How proxy wars, logistics sabotage, and sudden US precision are reshaping the shadow global conflict.
Growing up, I was terrified by the prospect of World War III. I remember being nine or ten, waking up really early, turning on the radio, and finding that none of my favorite stations were broadcasting. I honestly thought "did it happen?" Now, what I didn't know at the time was that radio stations went off the air between something like midnight and 6 a.m., and I was reassured a few minutes later when KCSJ came on the air at 6 a.m. and the big news was the cattle and pig prices. No war.
So that was 60 years ago, and there still haven't been any atomic bombs — I would have noticed, Cheyenne Mountain was straight out my parents' living room window. But I think I was mistaken another way.
World War III has been going on, pretty continuously, since sometime in the late 1940s, and we haven't really noticed, because it's been a war of proxies, logistical sabotage, and resource control rather than great-power combat. For 50 of those years, Islamism has been a volatile ideological proxy, but under that have been issues of access to oil, rare earths, and trade routes.
The core of this ongoing conflict has been between two sides: classical-liberal capitalism led by the U.S. and, sometimes haltingly, by its allies; and authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, and Iran — and sometimes abetted by liberals in the new-fangled definition of "liberal" as squishy feel-good authoritarianism.
At times it's been hard to see any progress to any sort of conclusion, or at least any desirable conclusion. But in the interval between Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2025, and today, Trump's aggressive foreign policy has exploited authoritarian over-extension by delivering repeated, almost surgical blows that have depended more on economic pressure, enhanced at times by direct surgical military action.
It appears to me that this year of Trump's — and Marco Rubio's, and I think JD Vance's — foreign policy has pushed this shadow war out of the shadows, and to a decisive inflection point.
Amateurs Study Tactics; Professionals Logistics
That's a saying repeated over and over in military circles. The best attributed quote is from U.S. Marine Corps General Robert H. Barrow (1979): “Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare.” But the insight is ancient, going back to Sun Tzu in his Art of War, but mirrored by Clausewitz and Alexander the Great.
Both Napoleon and Hitler ignored that advice, and it destroyed them. In fact, it ruined them in the same place: their invasions of Russia. Logistical collapse defeats armies much more reliably than tactical brilliance.
The shadow WWIII is primarily being fought globally: sanctions, shipping disruptions, and proxy wars that consume resources and destroy infrastructure are weapons that cripple economies and bleed forces dry.
The authoritarian side has exploited this strategy.
Russia uses the Wagner/Africa Corps to obtain access to resource-rich African states.
Iran has used its own presence in the Persian Gulf and its clients among the Houthis on the Red Sea to threaten an incredible amount of world-wide shipping.
China has focused on debt traps and surrogates in client states to endanger and even disrupt Western supply chains, seize control of critical minerals, and impose asymmetric costs while wagering that it wouldn't lead to direct confrontation.
The Turning Point
In 2025, Trump came into office. Opposing him was a combination of U.S. authoritarians seeking to use a dementia patient as their front, extreme tactics that would be hard to credit if we hadn’t seen them, and what now appears to have been a cat’s-cradle of fraud in financing, electoral shenanigans, and lawfare aimed at knocking him out of the race. On Trump's side, he had four years to plan, a desire for revenge, and arguably divine intervention at a critical moment.
Beyond that, Trump had two superpowers. First, he understood people in ways no politician had really done since Truman and Eisenhower, and liked them. And second, and I think this is his real superpower, his opponents think him a buffoon. He is brash, he is undignified, he has a Queens accent. And nothing in the ten years since he rode down the escalator can seem to make them rethink.
He also was a real estate developer in the nastiest market in the U.S. That means logistics is his meat and potatoes.
From the start, he approached foreign policy and national security from the point of view of logistics. He pressured Panama to break their connection to China with a little saber-rattling and a lot of jawbone. He broke a major logistical challenge — among other things — by closing the southern border and beginning to challenge the corruption that came with the immigration invasion.
Since then, the authoritarian opposition has tried their best, and overextended themselves far beyond what they could support.
Russia had started a war they thought would be over in days or weeks; when Trump took office, it had been a Russian logistical and political nightmare for almost three years.
Iran pushed Hamas and Hezbollah into mass confrontation with Israel while at the same time supporting the Houthis attacking shipping in the Red Sea. All sucking Iranian resources while they were also crippled by sanctions.
China continued its incursions into South America, especially in Venezuela.
Then Came January 20, 2025.
Israel had clearly determined that Hamas was no longer an avoidable confrontation. Then Trump — the most pro-Israeli president in decades, possibly ever — restored "maximum pressure" on Iran, with targeted sanctions; began a major air campaign against the Houthi rebels backed by Iran; and bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. The U.S. also provided extensive military support to Israel. Diplomatically, Kazakhstan and Somaliland have joined the Abraham accords, and Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Azerbaijan, and Armenia have hinted they may be next.
Look at this in terms of logistics: Trump was cutting off Iran's sources of revenue, while destroying materiel Iran had provided its clients at great expense.
Against Russia — our second major adversary — Trump maintained the full weight of existing sanctions and allowed Biden's final pre-inauguration restrictions on petroleum services to take effect. In October 2025, he went further, imposing the first direct new sanctions of his second term on Rosneft, Lukoil, and dozens of subsidiaries, deliberately targeting the revenue stream that funds Russia's war machine.
While the usual suspects complained the U.S. wasn't doing enough — and I'm on Ukraine's side, and not just because I'm on the side of "whoever is Russia's opponent" — Ukraine has been striking deep inside Russia, forcing Russia into gas rationing while crushing the Russian military's morale.
Again, look at the logistics: the result was Ukraine got more support, while Russia and Iran were forced to resort to the "shadow fleet" to sell heavily discounted oil. This hit both countries financially and as a side effect lowered energy costs in the U.S.. Now Russia is fighting a long, drawn-out World War I-style ground war at the end of long supply lines and much impaired supplies.
Our third major adversary, China, was joining in, although not as openly as Russia and Iran. But they had provided many billions of dollars of support to Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. It became Russia's biggest trading partner, as well as supplying critical parts for drone manufacture, enough that Western intelligence estimates say up to 80% of Russia's imported military components come from China. China has aligned itself diplomatically with Russia and Iran, has built a strategic partnership with Iran, buys oil over the sanctions on Iranian oil, and has supplied things like missile components and propellants to build back Iranian ballistic missile and air defense after the 12-Day War.
Then there's Venezuela. I've already written about this in some detail, but the short summary is that China has supplied billions of dollars in support and loans, bought more billions of Venezuelan oil at garage-sale prices, and pledged support, bragging last year that Venezuela was under China's protection and the US couldn't do anything about it.
And Then Came January 3, 2026
In the early morning hours of January 3, the U.S. Delta Force, with Navy and Air Force support, swooped in on Caracas, basically ignoring the air defenses and “anti-stealth” radars of which China had been so proud, killed Nicolás Maduro’s Cuban Praetorian Guard, and exfiltrated him, with his pants pissed, to the USS Gerald R. Ford and from there to a jail cell in Brooklyn.
It's hard to overestimate the impact of this. Really hard. Venezuela had already been a thorn in America's side, and the U.S. had been rolling up Venezuela's narco-terrorist Tren de Aragua (TdA) guerrillas throughout 2025. TdA's own logistical support was gutted by taking Maduro, and there are good reasons to think a lot of intelligence will be gained that will allow them to be eliminated from the U.S.
So we in 2026 are in a new world, where the hub of anti-U.S. operations in the Western Hemisphere has been badly hurt, potentially destroyed, while a new ten-nation coalition of South American countries has formed around Milei's Argentina and Bukele's El Salvador. Along with Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and others, they are making a focused resistance to the leftists in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
Authoritarians Real Vulnerability: Loss of "Face"
Whether we talk about Chinese mianzi 面子 "face", Persian aberu, or Russian avtoritet, authoritarians cannot sustain public humiliation. After a year of establishing the logistical groundwork, the taking of Maduro out from under the noses of the Chinese has publicly humiliated them to an incredible degree. Quickly following that, the U.S. has taken two "shadow fleet" ships away from Russia and Iran, one of them being escorted openly by the Russian Navy. More humiliation, and if I were a Russian admiral, I'd be staying away from open windows and on the ground floor.
It's not true that "may you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse; the original source appears to have been a British diplomat in the 1930s. Whoever said it first, I think we're in for some very interesting times.
With Trump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, and the rest, I think we're in for some very favorable changes.
