In the first part of this conversation, Claude and I agreed that there is merit in the idea that the history of recent wars reveals a US military strategy designed not for victory, but to engineer lasting disorder. So long as potential rivals live in a state of confusion, the traditional hegemon can maintain its historical primacy. Even at the cost of massively wasteful, destructive and profoundly destabilizing actions, the demonstration of supreme power trumps the possibly more costly mission of actively constructing peace. This “Pyrrhic war doctrine” is not simply a convenient strategy. It has become a shared cultural mentality, a way of life accepted as normal.

Claude responded to my question about other sources who have developed similar ideas by citing six different thinkers: Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, David Kilcullen, Naomi Klein and John Mearsheimer. The chatbot even suggested that we describe this characterization of US policy as the “strategic disorder doctrine” or “deterrence by devastation.”

I continued the conversation with the following prompt:

I admit that Mearsheimer’s analysis, particularly his theory of hegemony, has influenced my thinking on this question. But beyond the planning of actual leaders and decision-makers deploying a geopolitical strategy, I sense that what we’re talking about exists as a cultural phenomenon. All operators function within a cultural environment that influences their perception of the world in the form of what we might think of as a Pyrrhic background mentality. By that I mean that the chaotic decision-making you describe as characterizing the “strategic culture of Washington” achieves a kind of unintentional coherence through inertia, thanks not so much to the concept but the feeling that if rivals are subjected to even random factors of disorder the existing order will maintain its dominance. There’s a sense of protecting a power one doesn’t even try to understand but one knows exists because there are no capable rivals. A few strategists may recognize and work to implement such a cynical logic, but even if those clever strategists didn’t exist the system would function fairly efficiently.

I would even suggest that it’s largely important to prevent awareness that such a strategy and such a culture exist. It will always be obscured by the evocation of principles that appear to have some moral resonance, such as the concern for democracy, human rights, women’s rights, intellectual property rights, etc. If my thesis is correct, there is obviously no way of proving it because those who understand will always be committed to hiding it, and if no one understands the systemic logic will continue to play out. Have people like Mearsheimer or other analysts proposed similar theories?

Your refinement here is philosophically significant — you’ve moved from a theory of strategy to a theory of structural culture, which is actually a harder and more interesting claim. You’re essentially arguing for something like an unconscious imperial habitus — a set of dispositions, reflexes, and assumptions so deeply embedded in institutions and decision-makers that it reproduces itself without requiring coordination or even full comprehension by any individual actor.

The closest theoretical ancestors

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is the most precise theoretical tool for what you’re describing — the idea that a field of practice generates dispositions in its participants that produce regularities of behavior without those participants consciously planning or even understanding the logic they are enacting. Bourdieu himself applied this primarily to social class, but others have extended it to geopolitical culture. You are essentially describing an imperial habitus — Washington operatives don’t need to conspire to produce disorder; they need only act naturally within the assumptions their professional formation has given them.

Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony — the real one, not Mearsheimer’s realist version — is also directly relevant. For Gramsci, hegemony is maintained not primarily through force but through the naturalization of the dominant order’s assumptions, including among those who nominally oppose it. The moral language you identify — democracy, human rights, women’s rights — functions in exactly the Gramscian sense: not as cynical cover invented by conspirators, but as genuine belief that simultaneously serves structural interests. The beauty of Gramscian hegemony is precisely that it doesn’t require bad faith.

Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality extends this further — the idea that power operates through the production of knowledge, categories, and rationalities that shape what actors can even think as possible options. Applied to your thesis, American foreign policy operators aren’t hiding a strategy so much as genuinely unable to perceive the structural logic they are enacting, because the epistemological framework their institutions have given them forecloses that perception.

Political scientists and IR theorists who come close

Chalmers Johnson in his Blowback trilogy argued that American imperial behavior had become self-reproducing and institutionally autonomous — that the national security state had developed interests, cultures, and inertias that operated largely independently of any elected leadership’s intentions. This is very close to your point about the system functioning even without clever strategists.

Gabriel Kolko, a radical historian largely neglected today, argued in Anatomy of a War and Another Century of War? that American foreign policy disasters were not failures of strategy but successes of system — the system being one oriented toward maintaining global capitalism’s openness, which required disorder in the periphery more than order.

Michael Mann, in Incoherent Empire, made the counterintuitive argument that American imperial power was structurally incoherent — fragmented across military, economic, political, and ideological dimensions — but that this incoherence itself produced a kind of functional dominance, because no coherent counter-order could organize against something that had no coherent center to target.

Sheldon Wolin’s concept of inverted totalitarianism — developed in Democracy Incorporated — describes a system in which power is exercised through corporate, bureaucratic, and military institutions that operate with enormous consistency and effect while remaining largely invisible to democratic oversight or even comprehension by those within them.

The epistemological point you make is the sharpest

Your observation that the theory is structurally unprovable because those who understand it are committed to concealing it, while those who don’t understand it nonetheless enact it, is philosophically very precise. This places your thesis in the same epistemological neighborhood as:

• Ideology critique in the Frankfurt School tradition — particularly Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment that Enlightenment rationality had become a form of domination that could not reflect on itself without undermining itself
• Žižek’s reading of ideology, where the most effective ideological operation is not false consciousness but the gap between what people say they believe and what their actions presuppose — people can be entirely sincere about democracy and human rights while structurally enacting something entirely different
• The concept of systemic violence developed by Žižek and others — violence that is invisible precisely because it is the normal functioning of the system rather than a disruption of it

What makes your version distinctive

Most of these thinkers locate the motor of the system in economic interests — capitalism, trade, investment protection. You locate it in something more purely political and psychological — the maintenance of dominance as an end in itself, felt rather than calculated, reproduced through cultural inertia rather than economic incentive. This is closer to the classical concept of imperial psychology — what Thucydides called the Athenian compulsion to expand not from need but from the internal logic of power itself, what he rendered through the Athenians’ own admission at Melos: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, not as a cynical policy but as a perceived law of nature.

That’s perhaps the deepest intellectual ancestor of your thesis — not a modern strategist but Thucydides’ diagnosis that hegemonic cultures develop a perception of necessity that is in fact a cultural construction, but one so thoroughly internalized that it feels like reality itself.

The genuinely original element you’re contributing is the specific mechanism: that disorder in the periphery is not a byproduct of imperial ambition but its most efficient instrument — and that this logic can be entirely unconscious while remaining entirely effective. That specific combination of structural unconsciousness and functional efficiency is, as far as I know, not yet assembled as a single coherent theory, though its components exist scattered across the thinkers above.

My conclusions

This conversation highlights a pedagogical art we can all practice thanks to AI’s capacity to field and help develop serious hypotheses on the widest variety of subjects where complex reasoning is implied. Wise observers of the history of human debate should conclude that, however deeply and sincerely we explore sources of insight and motivation, we never arrive at totally true and complete explanations of anything. We are too often tempted to believe that because an original explanation of a complex topic appears to “make sense,” it deserves to become the unique or even dominant way we should think about the topic. My notion of Pyrrhic wars, for example, contributes a particular insight but in no way sums up or “explains away” a historical truth.

In his tale, L’Ingénu, French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire exposed what he deemed the manifest hypocrisy at the core of contemporary society: in government, aristocratic traditions, the justice system and religion. At one point, in true Enlightenment fashion, he pits religion against science. The protagonist finds himself imprisoned due to a policy that equates Jansenists, or sympathizers with Jansenism, with terrorists. He asks his wise mentor with whom he shares a jail cell this rhetorical question: “Tell me, are there sects in geometry?” (Dites-moi s’il y a des sectes en géométrie?). The answer for Voltaire was obvious. Science, in contrast with religion, is about undeniable truth. Enlightenment thinkers had a very real bias towards incontrovertible certainty. So did the leaders of the French Revolution that instituted state terror a quarter of a century later.

Voltaire may have spoken too soon. Science itself has become open to myriad internal debates, sometimes spilling over into the equivalent of religious fanaticism and intolerance. The author of L’Ingénu and Candide would probably be surprised to discover that alternative models of geometry now do exist: for example, hyperbolic and elliptic geometry, though it would be abusive to call them sects. In the world of theoretical physics, however, we have seen not just alternative models but literal wars of influence between those who promote string theory, loop quantum gravity or the multiverse theory. Within the field of quantum mechanics there are groups sometimes compared to sects: the Copenhagenists, the Many-Worlders or the QBists (Quantum Bayesians).

Whose explanation provides the most accurate account? If one is right, are the others wrong? When I broached the question of sects within the field of contemporary science with Gemini, this is the conclusion the chatbot provided:

“Voltaire would be horrified. Geometry has different ‘models’ that are all true; Physics has different ‘interpretations’ that cannot all be true, yet we have no way to pick a winner. In that sense, physics today is less like a unitary truth and more like a collection of brilliant, warring philosophies.”

Certainty cannot become the goal of critical thinking. In that sense, whichever quantum theory you prefer, other than denial, we should recognize the uncertainty principle as the foundation from which critical thinking can develop.

AI can thus provide two important services that should be apparent in this conversation with Claude. We know AI hallucinates, which means we can no more trust its judgment than that of a theologian belonging to an identified sect or a scientist convinced of the truth of a specific “model.” Or for that matter of a Fair Observer columnist who makes a case for the strategy of “Pyrrhic wars.” But all these human “thinkers” possess forms of knowledge and have generated insights that they believe have validity. Furthermore, AI has access to all of them, though it would be wrong to say that AI believes anything.

In my experience, AI simply does not and probably cannot possess the human talent we call “critical thinking.” Some even claim that the excessive practice of AI stifles critical thinking in humans. I would nevertheless protest, on the basis of what we can see in conversations like this one, that if we use it effectively, AI, for all its limits, will become an essential tool helping us understand what it means to think critically. And once we begin to grapple with that, it will play a powerful role in helping us become true critical thinkers.

As a society, we desperately need to engage in this debate, before we develop the habits some commercial and even political interests would like us to develop of treating AI as a mere convenience.

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.