A fictional book about the Extreme Right.

I’ve been toying in my mind a vision of the future as I imagine some people on the Extreme Right might want it. Reason and rationality don’t have anything to do with a work of fiction. Fiction by its very nature is escapist fantasy. The best works of fiction, especially spy fiction, actually refer to real world events and they’re brought into the book from the cold. The described events in the present, past or future don’t have to be true, they don’t have to conform to any norms of normal behavior, they simply have to exist within the confines of the book. That’s what escapist fiction is, a CIA spy, send undercover, into the heart of the right wing conspiracy. It’s not actually a conspiracy, it’s simply, to some “The Plot”. That’s how the book would begin, with a sentence like “The thickens plottens…” he wrote in his diary that was online, his computer encrypted it and sent it to his handler. The handler’s computer decrypted the message and said “Mother will be home soon…”

What year will the war for Taiwan be? ChatGPT suggested 2051 as the year from whence to start writing. I think it might be sooner. 2047 perhaps as a way to honor one of the greatest extreme right winger theorists of all time. Hell it could even be a decade earlier at 2037. We don’t truly know, yet we know, that there is strategic ambiguity that we have maintained about Taiwan for decades. Sort of like, yeah I want your girlfriend but don’t tell her, sort of a vibe. The year did not matter nearly as much as people later pretended it did. Historians are terribly fond of dates because dates behave themselves: they stand quietly in rows, permit themselves to be divided into periods, and never object when some professor declares that one age ended on Tuesday and another began Wednesday morning. The people living through history have no such luxury. For them the end of an age usually arrives disguised as a television interview, an appropriations bill, a tariff, an election in a country they could not confidently locate on a blank map, or an admirably dull communiqué from two defense ministers announcing that their conversation had been “frank and productive.” The Plot understood this. Indeed, if The Plot possessed anything resembling a central doctrine, it was that history should never be announced until everyone was already living inside it.

Taiwan was particularly useful because everyone had been preparing for the war while solemnly insisting that preparation was intended to prevent it, an arrangement so perfectly circular that no conspirator could possibly have improved upon it. China prepared to take the island so that America would not defend it; America prepared to defend the island so that China would not take it; Taiwan prepared to survive both preparations; Japan prepared for whatever happened next; defense contractors prepared quarterly earnings calls; and strategic thinkers prepared increasingly colorful maps containing arrows that invariably crossed oceans much more easily than human beings did. This was called deterrence, and it had worked magnificently for decades, rather like two men standing in a gasoline-soaked room explaining that the enormous boxes of matches in their pockets were the principal reason neither intended to start a fire. The CIA man had another word for it, but Mother disliked profanity in official correspondence.

“Fuck” he thought. Two events happened on Aug 8 2026 and no one even noticed. Actually more than two that had direct bearing on The Thick. He no longer called it The Plot. It was far easier to say nonchalantly: that’s thick bro… we are thick as thieves brah… than to use that other word. He then decided to encrypt it further by using the word thin like think or thinking. I am thinking Father he would yell to himself in a room when it got to him. I am fucking thinking, leave me alone, he would scream into his pillow, when he got worried that his neighbors were starting to talk about his verbalization tics. Here are snapshots of the events. He would take screenshots and then delete them from his computer.

Keiko Fujimori was recently elected president of Peru in June 2026, defeating a leftist rival by less than 1% to become the latest right-wing leader in South America. Shortly after, Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as Colombia's president on August 8, 2026, following a narrow runoff victory on a platform of fiscal austerity and a crackdown on armed groups. These elections continue a regional "conservative wave" that includes José Antonio Kast in Chile, who took office in March 2026, and Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, elected in late 2025. The trend is characterized by voters prioritizing hardline security policies and free-market economic reforms, with several leaders receiving explicit endorsements from US President Donald Trump.

Kane and Abel he thought to himself and wrote off a message to his handler: “William Lowell Kane is ascendant at Columbia University.” The message came back and after decryption read: “Meet Abel’s at 4170 Oceanside Blvd Suite 193 at 18.” He made a mental note to his AI and the messages disappeared from his mind and his computer. At seventeen forty-three he began wondering whether Abel’s was a person, a restaurant, a storage locker, a dentist or one of Mother’s increasingly irritating jokes, and resisted the temptation to search the address because searching an address you had been specifically instructed to visit seemed to him exactly the sort of thing computers remembered forever. People had once worried that the government was watching them. By 2026 this had become charmingly antiquated. Everyone was watching everyone, principally for the purpose of selling them mattresses, testosterone supplements and videos explaining why civilization would collapse next Thursday. Governments merely had the advantage of subpoenas.

Kane bothered him more. Fujimori in Peru, Kast in Chile, Paz in Bolivia, de la Espriella in Colombia: individually they were elections, which was how democracies worked, and collectively they were still elections, which was how paranoia worked. The distinction was important. Mother had taught him never to confuse a pattern with a plan, although she had also taught him that the easiest place to hide a plan was inside a pattern everyone could explain individually. He wrote THIN on a yellow legal pad and underneath it: If four clocks strike twelve at approximately the same time, first determine whether they are in the same time zone. He stared at this for several seconds, decided it sounded profound, then realized it was idiotic and drew a penis beside it.

The second screenshot was harder to laugh away. He enlarged it, reduced it, enlarged it again, as though changing the font size might change the meaning. Somewhere else that morning another government had said something perfectly reasonable, another minister had invoked civilization, another official had rediscovered the Western Hemisphere, another military had signed an agreement with another military, and another commentator had explained why none of these things had anything whatsoever to do with one another. Perhaps they didn't. That was the occupational hazard. Intelligence work was largely the business of deciding which coincidences deserved to remain coincidences.

“I am thinking, Father,” he said. The room said nothing.

“I am fucking thinking.” The pillow, which had heard this before, maintained appropriate compartmentalization. What exactly was the point of the Russian War on Ukraine, he never stopped asking himself. He never accepted the argument that Ukraine had checkmated Russia to a stalemate. Wars don’t continue into perpetuity. The whole point of war is to finish things. To him it was simply an open wound festering on the right hand of the planet. A wound that by not healing asked the world to pay attention. The world stopped paying attention after the first six months. The Serbs finally made up their mind and aligned with Ukraine, read the headline. What? He whispered that in the recesses of his mind. His alarms were going crazy inside his mind. Some sort of tripwire. Pay attention to those alarms he had been trained at Langley. They only ring when something is off. The Serbs…. motherfucker… Putin once called them brothers by blood. Russia was willing to forget the atrocities against the Muslims, the Slavic Brotherhood was stronger than that! Why would the Serbs align with Ukraine?

The peasants here work like slaves, he typed into his Computer, got himself a tea and started to think on a napkin.
Pakistan…Saudi Arabia…Turkiye : Mutual Defense Pact.
Pakistan…China…North Korea : AQ Khan, nuke proliferation, mutual defense pact, BRI.
China…Russia…Iran : intel sharing, weapons sharing.
Iran…Yemen…Cuba : all used Shahed drone tech upgraded from Russia, China.
China has made inroads into South America… lots of Chinese cars, citizens in Mexico, fentanyl, MSS via drug cartels.
Chinese cars, Huawei tech…extensive reach into Europe.
Taiwan… he circled it. US troops bases in Guam and Japan.
Japanese yen intervention… carry trade.
Ukraine bombed an Iranian ship…
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy met Vucic in Serbia.
Serbia wants out of bear embrace and into the Western Camp.
Camps are forming… though no one talks about it… Western Civilizations v/s Eastern Civilization.
Fuck! Where’s my fucking pillow?
He screamed not because he cared a whit about the casualties from the war with Taiwan. He screamed because… well… because his mission was going to be extended further… and he had already been promised twice that he would be home by Christmas, although Mother had been careful never to specify which Christmas. This was an old intelligence-community joke and therefore not funny, which was how you knew it had originated at Langley.

He looked again at the napkin. CAMPS ARE FORMING, he had written. No. Too obvious. He crossed out camps and wrote CIVILIZATIONS. Worse. He crossed that out too.

That was the trouble with words like civilizations. They were enormous suitcases into which people could pack almost anything: Judeo-Christian alliance, Jesus, Plato, Shakespeare, aircraft carriers, immigration quotas, missile-defense systems, tariffs, white people, black people who agreed with white people, brown people who were temporarily useful to white people, Japanese people who had apparently been admitted by special dispensation, Israelis depending upon who was speaking, and occasionally the Greeks, although nobody had bothered asking the Greeks what they thought about it. The Chinese had their own suitcase. So did the Russians. So did Islam. He drew a line through the whole thing. TEAMS? MUTUAL DEFENSE INSURANCE POOLS?

And Taiwan sat in the middle of his napkin like a cigarette burn. What happened if somebody lit the paper? Not who won. That suddenly seemed like the least interesting question. What happened to all the insurance policies? He thought of Article Five. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Türkiye. Japan. Korea. Russia and North Korea. America's commitments throughout the Pacific. China's obligations that weren't called obligations. Intelligence relationships. Oil relationships. Shipping relationships. Semiconductor relationships. Financial relationships. The fucking carry trade.

Perhaps this was why the Russian wound had never closed. He had spent years asking what the Ukraine war was for, as though wars were novels and somewhere in the final chapter the author was obliged to explain the plot. Maybe its function by 2026 had nothing to do with its original purpose. Wars aged. They acquired tenants. Industries moved into them. Alliances grew around them. Intelligence services learned inside them. Weapons were tested there, doctrines discarded there, careers made there, fortunes accumulated there, grudges imported there from places thousands of miles away. Eventually nobody needed to remember why the building had originally been constructed because too many people now had offices inside it.

He looked at the Iranian ship Ukraine had attacked. That shouldn't belong on this napkin. He drew a box around it.

Then Serbia. Another box.

Then Pakistan—Saudi Arabia—Türkiye.

Then the Iranian drones.

Then Japan.

Then South America.

He stopped.

There was a technique taught at Langley for moments like this. When an analyst discovered a pattern capable of explaining everything, he was supposed to assume first that he had discovered bullshit. Reality resisted elegant theories. Human beings were incompetent, governments contradicted themselves, bureaucracies fought bureaucracies, presidents changed their minds, generals misunderstood enemies, intelligence agencies misunderstood presidents, and occasionally some poor bastard simply took the wrong exit from the airport. A theory explaining everything was usually evidence that the analyst had fallen in love with his theory.

He therefore wrote at the top of the napkin:

ASSUME THIS IS BULLSHIT.

Underneath it he wrote:

What would prove it isn't?

That was when his computer chimed. He hated when his computer chimed. There was no message, merely a photograph Mother had pushed through the encrypted channel. An old photograph. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin sitting together at Yalta in February 1945, three exhausted men dividing problems they had not created into arrangements that would create entirely new ones.

Beneath it Mother had typed five words.

YOU ARE THINKING TOO SMALL.

He stared at Stalin. Then Churchill. Then Roosevelt. Then Taiwan.

He imagined the aftermath of the war with Taiwan that would involve multiple countries around the world… and the eventual peace. What would that sound like? It would sound like both sides would split up the world into Western and Eastern zones of influence. Has anyone said that recently? He queried his search engine. This is how it responded.

The 2025 National Security Strategy and various realist analysts also discuss a potential return to this multipolar structure, with the U.S. asserting predominance in the West and China in the East.
Really?
1. The "Timeless Truth" of Spheres (Section IV.1) The most cited passage regarding spheres of influence appears in Section IV (Regional Priorities):

"The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations. The United States recognizes the right of great powers to exert influence over their immediate neighborhoods, provided they do not threaten the U.S. homeland or our core interests."

This paragraph serves as the philosophical justification for accepting China's regional influence in Asia while asserting absolute U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere.

2. The Western Hemisphere as an Exclusive Sphere (Section IV.2) The strategy elevates the Western Hemisphere to the top priority, effectively reactivating the Monroe Doctrine with a "Trump Corollary":

"The Western Hemisphere is the United States’ exclusive sphere of influence. We will not tolerate the presence of hostile extra-hemispheric powers (specifically the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation) establishing military or strategic footholds in our backyard. We will reassert American preeminence through economic statecraft and, if necessary, unilateral action."

3. Asymmetric Multipolarity and the "Core 5" (Classified/Leaked Context) While the public document speaks in general terms of "balances of power," reports indicate a classified annex or longer draft circulated within the administration (often attributed to the influence of realist advisors) that explicitly outlines a "Core 5" (C5) structure:

• Concept: The world should be managed by five great powers: United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan.

• Structure: Each would dominate its respective region (U.S. in the Americas, China in East Asia, Russia in Eurasia, India in South Asia, Japan in parts of the Pacific), creating a stable balance of power without U.S. intervention in other regions' internal affairs unless core U.S. interests are threatened.
  

  He closed his computer, burned his napkin and decided not to ask who had written the 2025 National Security Strategy. Mother would know.