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"Next Year's News This Week" THE NEXT WORLD By Mark Anderson ________ Why Read: While many of us see through yesterday's glasses, using our views of ethics, morality, and perhaps service to understand the world, it would appear that things are changing very quickly. The map of the Next World may well be drawn by dictators - including our own - in a global new version of "The Great Game" crossed with the Trump / Monroe Doctrine. Read on to see if this makes sense to you. - mra ________ Basic Sectors of the Next World Suddenly, it all seems crystal clear: you just have to see the world through the eyes of the Class I dictators: Xi, Putin, Trump. And, while doing this, you need to look through the lens of basic sectors:
Let's move in closer.
Geography & Territory Here is the likely future "map," as each dictator gets what he wants. I. The US gets: The Trump/Monroe Doctrine. Specifically, the US gets ownership or control (money, military, oil, and gas) over:
II. Russia gets:
III. China gets:
Energy: Oil & Gas I. The US gets: Near-monolithic control:
II. Russia gets:
III. China gets: Nothing. Continued strong dependency on coal and ...
Energy: Renewables & All Other I. The US gets: Nothing.
II. Russia gets:
III. China gets:
Military I. The US gets:
II. Russia gets:
III. China gets:
War & Peace
Trade & Tariffs
Culture & Religion
Innovation & IP
AI & ML
Power Culture & Ethics It appears that a prime descriptor of this dictator-driven Next World is the exchange of individual freedoms for absolute power. The first to go - historically with China and Russia and presently in the US - were freedom of speech and true democracy. Indeed, one can make a convincing case that democracy cannot survive the Internet Age with either of these freedoms intact. The power of bots, info war, newsfeed manipulation, social engineering, consumer controls, and so on make it difficult, if not impossible, for an otherwise-informed electorate to exercise intelligent voting power. The result appears to be increased fear and hate of The Other and increased centralized power to the executive. I do not think it is overstating this transition to say that, in the US, Congress and the judiciary have lost their constitutional roles, leading to what is currently a quasi-dictatorship. Culture and ethics seem suddenly quaint, amid the power struggles. EU: Floundering and Free All of the above leaves out the EU. Why? Because, through its 27-nation federalism, often requiring unanimity, very little gets done. One might describe this as the structural opposite of a dictatorship, perhaps therefore leaving its nations as the global protectors of the above-threatened human rights and ethics - but they do so at the cost of not getting much done on the global stage. The EU's flailing attempts at rejecting China's economic attacks would be Exhibit A. Of course, having Trump attack it from the rear, likely with Putin's glowing approval, doesn't make the EU's current position any easier. Energy, Money, Power Energy leads to money; money leads to power. Ultimately, this is the new Great Game in British parlance: power is the endgame, and the US and China are both winning. The US makes the things that make money and owns the leading share of oil energy. China steals the things that make money and thereby owns the leading share of renewables. Russia just thugs along, killing people who get in Putin's way. Anomalies In this Next World map, there are a few anomalies that deserve attention for their own reasons, including:
What do you get when you combine oil with 4th-century tactics? Thousands of years of unending war. And what do you get when you forcibly insert a non-Muslim new country into the middle of this Shia vs. Sunni vs. Christian multi-century battle? Israel today, perpetrating and facing endless war. How many times does the world have to hear the chant Death to the infidels! to understand that this is an endless religious war, fought by Islamists against the "nonbelievers"? In the case of Russia, they got the message early, wiped out Chechnya, and used the Chechens as fake terrorists to bring Putin to power. In China, they burned the temples and killed or arrested all of the Uyghurs they could find, putting them in concentration camps and eradicating their culture, religion, language - what China calls "re-education." And the US, forgetting everything everyone from Britain to Russia had already learned, has been in endless war, and waste of blood and treasure, to the great approval of lonely Israel, but to the increasingly loud disdain of the American people, including the GOP.
The final anomaly in this Next World map is the South Pacific - most likely the place where a next world war would start. After all, it violates everything we have covered above, in terms of trends. Specifically, the countries of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan all sit uncomfortably in the middle of China's current plans for global domination. All have China as their top trading partner, and so are already economic captives of the InfoMerc net. All are in military zones inside China's plans, as Japan, Taiwan, and SK are all too historically aware. Lucky for them, to date China is not interested in a kinetic war - but keep in mind that China has the most accelerated nuclear weapons program in the world, and they have none. That's a pretty big stick to wield in an otherwise economic game.
What is the good news about this new map? Well, it depends. Lula just won the Brazilian election, which is both good news and bad. Good for human-rights activists, but very bad for those fighting China's global domination program, with Brazil and the BRICs as its top-priority geographical goal. If the GOP loses both the House and the Senate, it is hard to imagine Trump behaving any differently than today. That would include massive challenges by all available agencies under his control to invalidate the November vote. I suspect he is well aware that Jair Bolsonaro is in jail on a 27-year sentence for doing exactly what Trump did in the US, even as Netanyahu faces potential jail time for other prior offenses. Lesson: If you want to stay out of jail, stay in power. During the attempted coup in the US on January 6, 2021, the apparent idea was that, after thugs used violence to take control of the Capitol and all those inside it, Trump would join them. This only failed because: a) the attempted violent break-in into the joint Congressional session was met with gunfire from within, killing one and stopping the takeover; and b) it appears that, despite Trump's insistence that his Secret Service team drive him to the event, they refused to do so. Will Trump now allow a peaceful midterm power change, or a peaceful transition in power after the next presidential election, should he lose either or both? If past performance is any indicator of future outcomes, it seems quite unlikely. And, to the degree that the trends underlying a global move to establish the Next World map are real and hard to resist, it would seem that we had all better take it seriously, ignoring false assurances and watching real actions that could put us there sooner than we thought. Here is one vision of the Next World map:
Source: SNS (click to enlarge)
Your comments are always welcome.
Sincerely, Mark Anderson
Copyright 2026 Strategic News Service. Redistribution prohibited without written permission. DISCLAIMER: NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Information and material presented in the SNS Global Report should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained in this publication constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by Strategic News Service or any third-party service provider to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments. This publication is not intended to be a solicitation, offering, or recommendation of any security, commodity, derivative, investment management service, or advisory service and is not commodity trading advice. Strategic News Service does not represent that the securities, products, or services discussed in this publication are suitable or appropriate for any or all investors.
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"We don't want to rely on standard civilian municipal infrastructure to run our national defense." - Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell, to Fox News; quoted in the Daily Mail
'The Pentagon's doing its job to keep our national security safe and make 'Fortress America.' You have to make 'Fortress my house,' 'Fortress my apartment.' Please, do it for everyone. Your neighbors are not going to have any extra food." - Dan Bongino, former Deputy Director of the FBI; ibid.
"Given the capabilities of these [agentic LLM] systems and the behavior they exhibit, it is becoming increasingly important - almost urgent - to better understand them." - Marius Mosbach, professor at Germany's Saarland University and Scientific Director at the German Research Center for AI; quoted in the New York Times
"When you are trying to engineer something, it's generally better if you can understand it." - Tom McGrath, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Goodfire, ibid.
"There really is no comparable case where you have an economy of such significant size where the macroeconomic data is so problematic. [...] Everything doesn't really fit together, looking at the official numbers." - Daniel Rosen, Co-Founder, Rhodium Group; in the Wall Street Journal.
[Ashli] Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was shot by the police lieutenant when she tried to climb through a door with the glass smashed out as she and others in the mob pressed to get into the Speaker's Lobby outside the House chamber. She was unarmed. Prosecutors said Babbitt was part of the mob that was trying to get into the House as Capitol Police officers were evacuating members of Congress from the chamber. The officers used furniture to try to barricade the glass doors separating the hallway from the Speaker's Lobby to try to stave off the rioters, who kept trying to break through those doors, smashing the glass with flagpoles, helmets and other objects. At the same time, Babbitt tried climbing through one of the doors where the glass was broken out. The officer, inside the Speaker's Lobby, then fired a single round from his service weapon, striking Babbitt in the shoulder, prosecutors said. Capitol Police said its office of professional responsibility - which handles such investigations - determined "the officer's conduct was lawful and within Department policy." The officer will face no internal disciplinary action. - AP wire story on the insurrection and attempted coup on January 6, clearing the officer who killed one of the mob breaking through a door into the Congressional proceedings transferring power.
Sunday, October 25, 2026
THE LONG BETRAYAL: RUSSIA, TRUMP, MUSK, AND HOW WE GOT HERE By Evan Anderson This week, we examine why the ties between the Trump administration, those who aid and abet its criminal activity, and Russian intelligence, government, and money are a "clear and present danger" to US national security. Read on for a description of Russian tactics for gray-zone, information, and psychological warfare; the blatant cooperation between our administration, Putin, and the KGB/FSB; and what to expect next, as these forces move to finalize the permanent reduction of the American state.
Sunday, October 18, 2026 HANDICAPPING THE WEALTH TAX QUAGMIRE By Berit Anderson Ahead of the midterm elections, conversations about US wealth taxes - in all their varied forms - have become politically incendiary, rife with strong opinions but light on evidence. This week's Global Report looks to change that, combining analysis of domestic migration within and between states with historic responses of capital and investment to such policies across the US; and explaining how the states championing these policies - and their economies - are likely to be affected.
Sunday, October 11, 2026 THEY BUILT THE GUN, THEY PULLED THE TRIGGER By Mark Anderson While the Anthropic crew is marketing their large language models as humanity-ending murderers that are also religious beings who might need to confess as in the Catholic tradition, and OpenAI ships product (or threatens to) with less chain of thought explainability, even as it fires members of its safety team ... it is not just possible, but also likely, that this whole hype circus can be reduced to a single tech storyline, without any of what the Irish, in a recent peer-reviewed paper, labeled "bulls**t." In this discussion, we will provide that simple thread.
Sunday, October 4, 2026 THE TRILLION-DOLLAR PROMISE II: Truth and Consequences By Evan Anderson The LLM boom always sounded irrational to anyone paying attention to the buildout statistics touted by its top spokespeople. The ubiquitous deployment of flawed LLMs was "projected" to cost trillions, and to achieve exactly what result was never quite clear. This week, we take a look at what we were told would happen, what actually happened, and what is likely to come.
Note: Some letters may be republished to include subsequent replies.
Subject: SNS: THE LONG BETRAYAL: RUSSIA, TRUMP, MUSK, AND HOW WE GOT HERE (10/25/26) Evan, Mark, This needs to be published nationally on a large scale before the election!! Jerry M. Woodall Consultant, B&B Gulf LLC
Hi Jerry, We agree - and have made this issue gratis for non-SNS members. Just click on the Subject heading above or see Evan's video invitation in our recent LinkedIn post, both of which we invite you and other members to forward freely to others. (Note: The Spark salon Ev references happened this past Thursday; see "Upcoming Events" in this issue to sign up for our next virtual Spark, on November 19.) Sally Anderson Editor-in-Chief
Subject: SNS: HANDICAPPING THE WEALTH TAX QUAGMIRE (10/18/26) Berit, Thanks, full of "meat". But, early on there was a reference to socialism. There is no "nuance" in socialism. We are all equal in ownership, the state tells us what we "own". So why work harder, sacrifice more, to "get ahead"? Any excess we produce will be taken from us and be given back to "THE STATE". In that system human nature is ignored, actually degraded. We all regress to the lowest common denominator. The evidence is overwhelming that capitalism results in greater wealth creation than does socialism. But it can also lead to a greater diversity in dispersion of that wealth creation. Those that work harder, and forge on through adversity, generate more wealth for themselves than those who don't. The indolent and easily discouraged resent that disparity, putting the blame on the successful: "Life's a bitch, and it's their fault"! "Bad stuff" can happen to anyone. Some people are more fortunate than others. But envy of the successful only hurts the envious. In this amazing country, you can pick up the pieces of failure and still be successful. But success is not handed to most of us. For most of us it requires hard work and dedication. Some luck and the grace of God can also help. Al Braun [aka OttoPolitico]
Al, I really appreciate your thoughts on this. And I agree that societies that villainize financial success on its own disincentivize striving and the hard work of innovation. I didn't get into socialism specifically in last week's Global Report, but I find a lot of the public conversation on capitalism vs. socialism to be reductive to an extent that isn't particularly helpful - and significantly lacking in clear definition. Which generally contributes to political animus between parties - and between friends and family members, but without any real understanding of one another's beliefs. I don't personally believe that taxation of wealth on its own indicates socialism - taxation only with representation was the founding basis of our capitalist democracy. Most modern societies are some combination of capitalist economies with social benefits. And that nuance and its various implementations, I find very interesting as a study in the impacts of various policies. The devil of course is in the details - a conversation that I would love to have with you sometime in person. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. All the best, Berit Anderson
Hi Al, I agree; if society is only based on wanting, vs. performing, it won't prosper. This was always the big fail behind Marx; it was a bookish and uninformed view of human nature. The epitome was, after someone became dictator during the march of progress, they would then relinquish power to the masses. Funny how that made sense in the quiet confines of the British Museum but never happened in real life. I think many nations are now at a crossroads, perhaps thanks to the internet, of either hating those who prosper or trying to restrain their lesser angels of greed, etc. It will be important to the world to help create a balance on this. But perhaps our greatest service will be to take the word Hate out of the conversation. Thank you for sharing your ideas, Mark Anderson
Subject: SNS: IRELAND & ICELAND: THE NORTHERN ISLANDS OF TECH (9/13/26) Mark, Thank you for your appropriate comments in [the Ethermail section of] your SNS issue dated October 11th. The only things that I'll add relate to your "opposite tack". I of course will not disagree with you. You are right that Ireland's efforts to attract multinationals' investment have succeeded gloriously. From that investment, Ireland and its people have greatly benefited from many thousands of good jobs, a better environment, and unbelievably increased corporate tax revenues. I have no problem with countries granting certain benefits to attract inbound investment and job creation. (You may or may not recall that I worked for three years in Singapore from 1979-1982, helping multinationals secure the same types of locally-offered tax and other economic benefits.) This, however, is not all that Ireland has done. Ireland, as well as Luxembourg and some other countries, has also operated in a fashion that not only provides benefits for profits legitimately earned through real activities conducted within Ireland, but also has actively helped multinationals avoid tax on profits legitimately earned through real activities conducted within other countries, including the United States. In a real sense, this is a "beggar thy neighbor" approach, and should not be condoned. Now looking to the United States, you said: "[T]he real problem you are describing strikes me as being the failure of US laws and regulations to prevent the leakage of so much IP and money to an offshore location." No question there, Mark. We're in complete agreement. The following is something that I wrote a month or so ago for an in-process article I'm writing concerning the Apple "State Aid" case, decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in 2024. That was the decision that forced Apple to pay about $14 billion additional tax to Ireland. (I've excluded the footnotes.) A recent contribution to this discussion of factors that contributed to Apple's structuring comes from Philip Laroma Jezzi, who focused on the political situation in the United States. He noted that Apple's ability to shift profits was not a result of "accidental tolerance but institutional complicity, a system whose distortions were visible yet left uncorrected." Supporting this, he adds: For instance, some U.S. politicians accused Ireland of acting as a tax haven through which vast amounts of profits were shifted. [But] the architect of the "Double Irish" scheme, Feargal O'Rourke [an Irish accountant and former PwC Ireland managing partner], cynically - yet not inaccurately - pointed out that directing blame at Ireland distracts from the real issue: namely, that politicians around the world who protest against tax avoidance should, first and foremost, hold themselves accountable. "Why should Ireland be the policeman for the U.S.? They can change the law like that!" he said, snapping his fingers. "I could draft a bill for them in an hour." Yes, Mark, this is pretty damning concerning the U.S. system. I won't go into detail, but while U.S. tax law and regulations could, of course, be improved, the most significant problem is the lack of IRS enforcement of existing laws already on the books. I've been writing about this for over a decade. Where I'll get picky, Mark, with your generalization about IP and money escaping to locations like Ireland is that many multinationals physically conduct their real profit-making activities within the United States, but it's only the profits that are shifted. Yes, many multinationals have thousands of people doing important things outside the United States in places like Ireland. But from a tax perspective, these are mostly routine support functions (maybe some marketing and sales activities, customer support functions, logistics support, locally necessary admin functions, etc.) that should only attract some minor portion of the multinational's worldwide profits. These activities in Ireland are not the actual conduct of producing products and providing the services that truly generate the multinationals' high levels of profits. This is why in the Apple State Aid case so many commentators cried foul at the 2024 CJEU decision that Ireland must tax all of the excessive profits that Apple had stuffed into its non-Irish tax resident Irish subsidiary. Almost uniformly, they said that those profits should have been the U.S.'s to tax. (A point made in the article that I'm currently working on notes that while U.S. taxation is the economically right answer, Apple had painted itself into a corner through a convoluted tax structure under which the only right answer based on how tax law operates was that 100% of these shifted profits were taxable under Ireland's existing tax law. Irish authorities had granted Apple very beneficial tax rulings that the Irish law effectively didn't allow. Even after the 2013 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' hearings on Apple (Senators Levin and McCain) and factual revelations made public from the State Aid decisions and documents, there was no apparent IRS response.) To summarize the principal point, many multinationals conduct their most critical activities within the United States, and not within the countries where they report their transactions and profits. They frankly flout U.S. tax law and regulations and report in a manner where there's a close to a 180 degree divergence between where they conduct relevant business functions and where they report their profits earned from those business functions. While the IRS is working hard to attack a few of these situations (e.g. ongoing litigation with Meta, Coca Cola, a few pharmaceutical companies, etc.), this is only a drop in the bucket. With the IRS not having the resources for more comprehensive efforts, the current apparent ethics of multinationals and their advisors and auditors (along with the economic encouragement of equity-based compensation) allows the approval and encouragement of bogus structures that I would have strongly advised against back when I was in practice. I hope that the above adds to your and the SNS community's perspective. Keep well. Jeffery M. Kadet University of Washington - School of Law
Jeff, I think we have basic agreement on all of these subjects, and I also appreciate that your personal view is informed by a combination of accounting expertise and a sense of international fairness in the location of original IP creation, i.e., invention and innovation. To that end, I would like to extend this conversation beyond what states and nations have done in tax code to drive out or attract IP creators, and move to a larger scale. I would be curious about your views of China, whose InfoMerc model is now well understood worldwide. If transferring tax basis from the inventing location to a lower-tax location is wrong, I wonder how you feel about a country whose entire economy is based upon IP theft and the reselling of this IP at subsidized pricing that destroy the inventing companies, and ultimately, do massive harm to their home countries? In other words, how should governments and accounting firms deal with making money and creating jobs from stolen IP? I think this issue that you raise, when taken to this even larger scale, gets almost none of the attention I expect we would both [deem] it should. Why would any nation trade with a country whose sole income derives from direct harm to the inventing nation? The answer: they shouldn't. Perhaps you and I can agree on this as well, and start an international movement to block all trade in stolen IP. Now, that would be something - Thank you for an interesting conversation on this core subject. Mark Anderson
* The week of November 15, Mark will be in Las Vegas for the annual HLTH USA 2026 conference and the Goldman Sachs Private Innovative Company Conference (PICC). * On Thursday, November 19, he will be attending this month's virtual SNS Spark salon; register above (free for SNS members) to join him and the full SNS Team for another invigorating conversation.
In between times, he will be trying to keep track of the exact sheep-feeding recipes: 3 flakes alfalfa and 3 flakes of hay for the ewes, 2 each for the lambs, and 1 each for the ram and his pal. Makes sense, I reckon.
Strategic News Service (SNS) is a membership-based news organization providing the most accurate source of information about the future of technology as it drives the global economy. It is the publisher of the weekly SNS Global Report, which brings members predictive, deep-dive analysis at the intersection of tech, economics, and geopolitics. SNS hosts monthly virtual Spark salons, offering members access to its global network of leaders in business and industry and allowing them to capitalize on the insight and experience of the broader network. Annually, SNS releases CEO Mark Anderson's Top 10 Predictions for the coming year, which have a 95.3% publicly graded accuracy rating. Founded in 1995, the Global Report is read by industry leaders worldwide. Bill Gates has called it "the best thing I read."
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