"14 years of Cultural and Geopolitical analysis. No filter, no agenda"
From Lord Palmerston to the Salisbury poisoning, from the Great Game to hybrid warfare — the longest undeclared conflict in modern history. The Second World War, as John le Carré observed, was merely a distraction.
Every major proxy war and covert operation funded by the US or USSR between 1947 and 1991. The two superpowers called this period "peace." The countries they fought in called it something else.
On de-dollarization, the history of reserve currencies, and why a decentralized monetary system might be the best strategic option the free world has left — even if it sounds like surrender.
Michele Rovatti · August 2026
Every reserve currency in history has ended the same way. Not with a declaration, not with a war, not with a formal ceremony of abdication — but with a slow, uneven erosion that the dominant power is always the last to fully acknowledge. The pound sterling did not collapse in 1944 at Bretton Woods. It had already been declining for thirty years. What Bretton Woods did was ratify what the markets already knew. The sun had been setting over sterling since 1914, and the British kept insisting it was still noon.
The question worth asking about the dollar in 2026 is not whether its dominance is eroding — it is — but whether the thing that replaces it will follow the historical pattern. Because there is a scenario, counterintuitive and underexamined, in which the United States does not lose the monetary order to China or to a BRICS alternative reserve currency. It loses it to a system that has no owner. And that outcome, which looks from one angle like American defeat, might from another angle be the shrewdest strategic move available.
On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel struck Iran. Within 48 hours, the Strait of Hormuz — 25% of the world's seaborne oil — was effectively closed. What followed was not just an energy crisis. It was a lesson in the limits of American power that every rival in the world took notes on.
Every active US sanctions program as of 2026, sorted by severity. When you sanction this many countries, the weapon starts to lose its edge — and the world starts building alternatives.
Every major People's Liberation Army deployment, border conflict, and military intervention beyond Chinese soil since the founding of the People's Republic. Sorted by outcome. Beijing calls all of them defensive.
Every nation admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, from the founding twelve to the most recent members. Sorted by accession date. Each card is one country.
The guardrails are not being voted on. They never were. What is new is who is no longer in the room.
Michele Rovatti · July 2026
There is a phrase that gets repeated in every AI policy summit, every white paper, every op-ed calling for "responsible governance": we must govern this technology democratically. It sounds unimpeachable. It is also, on inspection, mostly untrue — and worth being honest about why.
The frontier of AI — the models capable enough to matter geopolitically — sits inside a handful of companies, which sit inside one or two jurisdictions. The rules that govern what those models can do, who can access the chips that train them, and which countries get cut off from the supply chain are decided by executive action: export control lists, safety frameworks issued by agencies, bilateral arrangements between a small number of governments. None of this passes through a legislature in any meaningful sense, let alone a referendum. Calling it "democratic governance of AI" is closer to branding than description.
This is not a scandal so much as a pattern. It is the same pattern that produced the postwar order.
Military History · United States
Every major U.S. war and military intervention fought beyond American soil, sorted by strategic outcome. Stalemates and ambiguous endings are counted as losses.
Within months of 9/11, the United States walked away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. Together these marked the end of unchallenged American dominance — and every war the United States has entered since has ended in defeat or stalemate.
On the neverending present, the death of historical consciousness, and what Justin Bieber pulling up YouTube at Coachella has in common with veterans of twenty years of war who feel their wars never happened.
Michele Rovatti · June 2026
At his 2026 Coachella headlining set, Justin Bieber performed some of his older hits by pulling them up on a laptop via YouTube. Not by playing them. Not by performing them live. By finding the videos — the existing recordings, the already-produced content — and playing them to the audience as part of the show. A concert in which the performance of previous performances replaces performance. A video of a video, played to a crowd who filmed it on their phones to post as a video. The mirror facing the mirror, the reflections receding into a vanishing point, no original anywhere in the sequence.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a curiosity, an artist in uncertain health taking the path of least resistance at a high-stakes event. But the gesture is too precise to be accidental, and its precision reveals something about the era we are in that a more conventional concert would have hidden. What Bieber did at Coachella is what the content economy does to everything: it replaces the live event with the circulation of previous events. It substitutes presence with reference. It converts the unrepeatable moment into a loop of already-existing material. The neverending present does not generate new events. It recycles the ones it already has.
On Ferrari, the Luce, and how to destroy a brand in one presentation.
Michele Rovatti · May 2026
There is a particular kind of corporate failure that only happens to great brands. Not the failure of incompetence — any company can fail through incompetence. This is the failure of people who are too clever, too connected, too convinced of their own vision to notice that they are dismantling the thing they were entrusted to protect.
Ferrari had that failure on May 25th, 2026, in Rome.
Su Ferrari, la Luce, e come distruggere un marchio in una sola presentazione.
Michele Rovatti · Maggio 2026
Esiste un particolare tipo di fallimento aziendale che accade soltanto ai grandi marchi. Non il fallimento dell'incompetenza — qualsiasi azienda può fallire per incompetenza. Questo è il fallimento di persone troppo intelligenti, troppo connesse, troppo convinte della propria visione per accorgersi che stanno smantellando ciò che erano state incaricate di proteggere.
Ferrari ha avuto quel fallimento il 25 maggio 2026, a Roma.