Black Coffee
Why specificity of vision is strategic advantage
You’re in a coffee shop. The barista asks what you’d like.
You know what you don’t want. Definitely not a black coffee.
But what do you want? There are some nice options here.
You hesitate. She moves on.
Three orders later she circles back. Have you decided?
Not yet. But not black coffee.
She nods. The line is growing. She comes back a third time. You’re still not sure what you want, but you are absolutely certain about what you don’t.
She goes.
Returns with a black coffee.
You are more likely to get what you fixate on.
The ordering of our lives, our institutions, our civilizations: the tendency to build an identity entirely out of opposition, as though knowing what you refuse is the same as knowing what you want. The harder you fixate on what you don’t want, the more likely you are to receive it. When your identity is built on rejection, you hand the initiative to everyone who knows what they’re actually building toward.
They know what they want. You only know what you don’t.
Right now, this is operating at the largest scale there is.
The Costume and the Body
For seventy years, negation defined the international order. Not the 1930s. Not another war that swallowed the world. The architecture that emerged from 1945 (the United Nations, Bretton Woods, NATO, the web of treaties and trade frameworks) was built to prevent a specific nightmare from recurring. And for decades, it worked. Partly because the nightmare was still close enough to touch. Partly because American power made the negation enforceable.
But an order that only knows what it opposes can’t regenerate itself. It can’t adapt to conditions its founders never imagined, can’t inspire the commitment its maintenance requires. The original nightmare fades from living memory, and the will to maintain the architecture fades with it.
Machiavelli watched the same pattern five centuries ago. Writing from exile in 1513, he warned against designing politics for the world you wish existed: “Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.” Leaders who govern for the ideal get destroyed by reality. The rules-based international order became its own imagined republic. It appeared to constrain all states equally, to operate on shared principles rather than power. The effectual truth was different. The rules were the rules America wrote. Enforced when convenient. Bent when not. The order rested on American hegemony wearing the costume of multilateral consensus.
This is how order works. Someone builds it, and the architecture reflects the builder’s interests. The problem was that we insisted the costume was the body. And when the gap between appearance and reality widened far enough, others noticed.
And now we deal with the collective guilt. Another poison entirely. The recognition that we helped break the order doesn’t clarify what to build next. It just makes us hesitate. Guilt fixates on what went wrong. The black coffee again: we know what we regret but not what we want.
They noticed because we showed them.
Iraq, 2003: the rules said one thing, America did another. Withdrawal from treaties under multiple administrations. The dollar weaponized through sanctions and SWIFT exclusions, teaching every watching nation that the global financial system was an American instrument, not a neutral one. When the UN spent credibility on politically charged actions while structural paralysis went unaddressed, hair fractures deepened into crevasses.
We taught the world that the rules were a costume. The lesson landed.
China took notes. Patient and strategic, already sketching alternatives. Russia cataloged weaknesses, looking for pressure points. They drew different conclusions, but both arrived at the same observation: the gap between how the order appeared and how it actually operated was the only thing you needed to understand. Institutions serve those who operate them. Stated purposes diverge from actual behavior as reliably as water flows downhill. Watch what the powerful do, not what they say. Then build accordingly.
Now we’re alarmed. China asserts territorial claims boldly. Russia invaded a sovereign European nation. The rules that were supposed to prevent this seem powerless to stop it. And we look at the chaos and say the rules-based order is under attack, yet lack the will to go enforce them.
I think that’s half right. The order is fracturing. But we helped fracture it. We modeled the behavior we now condemn, called it something else, and are surprised that others learned the real lesson rather than the stated one. Americans across the political spectrum contributed. On the right, unilateralism was celebrated as strength. The left championed institutional idealism while quietly tolerating the selective enforcement that kept the system running. Both widened the gap between appearance and reality that others eventually walked through.
What Walked Through
China and Russia are playing different games on the same board.
China is a rising power seeking to redesign the architecture. Belt and Road, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS expansion: patient construction of parallel structures that don’t require American permission to function. China knows what it wants. It can name a positive vision (Sino-centric regional order, economic interdependence on Chinese terms, technological leadership) even if we find that vision threatening. Specificity of vision is strategic advantage. China has it.
Russia is playing a different game entirely. Its economy is smaller than Italy’s. Its demographic trajectory is dire. Disorder is the only environment where a declining power punches above its weight, so Russia sows it: information campaigns, election interference, frozen conflicts, and the invasion of Ukraine as a bet that the rules had decayed enough to survive the consequences. Russia wants only to ensure that no stable order constrains it.
Graham Allison called this structural tension between rising and established powers the Thucydides Trap: historically, 12 of 16 such transitions ended in war. Compelling warning. But the trap may not spring as it has before. Nuclear deterrence changes the calculus. Economic interdependence makes total decoupling suicidal for all parties. And the transition is multipolar, not bipolar: India, the Gulf states, ASEAN nations, the EU are all making independent calculations. The old first-world, second-world, third-world paradigm is long past. We now have entire blocs willing to make decisions based less on international ties.
The danger takes different forms: economic warfare, proxy conflicts, institutional capture, information operations, and the constant risk of miscalculation when there are no agreed rules for the transition. The old pattern was rising power challenges established power, war decides. The new pattern may be protracted competition between systems, none dominant enough to impose order, all too entangled to fully separate. Managed tension on a civilizational scale. And managed tension requires a kind of strategic clarity that nobody has shown yet.
Florence, 1513. Italy fragmented into competing city-states of varying strength. No overarching authority capable of keeping peace. France and Spain exploiting every internal division, playing Italian states against each other for strategic advantage. And within each city-state, factions so consumed by domestic rivalry that they preferred inviting the foreign power to compromising with their neighbor. Florence fell partly because its internal divisions made external exploitation inevitable. Each faction called in the foreigner rather than making peace with the faction next door.
I keep coming back to this. The scale is different. The weapons are different. But the world now is that same Italy. Competing powers exercising influence more directly. Alliances shifting. And the old lesson holding: those with inner division should expect foreign adversaries to exploit it.
This is the truth Americans across the partisan divide need to hear. Every domestic battle that weakens institutional coherence is a strategic gift to Beijing and Moscow. Internal fracture invites external exploitation, and it always has. Florence’s factions weren’t stupid. They were consumed. Each believed the domestic enemy was more dangerous than the foreign one. Each was wrong, and the city paid for generations.
The mechanism doesn’t care about your politics. It cares about your fracture.
Machiavelli warned that the innovator has enemies everywhere: “those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” Building anything durable as things fragment requires what he called virtú: the capacity to see the situation clearly and act before the flood. Fortuna governs half our affairs. Virtú, the other half, is ours if we’ve cultivated the capacity to respond. The levees go up when the weather is fair. Not when the river is already over the banks.
The Barista Is Waiting
So what gets built?
Not a universal system. The architecture that includes actors who benefit from its dysfunction is structurally unstable: too many people inside the house with matches. The imagined republic of universal governance, where every nation agrees to the same rules and plays by them honestly, belongs to a world that never quite existed and certainly won’t return.
Think of the US and Saudi Arabia. Nobody pretends the values align. The relationship serves mutual interests (energy security, regional counterbalance to Iran, arms markets) and both parties know exactly what they’re getting. That honesty is its own kind of durability: more stable than chartered solidarity that nobody believes. An alliance of convenience dressed in the language of shared conviction is just another lie. Call the tier what it is.
The effectual truth of alliance is smaller than we pretend. Coalitions where geopolitics and values converge, tested by behavior rather than declared by charter. Shared interests verified by action. Multiple competing systems worldwide is the logical endpoint. Messier than what we had (or imagined we had). More honest. And built for the world that exists rather than the one we keep projecting onto it.
This is the prescription, updated: see clearly, then build durably. We’re in that window now. What gets built in the coming decade will set the shape of what follows. I don’t think anyone has a clean vision of what this looks like yet. But the people showing up with blueprints, even rough ones, have an advantage over those still mourning the old building. The strategic prerequisite everyone keeps skipping: you cannot build toward something you can’t name.
The same pattern operates at every scale. Nations that can’t say what they’re building toward get the black coffee. So do people.
We define ourselves by what we oppose.
I’m not that kind of person. I would never live like that. I don’t think what they think, don’t want what they want.
The identity feels solid because the opposition feels real. But opposition is a costume with nothing underneath (and we’ve seen where costumes lead). Take away the thing you’re against and there’s nothing there. No vision. No answer to the simplest question anyone can ask: what do you want?
Freedom is expensive. It demands that we tolerate uncertainty, bear responsibility for our choices, generate conviction from somewhere inside rather than borrowing it from the crowd’s negation. Many of us flee that burden into the comfortable work of defining what we’re not. We order by exclusion. And we’re surprised when the cup arrives filled with everything we were trying to avoid.
The barista isn’t going to ask again. Neither is the world. The order is fragmenting. New architectures are being built by people who know exactly what they want, whether we share their vision or not. The rest of us, nations and individuals watching this transition unfold, have the same task ahead. Name something worth building toward. Something specific. Something that demands more of us than opposition.
I think we can. But it starts with knowing what we want. What we’re willing to build, and bear, and carry into the cave.
Be specific. The barista is waiting.
Sources and Inspiration
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom - James Burnham
Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm