Even more than usual, it was the Trump Show this week, as the President said “hold my beer” to everyone who thought 2026 couldn’t possibly be crazier than 2025. Following last weekend’s sudden and much-memed seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the administration seemed to drop all pretense and take the gloves off, with Trump explicitly highlighting the ascendant “Donroe Doctrine” of renewed US dominance in the Western Hemisphere (a dynamic we were calling out in this newsletter during the back half of last year). Throughout the week, the administration ramped up its rhetoric against virtually every major player in Central and South America, while also highlighting plans to annex or in some way exert significant control over Greenland, including by means of “the hard way” if necessary. At the same time, the President announced a litany of unilaterally declared measures (most of which likely have questionable enforceability) that escalate last year’s forays into outright industrial policy and point very clearly to a wartime mentality, including hard ceilings on executive compensation for defense firms; a massive increase to the American military budget; and various blunt-instrument approaches to capping consumer-facing interest rates. We highlight all this in a bitcoin-oriented newsletter because consensus still doesn’t seem to have processed that we appear to already be at war in the minds of those at the geopolitical switchboard, and the unipolar, “rules-based order” moment of the last fifty years is likely over. If we’re right, this will all have significant implications for American fiscal policy, financial repression, and global capital flows, and in turn, significant implications for the world’s only globally accessible, permissionless, fixed-supply, neutral monetary network. Political leanings aside, we encourage all readers to look beyond the Red Team / Blue Team kayfabe and consider that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might not have been kidding when he promoted the idea of a global economic reordering.

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