Confessions of Failed Statecraft

The Jipshow with Mr. Menger

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-23:26

Confessions of Failed Statecraft

Rules-Based Order as “Pleasant Fiction”

Mr. Menger

Jan 31, 2026

Time Stamps:

The Animal Farm of Peace (0:00)
PM Carney Ditches Life Within the Lie (3:36)
Statecraft, Maximum Pressure, and Shots Fired (10:30)
Rebranding Al Qaeda For Politics (16:15)

The Animal Farm of Peace

International tensions heightened at the turn of the new year, in tandem with claims of “moral clarity,” demanding that the Western powers act, while their privileged subjects leave behind “Iraq War Syndrome” for good— even as senior officials began confessing, often casually, to what “statecraft” actually entails.

In our last episode, we discussed an overlooked factor in the conflict with Iran: the “Unmuzzled Allies” in the Gulf region. Remarkably, a few major Western allies soon offered a few words of their own, defying the will of Washington DC.

This follows Donald Trump's recent creation of the Board of Peace. England refused to attend the signing ceremony due to Vladimir Putin being invited into the alliance (Putin himself is not on board). Trump disinvited Canada (who had originally accepted), following a speech by Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos.

PM Carney Ditches Life Within the Lie

At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney labeled the traditional rules-based order a "pleasant fiction" that finally reached a breaking point.

Carney’s speech, titled "Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path," argued that the world is not in a transition, but a rupture.

The speech's most devastating moment is when Carney cites the 1978 essay called The Power of the Powerless, written by the Czech dissident Václav Havel, who asks how the communist system sustained itself.

Here, we see the power of ritual compliance, beginning with the shopkeeper placing a sign in his window: “workers of the world, unite.”

Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “living within a lie.” The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing — when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack.

This political marriage between narrative and ritual explains many sacredly-held absurdities, and why dissident “info-warriors” are at best reluctantly tolerated.

From:

George H.W. Bush’s call for a “New World Order
The “Clean Break” Strategy
Donald Trump's Board of Peace

Canada once saw within its interest to play along - to “live within the lie” - hoping to achieve safety through compliance. Although "partially false," the arrangement was once predictable and beneficial.

Carney cites the specifics:

Open sea lanes
A stable financial system
Collective security
Frameworks for resolving disputes

But more recently, “economic integration” amounts to:

Tariffs as leverage
Financial infrastructure as coercion
Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited

The pretense of “enforced liberalism” was unveiled as rogue mercantilism. It may not prove to be a defining moment for Canada’s defiance in the long run, but we can say this much: the cat is out of the bag.

But let us pose a more fundamental and much less settling question: who had any right to expect this to end well?

The great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described this stage with brutal precision.

We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.

Havel's essay is instructive in declaring: [b]ecause the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything.

The examples cited are exhaustive in his critique of “post-totalitarian” communism, and yet, vividly familiar:

[T]he use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.

Statecraft, Maximum Pressure, and Shots Fired

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was recently asked about the impact of economic sanctions against Iran in Davos.

President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports. And this is why the people took to the street. So this is economic statecraft, no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.

Maximum pressure. Economic collapse. No shots fired.

Yet, victims of the brutal crackdown by the Iranian regime would surely dispute the last point. “Statecraft” is the reason people “took to the street.” It's also the reason shots were in fact fired. Thousands of them, at the very least.

How can Bessent have it both ways?

It's not a pleasant point, but it bears repeating as state actors confess the quiet part out loud. Our last installment featured a short clip from Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has also raised self-indictment to an artform.

At the time, this may have been seen as an isolated statement with little relation to the recent wave of media and Trump acolytes encouraging deep sympathy for the Iranian people. That sympathy may have its own merits, but the motives of those serving either Trump administration are demonstrably manipulative in propagating it.

Pompeo also left a revealing mark in an X tweet, boasting about Mossad agents on the ground as riots “in dozens of cities” took shape.

Notice how Mr. Pompeo delights in riots - not protests - which suggests that disorder is to be celebrated. Disorder is not a tragic side effect here — it is presented as proof of success.

While claims of Mossad on the ground might sound conspiratorial coming from an everyday observer, we can be sure that a Former CIA Director has a good grasp on how they operate.

The past and present boasting of sanctions hurting the Iranian economy recall a particularly ugly moment when Former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright told 60 Minutes that the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children due to US sanctions had been “worth it.”

There is simply no coherent way to engineer “maximum pressure” against a foreign power without its population bearing the bulk of the burden. Bessent knows this as surely as Madeline Albright did.

This is neither moral confusion nor moral clarity. It's evasion when accountability matters the most.

Rebranding Al Qaeda For Politics

A London-based NGO called Inter Mediate with ties to the British government recruited Former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford to rehabilitate the image of former Al-Qaeda leader Ahmad al-Sharaa (previously known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani), who now serves as interim President of Syria.

The NGO was founded in 2011 by Jonathan Powell, the Former Chief of Staff of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Inter Mediate negotiates in “complex and dangerous” conflicts, according to its website.

From The Cradle's coverage in May 2025:

The report comes as many have been dumbfounded by Sharaa’s warm reception in Paris and during a recent Saudi-hosted meeting with US President Donald Trump, particularly given his extremist past.
Sharaa joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) following the 2003 US invasion of the country. He ended up serving as the deputy to ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back when the group was known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), after it changed its name from AQI.
He was dispatched by Baghdadi in 2011 to enter the war against Assad’s government in Syria, where he took part in the launching of deadly suicide attacks against both security personnel and civilians before founding the Nusra Front in 2012. Following several Qatari-sponsored rebranding campaigns, the Nusra Front eventually became HTS in 2017.

Whether this effort succeeds or fails is beside the point; the confession is that such rehabilitation is even considered acceptable. Regardless of the aims in play, the stunt to “moderate” al-Sharaa's image is a low point in Western propaganda.

On November 10, 2025, Ahmed al-Sharaa became the first leader of Syria to visit the White House, following a brutal 13-year period claiming over 600,000 lives and saw more than 6.5 million people displaced. As head of HTS, he overthrew Bashar al-Assad in 2024, ending the family’s 50-year reign.

This turn of events is certainly bizarre, the United States wishes to gain an ally against Iran, once an Assad-backing ally that eventually abandoned him in the lead-up to his downfall. The US may also gain an airbase in Damascus, considered strategically important to rival Russian influence in the region.

Gone may be Iran's most important military base in the region and its supply line to Hezbollah, but they have been replaced with “a deal with the devil,” as the Obama administration once put it, referring to their own tacit support of Al Qaeda that continues well into the age of Trump.

The titans of American statecraft have given us plenty of fictions to ponder, but none of it is pleasant.

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