Weaponizing Time: Elite Anxiety and the Fight for a Closing Window

 

Welcome aboard Worldlines! You’ve joined a space where we untangle the threads connecting geopolitics, societal issues, and modern history. As someone exploring how people and places shape our world, I’m excited to share research-driven insights that go beyond the usual headlines. For now, you’ll receive select analyses right in your inbox. But if you’re curious to look deeper—from detailed curated bibliographies to subscriber-only discussions—consider upgrading to full access. The first of a two-part analysis. Here, we dissect the ideological and historical roots of Western elite panic. Next, we examine its material base and the dangerous military doctrines it has spawned. Nel Aug 21   READ IN APP   Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) - This Romantic masterpiece embodies the fog that permeates contemporary geopolitics. Created during Europe's imperial scramble, the painting's obscured vision mirrors how Western elites both navigate and manufacture uncertainty in the multipolar age. Prelude: The Mist That Never Burns Off We stand at an inflection point where the very architecture of global order is being recalibrated. Dmitry Trenin, former colonel of Russian military intelligence, director emeritus of the Carnegie Moscow Center, and astute chronicler of an emergent multipolarity, frames this process in early July 2025 as he observed: “Many are now talking about humanity drifting toward a ‘third world war’... In fact, the world war is already here, even if not everyone has noticed or realized it. The pre-war period ended for Russia in 2014, for China in 2017, and for Iran in 2023... This is not a ‘second cold war.’ Beginning in 2022, the West’s war against Russia took on a decisive character.” Trenin's insight is clear: conflict now permeates the global system like fog, diffuse, omnipresent, obscuring the horizon. This article, however, looks beyond the visible eruptions (as critical as they are): Tariffs rise, joint war games hosted by Australia not seen on this scale before, and nuclear sharing arrangements from Washington to London are now announced in the press. Then there are the verbal nuclear tensions, or what KJ Noh, a geopolitical analyst specializing in the continent of Asia, recently called dangerous precisely because it signals movement up the escalation ladder:“The signals themselves are part of that ladder." And most recently, Washington has moved ships and troops into the Caribbean near Venezuela while placing President Nicolás Maduro on a wanted list. Such events and processes are serious symptoms. But what lies beneath all of this? Our focus will examine the subterranean frameworks of elite cognition, which have developed over time, that convert economic emergence into an existential threat. When Trenin speaks of a war “already here,” he describes a reality where development itself, technological leaps, infrastructure corridors, and resource sovereignty are seen as weapons by Western (elite) perception. The mist that grows out of these worldviews is obscuring the chessboard, and it is (partly) manufactured. This, then, is a dissection of that fog’s composition: Elite panic over narrowing resource access and fading ideological monopoly. Strategic ambiguity: a deliberate weaponization of time and uncertainty that forces rivals to hedge everywhere at once. Multi-Domain Operations (MDO): the doctrine that stitches finance, information, cyber, and kinetic force into one rolling, low-visibility offensive. Washington and its closest allies (or vassals) are not even trying to out-develop BRICS on civilian terms; they aim to bleed them, to overextend them, to underpower them: economically, diplomatically, kinetically—before the technological gap flips irreversibly. What we are observing is a desperate game of chance based on the assumption that military attrition can (at least) stall a tectonic shift in the current global order. That choice, rooted in an older colonial logic which framed “non-Western development” as inherently threatening, explains why every Russian drone or Chinese port deal is read as casus belli. The hourglass drains as Western elites weaponize time itself, turning uncertainty into their sharpest weapon through a fog deliberately engineered not to burn off; for in this manufactured mist, they seek to stall the very shift they cannot prevent. Introduction: A Changing World A quiet, palpable panic simmers beneath the official communiqués of Washington and Brussels. This elite anxiety defies conventional polling, not least because its subjects expertly evade scrutiny. It is deeper, almost existential: a dawning recognition among Western power centers, particularly the United States and its core dependencies, that their entrenched political, economic, and military hegemony is unraveling. Surface manifestations appear frantic, even disorganized, yet this panic fuels a far more perilous response: calculated, systematic escalation. The post-1945 order, engineered for transatlantic dominance, frays as BRICS consolidates influence, sovereign assertions multiply, and critical resources flow beyond Western control. For elites whose material and symbolic status depends on global primacy, this shift threatens more than markets or ideology; it undermines their foundational position in the world hierarchy. The loss is tangible: energy supplies, mineral wealth, shipping lanes, and the ability to dictate rules of trade and finance now resist their reach. Extraordinary profits shrink, military power projection falters, and coercive leverage over commercial agreements weakens. This anxiety has roots in history. To understand its depth, we must revisit the contrasts between today’s multipolar challenge and the Cold War era it superficially resembles. I. From Cold War Containment to Material Erosion Comparisons to the Cold War reveal the distinction. Back then, the Soviet Union offered an ideological rival but did not jeopardize the core material underpinnings of Western power. Global resource flows remained secure, and technological leadership was largely intact. Containment was brutal but feasible: as Lindsey A. O’Rourke documents, the U.S. executed 64 covert and six overt regime-change operations between 1947 and 1989. China’s rise is qualitatively different. It reshapes the channels through which global capital and resources move. Unlike the isolated Soviet experiment, China embedded itself in supply chains while simultaneously building parallel systems of trade, finance, and infrastructure. Economist Yi Wen captures the transformation in The Making of an Economic Superpower: “China's development experience showed to the world that the centuries-long Western-style 'natural' and lengthy market-fermentation process can be dramatically accelerated and re-engineered by the government, by its acting as the market creators in place of the missing merchant class—yet without repeating the Western powers’ old development path of barbaric primitive accumulations based on colonialism and imperialism and slave trade.” What this model challenges is not merely Western ideology but the very narrative of exceptionalism that has justified elite power for centuries. An Existential Model Shift This alternative model disproves Western exceptionalism. Prosperity no longer appears tethered to liberal democracy or free-market capitalism, undermining both ideology and material dominance. As historian Adam Tooze observed in his June 2025 address at the Center for China & Globalization: “When large-scale development happens, it's obviously a huge human benefit, but it also utterly changes the power balance.” In green technology, for example, China “has completely broken the envelope” with ultra-high voltage transmission, creating “the global electrostate… proudly bearing the China State Grid label.” Tooze concludes: “Power is entailed, and dependency is entailed… We need to talk détente. We need to talk mutual coexistence.” Technological change does more than solve shared challenges; it reshapes geopolitical hierarchies. Western elites face a comprehensive reordering of the systems that sustained global primacy since 1945: resource access, financial mechanisms, and the technological edge that underpinned military dominance. Digital hegemony remains contested but not yet lost; time remains to attempt victory in the technological-military race—a fact evident in the growing fusion of military-tech corporations and war-driven state actors. Strategic Ambiguity and Elite Survival Within this context, strategic ambiguity—deliberate, public unpredictability—and synergetic multi-domain operations—integrated military, economic, and psychological pressure—emerge less as tactical maneuvers than as survival mechanisms. They aim not at outright victory but at maintaining the appearance of control. Born from supremacist frameworks and amplified by deepening inequality, these doctrines were first described not as Western innovations but as alleged Russian or Chinese “efforts to remain below the threshold of armed conflict,” as one 2020 Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin article put it. Ironically, they forecast the very doctrines NATO and U.S. planners would refine for themselves. As Emmanuel Todd has noted, projection often reveals more about the accuser than the accused. What we are witnessing is a desperate gambit: ambiguity and integrated pressure deployed to manufacture friction, delay an irreversible transformation, and preserve privilege against the momentum of history. With this backdrop, the article turns to the deeper structures and historical continuities that explain how elite anxiety has transformed into a doctrine of permanent, low-visibility conflict. II. The Ideological Foundations of Elite Panic A world in flux disrupts not only geopolitics but the mental architecture of those who believed history had ended in their favor. As geopolitical economy analyst Warwick Powell observes, the slow decline of Western hegemony brings into question the entire philosophical edifice that justified its global dominance: “The question of civilizational dialogue is becoming more pressing because the monologue of a singular, linear European developmental story is no longer sustainable… We are now confronting a new dimension of the ‘empire’s abyss’—its narrative framework, or its mental model of how the world works, no longer reflects its former ideological ambitions.” The story Powell names, colonial liberalism, rests on a hierarchical view of human development: that freedom, civilization, and rational governance unfold along a European timeline, measured by proximity to Western norms. Religious and secular strands meet here: Hegel and Mill, missionary and merchant, university and gunboat. The belief in a civilizing mission still informs foreign policy, even when cloaked as “democracy promotion” or “humanitarian intervention.” This architecture adapted with the slow process of decolonization. Where the metropole once ruled by decree, it now governs by standards, benchmarks, and conditionalities. Where the empire once drew borders, it now sets rules for trade, finance, data, and “responsible” technology. And when material realities threaten the story, the story is rewritten as a threat assessment. (Which in turn informs actions.) Racial Militarism as Prehistory Jasmine K. Gani, a scholar of international relations in a historical perspective, shows that European militarism surged not from a sense of superiority alone but from civilizational anxiety, insecurity about rank when “an ascendant Muslim Orient” pressed close in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The response was twofold: material expansion and discursive boundary‑making. In her words: “This (insecurity) created an imperative to (re)assert a hierarchy through military expansion and derogatory stigmas about their rivals’ military capacity… an insistence on the Orient’s military and intellectual weakness was baked into European militarism. This racial militarism initially compensated for European self‑doubt and insecurity, later provided chauvinistic self‑knowledge, and finally offered moral justification for colonization.” Gani notes how proximity sharpened anxiety: ideologues often placed “Oriental” peoples relatively high, just below Europeans, so closeness had to be pried open with stigma. American ethnologist John Wesley Powell (1888) had already identified military strength, organization, and a capacity for destruction as traits of an “advanced, civilized community.” The equation held: to be modern was to monopolize organized violence at home and project it abroad. Read with Max Weber, the story is familiar: the monopoly of legitimate organized violence becomes the hallmark of the modern state, while the ability to project that violence becomes the hallmark of a “civilized” one. Rising militarism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries then “played a central role in embedding racial hierarchies in the European imagination,” which were materialized in colonial administration. Gani, thus, supplies the prehistory; what follows is its codification. Colonial Liberalism’s Strategic Reincarnations John M. Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics traces how early IR formalized this racial worldview. Between 1860 and 1914, two branches coalesced: racist‑realism (Mahan, Mackinder), seeking to contain the capable non‑white, and liberal racism (Pearson, Kidd), promising uplift that faded, when needed, into exterminatory projects. The “standard of civilization” ranked Europeans at the top (with Western hyper‑sovereignty and denial of Eastern and Southern sovereignty), “yellow barbarism” in the middle, and “black savagery” at the bottom. Hobson catalogs the fears that animated both branches: “yellow demography,” “tropical climate,” “racial inter‑breeding,” and the “enemy within” of an “unfit” white working class and shows how they influenced and, consequently, organized conquest and policy. In contemporary policy we can still recognize three lanes that reflect these worldviews: Liberal internationalism: civilize the periphery through “democracy promotion” (e.g., EU’s Eastern Partnership). Liberal realism: contain, then civilize via sanctions and proxy arming (e.g., AUKUS, export controls; sanction first, train later). Siege realism: contain the “barbarian at the gate” through rearmament and walls (e.g., TikTok bans, tariff schedules). These mental frameworks lead to routinized practices, embedded in law, procurement, and media. The names have changed; the organizing grammar has not. Still, there was a short historical exception. The Cold War Exception The Cold War represented a temporary deviation from this pattern, not its negation. Western elites viewed the USSR as an ideological rival rather than an existential threat to their domestic and global roles. During the post-war order, for forty years, western elites bought social peace to their countries: rising wages, cheap petrol, subsidized university places. Why? Because the USSR's very existence, combined with strong labour unions, made concessions cheaper than repression of inner opposition. Once the Soviet Union folded, the bargain expired. Profits recovered, inequality climbed, and social programs atrophied. The US functional and governing elites succeeded in containing the "threat" through forceful interventions (Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia), covert operations (El Salvador, Chile, Burkina Faso), and less coercive means in European countries. This allowed for détente and elite compromise (Nixon's China opening). The global opening to globalization rested on the idea of a civilizing mission through commerce, which "failed" specifically concerning China. But what about today? A Doctrinal Exhibit: Russian Perspective and Operational Framework (2020) A recent example of this grammar appears in the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin article Russian Perspective and Operational Framework. The paper warns that Russia employs a “whole‑of‑Russia” approach that blurs competition and conflict, and civilian and military spheres. It begins by admitting a categorical error that reveals the underlying framework: “We misapplied our own worldview to Russia and assessed Russia as European after the collapse of the Soviet Union, seeking to bring them into the NATO tent in the fight against violent extremism. We were disappointed when Russia acted as a distinct Eurasian nation state, wholly apart from Western Europe, that rejected a progressive NATO encroachment toward Moscow.” The authors then re‑cast a diverse policy repertoire as a single campaign: “While it may appear the Russians are conducting a broad range of discrete actions across the Eurasian landmass, it is actually a campaign across the theater. The Russians are employing new technologies and techniques to accomplish traditional tasks, which often obfuscates their intent or purpose.” Conceding that Russian actions are largely positional, they nevertheless fold everything into one category: “Russia remains opportunistic, but their actions are strategically defensive… The dichotomy between hybrid and conventional is a false one—Russia does not distinguish or compartmentalize warfare as the West does… Instead, when understanding Russia, and China, we should simplify their actions to one—warfare.” Having simplified, the conclusion follows: “unacceptable risks to NATO” and the need for “enhanced forward posture.” Thus, the barbarian‑containment frame persists without explicit slurs. Yet, port investments, gas contracts, or lithium deals are read as “below‑threshold warfare,” i.e., casus belli by other means. The significance lies less in tactical analysis than in assumption: non‑Western development is intelligible primarily as a threat. A civilizational coding—“Eurasian,” “not European”—anchors a worldview in which whole societies are construed as engaged in permanent, whole‑of‑nation warfare. That reading licenses a mirror response: continuous sanctions, information operations, posture changes, technology denial, and proxy support woven into a single operational fabric. Civilizational Essentialism in the Mainstream: Media as Ideological Conduit Once lodged in doctrine, the grammar travels from staff papers to the TV studio, where it tries to acquire popular legitimacy. Consider two appearances on Germany’s Markus Lanz, one by military analyst Florence Gaub (2022) and another by journalist Katrin Eigendorf (2025). Gaub offered the template: “We must not forget that, although Russians look European, they are not Europeans—at least not culturally. They have a different relation to violence, a different relation to death. There is no liberal, postmodern view of life where each person individually designs their own life as a project. Life can end early.” Eigendorf hardened the line: “I believe that, fundamentally, the understanding of what war is is different in Russia… This is the DNA from which what we are experiencing today has grown… The military has always been part of Russian DNA.” The pattern is consistent: an entire population is rendered war‑minded, death‑accepting, and collectively implicated in violence. “DNA” language pushes the argument toward biologized cultural determinism, a direct echo of early twentieth‑century eugenic thinking that Hobson catalogs. The move mirrors the military paper’s injunction to “simplify… to one—warfare.” As complexity collapses, the range of legitimate policy narrows; sanctions and collective punishment become thinkable as moral necessity. Emmanuel Todd’s aside captures the projection at work: “Russia is our Rorschach test.” However, the danger is not rhetorical excess alone. This discourse prepares the public for policies that treat entire societies as legitimate targets. Diplomacy shrinks, escalation reads as prudence, and “peace” becomes a synonym for capitulation. III. Temporal Panic Historian Paul Chamberlin reminds us that empires are governed by clocks (as they are by territory and resources). In the 1930s, a crowded world of empires generated enclosure anxiety: most of the globe was already partitioned; the United States rose meteoric in the West; the Soviet Union consolidated in the East. Leaders in Rome, Tokyo, and Berlin drew a blunt lesson: to matter, you must have an empire, and time was short. As Chamberlin puts it, aspiring powers felt they had “a short window of time to build themselves up and to seize… imperial territories” before they would be “at the mercy” of rival hegemons. Wars ignited not solely over abstract ideology but over access and order: who controlled territories, sea lanes, and resource flows. Britain and France fought Germany not because it was Nazi in essence, Chamberlin notes, but because it invaded Poland, threatened the existing structure; in Asia, Japanese encroachment on Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines triggered conflict. The lesson for today is the question of tempo. When U.S. planners speak of “shrinking windows” with China, they voice an old imperial anxiety in modern terms: act now or be constrained later. Present resonance: Washington now thinks in terms of supply‑chain sovereignty and chokepoint stewardship, not per se territorial expansion (even though this had been voiced by Trump around the question of Greenland and Canada). BRICS de-dollarization, nationalization of critical minerals, and the rerouting of energy corridors are perceived in Washington as threats. The fear is not just that ideology spreads; it’s that access hardens against leverage. Chamberlin’s observation that Britain went to war over territorial encroachment finds echoes in twenty‑first‑century practice, where interventions and sanctions aim less to promote democracy than to arrest realignment of control over pipelines, ports, and payments. The proxy template persists: 1940–45: The US leverages British imperial infrastructure while Soviet and Chinese forces absorb the continental blow; it chooses when and where to fight. 2022–25: The West uses Ukraine as an attrition sink against Russia (with the EU as subsidy sink and shock absorber); in the Indo‑Pacific, cultivate standoffs that keep Beijing reactive (e.g., Taiwan Strait transits, South China Sea patrols). Operationally, the continuity is stark. The 1940 Plan Dog memorandum set “Germany first” and envisioned using British imperial bases as launchpads. In September that year, the Destroyers‑for‑Bases deal exchanged decommissioned U.S. ships for 99‑year leases on British colonial sites across the Western Hemisphere. Maritime power, logistics, and amphibious proficiency allowed Washington and London to hold the initiative while the Soviets and Chinese fought largely on the defensive. By early 1944, Allied fear was no longer of Axis victory but that the Soviets would win too quickly and dictate peace: one motive for the rush to Normandy. The modern analogue is often about China: if Chinese tech‑industrial capacity races ahead, it will write the standards and close the window on coercive leverage. That temporal panic shapes today’s escalatory bias. Colonial Violence Repatriated Chamberlin is blunt about method. Anglo‑American “strategic bombing” prior to spring 1944 largely meant bombing civilians. The permissibility of such campaigns was incubated in the interwar colonies, where bombardment of Ethiopian towns or artillery against Damascus was coded as “savage warfare.” With World War II, that repertoire migrated home. In a “savage war,” the restrictions on “civilized” war do not apply; entire populations become targets; resettlement and reprisals follow. The same cognitive ladder that renders non‑Western societies “outside” the laws of civilized war makes population‑level targeting thinkable again. The category slides easily forward into the present. Today, population‑centric punishment frequently arrives through financial siege (broad sanctions that collapse wages and medicine imports), infrastructure strikes (grids, bridges, ports), and information throttling (de‑platforming and media bans). These are the late‑modern lineal descendants of the “savage war” toolkit: civilian pain is treated as leverage rather than as a constraint on policy. IV. Pointillist Empire: Light‑Touch, Heavy Leverage Out of this convergence emerged a lighter imperial form. As Daniel Immerwahr argues, post‑1945 America did not annex vast territories like empires of old. Yet, it built an archipelago of bases, paired with naval and air supremacy, financial chokepoints, and technological standards: a “pointillist empire” that could be everywhere, and, when signalling was needed, brutally exemplary. Amphibious reach, carrier groups, global airlift, and the ability to strike atomically or conventionally from dispersed nodes preserved initiative without formal colonies. Cultural and informational infrastructures, Hollywood, NGOs, and development banks completed the grid. This form is most vulnerable where multipolar sovereignty closes chokepoints and re‑routes flows. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 36 — “the terrific boomerang effect” of colonial violence. Closing Notes: Transition to Part II Methods refined abroad return to organize life at home (from the Western viewpoint); languages coined for an empire reappear as common sense. The feeling of time running out is not a novelty in imperial statecraft, but it is once again the principal accelerant. Where the metropole once feared territorial enclosure, it now fears sovereignty by other means: development banks with their own standards, lithium nationalization, energy corridors that bypass favored hubs, payment systems that ignore the dollar. The pointillist empire of bases meets a world busy rerouting the map. The response still follows an old grammar. Strategic ambiguity and the logic of multi-domain operations supply the administrative nerve of a “savage war” mindset updated for the 21st century: whole societies are read as civilizational threats, so whole societies become fair game through sanctions that collapse wages and medicine imports, through tech denial lists that strangle industrial lifecycles, through information campaigns that fix an enemy’s “DNA.” The media essentialism of Gaub and Eigendorf, along with the doctrinal simplifications in staff papers, provides a license for a strategy that must believe in the barbarism of its targets to justify permanent pressure or worse. In that fog, the wager is simple. Not to win in any decisive sense, but to win time: to keep the attrition plateau intact until some outside relief (a technological leap, a rival’s crisis) restores room to maneuver. It is governance by delay. What is happening in material terms? Which doctrines, budgets, and pipelines knit the fog together? Where might the plateau crack: fiscal saturation, alliance fatigue, or a lurch into escalation when other strategies stop working? Part II takes up those questions. We shift from worldview to machinery—qualitatively, by reading the texts and artifacts that do the work: Strategic ambiguity as tempo control: how “talks,” pauses, and feints choreograph strikes, force costly hedging, and keep rivals reactive. MDO’s finance-to-fires pipeline: how sanctions, export controls, cyber actions, and limited kinetic moves are sequenced as one operation. Multipolar resistance: how China, Russia, Iran, and non-aligned partners build endurance, and how their own clocks shape choices. If this essay clarified anything or made you ponder, add your voice. Comment, share, translate, argue with the premises. The debate over how time, technology, and ideology are being weaponized belongs to all of us, not just to think-tanks and late-night panels. Leave a comment Support Independent Analysis If this first installment on elite anxiety, strategic ambiguity, and the politics of time proved useful, please consider helping me keep this project going: Subscribe to this Substack for more long-form, qualitative analysis of geopolitics and political geography. Upgrade to paid Share the essay with friends, colleagues, classes, or on social platforms—debate thrives when ideas circulate. Share Join the discussion below: add corrections, sources, counterpoints, or leads for Part II. Leave a comment If this piece helped, consider buying me a coffee—thank you. Democracies fray when scrutiny fades. By subscribing or sharing, you help sustain independent journalism that cuts through noise and dogma. Contact: Bluesky: @themindness.bsky.social X: @noirnen Leave a comment Stay curious, Nel