From “Uncertainty” to “Gunboat Diplomacy”

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At Davos this week, Christine Lagarde’s message to markets is that the disruption isn’t tariffs by themselves—it’s the uncertainty they inject. Uncertainty freezes planning and reshapes capital flows.

I think that frame is incomplete. The last month looks less like random volatility and more like a deliberate re-assertion of choke-point control—because the backdrop is unavoidable: U.S. debt is now widely discussed as having surpassed $38 trillion, and the politics of that reality are changing the rules of the game. 

You can see how markets are interpreting it in real time. Gold has surged to fresh record highs above $4,800/oz, and silver has also been making new highs—classic behavior when investors fear some combination of geopolitical risk, fiscal stress, and fiat debasement. At the same time, the dollar has been sliding amid a revived “Sell America” trade narrative in currency markets. 

Now layer in Japan. In the same news cycle, super-long Japanese government bond yields jumped sharply—a reminder that capital will move and reprice regardless of which currency is “dominant.” Money moves. Risk reprices. Systems react. 

This is where the old lessons of power matter: throughout history, the winners didn’t control outcomes by making speeches. They controlled outcomes by controlling chokepoints—ports, sea lanes, customs houses, energy routes. In the analog era, debt crises turned into foreclosure politics. In the “gunboat diplomacy” era, default and leverage were enforced with navies and blockades.

Today, the choke points are evolving.

In Greenland, we’ve watched a high-profile, high-friction episode that explicitly links geopolitics, trade pressure, and strategic territory—even as Trump publicly says he would not use force. The public message is “negotiation,” but the deeper signal is that the U.S. is willing to use economic leverage to reshape outcomes in strategic zones.

In Venezuela, the posture is more direct: U.S. actions have included seizure of multiple Venezuela-linked tankers, reinforcing a theme of influence over oil flows and regional energy leverage. 

Put this together with the macro backdrop—debt, rates, and currency sensitivity—and the message feels like this:

The U.S. is not going to quietly absorb a world where its liabilities grow while rivals seek alternatives to dollar-centric settlement. The response won’t be a single policy. It will be a blend: resource security, hemispheric leverage, trade pressure, and reshoring.

But here’s the part most people miss: the real play isn’t only about oil fields, tariffs, or territory. It’s also about the rails.

Davos is increasingly a picture of a world trying to protect the old system while controlling the new one. You can see it in the growing institutional focus on stablecoins, tokenization, and regulated digital settlement—less “crypto hype,” more “how do we modernize the pipes without losing sovereignty?”

That’s why the gold/silver surge matters in the narrative. If markets are voting against fiat stability at the margin, the strategic response isn’t just “buy gold.” It’s to ensure that if capital migrates into digital form, it migrates onto rails the U.S. can regulate, audit, and influence—so the dollar doesn’t collapse into irrelevance but evolves into a more programmable, controllable settlement layer.

Call it a feint: while everyone argues about the daily noise, the signal is the repositioning of choke points—from ports and sea lanes to banking rails and settlement networks.

My core thesis in The Token Age is simple: the system doesn’t break from lack of money—it breaks from lack of movement. And in a world where movement is becoming digital, the most strategic asset is not the headline currency—it’s the infrastructure that moves value.

If you want the longer walk-through—how sovereign leverage historically enforced “collateral by force,” and how tokenization is turning collateral into code—this is exactly what I unpack in The Token Age.