The global situation has got increasingly complicated in recent weeks/ months/ years. Part of this is that it is now difficult to know who the "good guys" are and who the "bad guys" are. In fact, a lot of people have given up trying to tell them apart.
Putin is clearly "evil," as he started a major war "out of the blue" that led to millions dying. Trump, too, is pretty "evil." Just listen to that old, arrogant, corrupt piece of garbage talk. But wait a minute, isn't he also doing God's work by bombing the hell out of the "evil" mullahs who have been supplying the "evil" Russians with Shahed drones to attack the innocent Ukrainians?
And what about the Chinese? They must be "evil," as they appear to be sitting back in a sinister way, as if they hope to benefit from all the stupidness and craziness out there.
OK, stop right there. Once you start getting your moral knickers in a bunch like this, it's not going to end well. Instead of "evil" we need another way of looking at geopolitics—and solving the frequent problems (and threats to humanity) that it throws up.
And what about the Chinese? They must be "evil," as they appear to be sitting back in a sinister way, as if they hope to benefit from all the stupidness and craziness out there.
OK, stop right there. Once you start getting your moral knickers in a bunch like this, it's not going to end well. Instead of "evil" we need another way of looking at geopolitics—and solving the frequent problems (and threats to humanity) that it throws up.
I believe that the correct frame to address these issues is toxicology.
Toxicology is simply the study of how perfectly natural and neutral chemicals and compounds can, in the wrong doses and combinations, create extreme dangers and how to obviate these through separation and adding other, more pacifying elements.
From a geopolitical standpoint, I would identify three main points of toxicity in the world, namely: Israel-Islamia, Taiwan-China, and the Ukraine-Russia. None of them are necessary but any one of them could blow up into WWIII, and right now two of them have activated actual wars.
The one on most people's minds right now is Israel-Islamia. This looks like a conflict between Trump and Iran, but it's really just the effect of the long-running sore of Israel-Islamic conflict. In fact, Trump was clearly bribed, bounced, or blackmailed into it by Israel.
With toxicology, a key point is to fix the problem by identifying the "irritant" and then reducing or removing it from a situation that is otherwise seen as "natural" or the "status quo."
Toxicology is simply the study of how perfectly natural and neutral chemicals and compounds can, in the wrong doses and combinations, create extreme dangers and how to obviate these through separation and adding other, more pacifying elements.
From a geopolitical standpoint, I would identify three main points of toxicity in the world, namely: Israel-Islamia, Taiwan-China, and the Ukraine-Russia. None of them are necessary but any one of them could blow up into WWIII, and right now two of them have activated actual wars.
The one on most people's minds right now is Israel-Islamia. This looks like a conflict between Trump and Iran, but it's really just the effect of the long-running sore of Israel-Islamic conflict. In fact, Trump was clearly bribed, bounced, or blackmailed into it by Israel.
With toxicology, a key point is to fix the problem by identifying the "irritant" and then reducing or removing it from a situation that is otherwise seen as "natural" or the "status quo."
In the case of the Israel-Islamia problem, it is not Islam that is imposing on Israel, but clearly the other way around. But this process is not one-way. As it has progressively interacted with the Islamic World, Israel, which started as a pseudo-Western democracy that sought a kind of regional assimilation, has become radicalised and toxified into an increasingly terroristic and genocidal state, not to mention a virulently "racist" state that is not even based on a "race" (as the Jews are very far from being an actual race):
In this respect, Jewish "racism" is not unlike MAGA/America First "racism":
Groypers
Iran, "evil" as it seems at times (and is), is essentially a toxic reaction to the pathogenic effects of placing the Israeli state in the wrong location.
It was placed here, rather than its true, natural Zionist home—which would have been somewhere in Eastern Europe—due to the existence at the time of the Soviet Union. (In my view, the best site for the Jewish state would have been the "ethnically cleansed" Kaliningrad oblast that is now a detached territory of the Soviet Union. But who wanted to live under Communism in 1948 after surviving Naziism?)
So, the point is this: Israel is not evil and Jews are not evil, but placing a Jewish state smack bang in the middle of hundreds of millions of Muslims is either going to kill it or make it extremely toxic. Right now it is the latter.
Next, we can consider Taiwan in geopolitical toxicology terms. Really, Taiwan shouldn't be an issue, as we have all more or less admitted that it is an "integral part" of China, but here the toxifying agents has been economics.
In the 1980s, America destroyed Japan's chip industry in a relatively "natural" act of economic rivalry. Not nice, but there you go. The result of this is that Taiwan, not America, picked up the slack, with now around 90% of the World's microchips being manufactured a stone's throw from mainland China.
This was reinforced in the 1990s, when America's political elite decided that outsourcing most of US manufacturing to China would be a smooth route to popularity. With everything being built in China and more and more stuff needing chips, in the end Taiwan had to be where it was.
This then created the geopolitically toxic situation where the US and West both recognised Taiwan as "part of China" while being totally dependent on it for chips. The ad hoc "solution," such as it was, was to not to change the recognition of Taiwan as Chinese but simply to add toxic appendages to the formula like "not yet" and "let the Taiwanese people decide," all underpinned by something called "strategic ambiguity"—essentially just code for "geopolitical toxicology" and a ticking time bomb.
This then created the geopolitically toxic situation where the US and West both recognised Taiwan as "part of China" while being totally dependent on it for chips. The ad hoc "solution," such as it was, was to not to change the recognition of Taiwan as Chinese but simply to add toxic appendages to the formula like "not yet" and "let the Taiwanese people decide," all underpinned by something called "strategic ambiguity"—essentially just code for "geopolitical toxicology" and a ticking time bomb.
Then we come to the worst problem of all—Russia-Ukraine.
Whereas China can be stabilised by acknowledging its integrity and relocating chip manufacture to safer locales, this can not be done with Russia. China has a clear geographical shape, defined by the mountains to the West and South West and the deserts to the North. Russia, by contrast can only attain "geographical integrity" by impinging on superior civilisations like Europe and China (i.e. Vladivostok).
Once again, it is not useful to think of Putin as "evil," although he most certainly is, but instead it is better to see this as a problem of geopolitical toxicology. Either we have a "dominant" Russia with borders anchored on the Baltic, the Oder, and the Carpathian mountains (and necessarily imposing a form of tyrannical Tsarism), or we have what I prefer, a "multipolar Russia" of which the Ukraine is a partial iteration.
The other option is that we have a long-running toxicology problem that could kill billions and blight centuries.
Once again, it is not useful to think of Putin as "evil," although he most certainly is, but instead it is better to see this as a problem of geopolitical toxicology. Either we have a "dominant" Russia with borders anchored on the Baltic, the Oder, and the Carpathian mountains (and necessarily imposing a form of tyrannical Tsarism), or we have what I prefer, a "multipolar Russia" of which the Ukraine is a partial iteration.
The other option is that we have a long-running toxicology problem that could kill billions and blight centuries.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.
Israel is a feature not a bug of the post-WW2 global settlement.
ReplyDeleteYour piece is a goddamn masterclass in finally ditching the kindergarten “Putin evil / Trump evil / mullahs evil / Trump bombing mullahs good” morality porn that has rotted every think-tank and subreddit since 2022. Toxicology instead of theology? Based. Identifying the three volatile reaction chambers — Israel-Islamia, Taiwan-China, Ukraine-Russia — as concentration + proximity problems rather than cartoon villainy? Double based. But as someone who has literally wasted years coding agent-based civilizational collapse simulators in Python (numpy for payoff matrices, networkx for emergent alliance graphs, sympy for equilibrium equations, the whole autistic toolkit), I have to sperg the absolute fuck out here: you’ve diagnosed the acute poisoning events but you stopped short of the full pharmacokinetic + memetic + cliodynamic profile. You gave us the LD50 warning labels but not the cytochrome-P450 interaction chart or the long-term bioaccumulation model. Let me fix that.First, Israel-Islamia. Yes, dropping a high-agency, high-verbal-IQ ethnostate (Ashkenazi profile, fight me) into a sea of clannish, low-trust, oil-rent theocracies is exactly like introducing metallic sodium to a hydrocarbon bath — exothermic, hydrogen off-gassing, and eventually a fireball. The Kaliningrad counterfactual is delicious (post-’45 ethnically cleansed Prussian exclave, zero Arabs, perfect Baltic real estate, Herzl himself would have taken the deal over Stalin’s alternative). But you underplay the catalyst layer: Western liberal universalism acts as the sulfuric acid that turns a manageable irritant into a runaway chain reaction. Every time Washington screams “rules-based international order” it supercharges the feedback loop — diaspora narrative control + petrodollar recycling + Iranian blowback drones. The “genocidal/racist” turn you note isn’t some moral failing; it’s emergent dose-dependent toxicity when a tiny population with medieval siege mentality is forced into permanent demographic siege. Groypers noticing the same pattern in MAGA circles is just convergent evolution under different selective pressures. Solution space? Not “peace process” cope. Either hermetic containment (iron-dome-on-steroids + total Western energy independence to break the petrodollar valve) or actual population transfers on a scale that would make 1948 look like a garden party. Anything else is just slow-acting poison...
ReplyDeleteNext, Taiwan-China. You nailed the origin story: 1980s Plaza Accord Japan-chip-smash + 1990s China-outsourcing orgy created the world’s most dangerous single-point-of-failure — TSMC’s ~92 % advanced-node monopoly sitting 100 miles from PLA artillery. Strategic ambiguity was always just geopolitical duct tape over a nitroglycerin drum. But “relocate the fabs” is pure engineer midwit cope. These things aren’t Legos. EUV lithography from ASML, CoWoS packaging, ultra-pure neon from Ukraine (lol), tacit knowledge in the cleanroom workforce that takes decades to replicate — Arizona and India fabs are still running at 60-70 % yield after years and billions. The real toxicology upgrade is obsolescence catalysis: pour R&D into gallium-nitride, 2D materials (graphene, MoS2), photonic computing, and optical interconnects until silicon nodes become as relevant as vacuum tubes. Simultaneously harden Taiwan into an unsinkable drone-porcupine with Starlink redundancy, sea mines, and hypersonic decoys. Phase-shift the dependency curve or accept periodic near-death experiences every time Xi gets a bad poll number.Third — and this is where your piece goes full midwit multipolarity cope — Russia-Ukraine. Yes, Russia’s geography is cursed: endless steppe with no natural eastern or western stop lines, forcing either tyrannical buffer-state swallowing (Oder-Carpathians edition) or perpetual insecurity. You prefer the “multipolar Russia” iteration. Cute. That’s just Dugin’s fever-dream with better prose. Turchin’s cliodynamics models show exactly what happens when a declining steppe empire hits elite overproduction + lost peripheral wars + hydrocarbon rents: disintegration cycles every 80-120 years. Putin isn’t “evil”; he’s the supersaturation seed crystal in a solution of post-Soviet ressentiment. The Ukraine buffer is temporary theater. Long-term either (a) genuine Slavic federation carved along genetic/cultural affinity maps (not Lenin’s stupid lines) or (b) we keep bleeding treasure and young men every decade until the next tsar or the next color revolution. Dominant Russia to the Oder is 19th-century nightmare fuel; endless proxy war is 21st-century managed decline. Pick your poison, but stop pretending “multipolar” magically solves the Heartland Mackinder problem.The bigger miss in the entire framework: you treat the three hotspots as isolated vials when they’re a metabolic network. Iran drones in Ukraine link the Israel and Russia nodes. Chip shortages from a Taiwan crisis would spike global inflation and fund more Russian energy blackmail. Western universalist memeplex (the ultimate catalyst enzyme) accelerates all reactions at once — turning manageable tensions into civilizational organ failure. We need systems-biology toxicology: map the feedback loops, identify hormesis thresholds (some controlled tension actually builds civilizational muscle), calculate cumulative exposure LD50 for high-trust high-IQ polities, and deploy chelators (de-memeticize universalism) alongside surgical irritant removal.The dose makes the poison, Colin. But without high-resolution spectrometry on ethnic genomes, historical path dependencies, resource flows, and memetic catalysts, we’re all just medieval alchemists throwing shit in the cauldron and praying it doesn’t detonate into WW3.
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