Hegemony 101: How Trump Checkmated Putin, Xi, and Proxies—While You Feared the ‘Strongman'

Things to Make You Go Hmmm About Venezuela That They Don’t Teach You in School or on Mainstream Media. The Paradox of Peace, Global Prosperity, and Perpetual Power Projection

Jan 04, 2026

Before jumping to knee-jerk reactions shaped by fear-mongering media or paid protests designed to hijack your thinking and trigger hate or fear of Trump, pause for a short history and macro-economic lesson. Remember, there is the world and market as it is, and then there is the one we wish it to be.

Understanding is what brings us peace and clarity to accept the things we cannot change, change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Some factual context reveals the nuanced, strategic value of recent capital- and cost-of-life-efficient moves by the Trump Administration to restore the hegemonic order—ending less efficient, more costly missteps from Russia’s Ukraine adventure, China’s quiet mind virus, and proxy drug wars on the West. This isn’t about politics or party; this is about understanding how the macro-world order works and what it takes and costs to maintain the monopolized influence over it.

This is a look at the current administration’s strategic aim to re-centralize deterrence and efficiency, buying more peace for more people through decisive stewardship rather than endless drift. You can draw your own (more informed) conclusions from there.

Key Terms for Clarity as You Dive in.

Hegemony: When one dominant power (like the post-WWII U.S.) sets and enforces global rules for trade, security, and finance, providing stability and prosperity for most in exchange for accepting its leadership and selective use of force.
Rules-Based Order: The system of laws, norms, and institutions (e.g., UN, WTO, dollar-based finance) that channels conflicts into diplomacy and markets rather than total war, upheld by the hegemon’s monopoly on credible violence projection.
Petrodollar: The post-1971 arrangement where oil is priced globally in U.S. dollars, ensuring constant demand for the dollar and funding U.S. deficits through recycled oil revenues.
Fourth Turning: Neil Howe’s theory of 80-100 year societal cycles ending in crises that forge new orders through elite resolve and institutional rebuilds.

Peace for most of the planet since 1945 has rested on a paradox: a small number of states claim a kind of delegated “right” to organize and use large-scale violence so that most others can enjoy a relatively predictable, rules-based economic and political order. The price of that broad peace has been continual, messy coercion at the margins—sanctions, covert action, regime pressure, targeted strikes—which is easy for beneficiaries of stability to ignore, just as you and I ignore that slaughterhouses exist while enjoying our chicken or beef over dinner.

Hegemony and the Peace Paradox

Since World War II, the basic structure has been:

One dominant power (primarily the United States since 1945) anchors an open trading and financial system and provides security guarantees for allies.

In exchange, allies accept U.S.-centric institutions, norms, and a “rules-based” language that channels disputes into law, markets, and diplomacy rather than total war.

The paradox is that this order’s relative peace depends on:

Concentrated hard power: a near-monopoly, or at least a decisive edge, in force projection—bases, blue-water navies, nuclear umbrellas.
Persistent low-level conflict: interventions, proxy wars, and coercive tools used not to end violence everywhere, but to keep violence “manageable” and away from core economic zones.

From an amoral, economic lens, this is portfolio hedging: a hegemon trades localized instability and visible moral compromises to keep the macro-system of trade, capital flows, and energy supply functioning for the majority.

Monopoly on Violence, Exported Costs

Modern hegemony works like a vertically integrated security-industrial complex: some actors carry the fixed costs of violence capacity so that others can free-ride on peace.

The post-1945 order institutionalized this via:

Security guarantees (NATO, bilateral pacts in Asia) that reduce defense burdens for allied states in exchange for political and economic alignment.
Delegated enforcement: sanctions regimes, peacekeeping, and selective interventions that act as “policing” functions for global markets, shipping lanes, and energy routes.

For the median citizen inside the core of the system, peace feels normal and almost costless: stable supply chains, reserve-currency benefits, cheap imports, safe travel. The real costs—disrupted regions, coups, insurgencies, resource conflicts, militarized borders—are spatially and psychologically outsourced, comparable to how industrial slaughter is hidden behind a clean supermarket aisle.

The Price of Freedom and Assembly

“Freedom” in this context is not just speech or voting; it is the ability to transact, assemble, and build businesses inside a framework where contracts are enforceable and physical security is assumed.

For that environment to exist at scale:

Someone must underwrite predictable rules: property rights, navigation freedoms, payment systems, intellectual property, and dispute mechanisms.
Someone must deter or punish challengers that attempt to rewrite those rules by force—whether regionally (through territorial grabs) or systemically (through alternative monetary/energy blocs).

Thus, the “right to peaceful assembly” in New York or Frankfurt coexists with armed patrols in strategic waterways and forward-deployed forces around energy chokepoints and digital infrastructure. Economic freedom for many is inseparable from strategic constraint for some, enforced by the few actors with both the will and capacity to project violence at a distance.

Iran Nuclear Strikes as System Defense

Viewed through this lens, the 2025 US–Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities are not just regional events; they are maintenance operations on the underlying order.

Key dynamics:

Nuclear hedging: Iran’s decades-long program has been shaped by offensive realist logic—seeking security and leverage in an anarchic system where only power guarantees survival.
Order-preservation: For the hegemonic camp, a nuclear-armed or near-nuclear Iran threatens not only Israel or Gulf allies, but also the credibility of nonproliferation regimes and the predictability of energy and shipping in a core region.

The joint offensive—targeted infrastructure, elite personnel, and nuclear sites—temporarily restores the asymmetry of force and buys time for the existing rule-set (NPT norms, US-centric Gulf security architecture) to remain dominant.

Yet this does not resolve the underlying paradox: the more the hegemon strikes to “preserve peace,” the more legitimacy it can lose in peripheral societies that experience those strikes as imperial violence, feeding the very resistance that justifies further action.

Venezuela and Regime Engineering

Venezuela’s recent trajectory—contested elections, international non-recognition of Maduro’s rule, sanctions, and discussions of forced removal—illustrates the same logic in the Western Hemisphere. From an order-maintenance perspective:

An oil-rich state with authoritarian governance, criminalized networks, and external patrons (Russia, China, Cuba) sits at the intersection of energy markets, migration flows, and regional political signaling.
Sustained instability threatens neighboring economies, pushes refugees across borders, and opens space for rival powers to gain leverage close to the hegemon’s core geography. Oh yeah, and then there is the Chinese-sponsored drug trafficking at scale, fatally poisoning millions of U.S. citizens each year.

Moves to pressure or remove Maduro—sanctions, support for opposition figures, and discussion of strikes or forced exit—are less about moral disgust and more about system hygiene: pruning a node that exports disorder and admits rival influence into the hegemon’s near-abroad. Yet here again, removal is not a clean “win”; experts warn it likely requires long-term security commitments and risks new forms of authoritarianism, showing how defending a rules-based order often generates new cycles of managed instability.

The Petrodollar System: Keystone of Dollar Hegemony Post-1971

The U.S. petrodollar system emerged in the early 1970s as a pivotal adaptation to the Nixon Shock, when President Nixon unilaterally suspended the dollar’s convertibility to gold in August 1971, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system. This created an urgent need to sustain global demand for dollars, which had served as the world’s reserve currency due to America’s post-WWII economic dominance and military reach.

In 1974, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger brokered a landmark deal with Saudi Arabia: in exchange for military protection and economic aid, the Saudis agreed to price all oil exports exclusively in U.S. dollars and invest surplus petrodollars back into U.S. Treasury securities. Other OPEC nations soon followed, institutionalizing the petrodollar recycling mechanism. This arrangement flooded global markets with dollar-denominated oil transactions, ensuring perpetual demand for dollars as countries accumulated them to secure energy supplies—cementing U.S. financial primacy without gold backing.

The implications have been profound for the global economic order. Petrodollars created a structural bias toward dollar usage in trade, reserves, and debt issuance, allowing the U.S. to run persistent current-account deficits financed by foreign inflows into Treasuries. This “exorbitant privilege,” as coined by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, subsidized American consumption, military spending, and innovation while imposing inflationary discipline on the rest of the world through dollar scarcity and SWIFT-mediated control.

Disruptions to this system—such as Iraq’s 2000 attempt to price oil in euros or Libya’s Gaddafi-era gold dinar proposals—have historically invited swift U.S.-led interventions, underscoring the petrodollar’s role not just as an economic construct but as a pillar of hegemonic enforcement.

Over five decades, it has underpinned the stability of the rules-based order by linking energy security directly to dollar supremacy.

Petrodollars, Bitcoin, AI Energy Demand, and Western Hemisphere Imperative

In today’s era of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work energy intensity and the explosive global demand for megawatts driven by AI data centers—projected to consume up to 8-10% of world electricity by 2030—the petrodollar’s vulnerabilities and reinforcements take on heightened urgency.

Bitcoin, as digital gold with a fixed supply, challenges fiat debasement by tying value to real-world energy inputs, while AI’s insatiable power needs amplify competition for reliable, affordable hydrocarbons and nuclear baseload.

Controlling Western Hemisphere energy hubs like Venezuela’s vast Orinoco Belt reserves (over 300 billion barrels) becomes non-negotiable:

It prevents adversaries such as China, Russia, or Iran from gaining footholds that could enable alternative settlement systems (e.g., yuan-denominated oil trades or crypto-backed energy tokens), eroding dollar recycle loops.

For national security and dollar hegemony, denying rivals control over these hubs preserves not only physical supply chains but also the monetary architecture evolving into stablecoins and token economies.

Stablecoins like USDT and USDC, now exceeding $200 billion in circulation, extend petrodollar logic into programmable money—offering instant, borderless settlement while remaining dollar-pegged and compliant with U.S. oversight.

In the coming century of tokenized assets, where energy credits, carbon tokens, and AI compute shares trade on blockchains, hegemony hinges on ensuring that Western Hemisphere oil flows reinforce dollar liquidity rather than funding multipolar challengers.

A Maduro-style regime, intertwined with Beijing and Moscow, represents a direct threat to this:

Regime realignment secures energy for AI/Bitcoin growth, bolsters stablecoin rails as “digital petrodollars,” and thwarts upstart blocs for another generational cycle of economic peace for the many.

Vacuums, Drift, and Proliferating Challengers

When hegemonic leadership grows weak, is only available between 10a-5pm, is distracted, or compromised, several predictable things happen in an amoral, systems sense:

Security guarantees lose credibility. Allies hedge, adversaries probe, and local actors test red lines because they no longer believe distant promises will be enforced.
Rule enforcement becomes selective or arbitrary. Sanctions are inconsistently applied, red lines are declared and then ignored, and institutions look ceremonial instead of coercive.
Regional powers start acting like mini‑hegemons. They expand spheres of influence, invade neighboring sovereigns, seek nuclear or advanced missile capabilities, weaponize migration or energy, and undercut the incumbent’s norms with their own patronage networks.

In this phase, the “rules-based order” is still invoked rhetorically, but operationally, the world slides toward a more multipolar, transactional, and volatile environment. Under this veneered version, the paradox of peace worsens: coercion is still happening, but it is less coordinated, more localized, and often less constrained by any overarching logic beyond short‑term gains.

Strongman Restoration as Systemic Re-Centralization

When a strongman leader (Trump) and aligned administration arrive on the scene, promising to “end chaos,” “promote peace through strength,” and “make the country/system great and respected again,” this is the system’s attempt to recentralize authority after a period of drift. The tools look familiar:

Rapid clarification of red lines: who can have what weapons, which sea lanes are non-negotiable, which regimes are beyond the pale, which currencies/settlement systems are tolerated.
Willingness to use force or the credible threat of it quickly and decisively, rather than allowing long, ambiguous escalatory ladders.
Re-bundling of economic and security ties, where access to markets, technology, and financial rails is explicitly linked to political alignment.

To those inside the hegemon’s core, this can feel like a necessary shock treatment—replacing indecision with clear hierarchy, reestablishing deterrence, and “saving” peace by making the underlying monopoly on violence visible and credible again.

For actors on the receiving end (or the enablement end), it can look like naked imperial centralization. In both cases, the structure is the same: an attempt to suppress emergent multipolarity in favor of restored vertical order.

Fourth Turning Cycles and Hegemonic Resets

Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning framework suggests that roughly every 80–100 years, societies pass through a climactic crisis phase in which institutional legitimacy collapses, elite factions collide, and new arrangements—political, economic, and cultural—are hammered out under pressure. In a hegemonic context, this crisis:

Exposes the rot and contradictions of the existing order: debt overhangs, demographic strains, loss of faith in institutions, and external challengers testing the system’s will.
Forces a choice between gradual, negotiated adjustment (more multipolarity, shared rules) and abrupt, top‑down reset (reasserted hierarchy under new leadership, possibly with a “strongman” as the visible personification).

A strongman-led restoration in this frame is not an anomaly; it is one possible resolution of a Fourth Turning (crisis). The system chooses clarity over ambiguity, hierarchy over diffusion.

The narrative offered is: “We will endure this storm by consolidating power, crushing threats, and rebuilding institutions around a firmer spine so that the next long cycle can be more peaceful for the majority.”

Energy Security as the Hinge of Order

Global energy flows—especially from the Middle East and increasingly from Western Hemisphere producers—are the practical bloodstream of any world order.

A hegemon that appears absent or equivocal about securing transit routes, chokepoints, and critical infrastructure invites both revisionist states and non-state actors to weaponize energy and shipping. In that environment:

Tanker attacks, pipeline sabotage, and blockades become tools of leverage.
Maritime insurance, freight costs, and risk premiums rise, feeding through into inflation and political instability in import-dependent countries.
Upstart hegemons (or coalitions like BRICS) can offer alternative security umbrellas and payment systems, using energy as a wedge to build their own order.

A strongman restoration of hegemony almost inevitably prioritizes the visible re-militarization and securitization of these flows: carrier groups at chokepoints,

expanded bases,
firmer deals with key producers, and
clear demonstrations that attempts to weaponize energy will be punished.

The message is: “The price of your cheap fuel and stable logistics is our renewed, unapologetic willingness to decide who can credibly threaten this system and who cannot.”

Amoral Global Equation and Thwarting Challengers

If the frame is economic peace for the multitude, the global equation since 1945 looks something like:

Concentrated coercive capacity + selective, often ugly interventions → Lower probability of systemic war among great powers, expanded trade and financial integration, and historically high average living standards for billions.

The inconvenient truth is that this “peace” is unevenly distributed and structurally dependent on:

A small club’s readiness to use or credibly threaten force across borders to enforce red lines, protect trade arteries, and block certain technological or nuclear thresholds.[7][6][1]
A collective decision—implicit in consumption habits and political passivity—to look at the benefits of order and not at the periphery where its enforcement is contested, bloody, and ongoing.

When a reasserted hegemon moves to block or delay rising challengers—whether through financial containment, tech/semiconductor controls, energy corridor strategies, or hard-power demonstrations—the stated justification is usually system-wide peace and prosperity:

If we let a rival bloc set its own rules, fragmentation will lead to conflict; therefore, we must keep the commanding heights.
If we allow nuclear or advanced military parity in volatile regions, escalation risks major war; therefore, we must limit who gets what.
If we lose control of key trade and payment infrastructure, the result will be beggar-thy-neighbor policies and global depression; therefore, we must retain central control for everyone’s good.

Reframed this way, freedom of assembly and economic opportunity in the core are not morally pure outcomes, but side effects of a global operating system that continuously trades localized violence and coercion for macro-level stability.

The paradox of peace is that to keep war rare at the center, the hegemonic order must never fully disarm at the edges.

Yours in health and wealth,

~Chris J Snook