The Fragility of Long-Standing Regimes
Over the past several years a number of regimes long considered immovable have begun to fracture.
Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria collapsed after more than a decade of war. Nicolás Maduro’s hold on Venezuela is non-existent after years of sustained pressure and isolation. Now Iran appears to be entering its own period of instability, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facing the most serious crisis of its existence.
In the moment, events like these rarely feel connected. American politics is loud, partisan, and theatrical. Each administration claims to represent a decisive break from the last one. Cable news reinforces the idea that U.S. foreign policy resets every four years depending on who wins an election. That perception is comforting, but it is mostly wrong.
Continuity Behind the Noise
Behind the noise there is continuity. Presidents change. Secretaries of state rotate. Political coalitions rise and fall. But the institutions that conduct American foreign policy operate on a much longer timeline. Intelligence services, diplomats, military planners, and sanctions architects move within strategic frameworks that often span decades. Plans begun under one administration are refined under the next and sometimes reach their conclusion under a third.
What appears to be improvisation from the outside is often the slow execution of long-running strategy. As a young American soldier in Iraq, I learned quickly that Iran was never far from the war, even when it was not the country we were officially fighting. Years later in Afghanistan, working as a contractor, I saw what happens when the machinery of strategy begins to slip its gears.
Wars develop their own institutional momentum. Plans accumulate. Metrics multiply. Strategies are revised without always reconsidering the assumptions beneath them. Afghanistan became a case study in how a system designed to sustain pressure can struggle to recognize when the strategic foundation underneath it has eroded. By the time the withdrawal came, the collapse felt sudden to the public. To many people inside the system, it felt like the end of a long drift.
The Quiet Currents of Power
I learned something else about geopolitics in a place where it had no obvious role at all. On the mats in Asia.
Iran has long been a wrestling powerhouse. Anyone who has grappled seriously knows it. The first time I tied up with an Iranian athlete in Thailand we shared almost no vocabulary beyond the grammar of the sport. Collar tie. Underhook. Pressure. Sweat. He spoke little English; my Farsi was nonexistent. It did not matter. Respect moved through the exchange in simpler ways, in how he pushed the pace and how he offered a hand after the round ended.
One afternoon an Iranian training with our group sprained his ankle badly during practice. I had recently come from Ukraine and still carried a small medical kit in my bag out of habit. I drew up a diclofenac injection and gave it to him while he gritted his teeth and nodded in thanks. We exchanged only a few words. That was enough.
Encounters like that remind you of something simple but often forgotten: people are rarely the same thing as the governments that rule them. But sympathy for people does not erase the realities of geopolitics. Governments pursue power. They do not ask permission from the civilians who will eventually bear the consequences. That reality becomes clearer when you watch wars unfold over time.
In Ukraine I saw Russia stumble into the kind of grinding war that great powers sometimes build for themselves. What the Kremlin expected to be a short campaign hardened into a prolonged conflict of attrition. Russian casualties have mounted steadily while vast quantities of equipment have been consumed by the front. Wars like that rarely end quickly. They end through exhaustion.
Taken together, these experiences reveal something about how international power actually operates. Grand strategy rarely unfolds in dramatic bursts. It moves slowly, across years and across administrations. Individual presidents may adjust the tone or the tactics, but the deeper strategic currents tend to persist. This continuity is easy to miss because American domestic politics is so loud. Elections dominate attention. Partisan conflict fills the air. Every foreign policy decision is interpreted through the lens of internal political rivalry.
Strategy rarely operates at that volume. American politics is loud. Strategy is quiet. Administrations change. The machinery does not. If you listen closely enough, you can hear it moving.
