through negative objectives — preventing disasters rather than creating visible wins. Preventing bridge collapses, foreign invasions, and professional malpractice generates no credit on normal days because normalcy is the outcome. This makes evaluating leadership difficult. The framework for assessing current U.S. policy is straightforward: measure against two core government functions — protecting national security and promoting prosperity. The Iran war demonstrably failed both metrics simultaneously, making attribution to specific policy decisions unusually clear.