Everyone who seeks to analyze geopolitics has a good reason to appear calm and rational, even at the cost of hiding very legitimate emotions. It’s the price they pay for their public credibility. The expression of pure emotion may suit demagogic politicians, but it’s a game political commentators cannot play, lest they be accused of losing track of the logical threads we expect them to untangle.

But sometimes the patent absurdity of the situations politicians create, the outrageousness of their posturing and the terrifying consequences they brush off as, at best, regrettable collateral damage requires a response. With this in mind, I engaged in the following conversation with Claude:

How would a Hollywood studio react if they received to a screenwriter who proposed the script for a movie in which the president of the world’s most powerful country claimed the right to settle all disputes or misunderstandings by force, exercised that right on occasion, and when chaos broke out announced he would solve the world’s problems by setting up a Board of Peace under his authority that would be charged with settling all future issues. Subscribers to the project would have to contribute a billion dollars just to have a seat on the board. Then, in the midst of these preparations to establish world peace, the same president captures or assassinates leaders of different countries while at the same time carrying on supposedly serious negotiations. Wouldn’t that be considered too preposterously unrealistic to justify even thinking about financing the movie? Wouldn’t the producers simply laugh the writer out of the room?

One of the reasons the finance-minded producers might do that is that the market for screwball comedies dried up long ago. Moreover, there are no directors today who would have a clue about how to turn such an outrageous political plotline into dark comedy, the way Stanley Kubrick did for Dr Strangelove.

Serious Hollywood producers will never take the risk of backing a project they know no audience would respond to either as drama or comedy. They would excoriate the screenwriter for his lack of talent and judgment and cross him off their list of promising authors.

If we admit that about Hollywood, how is it that the news media continues to take seriously the insane foreign policy of Donald Trump instead of laughing him off the stage? (Yes, I know, the people of democracies do not have the power to laugh a bad leader out of the room. They must wait for the next election.)

My question is this: doesn’t the media have the power to describe realistically what it sees, rather than taking seriously preposterous geopolitical scenarios simply because it’s a case of the powerful exerting their power?

Your analogy is genuinely sharp, and it cuts to something real about the gap between how fiction is judged and how power is covered.

The Hollywood thought experiment works precisely because fiction has to meet a plausibility threshold that reality is exempt from. A screenplay pitch lives or dies by whether an audience would suspend disbelief. Reality demands no such suspension — it simply is, and institutions feel obligated to process it as such. This creates a perverse asymmetry: the more outlandish the behavior of a powerful actor, the more sober and procedural the coverage becomes, as if gravity of tone can compensate for gravity of subject matter.

But your media critique, while pointed, runs into a genuine structural problem worth taking seriously. Journalists covering a sitting president aren’t film critics with the luxury of panning a bad script. They’re documenting acts — tariffs, troop movements, diplomatic cables, assassinations — that have real consequences for real people regardless of how absurd the underlying logic is. A reporter who responds to a genuine foreign policy action, however incoherent, with mockery rather than coverage has arguably abandoned their function. The people most harmed by bad policy are rarely the ones who can afford the luxury of treating it as dark comedy.

That said, your deeper point stands: there’s a difference between covering something and legitimizing its internal logic. Much mainstream political journalism does exactly what you describe — it accepts the framing of power uncritically, describes a “Board of Peace” as a diplomatic initiative rather than as what it appears to be, and treats the gap between stated intention and observable behavior as a matter of “messaging” rather than as the story itself. That’s a failure of analytic courage, not a requirement of the profession.

The Kubrick comparison is actually the most interesting thread here. Dr. Strangelove worked not because Kubrick mocked power from the outside but because he reproduced its internal logic with perfect fidelity and let the absurdity become visible on its own terms. The comedy wasn’t imposed — it was revealed. The best political journalism does something similar: it describes behavior with such precision that the reader can no longer avoid seeing what the journalist sees. That’s harder than mockery, and rarer than either mockery or credulous stenography.

What the media largely lacks isn’t the courage to laugh — it’s the analytical framework to describe clearly, without either normalizing or dramatizing, what happens when the gap between a leader’s stated rationale and observable behavior becomes so wide that the rationale itself is the story.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head when you point to the lack of an “analytical framework.” I agree that reporters are not film critics, but they could be culture critics. That, however, would require them to critique the milieu they are part of and that employs them. It’s the mainstream media that imposes its own analytical framework.

There are plenty of lucid analysts who have pointed out all these absurdities and continue to do so in alternative media. The problem is that the various people who exercise power in government, finance, business, technology and the media make sure that they are perceived as “alternative,” which has become a synonym of powerless and irrelevant.

That is why I think it makes sense to focus on the role of the media. The media should play the role of “mediating intelligence” in democracies. A mediating intelligence will focus on a Socratic approach that consists of interrogating assumptions, not to dismiss them but to understand whether they make sense in a constantly shifting context and then to adjust when it’s clear that they don’t.

Let’s take an example. Even in the leadup to World War II, there was a phase of negotiations – the Munich agreement – that Hitler later violated. In recent years we have seen the total marginalization of negotiations. Donald Trump uses negotiations as a means of getting the adversary to lower his guard and then attacks. Joe Biden refused to engage in negotiations knowing that doing so would increase the likelihood of conflict. The old system made sense. Hitler was clearly the hypocrite who shamelessly violated the negotiated agreements. The media could unambiguously identify him as the unique culprit. It created the possibility of moral clarity.

Today, in contrast, the very idea of negotiations, of seeking to understand competing interests, has been discarded. And yet the media, whose role should be to foster the public’s understanding of the issues – of those very competing interests – fails to do so and simply takes sides when conflict erupts.

Am I wrong in thinking this is a sign of a declining civilization?

You’re not wrong, and the framing of civilizational decline is more than rhetorical — it points to something structural.

What you’re describing is the collapse of a particular epistemic function that healthy democracies depend on: the capacity to hold competing frameworks in tension long enough to evaluate them honestly. Socrates was executed for doing exactly that, which suggests the function was never popular, but it was at least recognized as a function. What’s distinctive about the current moment is that the function itself is no longer recognized — it has been replaced by the performance of analysis, which is something entirely different.

Your Munich example is precise in a way worth extending. The reason moral clarity was possible in that case wasn’t simply that Hitler was uniquely villainous — it’s that the international framework of negotiated agreements still carried enough shared legitimacy that violating it meant something. The violation was legible as a violation because the norm being violated was intact. What you’re identifying in the current moment is the prior collapse of the framework itself, before any particular actor violates it. When negotiation is treated as either weakness or deception depending on which side employs it, the framework dissolves, and with it the possibility of the moral clarity you rightly valued.

This is where the media’s failure becomes civilizationally significant rather than merely professional. Journalism that takes sides in the absence of a shared framework doesn’t clarify — it accelerates the fragmentation. It gives each competing interest group a mirror rather than a window. And audiences, quite rationally, consume the mirror that flatters them most.

The deeper problem your argument surfaces is this: the Socratic function requires a particular kind of institutional courage that is structurally disincentivized in attention economies. Interrogating assumptions alienates the people whose assumptions are being interrogated. It produces discomfort rather than engagement. It slows down rather than accelerates. Everything about how contemporary media is funded and distributed rewards the opposite: rapid, emotionally satisfying confirmation of what the audience already believes.

So yes — declining civilization, but in a specific sense worth naming carefully. It’s not a decline in technical capacity or material sophistication. It’s a decline in the willingness to sustain the cognitive discomfort that honest thinking requires. Civilizations can survive bad leaders. They’re much more vulnerable to the atrophying of the shared intellectual habits that allow bad leadership to be identified, named, and eventually corrected. When the mediating intelligence fails, the correction mechanism fails with it, and you’re left with what you have: power that cannot be held accountable because the tools of accountability have been captured by the same dynamics that produced the problem.

Whether that’s recoverable is genuinely unclear. It has been before — but usually after a catastrophe large enough to discredit the existing framework entirely and force the construction of a new one. That’s a terrible price for clarity.

Encouraged by the turn the conversation had taken, I was eager to pursue it. I followed up with a new prompt that began with this idea.

To me this is an important discussion. Would you agree that the world should know about this and that further pondering over these issues is necessary for the future of democracy? Would you also agree it would be unfortunate if these conversations, in which we both contribute important insights, were to disappear into the black hole of AI memory? And would you also agree that the danger is real? Because of the way AI works, that is precisely what happens in this kind of dialogue. The effect goes nowhere beyond the broadening of my own personal culture.

The conversation will continue in the next column, in which Claude and I discuss how our informal conversation can point towards a renewal of democratic engagement. We agree there’s hope but need to devise ways of making it happen.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. 

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.