strategic incompetence, redux

It is an era of strategic incompetence. Except, of course, that so was almost every era that came before it.

Trump and Iran. Putin and Ukraine. Potentially China and Taiwan. The pattern looks contemporary only because we are trapped inside its current machinery and complex consequences. History has generally been spotlighted, outlined, and periodically detonated by extreme stupidity wearing the (ie narrative) camouflage of ideological destiny.

The uncomfortable fact is that human societies are profoundly entrained to tragic narratives of past suffering. Those narratives become identity. Identity becomes obligation. Obligation becomes repetition. We inherit old wounds as maps, then act surprised when they keep leading us back to the same ruins.

To be the kinds of selves and societies we currently are may be impossible without this madness: endless conflict, adversarial geopolitics, ritualised threat, the constant conversion of injury into legitimacy. It is atavistic, but not accidental. Conflict is not merely something humans do. It is one of the deep structures through which human groups organise memory, belonging, authority, and meaning.

This is where orbit frame dynamics matters, without needing to ration the theory. The relationship between humans and conflict behaves like a topological defect: not a local error that can simply be corrected, but a structural twist that reappears through experience, behaviour, belief, and narrative identity. We do not merely remember conflict. We become organised around it.

There may be little chance of restoring this vessel. But understanding the dynamics still matters. Not because explanation saves us, but because without it we keep mistaking the latest strategic idiocy for an exception, when it is closer to the operating system.