New Article: The Orbital Authority
The ultimate high ground cannot be divided geographically. The threat of stagnant peace under one world government means humanity must once more wrestle with war to thrive.
This article by
was published in our Spring print edition PALLADIUM 17: Universal Man on March 26, 2025. To receive our latest print edition, subscribe today.“War is the father of all things,” said the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. Even in a world in which war is out of fashion, Heraclitus remains right.
Growing up in the late Cold War, I was taught to believe in the “United Nations”—the future of humanity, as a world government. We would have no kings or presidents, only a UN secretary-general who would bring us together in our shared, kind, caring humanity. Who talks about the UN today? But there it is, in Turtle Bay, existing.
Later in life, I pieced together the real history of the UN. The term “United Nations,” invented by Lord Byron in 1815, was first used in World War II to refer to the winning coalition of that war—the U.S., the UK, and the USSR. Propaganda posters from the war, showing the Soviet flag fluttering alongside the flags of Western democracies, made as much clear. What we call the “UN” today was originally the “United Nations Organization,” UNO, founded at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944, in a meeting whose executive secretary was Alger Hiss—a secret agent of Stalin. The UN is an organization of the winners in a war to conquer the world. The losers in this war went to their deaths predicting that the winners would fall out, as thieves do. As they did. But not soon enough for the losers.
The great 20th-century historian Carroll Quigley—mentor, among many others, of Bill Clinton— wrote scornfully of the UN in his posthumous book “Weapons Systems and Political Stability:”
The role of any conflict, including war, is to measure a power relationship so that a consensus, that is a legal relationship, can be established. War cannot be abolished either by renouncing it or by disarming, unless some other method of measuring power relationships in a fashion convincing to all concerned can be set up. And this surely cannot be done by putting more than a hundred factually unequal states into a world assembly where they are legally equal.
Sure enough, the UN Security Council—made of nuclear powers—has been relevant. The UN General Assembly, with one vote per “country,” has never once been relevant. Even the UN, devised to abolish war, was made by war. It was undone by the power relationship between the U.S. and the USSR—no longer content to be our satellite. Heraclitus was right.
Quigley’s fundamental thesis is that military technology drives political structure. The almost two hundred “unequal states” of the UN are not genuinely sovereign—they are mostly satellite states. A militarily dependent protectorate is very different from a state that maintains its independence by force of arms. This dependency is not limited to the military sphere—it appears in the political, economic, and even cultural spheres. Everyone on Earth wants to speak the language of the dominant military power.
The statesmen of the 20th century realized, on different sides and in different ways, that the military technology of the 20th century, first air power and then space power, dictated the political unification of the planet. Any bright teenage boy could see that technology made world power inevitable.
Liberals and conservatives agreed. H.G. Wells, liberal par excellence, imagined the unification of the world through air power in his 1933 novel, “The Shape of Things to Come.” Rudyard Kipling had imagined it in 1905, in “The Night Mail”—with airships! Nuclear weapons, ICBMs, and mutual assured destruction strengthened the story. When the USSR at last expired in 1991, we thought the “new world order” was here.
But do we really want a unified world? Is that the right thing for humanity? It may be our technical destiny. Is it our human destiny?
It is difficult to look at human history and say that large, homogeneous, peaceful countries work better. Actually, the main leaps in human development seem to come from periods of smaller, competing sovereign structures: the Greek city-states, the Italian Renaissance, the whole complex patchwork of premodern Europe. Even the axial age of Chinese intellectual history is the Warring States period.
As Orson Welles put it, in his unscripted speech in “The Third Man:”
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
War is again the father of all things. Peaceful empires stagnate and grow decadent. Wars generate ideas, art, technology, and progress. Forget the UN—how much of the postwar 20th century was created by the war? Every time we fly, we are flying on a peacetime conversion of WWII air force technology. Without war, would we even have jets? Why?
And when we look at the future, we see even more unification. The whole concept of the European state is based on geographic sovereignty. The UN pays lip service to the multipolar European order. But in reality, the world has had one single dominant pole since the battle of Waterloo. The military technology that brought this about was first seapower, then air power.
What comes next? Orbital power.
Space is not one place, but orbit is one place. Orbit cannot be divided geographically. Orbit is the ultimate high ground.
Space is already partly militarized by observation and communication technology. ICBMs pass through space on their way from ground to ground. But Lyndon Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev, in 1967, signed a treaty against weapons in space. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative—a space-based missile shield. Perhaps it was technically before its time. Nothing came of it.
In the second half of the 2020s, thanks to Elon Musk’s Starship, the U.S. is poised to have an unprecedented lead in orbital lift capacity. In theory, the purpose of Starship is to take humanity to Mars—the Red Planet. Mars is a barren, airless, irradiated rock, which makes Greenland look like California. But what if it’s the wrong Mars?
Mars, god of war, is the father of all things. Orbit is the ultimate high ground. When we conquer orbit—despite the deeply felt pacifist sentiments of Messrs. Johnson and Brezhnev—we have conquered the Earth. How would we do that?
In theory, SDI already solved this problem in the 1980s. The first half of the answer was called Brilliant Pebbles—a system of thousands of satellites designed to shoot down a full-scale Soviet nuclear first strike. The second half was called Project Thor—an array of tungsten telephone poles in space, any one of which can strike the Earth with the force of ten tons of TNT. At $10 per kilogram, Starship’s expected launch cost, just $100,000 can destroy anything, anywhere, almost instantly.
The most important task of any weapons system is to defend itself. Not only could a 21st-century Brilliant Pebbles—not exactly farfetched in an era when we easily make phone calls over a very similar satellite megaconstellation—defeat a nuclear first strike, it could defeat any attempt to defeat the system itself. It would serve as a launch denial system. It would destroy any previously unannounced launch—rendering orbit a monopoly. There are various electromagnetic ways of harassing satellites—lasers, etc.—but a tungsten telephone pole at Mach 10 would soon put an end to them.
Control over space is not control over air, which is not control over sea or land. But aircraft need infrastructure, which can easily be destroyed. Once resistance from fixed-wing aircraft is defeated, enormous airships—whose payload capacity scales with the cube of their size—can park themselves over an enemy city, relay satellite bandwidth, and drown any ground forces in a flood of exploding quadcopters from the sky. Any remaining insurgents can be hunted down by remorseless robot dogs. In this world, ships are obsolete, airplanes are obsolete, tanks are obsolete, and even infantry is obsolete. War has defeated war. Orbital power creates a unified world government—since orbit is one place.
Do we want this? Is this right for the human species? Do we want a single planetary regime, inevitably followed by a single planetary culture? This peaceful planet would likely find itself under the control of the winners in any peacetime power struggle—in the words of Bronze Age Pervert, “lesbian mulatta commissars with young Martin Sheen face and haircut.” We would turn Earth, the best planet in the Solar System by far, into a single giant longhouse. And if we don’t do it—someone else will. China?
But there is an alternative.
In a way, the modern world was created by a version of Orson Welles’ insight. We call it “capitalism.” England in the 18th century developed the core technology behind the modern world—not the steam engine, but the joint-stock company.
The English joint-stock company is a pseudostate. A sovereign state creates a layer of secondary state-like entities within its body politic. Like true states, these entities are transient—new ones are born, old ones die, and mature ones compete, making a sort of “war” on each other. My own strong, if quite unprovable, thesis is that if the Greeks or the Romans had invented capitalism, they too would have had an industrial revolution.
These corporations still have to exist within a legal framework enforced by the state. Microsoft cannot send a squad of assassins to Palo Alto to wipe out Google once and for all. But the competition between them is otherwise just as bloody and Darwinian as the war of all against all that is the old system of sovereign states. It is this system of “war without war” that makes the modern world work.
Three historical examples show the fundamental geometry of the problem: China today, North Korea today, and Russia a hundred years ago.
The absolute “hydraulic despotism” of Maoist China, desperately poor and brutal, introduced a secondary layer of sovereignty in the 1980s. It turns out that communism and capitalism go quite well together—as long as the capitalist tycoons of the second layer don’t get too big for their britches, and start interfering with true sovereignty. If they make this mistake, they disappear—like Jack Ma. Chinese capitalism goes on. China, a nation of rice and backyard pig iron 50 years ago, now makes all our gadgets. They cannot quite rival SpaceX—yet. But time is short. The window is shrinking.
Lenin, no dummy, tried this 100 years ago with his New Economic Policy (NEP). It worked. It revitalized a devastated Russia. But Lenin had to kill the NEP. His sovereign layer was not stable enough. The businessmen would have threatened the state itself. Just across the border from China, Kim Jong Un still runs a state on the old Maoist lines. Why? Doesn’t he see how well capitalism works in China? Wasn’t he educated, in fact, in Switzerland? He was—but he fears that capitalism will end his unstable kingdom, at war as it is with almost the whole world. He might even be right.
For capitalism to work, the layer between state and corporation has to be respected on both sides. The state cannot play favorites among the corporations. The corporations cannot threaten the state.
When we look at the potential of orbital power, we see a potential for stable global power that the world has never seen. This power could be a single world government. But reducing humanity to a single locus of sovereignty would put all our eggs in one basket, and completely eliminate the force of sovereign competition that, blood and all, created the modern world. Mars, the god, must not be allowed to die.
The solution is to use the same trick of two-layered sovereignty but in the physical realm. Orbital warfare is so powerful that Mars can flourish again at a different level.
Obviously, any orbital power must suppress all other orbital powers—blocking the ICBM fleets of the nuclear age, as well as any unauthorized attempt to reach orbit. There is nothing subtle about an orbital rocket. If anyone anywhere is trying to make their own Starship, one tungsten telephone pole can ruin their whole day.
But why not go farther? 20th-century industrial warfare cannot possibly compete with 21st-century orbital warfare. We can abolish all these ancient death machines. We can bring about world peace! World peace is good, right? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?
What if world peace isn’t good? What if Quigley is right, and our political structures and technological progress come from war? What if war is the father of everything? What if our species evolved out of war—our closest relatives, chimpanzees, also worship Mars—and every human society until the invention of the gun was sustained by the sword?
If war is the father of everything, if our species needs war to remain healthy, we can imagine a new kind of war. When the 20th century distinguished between “nuclear” and “conventional” war, it took the first step toward creating the military equivalent of a capitalist layer. Conventional industrial war is considered okay, sort of. Nuclear war isn’t.
We already have these two tiers of conflict. We just need to move them farther apart. Instead of nuclear war and industrial war, we have orbital war and traditional war.
In traditional war, there are no nukes. There are no tanks. There are no guns. The rules are simple: no nuclear, chemical, or electrical energy. No gadgets at all on the battlefield. If you go to war, you bring basically the same gear as Achilles. Achilles might have a tough time getting his bronze sword through your Kevlar-composite breastplate, but he’s definitely going to give you a hard time trying. Material science is the only remaining advantage of technology over barbarism.
Why? Because political stability is a function of weapons technology, and the technology platform of traditional warfare tends to create political systems which contribute to human flourishing—including thousands of independent sovereign states and city-states. We would expect nothing less than a new rebirth of the species.
And who is enforcing this? An orbital power—call it the Orbital Authority. Since the Orbital Authority dominates, owns and controls the whole planet, it has every incentive for the planet and its humans to flourish.
In exactly the same way, the U.S. government dominates, owns and controls the United States. It doesn’t care if one American company defeats another American company. Does Microsoft want to unseat Google in search? Let the best corporation win. That’s capitalism. Does England want to invade France? If the English knights are stronger, they should humble the French knights and take their estates. The peasants don’t even have to notice, except for changing the Bitcoin address on their tax payments. And if the French knights are stronger—maybe they should build some boats. As Charles de Gaulle once said, England is just the largest of the Channel Islands.
Why? Because the result is an England ruled by knights—not an England ruled by longhouse commissars. Anyone in England can see the country the commissars have made, and the buildings the knights once built. Compare and realize that there is nothing fair about the comparison—because there is no reason to throw away our phones, cars, and AI.
For this layer of virtual sovereignty to work, the incentive structures have to be right. The stronger the orbital power, and the greater the differential between orbital war and traditional war, the easier it is for the orbital power to tolerate traditional war. In fact, it might even encourage traditional war—it would certainly film the battlefields. But the only drones in the battle are neutral camera drones, not buzzing death bombs.
At the dawn of the industrial war which destroyed Europe, most Europeans actually still believed in Mars. Every country had its chanting crowds ready to go to battle. We understood the immense value of traditional warfare in building culture and society. And then—the best aristocrats of the continent found themselves physically destroyed by industrial death machines. An artillery shell can’t even tell the difference between Achilles and Thersites.
Where does the Orbital Authority come from? Who creates this force? Who are the people who operate it? What ensures that they have no dog in the fight when France invades England? All good questions. But this is one future I would want to live in.
Curtis Yarvin is an author, computer scientist, and political theorist. He is the founder of Urbit, a decentralized personal server platform. You can read more of his writing at Gray Mirror or follow him at @curtis_yarvin.