On the geographical limits of Donald Trump and the multipolar trap
We are governed without anyone being able to point a finger at governments.
— Ralf Dahrendorf, 2003
In the first week of May 2026 something happened that ran on the margins of the German daily news and never reached most of the comment pages at all. On the evening of Sunday, 3 May, Donald Trump had announced on his platform Truth Social an operation called Project Freedom — American naval units were to escort merchant ships through the Strait of Hormuz, blockaded by Iran, with air support from US aircraft that would operate in part from the Saudi base Prince Sultan Airbase. The operation began on the Monday. Thirty-six hours later it was called off.
What happened in between can be told quickly, according to several concurring reports, above all NBC News of 6 May. Saudi Arabia had been taken by surprise by Trump's announcement — not consulted beforehand, not informed, presented with a fait accompli in a Truth Social post. The reaction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was without precedent in the diplomatic relationship of recent decades: Saudi Arabia informed Washington that it would neither allow US military aircraft to take off from Prince Sultan Airbase nor let them fly through Saudi airspace for this operation. Kuwait followed. A phone call from Trump to the Crown Prince did not settle the matter. The operation was stopped.
Three days later Trump declared that he now believed Iran's assurances that it was not building nuclear weapons, and was prepared to lift sanctions. That was a change of key that nobody had expected. What led the American president, within a single week, from escalation to readiness to negotiate is plain: he had no choice. Geography had decided against him. Without Saudi airspace, no operation. Without the operation, no leverage. Without leverage, only negotiation.
That is the news. It is small compared with many other headlines of the day. It is large if one asks what it means for the global order.
In the stream of commentary on American foreign policy there have for years been two readings, both of which wait for events of this kind and each of which gives them the opposite meaning. The first reading, which we shall call the anti-hegemonic one, sees in Saudi Arabia's refusal the end of an epoch. Unilateral American power, so its thesis runs, has finally broken. The world is becoming multipolar. China, Russia, India and the other risers are gaining influence. And that is a good thing, for the world was dominated by America for too long, and liberation from that dominance creates room for new voices, new values, new possibilities.
The second reading, which we shall call the Atlanticist one, sees a threat in the same event. The West is losing its footing. The rules-based order is crumbling. Authoritarian powers are winning, democratic values are losing. When Saudi Arabia contradicts the American president, that is a symptom of this erosion. What needs to be done: strengthen Western cohesion, bind allies in, form a front against the risers.
Both readings are well represented in the mainstream of political commentary. Their judgements are opposite, but they share an assumption that is rarely spoken because it is taken for granted. Both assume that the hegemonic system they are talking about is an American system. Whoever weakens the hegemony weakens the system. Whoever celebrates or laments the decline of the USA is talking about the decline of a structure.
This assumption is false. And it is false precisely if one takes seriously the structural diagnosis developed in the volumes of the Megamachine hub. The Megamachine, as we understand it, is not an American machine. It is a structural logic that found its most fully developed form so far in America, but it is not tied to America. What Saudi Arabia has weakened is the unipolar constellation. The machine itself emerges from the episode strengthened.
Before we come to the structural diagnosis, it is worth looking at the geographical fact that lies behind the episode. Anyone who lives in a world without an atlas — and that is the world of almost all modern political commentators — easily overlooks how closely the power of the hegemon is bound to the ground.
At its narrowest point the Strait of Hormuz is fifty-one kilometres wide. The shipping lanes run through it in two channels, each about three kilometres wide. Anyone who wants to provide escort in this bottleneck needs air cover from both sides. On the Iranian side it is not to be had. On the Arabian side lies Saudi Arabia. Next to it Bahrain, which is connected to Saudi Arabia by a causeway and can hardly decide independently on matters of security. Next to that the United Arab Emirates, and next to them Oman. The United Arab Emirates have no sufficiently large bases; Oman is diplomatically always oriented towards balance.
Anyone, then, who wants to control the Strait of Hormuz from the West depends on Saudi territory. There is no alternative that geography offers. This has held since the invention of manned flight and will hold as long as tanker aircraft have a limited range and fighter jets need bases to be stationed at. What constitutes the American presence in the region is not the sheer size of the American armed forces. It is the fact that Saudi Arabia has permitted it.
This fact has not only become fragile in May 2026. It always was; it simply was not spoken. Saudi permission was a necessary condition of American power in the Gulf region. As long as Saudi Arabia was a vassal, the condition was met. The moment Saudi Arabia ceases to be a vassal — because it has better alternatives, because its self-image has changed, because a personal snub is the last straw — American power loses its physical ground.
This is not new. The British Empire did not break apart through military defeat but through the end of the conditions for stationing its forces. The withdrawal from India in 1947, the withdrawal from Suez in 1956, the withdrawal from Aden in 1967 were steps in a geographical shrinkage. The navy that once spanned the world depended on bases, and when the bases were lost, its reach was lost too. The American variant of the same dynamic began later and is slower, but it follows the same pattern. Vietnam was a defeat of the ground. Afghanistan was a defeat of the ground. The Strait of Hormuz, on a small scale, was a defeat of the ground. Whoever cannot act without the ground of an ally is governed by geography, not the geographer of his own power.
That is the geographical barrier that Trump ran into in May 2026. It was always there. It only became visible because the diplomatic veils that usually conceal it did not work this time.
The geographical barrier is the obvious point of the episode. The structural point is deeper and less obvious. It concerns the question of how the Megamachine works at all.
In the volumes of the Megamachine hub it has been described again and again that the Megamachine does not work through central control but through conditions of selection. It forces no one to do anything in particular. It merely makes it cheap, attractive, without alternative, to do what serves it. And it makes it expensive, difficult, risky to do anything else. This produces what we call the self-steering of the actors — actors who of their own accord do what the system favours, because their individual incentives guide them there.
This principle works as long as the conditions of selection are in fact more favourable for the individual actors than the alternatives. For decades Mohammed bin Salman was tied to America because the tie paid off for him — military backing, technological modernisation, international recognition, the ability to keep regional rivals in check. In return he supplied oil, stability, military logistics. It was an exchange that both sides found advantageous, and as long as both sides found it advantageous, it ran.
What has changed since about 2017 — the date of the Khashoggi affair is symbolic — is the perception of the alternatives. China brokered the Iranian–Saudi rapprochement. Russia opened up energy diplomacy. India established itself as a major buyer. The BRICS offer banking outside the dollar system. Saudi Vision 2030 projects are increasingly being carried out by Chinese consortia. What was unthinkable twenty years ago — a Saudi crown prince simply informing the American president of the Saudi position over the telephone — is possible today, because the conditions of selection have shifted.
That is the mechanism that becomes visible here. The Megamachine itself established it. It said: every actor follows his interests, and the system runs. But when the interests shift — when a central actor finds that a different alliance is more favourable for him — the system runs against its former centre. The machine knows no loyalty. It knows only incentives. Whoever offers no incentives gets no following.
Trump's mistake was not that he started a war he could not finish. Trump's mistake was that he treated Saudi Arabia as a vassal that is already no longer a vassal. He tightened the conditions of selection — surprise announcement, no consultation, personal snub — without asking himself whether the conditions would hold at all. They do not hold. Bin Salman gave the answer that corresponds to his present interests. From the point of view of the Megamachine this is entirely consistent. From the point of view of American hegemony it is a defeat.
It is precisely here that the point becomes visible. The machine has not left Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has left the American node, because other nodes have become more attractive. But Saudi Arabia itself is not outside the machine. It is another node, with its own logic of accumulation, its own dynamic of extraction, its own platform strategy, its own practice of optimisation. The Vision 2030 projects are perfect examples of this logic — NEOM, Riyadh as a global financial centre, the Public Investment Fund with assets of over nine hundred billion dollars, the subsidiaries that invest in European and American corporations. That is the machine in its Saudi variant. It is no less a machine than its American variant. It merely has different accents.
All structures and nodes are components of the Megamachine. The only question is which of them dominate. That dominance will shift — nothing more.
This brings us to the central thesis of this essay. It runs counter to both obvious readings and is therefore at home in none of the familiar discourses.
The thesis is this: the multipolar world we are now seeing emerge is not the end of the Megamachine. It is the Megamachine in its most effective form.
Three reasons why the multipolar Megamachine will surpass the unipolar one.
The first reason is the diversification of the nodes. A unipolar Megamachine has one weak point — the hegemon. When the hegemon fails (through internal crises, through wrong decisions such as Project Freedom, through economic overstretch), there is a moment of gap. In that gap alternative structures could find room. A multipolar Megamachine does not have this weak point. When one node fails, the others take over. The machine becomes redundant, in the technical sense of the term — redundant does not mean superfluous, but secured several times over. What is redundant is robust. What is robust is harder to disrupt.
The second reason is the tightening of the conditions of selection through competition. In a unipolar world the hegemon can sometimes take a break. It has no serious competition, and its internal structures can relax. In a multipolar world all nodes must optimise permanently, because otherwise a competitor gains an advantage. The American tech sector optimises because the Chinese tech sector optimises. The Chinese optimises because the American optimises. Both optimise because the Saudi Public Investment Fund is coming, because Indian platforms are coming, because African markets are contested. What is celebrated as healthy competition is the tightening of the conditions of selection that were already the problem in the unipolar world. Accumulation is accelerated. Extraction is accelerated. Surveillance is accelerated. Platformisation is accelerated. Nothing slows down; everything speeds up.
The third reason is the myth of plurality. A multipolar world appears to be diverse. Different political systems, different values, different economic models. But beneath the surface of diversity the nodes converge in the decisive mechanisms. China and the USA are opponents in the security discourse, but their tech corporations work with the same algorithms, the same data-extraction practices, the same platform architectures. Russia and Western Europe are opponents in the energy discourse, but their oligarchs follow the same patterns of accumulation. Saudi Arabia and Switzerland are culturally opposites, but their sovereign wealth funds operate with the same return targets. What appears as competition between systems is in fact convergence of mechanisms. Multipolarity is the camouflage under which the Megamachine establishes itself globally.
This thesis will meet with contradiction, and the contradiction deserves an honest engagement. We go through the most important objections and examine whether they correct our diagnosis.
The first objection: China is different. It has a different economic model, strong state control, a different tradition. Whoever equates it with the USA overlooks real differences.
The answer comes in two stages. Yes, there are differences. The Chinese state does in fact have greater direct influence over the economy than the American one. The Communist Party can discipline corporations, as Jack Ma had to learn in 2020. There are interventions that would be unthinkable in the USA. But: the mechanisms that drive the Chinese system — the accumulation of enormous corporate wealth, the platformisation of social life, data extraction by Tencent and Alibaba and ByteDance, the optimisation of every area of life by algorithms, the shift of work into the gig economy — are the same as in the West. State control disciplines the mechanisms; it does not abolish them. The Chinese model is not an alternative to the Megamachine. It is the Megamachine with additional state supervision. The supervision makes the model controllable for the Communist Party. It does not make the system any less systemic.
The second objection: Russia is different. It is not a capitalist power in the Western sense. It has its own tradition, its own values, a different relationship to technology.
The answer: Russia in its present state is a particularly undisguised form of the Megamachine. The oligarch structure that emerged in the 1990s is accumulation in its most brutal form. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is greater than in the West. The dynamic of extraction towards the population is less embellished. Putin's consolidation disciplined the oligarchs, but not the oligarchic system. Energy diplomacy is Megamachine practice in pure form — raw materials for capital, capital for loyalty, loyalty for protection. What distinguishes Russia from the USA is the surface, not the logic.
The third objection: India is different. It is the world's largest democracy, a multi-ethnic state, a society with its own cultural depths.
The answer: India follows the logic of the Megamachine in a variant that is modified by demographic size and cultural heterogeneity, but not suspended. The concentration of wealth among a few great families (Ambani, Adani) is extreme. Platformisation through Aadhaar, through UPI, through Reliance Jio is just as comprehensive as in the West, in some places more comprehensive. The optimisation of work, the extraction of data, the algorithmisation of life — all of it is running. Modi's national discourse of modernisation is not an alternative to the Megamachine; it is its Indian variant. It has a stronger state accent than the American one, a stronger religious accent than the Chinese one. But the mechanisms are the same.
The fourth objection: there are spaces that have not yet been integrated into the Megamachine. Tribal societies, subsistence economies, religious communities that live alternative forms. Whoever regards all nodes as Megamachine overlooks these spaces.
The answer: they do indeed exist, and they matter. But they are margins, not nodes. The Megamachine does not form a geographical totality — it leaves edges in which something else is possible. In these edges lies what little hope our situation still holds at all. But they are edges, not nodes. They are not in a position to challenge the machine. They are in a position to protect themselves from it, and even that only to a limited extent now. Brazil's indigenous peoples, Mexico's Zapatistas, the reindeer herders of northern Siberia, the Kurdish self-administration in Rojava — they are examples of something different, but they are not components of global power.
The fifth objection: the diagnosis is deterministic. It leaves no room for change, for movements, for politics.
The answer: yes, it does leave room. But it does not leave it where it is usually sought — not in the change of hegemons, not in the rise of new powers, not in the competition of the nodes. It leaves it in the construction of new structures that are not Megamachine. That is a much smaller hope than the multipolar one. It is the hope that at particular points, in particular structures, through concrete legal and institutional construction, something different becomes possible. A company with bound assets (Gesellschaft mit gebundenem Vermögen, a proposed German legal form for steward-owned companies) is such a construction. A cooperative such as Mondragón in the 1950s was such a construction. A denominational order of money (Sortenordnung des Geldes) would be such a construction. They are small constructions, local, hard to scale, constantly threatened by the selection pressure of the machine. But they are something other than the machine. The multipolar world is not.
In the preparatory work for the follow-up volume — the planned book on the cybernetic economic model — we have worked with three-dimensional visualisations that represent the economic system as a bipyramid. Two poles, accumulation at the top and distribution at the bottom, and four factors at the equator: labour, capital, land, knowledge. The shape is robust, it carries a number of observations, it can be rotated, it shows different constellations depending on the angle of view.
What we have so far assumed implicitly — and must now correct — is that this bipyramid is a national form. The German economy, the French, the American. If the diagnosis of this essay is right, the bipyramid is not national. It is the global form, and it repeats itself in every node of the global Megamachine. There is an American bipyramid, a Chinese one, a Saudi one, an Indian one, a German one — and they all have the same shape. The only thing that differs is size.
What multipolarity means can be said more precisely in this language: it is not a structural change. It is a change in relative sizes. The American bipyramid is shrinking, the Chinese one is growing. The Saudi one is becoming visible because it has grown. The German one is becoming visible because it is shrinking. But the shape remains identical. Accumulation at the top, distribution at the bottom, the four factors on the ring.
A genuine alternative would have to be a different shape. Not a bipyramid in a different place, but a shape that no longer has the accumulation–distribution relationship as its central polar axis. A shape in which the poles are set differently, in which the factors are weighted differently, in which the relationships of effect run differently. That is precisely what the follow-up volume would be about. The present essay clears the ground for this question — by taking away the hope that some shift in dominance would be enough to help.
The diagnosis has consequences for the European situation that are not exactly comfortable. Since the end of the Cold War, Europe has lived in a position fed by American hegemony. It was junior partner, ally, sometimes a critical thorn in the side of the big brother, but always with the certainty that the basic order stood firm. That certainty is over.
The obvious European reaction would be: we must become more sovereign. We must build our own structures, our own platforms, our own defence industry, our own energy supply. We must become a node that does not depend on American grace.
This reaction is understandable, and it has its justification. But if the diagnosis of this essay is right, it leads to the wrong solution. A European node in the Megamachine is no counter-model to the Megamachine. It is merely one more node, with the same mechanisms of accumulation and extraction as the others, only now with a European tint. The Strait of Hormuz would then be a European problem, no longer an American one. But the problem itself would remain.
The more difficult but more consistent European reaction would be: we must learn what an alternative to the machine could be at all. Not another node in the machine, but a different form. We have material for this in our history — the cooperative movement of the nineteenth century, the ordoliberal tradition of Eucken, Müller-Armack and Erhard, the social market economy in its original sense, the company with bound assets, which has been under development since 2019 and in March 2026 was given a framework concept for the second time. These are not grand designs; they are small-scale constructions that work in niches. But they are the only trace that points in a direction other than the shifting of dominance within the Megamachine.
What Europe could learn from Saudi Arabia is not the strategy of growing power. It is the insight that even the hegemon is bound by geography and by conditions of selection. What Europe must learn is not how to build yet another node. It is the patient, long-term construction of structures that do not answer the Megamachine but let something else grow in its shadow.
Project Freedom was a small event. In the history books, if it is mentioned at all, it will remain a footnote. But it is a clear case in which several structural lines become visible — the geographical barrier of the hegemon, the shift in the conditions of selection, the end of Saudi Arabia's vassalage, the disintegration of the unipolar constellation.
The central point of this essay is that none of these findings means the end of the Megamachine. On the contrary. What we are now seeing emerge is a multipolar world in which the Megamachine has more nodes, is more robust, optimises itself faster, is harder to control. What appears as liberation from the American yoke is the generalisation of the logic of the yoke.
The question that is answered not in this essay but in the follow-up volume we are working on is: what would a different form be? Which structures, which institutions, which constructions could grow in the margins, once one knows that no shift will help? How would property have to be constituted, and money, labour, innovation, so that something other than the machine can arise?
There are no quick answers to these questions. There is only patient work on concrete constructions that must hold their own against the selection pressure of the machine — and that mostly fail, as Mondragón failed in its original form, because the pressure was too great. This work is lengthy, less heroic than the anti-hegemonic gesture, less spectacular than enthusiasm for new risers. But it is the only work that could seriously bring forth something other than what exists.
Mohammed bin Salman has shown the American president that even the greatest power has limits. The limits are geographical and they are structural. But they are not limits of the Megamachine. They are only the limits of one particular node. The machine itself is not bound by its limits. It carries on, in its shadow and in that of the other nodes. Whoever fails to see this is hoping for a solution that is none.
The multipolar world is not the end of the Megamachine. It is the Megamachine in its most effective form — more robust, because redundant; faster, because driven by intensified competition; camouflaged, because hidden in diversity.
Whoever wants to fight the machine cannot do so by shifting dominance. Whoever pins their hopes on the rise of new powers has understood nothing.
The only thing that helps is the patient construction of new forms — smaller, more local, more laborious, less certain. But they have the advantage that they could actually be something other than what we want to fight.
— Hans Ley & Claude Dedo / beyond-decay.org