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A war budget doesn’t come with a press release that says “war.” It shows up as numbers that don’t make sense for peace, and as a mood you can feel in the news cycle. We trace that mood back to two big ideas that shaped the post–Cold War mindset: the liberal belief that institutions can tame power, and the realist insistence that nations ultimately act for themselves. Using Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as guideposts, we sketch how the old order frayed and why cultural blocs—religion, memory, language—may reshape the map more than trade agreements ever did.

From there, we dig into Ukraine as a harsh teacher: drones over doctrine, trenches over glossy strategy decks, and the stubborn reality of industrial bottlenecks. Can the U.S. rebuild munitions capacity fast enough? What happens when defense contractors get pushed from buybacks to production and the state edges toward a “command economy” posture without formally declaring it? We explore how sovereignty, logistics, and frontier tech like AI become national-security terrain—and why markets shift when mission logic takes over.

Europe’s identity crisis threads through it all. A continent that once exported Christianity now struggles to define itself amid demographic change and civilizational tension. We consider what realism predicts for Europe, Russia, and the U.S., and how domestic fractures—censorship battles, CBDC talk, and culture-war fatigue—complicate strategy at home. Yet there’s a human counterpoint here: we share details for our Italy pilgrimage, why we’re keeping it small, how we’ll pray together, and a moving note from a Protestant listener reconsidering Mary through biblical typology. It’s geopolitics with a soul, grounded in faith, community, and the stubborn hope that meaning outlasts headlines.

If this conversation challenged your assumptions or clarified the stakes, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Then tell us: which lens explains the world better right now—liberal order or realism?

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