Armand Hammer blinked first.
That is where we left Libya last week.
Muammar Gaddafi’s government had cut Occidental Petroleum’s production, demanded better terms, and waited.
The timing could hardly have been better for Libya.
The Suez Canal was closed. TAPLINE had gone down. Tanker capacity was tight. Libyan crude was high quality, close to Europe, and suddenly much harder to replace.
Occidental had another problem.
There are obvious ways for a country to lose sovereignty.
An invasion.
A coup.
A foreign army.
Those are easy to see.
The less obvious way is Article 4.1.2.
I was afraid of Muammar Gaddafi before I knew anything about Libya.
I was a kid in the 1980s. To me, Gaddafi was not really a head of state. He was something closer to a movie villain who happened to exist in real life.
He had the sunglasses, the military uniforms, the bizarre costumes, the tents, the angry speeches. He looked exactly like the kind of dictator Hollywood would invent if Hollywood were trying too hard.
And Hollywood barely had to invent him at all.
In Back to the Future, released in 1985, Doc Brown gets the plutonium for his time machine from Libyan terrorists who want him to build them a nuclear bomb. They eventually show up at the Twin Pines Mall in a Volkswagen van and machine-gun him.
Nobody needed an explanation.
They were Libyans.
What I saw in 2019, what I believed in 2022, and what I believe now
I went to Ukraine in late 2019 to sell rubber hose.
That is not a metaphor. I run Crushproof Tubing, an industrial and automotive hose manufacturer in Ohio, and the Ohio Department of Development’s IMAGE grant program will pay to have someone on the ground identify potential distributors and customers for an Ohio manufacturer in a foreign market. The partner search came back with prospects in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Lviv, plus a few in Poland.
So I went.
I have spent about twenty-five years working with quality systems in manufacturing.
That is probably not the opening line you expected on a post about history and politics. Bear with me.
If you have ever sat through a quality audit, you know that an auditor has very little interest in what you know happened. You can stand next to a machine you have run for twenty years, explain exactly why the part failed, and be completely correct — and still get written up.
Why?
On March 2, 2026, Marco Rubio stepped out of a classified briefing on Capitol Hill.
The war with Iran was three days old.
Members of Congress had been asking a basic question. Was there an imminent threat to the United States?
That word mattered. Not dangerous. Not hostile. Not someday.
Imminent.
There are two ways to build a surveillance state.
The first is spectacular.
You announce a revolutionary new artificial-intelligence system. You make a video. You talk about simulation and prediction. You tell everyone that government is about to become smarter, faster, more efficient—and perhaps even capable of anticipating problems before they happen.
Maybe you put the president in the announcement.
Maybe you put Sam Altman in it.
Maybe you attach a number like $25 billion.
Everybody writes about it.
The second way is considerably less interesting.
On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old girl sat before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and told a horrifying story.
For her protection, she was identified only by her first name: Nayirah.
She had been in a hospital in Kuwait City, she said, when Iraqi soldiers came in. She watched them take premature babies out of the incubators, take the machines, and leave the infants on the cold floor to die.
A few years ago, everything had to have synergy.
You couldn’t just have two departments work together. They had to create synergy.
Then everything became disruptive. You couldn’t just make a better product. You had to disrupt an industry.
Then came thought leadership, purpose-driven, agile, holistic, ecosystems, transformational leadership, social impact and whatever other collection of words the keynote-speaker class could cram onto a PowerPoint slide.
Most business buzzwords eventually die merciful deaths.
One, unfortunately, seems determined to stick around.
Stakeholder.
Last Sunday I said that nobody needs to coordinate the AI buildout because the incentives handle it.
Every company can say a competitor will get there first.
Every country can say the same.
Every engineer is only working on one small part.
Nobody has to be evil.
The structure does the work.
I still think that’s right.
What I did not expect was to be answered within three days.
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