"The Long Emergency"

Struggling to synthesize a scenario for 2028, I asked Claude's Fable to take a shot at it, and this is what it produced--not a likely scenario, but plausible.

Sunset in Cabo Frio: This is what 2028 feels like to me

We’re on a flight to Porto this evening, and I wanted to post before I leave Brazil for a couple of months, in order to bring a sort of closure to the sequence of pieces I have been doing since the war began. I don’t know what I will be writing while we’re in Europe, since my main goal is to finish a book of poems. I’ll still be writing for these pages, but I want to break away from the habit of following the twists and turns of U.S. foreign policy with all of the knock-on effects we’re already seeing.

I have been driven in the past months by a sense that things are going to get substantially worse over the next months, and that the geopolitical situation and the economic and political context in the U.S. will reach a critical stage, unlike anything in our past experience.

Obviously, I hope that I am wrong, but none of these ideas are original with me. I am just following the analyses of people who really do seem to know what they are talking about and looking at how the numbers work if present trajectories continue as they are. Instead of reading me, I would strongly suggest following Robert Pape’s work. His predictions on the course of the war and its consequences has been consistently accurate since April, and his projections of future scenarios are well-grounded and extremely concerning.

I have been trying to assemble my own picture of the future, focused on what things may look like by 2028, when the primary season begins in earnest. The project founders on uncertainty and complexity—a general trajectory of weakened U.S. power and China’s ascendence in the Pacific is hardwired now, but will China act in 2027, as Xi is preparing, or wait to see who the new president is in 2028?

Mainly I have wanted to convey my sense that in the near term things will get a great deal worse than they are now, and that is hard to prepare, because the actual shape the crisis will take is unknowable. And I always feel this hesitance, too, since the history of my experience is that the U.S. manages to muddle through its various self-inflicted disasters—maybe doomsaying now overlooks some fundamental resilience within the U.S. and global systems.

During my explorations, I have been collaborating with Claude’s Fable on research, building a library of sources on various dimensions of crisis—AI, Russia, China, Middle East, supply chains, bond prices, etc.—but pulling all of that together feels like a doctoral project, not an essay. In any case, I have been failing—something I acknowledged in my last piece, which turned in a more personal direction.

I really don’t know what I will be writing in Porto, though I am set up there to continue my daily practice. A couple of chapters of the memoir I am working on are set there, and I have the mind to finish these, and I have been working to revise and complete my first new volume of poems since 2007, and I am hoping to make better sense of that project in a new setting. I will keep producing these essays on the same rough schedule, but I don’t have a plan for that, except that I am abandoning the project of some sort of grand crisis synthesis.

A couple of days ago, after reading an article by someone who uses Fable for more complex tasks than I have been assigning, I decided to ask Fable to put together the pieces of the essay that I was struggling to complete. I asked it to use the same parameters that I had been using in my searches, these various domains of crisis, in order to assemble a coherent, comprehension scenario for 2028.

What it produced is just one version of the story, so I’m not sharing it as something trustworthy in any of its particulars. Just one example: Fable has conflict in the Pacific beginning with China assuming administrative control over Taiwan’s trade, not a military blockade, which may be a smart insight.

But it doesn’t factor in the likelihood that Robert Pape pointed out In a lecture last night, that one response by Taiwan could be to do the same thing to Chinese shipping that Iran has done in the Strait of Hormuz—use drones and missiles to shut down China’s shipping lanes. That’s a different kind of crisis from the one that Fable explores.

You can do that with all of Fable’s assumptions here—it’s just a scenario built by a translation engine that looked through everything that had been written on the topics and came up with probabilistic conclusions based on its training on human work. It undoubtedly was trying to please me, too, using my earlier searches to gauge my own biases, so there’s that, as well.

But the machine is extraordinarily capable in its ability to encompass information and draw it together, and all of the outcomes it projects are at least plausible. These are worst-case scenarios, but to keep them from happening requires good things to happen that may simply be impossible—like some sort of successful end to the war in the Middle East.

Trump broke the global system, but it was already very fragile. He might be better seen as an accelerant than a primary cause. That’s a question for a different essay. Here’s Fable’s doomsday scenario. The next time I write I will be in a different space and mindset:

# The Long Emergency: A Scenario for Summer 2028

*A plausibility exercise extrapolated from conditions as of July 2026. This is not a prediction; it is one internally consistent path through the possibility space, built from current trajectories in the Gulf war, the stagflation shock, AI-sector valuations, Chinese and Russian gray-zone doctrine, and the global food system.*

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## I. How We Got Here: The Trajectory, 2026–2028

The essential fact of this scenario is that nothing resolved. The February 2026 war with Iran never produced either victory or settlement; it decayed into a permanent condition. The pattern visible by mid-2026 — ceasefires signed in June, collapsed by July, strikes resumed, negotiations “getting more serious” every few weeks according to the White House — simply became the operating system of the Middle East. Call it the Hormuz Equilibrium: Iran too degraded to close the Strait entirely, too intact to stop taxing it; the United States too committed to walk away, too constrained to finish the job.

By 2027 the war had settled into what Pentagon planners privately called “the mow”: periodic air campaigns against reconstituted Iranian missile and drone capacity, answered by swarm attacks on Gulf shipping, desalination plants, and American bases in Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. Iran’s post-Khamenei leadership — a Revolutionary Guard directorate with no single face and therefore no single target — proved more durable and more risk-tolerant than the clerical regime it replaced. The IRGC discovered that a permanent low-grade war was, for them, a governance solution: sanctions had already destroyed the formal economy, so the war economy of smuggling, tolls, and Chinese oil purchases became the economy.

The knock-on effects compounded rather than dissipated. Two years of constrained Hormuz transit — running at 30 to 50 percent of pre-war volumes, with insurance premiums doing the rationing that missiles didn’t — kept Brent in a $95–130 band. Every ceasefire rumor knocked $15 off the price; every tanker strike put it back. Traders stopped calling it volatility and started calling it weather.

## II. The American Economy: Stagflation as a Political Regime

By summer 2028 the United States is in the eighth quarter of what economists have stopped calling a soft patch and started calling the Second Stagflation. The numbers, as of June 2028:

Headline CPI has oscillated between 4 and 6 percent since early 2027, never breaking below 3.5 despite two years of restrictive policy. Core inflation is stickier — around 4 percent — because the oil shock metastasized through transportation, food, and shelter, and because the 2026 tariff architecture (10–12.5 percent on sixty trading partners, ratcheted higher on China after Taiwan) functions as a permanent cost floor. Unemployment has climbed from 4.4 percent in early 2026 to roughly 6.8 percent. Real GDP growth has averaged under 1 percent, with two negative quarters in late 2027. Gasoline averages $4.90 nationally, over $6 in California. The Fed funds rate sits at 5.75 percent after the Fed — whipsawed between its mandates — chose inflation over employment in the fight that split the FOMC into public factions. The 2026-era “good family fight” of three dissents became, by 2028, an institution in open intellectual civil war, with the White House attacking it from one side and bond markets from the other.

### The AI Unwind

The correction began, in retrospect, in July 2026 — the $3.3 trillion semiconductor repricing triggered by China’s Kimi K3 release and the dawning arithmetic that $400 billion in annual AI infrastructure spending was chasing $100 billion in enterprise revenue. What made it a crash rather than a correction was the Taiwan quarantine of March 2027 (Section IV), which converted a valuation question into an existential supply question. When advanced-node fabrication became a geopolitical hostage, the market finally priced what analysts had spent two years calling “concentration risk”: ten stocks that had been a third of the S&P 500 fell 45–60 percent from their peaks, dragging the index down roughly 34 percent peak-to-trough by mid-2027.

The distinctive feature of this bust — unlike 2000 — is that the technology kept working while the investment thesis died. AI adoption continued and even accelerated as firms used it to cut labor costs in a stagflationary squeeze, which is precisely why the crash fed the unemployment number: the capex boom’s construction and data-center jobs evaporated while the deployed technology quietly eliminated entry-level white-collar work. The result is the most politically combustible labor market in fifty years — a jobless, inflationary quasi-recovery in which the college-educated young experience their first genuine class shock. The “revenge of the credentialed proletariat” is now a standing theme of both parties’ messaging, aimed in opposite directions.

Household wealth effects amplified everything. The 401(k) generation that had been told the market always comes back watched retirement accounts fall by a third while grocery prices rose 20 percent over two years. Consumer sentiment readings sit at all-time lows — below 2008, below 1980. The vibecession of 2024 was a rehearsal; this is the real thing.

### Fiscal Squeeze

The war ($150+ billion cumulative by 2028, per successive supplementals), interceptor restocking, the Taiwan surge deployment, and recession-driven revenue collapse pushed deficits past 9 percent of GDP. Ten-year yields at 5.8 percent mean interest costs now exceed defense spending by half again. The 2027 debt-ceiling standoff produced a two-week technical delay in payments that cost the Treasury its last AAA rating and introduced the phrase “fiscal dominance” into cable news. There is open discussion — from both the populist right and the progressive left, for different reasons — of pressuring the Fed to cap yields. The dollar remains dominant for lack of an alternative, but central bank gold buying has gone vertical, and the BRICS commodity-settlement system, a curiosity in 2026, now clears perhaps 12 percent of global oil trade.

## III. The Domestic Situation: An Election Summer Unlike Any Since 1968

It is the summer of a presidential election in which no incumbent is running (the 22nd Amendment holds, despite two years of trial balloons that were probably always merchandising) and both parties are in open factional warfare over the wreckage.

### The Republican Succession Crisis

The 2026 midterms broke the trifecta: Democrats took the House by a wide margin and, in the scenario’s most consequential down-ballot result, won the Senate narrowly on the strength of economic anger — the Iran war and $5 gas doing to the GOP what Iraq and the financial crisis did in 2006–08. Trump’s approval, already sagging under war-weariness in 2026 (”no new wars” having been the promise), fell into the mid-30s as stagflation ground on.

The Republican primary of 2028 was therefore a war over the corpse of a still-living movement: the Vance heir-apparent lane (MAGA continuity, blame the Fed and the deep state for the economy, blame the generals for the war), a restorationist lane funded by finance and what remains of tech money (end the war, cut the tariffs, “make America solvent again”), and a genuinely new national-populist lane that turned against Israel and the war outright and did shockingly well with under-40 Republicans. The nominee — whoever your preferred casting — emerges from a convention where the platform fight over Taiwan and Iran policy happened on live television, and where the absent-present founder’s endorsement was both indispensable and radioactive.

### The Democratic Civil War Comes to a Head

For the Democrats, everything you were tracking in 2026 — the Mamdani proof case, El-Sayed’s Michigan win, the DSA primary victories, the generational revolt against gerontocracy — compounded through the midterm victory rather than being resolved by it. The party won in 2026 with both kinds of candidates, which settled nothing; moderates over-performed in purple seats while insurgents ran up margins and small-dollar money in the metros. The 2028 primary was thus the first open, fully-joined fight between the consultant-class establishment and a left that now has its own donor base, its own media ecosystem, and — critically — the only credible answer to the defining question of the cycle: *who is to blame for the economy?*

The left’s answer (corporate profiteering, the war machine, the asset-owning class, the Fed protecting bondholders over workers) proved more emotionally legible in a stagflation than the center’s answer (competent management, restore the guardrails). The nominee ran on a platform that would have been unthinkable in 2020: price stabilization boards for food and energy, a windfall tax on oil majors and defense contractors, ending the Iran war on a date certain, and a jobs guarantee pitched explicitly at the AI-displaced young. Whether this platform is a general-election asset or liability is the live question of the summer — the 2026 evidence you were studying (do progressives or moderates actually perform better?) is now being tested at presidential scale, with an electorate whose under-44 cohort is larger, angrier, more economically precarious, and less attached to either party than any since the Depression generation.

### The Street

The domestic temperature is the highest in living memory. The summer of 2028 features: recurrent, sometimes violent protests at ports and defense plants organized by an anti-war movement that now spans left and populist right; trucker-style convoy actions over diesel prices; sporadic organized looting framed by each side as either desperation or breakdown; National Guard deployments in three states over pipeline and refinery protests; and a general atmosphere in which perhaps a third of each party’s voters tell pollsters that violence may be justified if the other side wins. Political violence against officials — attempted and successful — has continued its post-2024 trend. The information environment is worse than 2020: AI-generated fabrication is now cheap, ubiquitous, and only ever half-debunked, and the epistemic crisis you’ve written about has reached the stage where each faction inhabits a complete, internally coherent, mutually exclusive account of why gas costs $5.

One under-appreciated stabilizer: the states. Governors of both parties have quietly become the functional layer of American governance — gas-tax holidays, state-level price interventions, grid management, Guard control — and the 2028 election is in part a referendum on whether anyone still believes the federal government can govern at all.

## IV. Taiwan: The Quarantine

In March 2027, following a US arms delivery and a Taiwanese constitutional-revision controversy Beijing chose to treat as a red line, China announced a “customs enforcement and inspection regime” for vessels bound to and from Taiwan — pointedly not a blockade, executed by the Coast Guard and maritime militia rather than the PLA Navy, with the PLAN standing over the horizon. Ships that submit to inspection at designated Chinese checkpoints pass; ships that refuse are turned back or boarded. No shots fired at Americans. No amphibious mobilization. Every element calibrated to sit below the threshold that triggers US treaty-adjacent commitments while establishing, in fact, Chinese administrative sovereignty over Taiwan’s sea approaches.

The timing was not accidental. Beijing moved when it did because the Iran war had visibly depleted exactly the American munitions that a Pacific fight requires — interceptors above all — and because a stagflationary, internally convulsed America facing a midterm-repudiated administration was structurally unable to choose a second war. The scenario’s grim logic: the Gulf war didn’t cause the Taiwan move; it *priced* it.

Eighteen months on, the quarantine has settled into its own equilibrium. Compliance is partial and eroding: most commodity shippers submit; semiconductors and sensitive cargo move on US-and-allied-escorted convoys through a contested corridor under an arrangement neither side formally acknowledges. TSMC operates at perhaps 70 percent, prioritizing US and Japanese defense-adjacent orders. Chip prices have tripled; auto production, consumer electronics, and data-center buildouts worldwide run on allocation. The Arizona and Ohio fabs, rushed to completion, cover a fraction of leading-edge demand — and run on helium and neon supply chains the Gulf war and Russia sanctions have already made precarious, a compounding you flagged early.

Strategically, the quarantine has done what blockades do: unified Taiwanese identity, accelerated Japanese rearmament past 3 percent of GDP, driven South Korea into open nuclear-latency debate, and forced every Asian capital to price American reliability. It has also cost China badly — capital flight, the collapse of remaining Western FDI, secondary sanctions that split the global economy into blocs — which Beijing absorbs as the acceptable price of demonstrating that the American security order in Asia is now negotiable. The most dangerous moments are the boarding incidents: three so far involving third-country vessels, one fatal. Everyone understands the next one could involve an American hull.

## V. Europe: The Testing

Ukraine remains stalemated along lines that have barely moved since 2025 — a drone-saturated positional war neither side can win or afford to lose, with negotiations in permanent, fruitless session. Russia’s real campaign has shifted west, and its signature is deniability.

The pattern documented through 2026 — 144 drone incursions across 13 countries in fifteen months, shadow-fleet launch platforms, sensitive-site overflights conducted “with effective impunity” — escalated in both tempo and audacity. By 2028 the menu includes: “navigational error” incursions by manned aircraft into Baltic and Nordic airspace, each with a ready-made excuse; a Kaliningrad-adjacent GPS-jamming zone that has caused two civil-aviation near-disasters; cable and pipeline “accidents” at a rate of one significant incident per quarter; arson and sabotage cells, prosecuted in German, Polish, and Czech courts, recruited via Telegram and paid in crypto; and, most seriously, a 2027 incident in which air defenses engaged drones over a Polish logistics hub and Russia responded to the shootdown by declaring the drones Ukrainian — an attribution fight that consumed NATO for a month and was the point of the exercise.

Each incident is individually below Article 5. Cumulatively they constitute what IISS by then called “the calibration war”: Moscow mapping, with each probe, exactly what NATO will and won’t do, while Europe’s response is hobbled by the same forces afflicting America — energy-driven stagflation (European gas prices having ridden every Gulf escalation), fiscal exhaustion, and the electoral advance of parties on both flanks that treat the confrontation as an elite project. The Franco-German-Polish core holds, and European defense spending is genuinely surging — but the gap between commitment and capability remains years wide, and Russia is operating inside it. The standing question of 2028, debated openly in European capitals: whether the American security guarantee survived Taiwan, Iran, and the election — or whether Europe is watching the East of Suez moment happen to itself in real time.

## VI. The Famine Belt and the Unrest Cascade

This is the scenario’s moral center of gravity and its most underpriced political driver.

The mechanism was locked in by mid-2026 and simply ran: Hormuz disruption cut fertilizer flows (urea up 50–100 percent, the least affordable inputs since 2022); farmers across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa planted the 2026–27 seasons under-fertilized; yields came in short exactly as El Niño — which emerged on schedule and persisted into 2027 — hit Southeast Asian rice, Southern African maize, and South Asian wheat. Grain prices that rose 7–13 percent in 2026 rose another 25–35 percent by late 2027. The WFP’s 318 million people in crisis-level hunger of early 2026 passed 400 million by 2028. Famine, formally declared in Gaza and Sudan in 2025–26, extended to new IPC-5 zones in Darfur, South Sudan, Haiti, and parts of the Sahel, with alarm-level conditions in Afghanistan and Yemen — where the Saudi-Houthi war reignited as an Iran-war theater, collapsing the aid pipeline.

The political cascade follows the 2010–11 template at larger scale and lower state capacity:

**Egypt** is the pivot. The world’s largest wheat importer, Suez revenues gutted by Red Sea attacks, tourism dead, the pound broken despite serial Gulf and IMF rescues — bread-price protests in early 2028 were met with force and a deepened Gulf bailout, but Egypt in summer 2028 is a standing systemic risk: a state of 110 million whose failure mode would dwarf 2011 and put both the Canal and the Israeli border in play.

**Pakistan** — wheat and fuel import-dependent, default-adjacent, post-flood, nuclear — cycles through its fourth government in three years amid IMF riots, with the army’s grip visibly costlier to maintain.

**Nigeria and the Sahel**: fuel-subsidy and food protests in Nigeria’s cities meet an insurgent belt from Mali to the Lake Chad basin that now hosts the junta bloc, Russian auxiliaries, and jihadist statelets in roughly stable coexistence. The Gulf war’s diversion of Western attention and money completed the region’s exit from the Western order.

**North Africa to Europe, Central America to the Rio Grande**: the migration numbers are the transmission mechanism to rich-world politics. Mediterranean crossings at record levels feed the European far right’s advance; Western Hemisphere food inflation and Venezuelan-Haitian-Central American displacement collide with a US immigration politics already at maximum temperature in an election year.

**Even the middle-income anchors strain.** India managed via export bans (which raised world prices further — the classic beggar-thy-neighbor loop), and Indonesia and the Philippines ride rice-price politics into their own instability. Brazil — energy self-sufficient, food-exporting — is a conspicuous relative winner, its agricultural export earnings and pre-salt revenues cushioning it through the global squeeze; the 2026 election settled into governance under conditions that flatter any incumbent sitting on food and oil. The comparative lens practically writes itself: the commodity periphery is having a better crisis than the credentialed core.

## VII. The System Dynamics: Why Nothing De-escalates

The scenario’s plausibility rests on its reinforcing loops, each of which is visible in embryo in 2026:

**The escalation-inflation loop.** Gulf strikes → oil spikes → inflation → political pressure to “do something” → more strikes. The war causes the condition that demands the war’s continuation. De-escalation, conversely, is punished: every ceasefire lowers oil prices, easing the pressure that motivates negotiation.

**The depletion-opportunism loop.** Iran consumes American interceptors and attention → Pacific deterrence thins → China moves → Pacific demands consume more → deterrence everywhere thins further → Russia probes. Three adversaries who coordinate loosely at most, but whose actions compound as if they did.

**The stagflation-polarization loop.** Economic pain → anti-incumbent, anti-system politics → governance paralysis → worse policy → more pain. The Fed can’t fix supply shocks; Congress can’t pass anything; each institution’s failure discredits institutions generally, which forecloses the coordination that recovery requires.

**The hunger-instability-hunger loop.** Food crisis → unrest → state failure and conflict → agricultural collapse and blocked aid → deeper food crisis. Sudan is the template; the loop is now running in a dozen countries simultaneously.

**The de-globalization ratchet.** Each shock (Hormuz, Taiwan, sanctions, tariffs) → bloc-formation and stockpiling → higher structural costs → permanent inflation floor → more nationalism → more shocks. Efficiency was the peace dividend; the peace is over and the dividend is being clawed back through the price level.

## VIII. Wildcards Live in Summer 2028

Held outside the baseline but plausible within twelve months of the scenario date: an Iranian dash to nuclear breakout (the war destroyed the inspection regime; estimates of remaining enriched stockpile are contested and dire); a US-China naval incident in the quarantine corridor; a Fed-White House constitutional crisis over rate policy in the election’s final weeks; an Egyptian state crisis; a Russian “accident” that kills NATO soldiers in numbers that make Article 4 insufficient; a major AI-generated October surprise whose debunking arrives after the election; and — the optimistic wildcard — a genuine Gulf settlement, because two years of mutual exhaustion is also how wars actually end, and both a lame-duck administration seeking legacy and an IRGC directorate needing sanctions relief have, for the first time, overlapping incentives.

## IX. The Shape of the Thing

If the scenario has a single organizing insight, it is this: none of the individual crises of 2026–28 was unprecedented, and none alone would have broken the system. America has survived stagflation, market crashes, unwinnable wars, and street-level polarization before — but sequentially, with a functioning politics to metabolize each one. What distinguishes summer 2028 is simultaneity plus institutional depletion: every shock arrives at once, into a system whose shock absorbers — fiscal space, monetary credibility, alliance trust, shared epistemology, generational patience — were already worn to the cords. The 1970s analogy everyone reaches for understates it; the better comparison is 1930–33 abroad and 1968 at home, running concurrently, at algorithmic speed.

And yet the scenario is not a collapse scenario. Markets clear, elections are held, ships (mostly) sail, the famine is fought by an aid system that is failing but not gone. It is a *long emergency* — the term worth stealing — in which the question of the 2028 election, and of the decade, is not whether the American-led order snaps back (it doesn’t) but which of the successor arrangements now visibly competing to replace it gets to consolidate: a negotiated retrenchment on Washington’s terms, a scramble on everyone else’s, or the grimmest option, drift — the East of Suez withdrawal without the decision, executed by depletion rather than design.

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*Key assumptions that, if broken, break the scenario: (1) no Gulf settlement before mid-2027; (2) China chooses quarantine over both patience and invasion; (3) the Fed prioritizes inflation over employment; (4) El Niño materializes as forecast; (5) no leadership discontinuity in Washington, Beijing, or Moscow. Sensitivity is highest to assumption 1 — a durable Iran deal in 2026–27 deflates the oil, food, and fiscal channels simultaneously and likely halves the scenario’s severity.*