Is Elon Musk really the story, or is he simply the latest symbol of a civilization searching for certainty? Inspired by a recent New York Times opinion video, this analysis goes beyond the man to explore why modern societies transform entrepreneurs into political and cultural icons. When trust in institutions weakens, individuals often become mirrors onto which we project our hopes, fears and anxieties. In the end, the debate is less about Elon Musk than about the identity crisis facing the West.

When empires begin to decline, their elites do not always try to save them. More often, they protect their wealth, negotiate with emerging powers and prepare private lifeboats for the world that comes next.

From the Hellenistic kingdoms to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, history shows that the powerful can recognise institutional collapse while choosing adaptation over resistance. Could something similar be happening in the United States?

This analysis examines Donald Trump, the fragmentation of America’s ruling class and the point at which traditional elites may finally decide that he has become too dangerous to protect. But even if they eventually abandon him, the political order that produced Trump—and the damage created under his administration—may survive his departure.

Is Donald Trump simply an incompetent president, or does his politics follow a deeper and more destructive logic? Through Freud’s concept of the death drive, this analysis examines Trump’s compulsion to repeat: premature declarations of victory, collisions with reality, denial of failure and renewed escalation. From tariffs and mounting debt to the expanding war against Iran, Trump appears unable to transform failure into knowledge. Instead, every defeat produces another enemy and another performance of strength. His movement survives because destruction is not always perceived as failure: weakening institutions, punishing cultural opponents and creating permanent crisis can themselves become political achievements. Trump does not pursue destruction instead of victory. He pursues a form of victory that can exist only through continuous destruction.

In “The Iranian Mirror: Trump’s War Against His Own Reflection,” The Axis examines the war against Iran as more than a military confrontation. Iran has become a mirror reflecting Trump’s own political methods: pride, unpredictability, escalation and resistance to humiliation. The United States may dominate the battlefield, but Tehran continues to deny Trump the symbolic submission he needs to declare victory. The conflict is therefore becoming a dangerous struggle over recognition, endurance and who will be forced to bend first.

The wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf appear to be separate conflicts, but what if they share the same underlying reality? In this episode of The Axis, we explore the emergence of an "empty centre" in international politics—a world in which no great power can fully impose a new global order. As authority becomes increasingly contested, wars no longer end with decisive victories. Instead, they become prolonged struggles over legitimacy, endurance, and symbolic power. Is the greatest crisis of our time not the rise of a new hegemon, but the absence of one?

A tribute to the United States on its 250th anniversary: not a sentimental celebration, but a symbolic reflection on a wounded republic. This episode explores America as promise, contradiction, empire, and unfinished sentence — from the Declaration of Independence to Lincoln, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and the destructive nostalgia of MAGA. To admire America today is not to deny its crimes, but to defend its better symbols against those who have turned fear into a political weapon.

In this episode of The Axis, we look at the deeper lesson of the Iran war: the rise of Hormuz as a political actor. The Strait of Hormuz is no longer just a route for oil tankers. It has become a symbol of the new geography of power, where control is no longer only about territory, but about circulation, delay, risk, and uncertainty.

In this episode of The Axis, we examine why the U.S.–Iran “truce” should not be understood as real peace, but as an architecture of fear.

The agreement may stop direct confrontation for now, but it does not resolve the deeper causes of the conflict: Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions, the Strait of Hormuz, Israel’s military freedom of action, and the limits of American power. What appears as diplomacy may actually be a pause built around exhaustion, pressure, and mutual fear.

This is not the end of the war. It is the temporary management of a war that no one can fully control.

In this episode of The Axis, we ask a different question about the conflict in the Persian Gulf: not who is winning militarily, but who is winning symbolically.

The United States may hold the stronger military hand, but Iran appears to be contesting something deeper: the rhythm, meaning, and political cost of the conflict. While Trump needs a visible victory—a deal, a signature, a scene of triumph—Iran seems to be turning the confrontation into ambiguity, delay, and pressure.

The Strait of Hormuz becomes more than a maritime route. It becomes a symbolic battlefield where oil, inflation, global trade, and political anxiety converge. In this struggle, victory may not belong to the side with more firepower, but to the side that can better survive uncertainty.

Trump wants closure. Iran imposes time.

And in politics, time can be more corrosive than defeat.

In his first Cuenta Pública, José Antonio Kast does more than report on the state of the nation: he constructs a political fantasy of order. Chile appears as a wounded body, damaged by disorder, crime, migration, economic stagnation, and institutional weakness. Against this image, the State returns as a paternal force promising reconstruction, discipline, security, and national rebirth.

This column examines the authoritarian nuances of Kast’s discourse: the shift from rights to moral rewards, the figure of the internal enemy, the fantasy of the restored Father, and the idea that freedom can only exist after order has been imposed. It is not fascism as open declaration, but authoritarianism as desire: the belief that the nation can be healed if the State becomes hard enough.