Pinboard bookmarks for February 2026

It is because the legal system made truthful instruction radioactive. The moment you treat instruction as a liability surface, you stop teaching and start lawyering. That is the whole story. Everything else is downstream.

If none of that was true – if allies were already free-riding, if China was already exploiting openness, if institutions were already failing their stated purposes – then Trump’s disruption is less vandalism than demolition of a condemned structure. Breaking what no longer works may be prerequisite to building something that does. The hardest part of this argument is separating Trump’s possible correctness about the world from his obvious unfitness to navigate it. He may be right that allies have underinvested. He may be right that China exploited Western naïveté. He may be right that multilateral institutions became mechanisms for diffusing responsibility rather than solving problems. None of this means his methods will produce better outcomes. Cruelty alienates. Unpredictability frightens. Personalized grievance substitutes ego for strategy. Trump could be directionally correct about the failures of the old order while being catastrophically wrong about how to build a new one. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.