Hegemony at the Edge

This book sits in a parallel universe between genres. It's not the unadulterated truth about present circumstances involving the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela. It's not a conventional work of history or political science, but neither is it fiction. It sits in the domain of strategic foresight. Much of what you will encounter is drawn from the record: wars that were fought, coups that took place, treaties that were signed, institutions that still exist, and patterns of extraction, intervention and resistance that are well-documented.
The analysis of hegemony, empire, development, debt, climate and technology rests on a large body of research and lived experience, the kind of material that any serious strategist must grapple with. Threaded through that, however, are elements that are imagined or extrapolated. The abduction of a president from Caracas, the precise choreography of certain operations, and some of the scenes and conversations have not (at the time of writing) occurred exactly as described.
They are composites and thought experiments. They are there to expose logics that already govern our world and to show where those logics might plausibly lead. You can think of the whole book as a meditation on power conducted in what I call the "expanded now". The narrative stretches the present backwards into the histories that made it and forwards into futures that are not yet real but are entirely possible.
It pauses over one imagined hinge event and uses it as a prism through which to examine the structures, habits and blind spots that already shape our lives. Nothing here should be read as prophecy. The point is not to convince you that events will unfold exactly as I have laid them out, but to make visible a set of trajectories that are already in motion. Equally, it's not "just fiction". The forces described are real; the constraints are real; the temptations and delusions of power are as real as anything you can graph.
I have tried, throughout, to bring to bear the best thinking available from a professional strategist: to trace connections across domains that are usually treated in isolation, to be honest about trade-offs and dirty hands, and to avoid both comforting optimism and easy despair. The book is an attempt to do serious analysis by means of story, to see how far clear thinking can go when it refuses the usual academic disguises.