At the May 14 Beijing summit, Xi Jinping reached for two words: Thucydides Trap. The phrase describes what happens when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one. Of the sixteen historical cases on record, twelve ended in war. Here is the part nobody dwells on. Athens, the rising power in the original analog, lost. So did Imperial Germany in 1918, Nazi Germany in 1945, and Imperial Japan in 1945.
When Xi reaches for Thucydides, he is invoking a framework where the rising side is the one that gets bled. The question is not whether the collision is coming. It is who is still standing when it ends.
All this and more on this week’s episode of Milkshakes, Markets, & Madness.
Tom Luongo argues that the prevailing narrative about Israel controlling US foreign policy via AIPAC and Epstein blackmail is a deliberate distraction from the real conflict: a battle between Trump’s new-world America and old European colonial money (Davos, City of London, French/British interests) that historically created and funded the IRGC and Iran’s “axis of resistance” as a chaos node in the Middle East.
He contends Trump is deliberately rewiring global oil and trade flows away from old-world chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Gibraltar) toward the Americas, Chinese coast, and Russian east, having already secured Alaskan oil deals with China and Japan while the UAE expands to 3.5–3.8 million barrels/day at Fujairah and Saudis push 7 million barrels/day across to the Red Sea.
Luongo predicts another US bombing wave on Iran after Trump returns from Beijing, a brewing dollar liquidity crisis in offshore markets, the end of OPEC as Venezuela and the UAE exit, and a “bottom-up” rally in the Russell 2000 as the durable signal of Trump’s transformation working.
Hidden hand behind Iran is Davos, not Israel: Luango asserts the IRGC and axis of resistance were a British/French operation with documented monetary ties, and Iran’s recent shift to bombing the UAE (not Israel) reveals Dubai was being set up as the new City of London after Swiss banking privacy collapsed, which is why globalists are “histrionic” about Trump moving on Iran.
Trump’s oil rewiring kills old-world chokepoints: Saudis are exporting 7 million barrels/day across the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea with zero Houthi interference, the UAE is expanding Fujairah pipeline capacity to 3.5–3.8 million barrels/day, and Trump has secured Alaskan oil deals with China and Japan so they bypass Hormuz, Malacca, and the South China Sea entirely.
Iran lost 50 years of capital and has no winning move: Trump doesn’t need regime change or invasion because the US blew up trillions in Iranian ballistic missiles, launchers, and hermit-kingdom infrastructure, while Iran has alienated China, Russia, and every Gulf state, making the Tucker Carlson/Megyn Kelly/Dugin “Iran just has to survive to win” framing a redefinition of victory the US never accepted.
Trump-Xi Beijing meeting signals real cooperation: Luango says Trump brought Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang to pitch joint development, secured Chinese purchases of Alaskan oil, and Xi’s rare-earth export bans are normal leverage in negotiations, not betrayal — rare earth processing isn’t technically hard and the US invented the tech before offshoring it.
Dollar liquidity crisis and Russell 2K as the real signal: With Kevin Warsh confirmed at the Fed declaring “Bitcoin is the new gold,” Europe holding ~$2 trillion in US Treasuries doing yield curve control for the US, and the Treasury moving to the center of monetary creation via the Clarity Act, Luango is ignoring the Dow/S&P/Nasdaq and watching only the Russell 2000 small caps as the durable signal of bottom-up reindustrialization, while bracing for a 2008-style replay engineered by European actors to hit Trump before the midterms.
Ryan McMaken walks through Murray Rothbard’s 1963 essay “War, Peace, and the State” (published in The Standard), framing it as Rothbard’s direct response to William F. Buckley Jr.’s critique that libertarians had no theory of foreign policy and obsessed over leash laws while ignoring nuclear war and conscription. Rothbard is explicitly not a pacifist — he distinguishes himself from “Tolstoyans” — but argues violence is only legitimate defensively against actual aggressors, never against innocents, which makes strategic nuclear weapons inherently illegitimate because their purpose is destroying entire cities, a view shared even by Robert McNamara and Pope John XXIII. McMaken emphasizes Rothbard’s exposure of conservative inconsistency: the same people who call domestic anarchism “crackpot” defend international anarchy between states as national sovereignty, while cheering “better dead than red” rhetoric that Ralph Raico notes Theodore Roosevelt himself would have considered Genghis Khan–level barbarism.
The give-me-liberty-or-give-them-death problem: Rothbard’s central moral move is that a just end doesn’t license unjust means — “Jones” pursuing a legitimate defensive war against “Smith” cannot bomb buildings or spray machine-gun fire into crowds to catch him, because killing innocents in pursuit of a legitimate end makes Jones “as much or more of a criminal aggressor” than the original attacker.
Modern weapons of mass destruction are inherently illegitimate: Rothbard rejects the conservative dodge that nukes are merely a “quantitative” not “qualitative” escalation, arguing a weapon designed to kill 10 million versus 1,000 is categorically different, and Raico’s line captures the shift — no American in 1914, not even Theodore Roosevelt, would have cheered annihilating a Japanese city of 100,000.
Vertical vs horizontal violence and the Roman peace: Using Weber’s monopoly-on-violence definition, Rothbard distinguishes “vertical” state-against-public violence (taxation, imprisonment, suppressing secession) from “horizontal” interstate war, and quotes Tacitus’s “where they make a desert they call it peace” to expose that intra-state “peace” is just successful one-way coercion, not voluntary order.
The anti-secession contradiction: Rothbard catches conservatives flat-footed — they insist a single monopoly state must rule everyone domestically to prevent chaos, yet defend international anarchy between 200+ sovereign states, with no principled standard for why centralization is mandatory below the US federal level but forbidden above it; McMaken adds the US and Britain bordered each other peacefully from 1815 to the 1930s.
Four concrete tactics for limiting war: Rothbard’s practical program covers banning weapons that target innocents by design, blocking states from extending their monopoly beyond their territory (including refusing to wage war over a citizen mistreated abroad), reviving 18th–19th century respect for armed neutrality, and starving states of war resources by opposing tax hikes and inflation — while permitting private citizens to voluntarily fund, join, or organize guerrilla and mercenary forces abroad, as discussed in Hoppe’s edited volume The Myth of National Defense.
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