Russian President Vladimir Putin just visited the disputed Kuril Islands, territory the Soviet Union seized in the closing days of World War II and that Japan still claims as its own. Japan has protested sharply and repeatedly, but there's a deeper problem underneath it, Russia and Japan never actually signed a comprehensive postwar peace treaty. That's not as rare as you'd think. The British and French fought on and off for a hundred years during medieval times with little more than uneasy peace, and much more recently, the Korean War ended without any treaty fixing the border between North and South, just a demilitarized zone and an uneasy peace that's held for more than seventy years. I think that's exactly the kind of outcome we may be heading toward in Ukraine.

I want to reframe a question everyone keeps asking wrong. It isn't will China invade Taiwan, it's about the siege China is already planning. Taiwan just completed ten days of military exercises built around two scenarios, breaking a Chinese naval blockade and surviving a disruption of mobile internet, and Beijing, naturally, condemned the drills, which is rich coming from the same government that routinely seizes islands in the South China Sea and builds artificial military installations to threaten the Philippines and Vietnam.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently blamed rising gas prices in the United States on Ukraine, specifically their drone strikes on Russian oil refineries. On this episode of Fair Game, I say plainly that this is the equivalent of blaming the victims of domestic violence for the attacks against them. There's an old Persian proverb that says in a kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is king, and Bessent is a bright, capable man, so I doubt he actually believes what he's saying. The real driver behind gas prices in America is the Iran war, you don't need a degree in international finance to see that, just look at when prices skyrocketed and line it up against events in the Gulf over the last seven months.

I borrow a framework from a forty-year-old little book by James Carse called The Finite and Infinite Games. A finite game, like baseball or a presidential election, has a prescribed length and a clear winner and loser. An infinite game has no ending, the point is simply to keep playing. Ronald Reagan understood he was in a finite game with the Soviets, when his national security adviser asked what his Cold War position would be, Reagan said, "we win and they lose," and by 1989 the Berlin Wall was down and two years later the Soviet Union was gone.

On this episode of Fair Game, I dig into something remarkable: Donald Trump has managed to turn our famously gentle northern neighbors into the most nationalistic version of Canada I've ever seen, starting with talk of annexing Canada as the 51st state and accelerating with round after round of tariffs. I remind viewers just how deep the alliance runs, Canadian boys died at a higher rate than we did storming the beaches at Normandy, before getting into the heart of the matter, effective September 8th, Canada slapped retaliatory tariffs of 15, 25, and 50 percent on 27.6 billion dollars of American goods, matching President Trump's new tariffs dollar for dollar. Canada's own industry minister has openly called the strategy "wise and strategic to put political pressure," and I think that's worth taking at face value.

I make the case that the United Nations needs a serious cleanup. It needs accountability, and it needs to stop being run as the personal preserve of a handful of wealthy, influential individuals. To understand how we got here, I trace the UN's roots back to the failure of the League of Nations in the 1930s, a body doomed from the start because the United States never joined it, thanks to a rigid Woodrow Wilson and a Senate that had soured on the whole idea of European entanglements. When Franklin Roosevelt championed a new international body built around collective security, it was actually tested almost immediately, in Korea in 1950, and worked, in large part because the Soviets had walked out of the Security Council over unpaid dues.