On Saturday, June 27, 2026, at 4:30 in the morning, an Iranian drone hit the Kiku, a Panama-flagged tanker carrying more than two million barrels of crude oil near the Strait of Hormuz. The United States struck back within hours, hitting Iranian air defense sites, drone stores, and the equipment Iran uses to lay sea mines. A ceasefire signed barely a week earlier, meant to end the war between the two countries, had already collapsed.

This is how Iran deals with the Strait now. And here is why: Iran learned that if it plays by Western rules, follows international law, and adheres to treaties, the US and Britain will break the rules, ignore international law, and dissolve treaties if Iran does not do what they want. Seventy-five years ago, Iran tried to get its oil and its honor back through the law and by following the rules. And it won. So Britain and the US overthrew the Iranian government and installed a puppet pro-Anglo regime.

Monday’s Edition showed that because Persia (Iran) was weak and Britain needed the Persian Gulf to guard its sea route to India, Persia lost the battle for the Gulf to the British. Then, an impoverished Persia sold the oil rights to a British company to raise cash. In an honor culture, where a nation’s worth depends on the respect of others, foreign control of its own oil and the Gulf was a humiliation, and honor demands that what was taken be returned.

After the Second World War, the United States built a new world order of rules and became the most powerful nation. Because rules now governed the world, Iran saw it could use them to get its oil, the Gulf, and honor back. Iran took the first step in 1951, when its parliament passed the Oil Nationalization Law and made Mohammad Mossadegh prime minister. Mossadegh canceled the rights of Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and moved Iran's oil into a new state firm, the National Iranian Oil Company. This prompted Britain to take Iran to the World Court, but in 1952 the court ruled in favor of Iran.

Unable to win legally, Britain went back to using force. In 1953, Britain’s spy service and the American CIA launched Operation Ajax to remove Mossadegh. The coup hit on August 19, 1953, when paid crowds and army units toppled Mossadegh after a day of street fighting that killed about 300 people. Britain and the US put Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in power, and he quickly gave Iran’s oil back to Britain and a large share to the Americans

Iran learned that the West follows the rules only when they are in its favor, and that the Western concept of dignity culture does not apply to other nations when the West wants their resources. This made it clear to Iran and much of the Middle East that the West could not be trusted and that only direct action would produce results.

For the next 26 years, the Shah ruled as a king, kept in place by the foreign powers. His secret police jailed and killed his opponents. This sparked intense anger across Iran, leading to the 1979 revolution. The Shah fled, and the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini took power. The revolution ended Iran’s role as a Western client state and made it an open enemy of the West.

The revolution also left Iran weak and isolated. In 1980, Iraq used that situation to invade, starting the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. By the mid-1980s both sides were attacking the oil tankers in the Gulf to destroy each other’s trade. Iran’s attacks on shipping forced the United States to take action: in 1987 it put American flags on Kuwait’s tankers and sent warships to escort them through the strait. Iran answered with sea mines, and on April 14, 1988, one mine nearly sank the American frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts. The United States struck back four days later in Operation Praying Mantis, sinking or wrecking about half of Iran’s working navy in a few hours. That defeat pushed Iran to accept a United Nations ceasefire, and the war ended on August 20, 1988.

This is the chain of events that put Iran in the position it is today. It uses the strait as its weapon, because it knows the West does not follow its own law, and direct action fits its honor culture. The drone that hit the Kiku on June 27 and the American missiles that followed are the latest collision of the two cultural perspectives that first met in 1820. The situation won’t be resolved until both sides take the time to understand and work with each other’s cultural perspective.

Friday’s Edition takes us to today: what Iran is most likely to do at the strait next, how far it will go, and what happens to the world’s oil if it follows the logic of this chain.

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On Saturday, June 20, 2026, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. It blamed Israel’s strikes in Lebanon and the United States for letting a ceasefire collapse. The United States Central Command said the strait was open and counted 55 merchant ships crossing that day. Independent ship trackers counted far fewer, 12 vessels. About one-fifth of the world’s oil is transported through this strait, 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, and the only sea route out of the Gulf. Iran declared the strait closed, the US declared it open, and the ship counts did not agree.

How did this channel gain the power to change the price of oil in every country? Why does Iran proclaim the right to close it? Why does the United States proclaim the right to keep it open? The answer starts more than two hundred years ago, with two cultures that disagree about how the Persian Gulf and the Strait should be controlled and how to address issues dating back 200 years.

Persia, now called Iran, is one of the oldest nations on earth. For about 2,500 years, it has been an empire or nation, and it has claimed the Gulf along its southern coast as its territorial waters. The maps still carry the name: the Persian Gulf.

Cultural researchers Kwok Leung and Dov Cohen identified three types of cultures: honor, dignity, and face. In honor cultures, a person's or a nation’s dignity, honor, and worth come from recognition by others. When there is a dispute, that dispute is settled by direct action to ‘win’ back one’s honor. Horon cultures take issues ‘personally’. For Persia, now Iran, losing control of its historic and legal territorial waters is more than a loss of control; it’s a loss of honor. That control, that honor, was taken from Persia by a stronger empire.

British corporations controlled India in the early 1800s and needed the sea route between Britain and India open and safe. To do that, Britain sent a fleet from Bombay in 1819 against the Arab rulers on the southern side of the Gulf, and in January 1820, it forced them to sign the General Maritime Treaty. That treaty gave Britain control of all shipping in the Gulf. Every ship had to register with British forces and fly a flag approved by Britain.

Britain felt it could take control of the Gulf in part because of its Universalist cultural perspective. Universalism is the belief that there are universal rules that apply to everyone and every nation equally. Britain’s Universalist perspective views the sea as a shared waterway, open to all ships that obey the laws of the sea equally. Britain, the strongest navy at the time, kept it open. Persia came from the opposite cultural perspective, Particularism. Particularism considers each case individually based on relationships, circumstances, and status. For Persia, the Gulf was theirs to control because of its history and status, and they, not a law, decided who could and could not pass through. This resulted in the British navy controlling the Persian Gulf, and for an honor culture, that control was a humiliation.

The British navy was able to control the Gulf because Persia was weak at that time. The weakness was not only military, Persia was also short of money, and it raised cash by selling mineral rights to Europeans. This was the time when oil was becoming a serious candidate to replace coal. In 1901, the Shah sold the sole right to drill for oil across three quarters of the country to a British investor named William Knox D’Arcy. For seven years, the drillers found nothing until 26 May 1908, when D’Arcy’s company struck oil that shot more than 80 feet into the air. It was the first oil field in the Middle East. Under the terms, Persia kept only 16 percent.

That discovery proved Persia held vast amounts of oil, and the right to pump and sell it belonged to D’Arcy and his London investors. They formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909, registered in London. Persia’s oil was now controlled by Britain, as was Persia’s gulf.

One of the oldest states on earth had effectively lost its mineral resources and its historic control of the Persian Gulf. These humiliations still drive Iran’s actions because Persia had lost its honor, and honor demands that what was taken be returned. This is why Iran and the West cannot agree on who controls the Strait.

Most Western nations operate from a Dignity culture, where each nation’s worth is held within itself. Recognition from others is not necessary. When there is a dispute, that dispute is settled by courts, treaties, and written rules. It’s not ‘personal’. From a Dignity and Universalism view, British control of the strait was just a change in power, the law supported it, and everyone was treated the same. From an Honor and Particularism cultural perspective, Britain took the Gulf and Persia must act directly and regain control. Every time Iran closes the Strait, it is taking back the control that London took in 1820 and 1909.

Two hundred years ago, Persia was weak and in need of money. This enabled the British navy to take control of the Persian Gulf, which it needed to secure the sea route to India for British companies. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was able to purchase mineral rights and control Persia’s oil at a time when oil was becoming a global commodity. These losses were seen as a humiliation by the Persians, and this legacy still affects Iran’s actions today. And all of this was driven by different cultural perspectives and historical twists.

Wednesday’s Edition covers how Persia/Iran tried to regain control of its oil and honor through the law, through Universalism in 1951, how Britain and the United States removed the leader who tried, how that produced the revolution of 1979, and how warring states first attacked the oil tankers passing through the strait in the 1980s.

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Xi operates from the Chinese Communist Party survival culture. The world of the cadre who learned that the Party outlasts everyone. Xi was born in 1953 into the Communist elite. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary hero and a vice premier of China, until Mao’s circle purged him in 1962 over a novel they branded anti-Party, and he spent sixteen years out of power, part of it in detention. The Red Guard attacked the family, his half-sister killed herself, and at fifteen Xi was sent to Liangjiahe, a village in Shaanxi, where he lived seven years in a cave house carved into a hillside. A boy whose family the Party had destroyed did not turn against it. He applied to join it, but was rejected about ten times because of his father’s actions. He kept applying until a local commune secretary admitted him in 1974. That world programmed how he reacts, and it gives us insight into what he will do in almost any situation

In this cultural perspective, the basic unit is the Party. Not the individual, the market, or the family, only the Party and its survival. Value in this world is power: who holds which post, where the money goes, what the army and the courts do, what the public can read. When you have that power, you keep it. Winning is to still be in power years from now, with the Party still ruling and no one able to remove you.

Party survival culture runs on a few fixed rules:

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In the spring of 2026, the leaders of America’s closest allies were making trips to Beijing. In the thirteen months after Trump took office, the heads of twelve Western governments traveled to China. Western officials now make about half of all the senior visits to Beijing, twice the number of trips before Trump took office. These are countries that have depended on American protection since World War II.

They are building ties with China because they no longer trust the US.

Monday’s and Wednesday’s Editions traced how American power came from trust in the dollar, and how America broke that trust by ending the gold standard in 1971, invading Iraq in 2003, crashing the world economy in 2008, and cutting Iran and Russia out of the dollar system in 2012 and 2014.

Then, in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, America and its allies froze about $300 billion of Russia’s national savings, the money its central bank had stored in Western nations. Blocking a country’s ability to pay was one thing; freezing its money was another. This had been done before, but in much smaller amounts and smaller nations, Iran in 1979, Libya in 2011, and Afghanistan in 2021. Thus, freezing the assets of a major power sent a clear message: no nation’s money held in dollars or in any Western currency is safe from being frozen if America decides to do so.

A central bank cannot take that risk. So central banks began buying gold and switching to systems like China’s CIPS to move money without the dollar.

Then America went crazy. The Trump-Republican administration that took office in 2025 put taxes on imports (tariffs) from its own allies, raising America’s average tax on imports to about 27 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. America’s own Supreme Court ruled the main tariffs illegal in 2026. The Trump-Republican administration threatened to take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally. Trump made it clear he would not guarantee American commitments to NATO. He moved to take control of America’s central bank, whose independence is what keeps the dollar trustworthy. For eighty years, America had claimed to follow the rules while sometimes exempting itself in practice. This was not ideal, but it was tolerated because it worked. Then the Trump-Republican administration made it clear: the US would no longer participate in the global system it had established. Trump's instability and erratic actions made the system unworkable. Trump’s “America First” meant “America Can’t Be Trusted.”

That is why America’s allies are in Beijing. They watched America break its promises and then break down. They had to protect themselves. The numbers show it. The dollar has fallen to about 57 percent of the world’s reserves, its lowest share since 1995. Russia and China now settle more than 90 percent of their trade without the dollar. BRICS, which accounts for about 40 percent of the world’s output, measured by purchasing power parity, is testing a gold-backed trade system called the Unit, though Brazil and India have rejected a single BRICS currency.

The dollar is the foundation of American power. Because the world holds dollars, America can borrow more cheaply than any other country, and that cheap borrowing paid for the most powerful military on earth and the bases and alliances that come with it. That advantage is rapidly shrinking. In 2025, America spent more on interest on its debt than on its military for the first time. As the world holds fewer dollars, America must pay more to borrow, leaving less for the military and weakening the protection it offers allies, giving those allies one more reason to leave. The dollar built American power, and losing the dollar takes the rest down with it.

The dollar will not collapse overnight. In 1920, the dollar overtook the British pound sterling, yet the pound stayed a top reserve currency for decades, propped up by Britain’s empire and inertia. What finally brought it to an end was debt and a single event. In 1956, when Britain invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal, the United States threatened to sell its pounds unless Britain retreated. Britain, unable to defend its currency, backed down. A reserve currency falls when two things line up. The issuing country has accumulated too much debt, and then one crisis sends it over the edge.

What will happen to the US dollar? Three things can happen from here.

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In April 2026, a payment system most people have never heard of set a record. China’s CIPS, its own network for moving money between banks across borders, pushed a record $178 billion through in a single day. By early 2026, 1,791 banks and financial firms worldwide had joined it. Its busiest days came as conflict in the Middle East pushed oil buyers to pay in Chinese yuan rather than dollars. CIPS exists for one reason: to let countries trade without using the American banking system.

Countries built CIPS to escape the dollar.

Monday’s Edition traced how American power was built on the dollar and how, after 1971, that power changed from trust to need and force. By the mid-1970s, the dollar was the currency most international trade was priced and settled in, and that dollar payments ultimately clear through US banks. This gave America the power to cut any country out of the global financial system.

America’s power still largely rested on the trust that it would follow its own rules. In 2003, it openly broke that trust. It invaded Iraq, but the United Nations Security Council would not authorize the war. America invaded anyway. The UN’s own secretary-general, Kofi Annan, later said the war broke the UN Charter. The nation that wrote the rules openly and deliberately broke them

At the same time, the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency was creating a disaster at home. In 1997, the financial crisis hit Asia, and the IMF, the global lender that America controls. The US forced those countries to cut spending, raise interest rates, and let their banks fail. To ensure they would never have to borrow from the IMF on those terms again, their central banks bought hundreds of billions of dollars in US government bonds and, seeking higher returns, bundles of American home loans. Trillions of dollars flowed back into the United States.

That influx of money pushed American interest rates down

Shortly after the Asian financial crisis, the US government relaxed rules for its own banks. After the Great Depression, America passed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933, a law that made it illegal for a single company (a bank) to hold people's savings and engage in financial market trading. A bank could not risk ordinary people's money in the markets. In 1999, the government repealed that law. The US government also chose not to regulate derivatives. A derivative is a contract whose value comes from something else, such as a stock price, an interest rate, or whether a borrower repays a loan. This allowed banks to profit or lose huge sums depending on whether people kept up their mortgage payments. These changes allowed banks to take far greater risks, which caused a housing bubble.

That bubble burst in 2008. Because the banks had sold those loans worldwide, the collapse spread to every country that had invested in them. The American model that the world had copied dragged the whole world into a recession. Then America did the opposite of what it had ordered Asia to do in 1997. Instead of letting US banks fail, the government rescued them. America forced austerity on other countries but rescued itself.

This erosion of trust convinced China and other nations that it could not rely on the dollar. In March 2009, the head of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, called for a new global reserve currency composed of multiple currencies. This way, no single nation could control it. This is what British economist John Maynard Keynes argued for at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. The US rejected this in favor of using the dollar. China began the long work of building its own network to move money without the dollar.

China’s new system grew slowly because, after the 2008 crisis, there was no urgency to abandon the dollar. That was until America turned the dollar system into an actual weapon. The first strike hit Iran: in 2012, America and Europe cut Iran’s banks out of SWIFT, the messaging network that lets banks move money across borders. It was the first time a country had been shut out of the world’s financial system, and Iran’s trade was severely disrupted. The next hit was Russia, which was sanctioned in 2014 for seizing Crimea. The message was clear: access to the global financial system was controlled by the US, and it would decide who could and could not use it. Mark Carney named this at Davos in 2026, when he counted “financial infrastructure as coercion” among the new weapons of great powers.

America controlled the world’s money because the world trusted it to play by the rules. Then the US broke its own rules in Iraq and later caused a global recession, from which it rescued only itself. This pushed China and other nations to find an alternative to the dollar. Then, the US used the dollar as a weapon against Iran and Russia. Each step made more nations want out of the dollar system. This caused systems like CIPS to grow, further weakening the dollar. But the strongest evidence that the dollar was no longer safe was to come.

Friday’s Edition covers the day America froze another country’s reserves, the moment slow drift turned into open flight, and what the chain says happens next.

Get a solid understanding of Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions by purchasing the guide or subscribing to Cultural Perspective (free or paid) and receiving the guide for free.

By early 2026, the dollar had fallen to about 57% of the world’s currency reserves, from a high of 85% in 1977 and its lowest share since 1995. Central banks that manage a nation’s money were buying more gold in place of dollars. Central bankers added 863 tonnes of gold to their reserves in 2025, and more than a thousand tonnes in each of the three years before. That is the biggest run of gold since just after World War II. The people who guard their nations' savings are moving away from the dollar.

The dollar is what gives the U.S. its power.

America emerged from the Second World War holding about half of the world’s output and most of the world’s gold. In July 1944, at a meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, America wrote that dominant position into rules other nations agreed to follow. The dollar was fixed to gold, and the world’s other currencies were fixed to the dollar. This made the dollar the center of world trade. Those rules made American dominance long-lasting because the world trusted the U.S. to follow them.

Trust, not military power or gold, was the foundation of American power and what led other nations to accept American leadership, hold its dollars, and live by its rules.

But that trust had a contradiction. America built a global order with one set of rules for all nations, universalism. America, though, acted from the opposite cultural perspective, particularism. It believed it was special and did not have to follow its own rules. Americans didn’t call it particularism; they called it American exceptionalism. This is what Mark Carney, in his famous speech at Davos, called the "pleasant fiction" from which "the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient."

The American world order also carried a fatal flaw. The U.S. promised to back each dollar with an equivalent amount of gold at a price of $35 an ounce. Because the world held the dollar as its main reserve currency, the money nations keep for safety and trade, America sent more dollars to nations than it held in gold reserves. Economist Robert Triffin warned in 1960 that the system forced America ever deeper into debt to the rest of the world, and that debt would eventually cause the U.S. to break the promise to swap dollars for gold.

That flaw was a trap, and it turns out America sprang the trap on itself. The U.S. had set itself as the protector against communism, a policy called containment. To contain communism in Asia, it sent its military into Vietnam. Paying for that war while also funding large social programs at home, “guns and butter” required far more dollars than the U.S. had in gold.

That widening gap between dollars and gold led foreign governments to demand gold rather than dollars. Nations began sending dollars back to America in exchange for gold. That run on American gold forced President Nixon to end the dollar-gold exchange. On 15 August 1971, Nixon ended it without warning. American allies were blindsided when America broke the system's central promise.

That broken promise left the dollar backed by nothing but trust, trust that had been eroded by breaking the promise. This caused the dollar to lose value through the 1970s. The falling dollar had an oversized negative impact on oil-producing countries because they were paid in dollars that bought less with each transaction. That loss in value and the 1973 Arab Israel War pushed the oil states to cut supply and raise the price of oil 300 percent. This caused the worst inflation America had seen since the war.

Inflation and the falling dollar forced America to find a new anchor for its currency, now that gold was no longer possible. America reached an understanding with Saudi Arabia in 1974. In an arrangement kept secret until 2016, the Saudis agreed to invest their oil earnings in US government debt, and in return, America supplied military aid, equipment, and security backing for the ruling family. Oil was already sold in dollars, and the Saudis kept it that way. This meant that virtually any country that wanted to buy oil needed dollars to pay for it

That arrangement changed how American power worked. Before 1971, the world held dollars because America promised to back them with gold. After 1974, the world held dollars because America controlled the oil trade and protected the states that sold it. The foundation shifted from trust to need, from a promise kept by the U.S. to dependence on the U.S., held in place by force. And because the whole world now needed dollars to buy oil and to trade, much of the world’s money had to move through American banks, which handed America even greater power: the power to cut off any country from the global financial system.

Wednesday’s Edition covers what America did with this new power: how it turned the dollar system into a weapon, and the day its own model broke the world.

Get a solid understanding of Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions by purchasing the guide or subscribing to Cultural Perspective (free or paid) and receiving the guide for free.

Putin operates from a sub-sub-culture of Russia: KGB operational culture, the working world of the Soviet foreign intelligence officer. He joined the KGB in 1975 after graduating in law from Leningrad State University and served until he resigned in 1999. He was stationed in Dresden, East Germany, for five years, where he ran and recruited agents and worked alongside the Stasi. That world programmed how he reads a situation, and it predicts what he will do in almost any situation.

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In mid-June 2026, the national polls all pointed one way. Only about 36 percent of Americans approved of Trump, and 58 percent disapproved. Democrats led by about seven points on which party should control Congress. Trump’s movement controlled the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, yet most of the country had turned against it.

How does a movement that just won the presidency, Congress, and the courts lose the public this fast, and what happens next? The answer is the last set of links in the chain of traditional, Embedded America culture, trying to hold on to a way of life that no longer exists. Wednesday’s Edition ended in 2001, when the anger of traditional, Embedded, white Americans at a country taking on new values and growing less white had been organized into a political machine. The missing piece was a leader.

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On June 11, 2026, the Trump administration announced a new trade agreement with China. It kept tariffs on Chinese goods at about 30 percent and paused a set of higher tariffs for sixty days. The announcement was routine by now. Trump had spent sixteen months using tariffs as his main economic tool, taxing imports from most of the country’s trading partners. A Republican president was running the economy on trade barriers, a policy the party’s own leaders had fought against for thirty years.

How did the party of free trade become the party of tariffs? The answer is the same chain that put right-wing populism in power, traced one stretch further. Monday’s edition ended in 1979, when the preacher Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority handed the Republican Party a reliable bloc of religious voters. That bloc had grievances and numbers. What it did not yet have was a program, an outlet, and a leader.

That bloc helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan gave the backlash something it had lacked, a single enemy. In his 1981 inaugural address, he said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That sentence turned the government itself into the thing standing between traditional, Embedded Americans and the country they wanted. This fused the cultural backlash with a war on government. The message took hold because of America’s hyper Individualism. Cultural theorist Geert Hofstede found the United States the most individualist country he studied, a culture that treats self-reliance as a virtue and government help with suspicion and as a moral weakness. Reagan’s line told that cultural perspective exactly what it believed.

In August 1981, he fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who had gone on strike and banned them from federal jobs for life. It was a clear signal that corporations could go after the unions and shut them down. That, together with the closing of American factories, collapsed union membership from about a third of workers in the 1950s to roughly one in ten.

Unions had organized the white working class around the same goals: higher pay, steady jobs, and good benefits. Their collapse changed what those workers voted on. They started voting on their religion, race, and way of life rather than their paycheck. The anger over lost jobs and falling wages no longer pushed them toward the left, which blames employers and the wealthy. It pushed them toward the right, which blames immigrants and government.

China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 caused a flood of cheap Chinese goods, which wiped out factory jobs across specific American towns. What economists later named the China shock. The lost work discredited the leaders of both parties who had promised that open trade would make everyone richer. It pushed the hardest-hit places to elect angrier, extreme politicians. By now, the base of the movement was set: millions of workers stripped of their unions, their factories, and their trust in the government.

A change in broadcasting law gave them a voice. The Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the rule that had required stations to give both sides of an issue airtime. That repeal created the false impression that a given, usually extreme, view was correct because no counterargument was required. A radio host named Rush Limbaugh went on stations across the country in 1988 and by the 1990s reached about 20 million listeners. His success built a one-sided conservative media that Fox News extended to cable television in 1996, which fed a mass audience one party's extremism.

That one-sided media rewarded conflict and sidelined compromise, and that gave the advantage to politicians who treated the other party as enemies to be destroyed. Newt Gingrich coached fellow Republicans, in a 1990 memo, to describe Democrats with words like "sick," "traitors," and "corrupt," and with that approach, took control of the House of Representatives in 1994. He forced a government shutdown in 1995 rather than make a deal. That refusal to compromise became the new Republican standard. Political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify this as the source of the win-at-all-costs politics that would lead to Trump’s election.

By 2001, this was a political machine. From Reagan, it had a target and a plan: government was the enemy, and shrinking it was the goal. It had the white working class, stripped of its unions and its jobs, and ready to vote on religion, race, and way of life. It had a media feeding those workers one party's skewed and extreme account of events, and politics that treated compromise as collaboration with the enemy. All of this organized the anger the 1960s had produced, when the country's values changed, and segregation ended (Monday’s Edition).

All that was needed was the right person to bring it all together.

Friday’s Edition traces how the 2008 financial crash and the election of the first Black president brought Donald Trump into the Oval Office, and where the U.S. is headed next: the prediction for the 2026 midterms and what comes after.

Get a solid understanding of Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions by purchasing the guide or subscribing to Cultural Perspective (free or paid) and receiving the guide for free.

On June 3, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an order stripping job protections from about 8,000 federal workers, making them far easier to fire. It was one of many executive orders. Trump signed 143 executive orders in his first hundred days, more than any president before him in that window. By the middle of 2026, Trump had signed more than 250 executive orders, raised tariffs on imported goods, tightened immigration enforcement, and begun remaking the government’s workforce. He had returned to office in January 2025 after winning the November 2024 election with 312 electoral votes and 49.8 percent of the popular vote. America has chosen right-wing populism, and it now governs the United States.

How did America find itself in here? The reason runs back more than sixty years, when the groundwork was laid for a fight between two groups of Americans whose cultural perspectives diverged over time.

It started with money. The generation raised during the postwar boom were the first American generation to grow up without scarcity. That security caused a change in their priorities. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart called this the silent revolution: people raised in a safe environment no longer need to focus on survival. This allows them to move to the next level, prioritizing self-expression, freedom, and personal identity. Inglehart and Christian Welzel later traced the same shift across many countries, away from Survival Values and toward Self-Expression Values.

That change in values caused the great movements of the 1960s and 1970s: the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and a steady move away from religion. Each of the new Self-Expression values in turn displaced the older values about faith, family, and order that most Americans had taken for granted. That displacement resulted in the first organized reaction.

Older, more religious, less-educated Americans felt the country they were raised to defend was slipping away, and in 1969, President Richard Nixon gave them a name, the “silent majority.” These two groups align well with cultural theorist Schwartz's Autonomy, where people are expected to question, debate, and form their own ideas, and Embeddeness, where people's identity comes from family, community, tradition, and the role one is born into. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart called it the cultural backlash, and it is the prime driver of this whole story. Some scholars argue the engine is economic, not cultural, that lost jobs and stagnant wages drove the same voters, but Diana Mutz tested both and found that fear of losing status best explained the populist vote. Economics is the secondary driver.

A second reaction was also taking place. The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned segregation in public accommodations and employment discrimination, and this caused white Southern voters, who had voted Democratic for nearly a century, to leave the Democratic Party. Nixon’s 1972 campaign captured them with what became known as the Southern Strategy: appeals on crime, law and order, and welfare that spoke to racial fear without naming race. That strategy made the Republican Party the home of racism and fused it with the cultural backlash already forming. From this point, the two reactions, one over changing values and one over ending racism, run together as a single force.

The racism issue intensified with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which ended the racial quotas that had kept immigration overwhelmingly European. This resulted in immigration shifting toward Latin America, Asia, and Africa, which caused the US to move toward a future in which white Americans would no longer be the majority. That shift made traditional Americans (Embeddedness) feel even more fearful of losing what they thought America should be. Diana Mutz calls this fear status threat: the dominant group’s reaction to losing its place as the nation changes.

The progress intensified with the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment. These issues and others caused religious conservatives to fear that the new values now had the force of law behind them and America had fundamentally changed. That conviction led the preacher Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority in 1979, which organized religious traditionalists into the Republican Party and turned a loose cultural grievance into a voting bloc the Party could count on.

This is the cultural perspective the whole series rests on. The populist right is the reaction of Embedded Americans, raised on tradition and wanting life to stay the same, to Autonomy Americans who value personal choice, equality, and freedom. Neither of these groups are making free, independent choices. They are acting the way their cultural programming requires them because values are stable within an individual, but they doe shift across generations

A postwar boom raised a generation that valued self-expression over survival, which drove the movements of the 1960s, which displaced the old moral consensus, which produced the first traditionalist backlash. The Civil Rights Act drove the white South out of the Democratic Party, which the Southern Strategy captured and fused with that backlash. Hart-Celler then moved the country toward a white minority, which deepened the sense of lost status, and the Moral Majority turned all of it into a voting bloc. Sixty years later, that bloc governs.

Wednesday’s edition traces how this same cultural perspective became an election machine: the anti-government ideology Ronald Reagan gave it, the talk radio and cable networks built to feed it, the political style that turned compromise into betrayal, and the collapse of the unions that once held the white working class on the left.

Get a solid understanding of Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions by purchasing the guide or subscribing to Cultural Perspective (free or paid) and receiving the guide for free.

Trump operates from a sub-sub-culture of the U.S.: New York real estate culture.

In this cultural perspective, the basic unit is the deal. Not the relationship, not the institution, not the mission, only the deal. Every interaction has a winner and a loser, and the goal is to be the winner of the transaction in front of you. This is a zero-sum worldview: value is captured, not created together.

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In the spring of 2026, while still at war in Ukraine, Russia began preparing its next move. In April, Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, warned that Russia would use “all available methods” to protect Russian citizens in Transnistria, a Russian-backed strip of Moldova held by Russian troops since the 1990s. On May 15, Putin signed a decree making it easier for people in Transnistria to become Russian citizens. Five days later, Russia’s parliament passed a law letting the Kremlin send its army abroad to protect Russian nationals. This is the same sequence Russia ran before it took Crimea and the Donbas: hand out passports, then claim a duty to defend the new citizens.

Russia is fighting one war while preparing for another.

Monday’s Edition traced why Russia treats Ukraine as Russian: it sees Kyiv as the birthplace of its faith and nation (Schwartz’s Embeddedness) and Ukraine as the buffer guarding its open western border (Hofstede’s Uncertainty Avoidance). Wednesday’s Edition traced how Russia lost Ukraine through the Soviet collapse, NATO’s expansion, the 2014 seizure of Crimea, and the loss of the Ukrainian church until Putin massed his army on the border in 2021.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, expecting to take Kyiv in days. Instead, the war bogged down and became the largest in Europe since World War II. Russian dead and wounded passed a million. This created the need for a deeper meaning to justify the sacrifice, and the Russian Orthodox Church supplied it. In September 2022, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the church, claimed that a soldier who dies in Ukraine “washes away all sins.” In March 2024, a council Kirill chairs declared the war a “Holy War,” fought to defend “Holy Russia” and the wider Russian World against a West it said had “fallen into Satanism.”

That framing caused a change in who the enemy was. Russia is no longer fighting Ukraine; it is fighting the West, and Ukraine is the battlefield where the two meet. Ukrainians are cast as lost members of the Russian family, to be brought home. From Russia’s cultural perspective, this is not a war over territory but a war for its faith and its survival. That is why a ceasefire won’t end it. A border dispute can be negotiated and a compromise reached, but a holy war against the West must result in total victory.

This also explains why Russia denies Ukraine the right to choose its own path. The cultural theorist Fons Trompenaars called this particularism: the belief that a specific relationship is more important than a universal rule. To most of the world, every country has a universal right to choose its own course. To Russia, the specific bond with Ukraine, sacred and unbreakable, overrides that rule. Ukraine’s vote to join the West is irrelevant because, from Russia’s cultural perspective, Ukraine was never free to leave, just as a U.S. state is not free to leave the United States.

Putin himself fits a clear pattern. In the framework of the analyst M.J. Hornby, he blends two archetypes. The North, the Power-Seeker, driven to lead and command his nation, and the Blue Guardian, driven to protect Russian faith and traditions, and to punish those who break from them. The North part of Putin wants Russia to be powerful, the Blue wants Russia to lead the world back to the traditional Orthodox church. Putin is a leader who does not back down or compromise on what he considers sacred. To him, losing Ukraine is losing Russia.

Here’s what happens next.

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On June 9, 2026, the leaders of eight northern European countries, the Nordic and Baltic states, called for Ukraine to be put on a fast track into the European Union. They backed Ukraine’s “irreversible path” toward full membership in NATO. The European Union prepared to open membership talks in the weeks that followed. Four years into a war meant to stop exactly this, Ukraine was advancing toward membership in the European Union and NATO faster than ever.

Monday’s Edition traced why Russia considers Ukraine to be Russian. Two forces, faith and security, set in motion centuries ago, that make Ukraine indispensable to Russia. Russia sees Kyiv as the birthplace of its faith and nation (Schwartz’s Embeddedness). And it sees Ukraine as a buffer guarding its open western border, a need driven by its fear of encirclement (Hofstede’s Uncertainty Avoidance). For more than three hundred years, Russia held Ukraine in various ways. This edition covers how Russia lost Ukraine and why Russia’s cultural perspective requires its return.

The first loss came in 1991. The Soviet Union broke apart, and Ukraine voted for independence, with more than ninety percent in favor. That vote stripped Russia of its largest buffer, its bread basket, and its spiritual center. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

That loss of control over the buffer states between Europe and Russia led Russia to view every nation that joined NATO as part of the encirclement it had always feared. Russia’s former satellite states joined NATO in 1999, then the Baltic states, which had been part of the Soviet Union, in 2004. From Russia’s perspective, the encirclement was happening.

The breaking point came in 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members. That declaration, in part, caused Russia to invade Georgia a few months later. That conflict is widely seen as a warning of what would happen if Ukraine joined NATO.

Despite the warning, Ukraine increased ties to the West. Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, who aligned with Moscow, rejected a deal to deepen integration with the European Union in 2013, largely under heavy pressure from Russia. This prompted Ukrainians to protest for months, driving Yanukovych from power in early 2014. Russia read his fall as a takeover staged by the West to secure Ukraine. This drove Russia to seize Crimea, home to its Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol, and start a war in eastern Ukraine.

The seizure of Crimea was also a message to Ukraine: back off from integrating with Europe and return to Russia. It had the opposite effect. It turned most Ukrainians against Russia. With that pro-Western majority, Ukraine wrote its goal of joining the European Union and NATO into its constitution in 2019. It also rebuilt its army with Western training and weapons, not Russian.

That same year, Russia lost control of the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church in Ukraine won its independence from the Russian church when the senior church in Constantinople recognized Ukraine. This ended Moscow’s authority over the church that it had held since 1686.

Russia was losing Ukraine as a buffer to NATO and as the cradle of its faith to a rival church. This caused Putin to publish an essay in July 2021 arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. He questioned whether Ukraine had any right to exist as a separate country. As he made that case, he prepared a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s cultural perspective could not deal with these losses. A nation driven by an Embedded Culture is divine to hold onto the birthplace of its faith. A nation driven by a High Uncertainty Culture is driven to defend itself against the loss of its buffer states and perceived encirclement. From Russia’s cultural perspective, Ukraine moving West was not a nation’s free choice. It was a threat to Russia’s safety and a theft of Russian faith.

The line from 1991 to 2022 is clear. The Soviet collapse led to Ukraine's independence, which removed Russia's largest buffer. NATO's expansion carried the West to Russia's border. The promise of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine was the final straw. Putin invaded Georgia as a warning of what would happen if Ukraine joined NATO. Russia's next warning, the seizure of Crimea, turned Ukraine decisively toward the West. The loss of the Ukrainian church took the cradle of Russia's faith. This prompted Putin's essay, written as the troops gathered, declaring that Ukraine is not an independent nation.

Friday’s Edition covers what came next: the full invasion of February 2022, how Russia’s church recast the war as a holy fight against the West, and where this chain of events is most likely to go.

Get a solid understanding of Trompenaars’ and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions by purchasing the guide or subscribing to Cultural Perspective (free or paid) and receiving the guide for free.

On June 4, 2026, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, sent Vladimir Putin an open letter offering an immediate ceasefire along the current front line and a face-to-face meeting to end the war. Three days later, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and Ukraine made the same offer together, calling for the fighting to stop and a starting point for negotiations. Russia rejected both. By then, the full-scale war Russia launched in 2022 had cost it over a million soldiers killed and wounded. In the previous year, its army had gained about 12% of Ukraine’s territory. Russia is paying that price and refusing offers just to talk.

What is Putin’s obsession with Ukraine? The answer is far older than this war, older than the Soviet Union; it started before Moscow was a city. It runs through how Russia sees two things: its religion and its safety.

It starts with Vladimir the Great, ruler of the lands then called Rus, who converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988, before Moscow was founded. He held a mass baptism of his people in Kyiv. That conversion created Orthodox Christianity among the East Slavs, the peoples who became today’s Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Because Russia claims that heritage as its own, it sees Kyiv as the cradle of its faith and the nation.

By becoming Orthodox, Russia joined the eastern branch of Christianity, based in Constantinople. That made Constantinople the center of Russia’s religious world. The Ottoman Turks were close to conquering Constantinople in 1439, which drove the church leaders, desperate for Western soldiers to save the city, to agree at the Council of Florence to accept the Pope in Rome as their leader. Moscow saw this as a betrayal of the true faith. The Roman Pope was not the head of Orthodox Christianity; the head of the Orthodox Church was the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Isidore, the senior church leader of the Rus’ lands, had signed the agreement, so Moscow arrested him when he returned.

The Council of Florence agreement convinced Moscow that it alone stood for true Christianity. The belief hardened when the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire and displacing the Orthodox Christian leadership. That void led Moscow to claim the leadership of the faith for itself. That claim was cemented in 1472, when Ivan the Third, ruler of Moscow, married Sophia, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and took the Byzantine double-headed eagle as his own emblem. The marriage created a direct line from Moscow to Byzantium and the Orthodox church. In the early 1500s, a monk named Filofei wrote to the ruler of Moscow that two Romes had fallen, first Rome itself and then Constantinople, which named Moscow the Third Rome.

The Third Rome doctrine made Russia, in its own eyes, the last protector of true Christianity and the rightful leader of all Orthodox civilization. That self-image leads Russia to treat Ukraine as Russian rather than as a separate country. This is what the cultural theorist Shalom Schwartz labeled Embeddedness: the value a society places on preserving its inherited faith, customs, and sacred place in the world. Russia is a strongly embedded culture. From that cultural perspective, letting Kyiv go means letting go of who Russia believes itself fundamentally to be.

Russia sits at the eastern end of a vast flat plain that runs across Europe with few natural barriers. That open ground exposed the Russian heartland to invader after invader. The Mongols destroyed Kyiv in 1240, Polish armies held Moscow from 1610 to 1612, Napoleon reached Moscow in 1812, and Germany invaded across the same plain in 1914 and again in 1941. Those repeated invasions taught Russia to keep a wide buffer between the heart of the country and the enemy to the west.

The lesson hardened into a permanent fear of encirclement, the belief that hostile powers are always closing in from every direction. The cultural theorist Geert Hofstede measured this trait as Uncertainty Avoidance, how strongly a society fears unpredictable danger and builds walls against it. Where others see an open border as a chance for trade or a risk to manage, Russia sees a threat it must defend against.

That need for a buffer drove Russia to expand outward for centuries and to create dependent buffer states from the Baltic to Central Asia. The same need led Russia to control Ukraine in various forms since 1654. Holding Ukraine gave Russia a large buffer and the farmland that fed the empire. That made Ukraine the single most valuable piece of that buffer.

These two forces, set in motion centuries ago, created Russia’s cultural perspective: Kyiv is its sacred birthplace, bound to be protected, and the territory of Ukraine is a buffer it cannot live without. The conversion of 988 made Kyiv the birthplace of the Russian faith. The betrayal at Florence and the fall of Constantinople pushed Moscow to claim leadership of the Orthodox world, and the Third Rome doctrine cemented that claim, making Kyiv non-negotiable. The open plain and four centuries of invasion made Ukraine the buffer Russia could not give up. By the time Ukraine became independent, Russia was already set to take it back.

Wednesday’s Edition covers what happened when that programming met the modern world: how Russia held onto Ukraine, lost it when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and could not accept watching it turn toward the West.

Get a solid understanding of Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions by purchasing the guide or subscribing to Cultural Perspective (free or paid) and receiving the guide for free.

On May 26, 2026, ships of China’s Fujian Coast Guard moved into the water around Kinmen, Taiwanese islands a few miles off the Chinese coast. China called it a routine law-enforcement patrol. Taiwan called it an intrusion into its waters and sent patrol boats to push the Chinese ships back. China has run these patrols for two years, since a Chinese speedboat collided with a Taiwanese coast guard boat during a chase in February 2024 and capsized, drowning two of the four men aboard. China used those deaths to begin regular patrols and call them normal policing of Chinese waters. Each patrol now treats water Taiwan has controlled for decades as China’s to police. The same pattern runs in the air. Taiwan began counting Chinese military aircraft entering its air defense zone in late 2020. The first full year, 2021, brought 972 crossings. The count for 2025 reached 3,764.

China is not preparing a surprise attack across the strait. It is doing something subtler and more difficult for Taiwan to respond to.

The story began in 1793, when two cultural perspectives met and did not fit. China saw itself as the center of the world with no equals, a rank fixed by who it was rather than what it did (ascription, Trompenaars). Britain saw a world of equal states under one set of rules (universalism). That mismatch, and the opium trade Britain used to break it, led to the Opium Wars, which led to the unequal treaties, which began the Century of Humiliation, the hundred years when foreign powers took China apart. That dismemberment cost China Taiwan, which Japan seized in 1895. Taiwan was returned to China after World War II. Then the Communists won China’s civil war in 1949, and the losing side fled to Taiwan, and a war in Korea in 1950 brought the American fleet into the strait and froze the island out of China’s reach. China lost Taiwan twice.

China has spent the decades since trying to close that wound because, in a Face Culture, a public defeat lowers a nation’s standing until that standing is restored. It took back Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macau. The land Russia took in the north is slowly being made Chinese again through names on maps, money, and migration. Taiwan is the last piece left.

Here, the Face Culture points away from the obvious move, not toward it. A Face Culture wants its standing restored in front of others. A long war that China might lose, fought against people who do not want to be ruled, would not restore standing. It would destroy it. So China is not trying to win a battle for Taiwan. It is trying to win Taiwan without a battle.

This is an old idea in Chinese strategy. Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that the highest skill in war is to break the enemy’s resistance without fighting. The coast guard ships off Kinmen, the planes in the air defense zone, and the twice-a-year blockade drills are that idea in practice. Each one is built to avoid a battle, not to start one. Together they wear down Taiwan’s will and its friends’ attention. The aim is to make Chinese control of Taiwan feel routine and Taiwan’s independence feel temporary, so that reunification, when it comes, looks less like a conquest and more like an inevitability.

China has already lost the one peaceful path it offered. It gave Hong Kong a deal called One Country, Two Systems: Hong Kong could keep its own way of life under Chinese rule. China ended that arrangement in 2020. Taiwan watched, and by December 2025, 82.6 percent of Taiwanese rejected the One Country, Two Systems. To China, that vote changes nothing because, from its cultural perspective, the relationship is more important than the rule, including a people’s right to choose (particularism, Trompenaars). Taiwan is Chinese in China’s eyes, and a vote cannot make it otherwise.

So the chain points to pressure, not invasion, as the most likely next phase. China will keep tightening the pressure. The patrols near Kinmen will reach more of Taiwan’s water. The flights into the air defense zone will continue to increase. The blockade drills will grow longer until a rehearsal and a real blockade look the same to Taiwan. Each step is built to draw no firm response, because each is too small to start a war over. China is betting that a wall built one brick at a time never gives the other side a clear moment to knock it down.

This runs on a clock most countries cannot hold. Xi Jinping has tied the recovery of Taiwan to 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the People's Republic of China. Holding one goal steady across a century takes a Tight Culture (Gelfand), a society with strong shared rules and the discipline to stay on course for generations, and a Long-Term Orientation (Hofstede) that counts progress in decades. The law is already written. China’s Anti-Secession Law of 2005 says that if peaceful reunification becomes impossible, China will use force. The pressure campaign is China’s way of making sure that line is never reached.

The danger in this plan is the risk of an accident. The chain that produced today is full of accidents, the Korean War being the largest of them. Chinese and Taiwanese ships near Kinmen will eventually collide. A plane will cross a line it should not, or a captain will fire when he should not, and a campaign built to avoid a war may start one by mistake.

From the West’s cultural perspective, the matter is closed. From China’s perspective, the matter is closed only when the humiliation is over and Taiwan is returned.

Get a solid understanding of Trompenaars’ and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions by purchasing the guide or subscribing to Cultural Perspective (free or paid) and receiving the guides for free.

On April 17, 1895, in the Japanese port town of Shimonoseki, Li Hongzhang, China’s chief negotiator overseeing the Qing government’s foreign affairs, signed a treaty that handed Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan. China also agreed to pay Japan 200 million taels of silver, recognize Korea as independent rather than a Chinese dependency, and open fou…

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In the last days of 2025, China ran a military exercise around Taiwan called Justice Mission. It rehearsed sealing off the island, blockading its ports, and cutting it off from the rest of the world. On a single day, Taiwan tracked sixty Chinese military aircraft near the island, forty-four of them crossing the line down the middle of the strait. A Chin…

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Monday’s edition argued that the United States is no longer the center of the global system, and that five leaders are building its replacement. Wednesday’s edition showed Modi and Lula writing the rules for trade and money. Today covers the two leaders building the European core: Emmanuel Macron in France and Friedrich Merz in Germany.

Modi and Lula kee…

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Monday’s edition proposed that the United States is no longer the center of the global system, and five leaders are building its replacement. The new system is multi-actor; no a single country sets the rules, and most of what these leaders build cannot be undone by a future U.S. administration because it is written into signed treaties, trade routes, an…

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Trump and the Republicans have done in a year what Russia could not do in decades. They are removing the U.S. as the global hegemon and effectively ending the global order that the U.S. originally created.

But since neither nature nor politics will tolerate a vacuum, the post-American order is well underway.

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