The Axis

What if the monuments, gold, AI fantasies and politics of fear surrounding Donald Trump are not signs of strength, but ways of covering weakness?

In “Golden Taps, Muddy Water,” The Axis examines how architecture, political spectacle and imaginary victories can create the appearance of greatness while deeper problems remain unresolved.

The question is simple: when the house is deteriorating, do we repair the pipes—or simply make the taps more beautiful?

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Is Donald Trump's foreign policy madness, incompetence—or something deeper?

As the United States struggles to convert military superiority over Iran into a decisive political outcome, China is presenting itself as an alternative centre of global influence. Washington can still bomb, sanction and threaten. But other countries are increasingly finding ways to resist, bypass or hedge against American pressure.

In this analysis, The Axis asks whether the real crisis is not simply Trump's behaviour, but America's difficulty adapting to a multipolar world.

Perhaps the United States is not losing power.

Perhaps it is losing the ability to make others obey.

What do Alfred Hitchcock’s blondes, Natalie Harp, Donald Trump, and tactical nuclear weapons have in common? Blondes, Nukes and Decadence explores a strange but revealing connection between image, power, and decline. Hitchcock showed how dangerous it can be when reality is forced to conform to fantasy. John Mearsheimer, from a very different angle, warns that renewed interest in tactical nuclear weapons may reveal not growing American strength, but weakening conventional military capacity. Between Trump’s politics of spectacle and America’s nuclear temptation, a disturbing question emerges: what happens when the image of power becomes more important than power itself?

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Donald Trump’s warm relationship with Kim Jong Un, combined with his increasingly hostile treatment of traditional U.S. allies, reveals something deeper than an unconventional foreign policy. For decades, American power depended not only on military strength but on the belief that alliances, treaties and commitments would survive individual presidents. Trump is replacing that institutional logic with a personal one: who respects him, who frustrates him, and who is willing to make a deal. This analysis asks what happens to American power when friendship between nations becomes friendship between leaders—and whether the United States is entering an era of dependence without confidence.

Donald Trump may be one of the most disruptive figures in modern American politics—but what if he is not the real problem? This analysis looks beyond Trump to the deeper forces that made his rise possible: declining institutional trust, economic and cultural fragmentation, resentment toward elites, and the disappearance of a shared vision of America’s future.

Trump will eventually leave the political stage. The more troubling question is what will remain after him.

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?