8 May 2026

Mythos, Not the Iran War, Is the Most Significant Geopolitical Warning of Our Time

Frederick Kempe

With the world fixated on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and Donald Trump’s peripatetic presidency, it’s worth a reminder that the geopolitics of artificial intelligence (AI) will almost certainly have far more lasting consequences than any of that.

We are living through a transformation of similar magnitude to the Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That said, the AI Revolution is moving far faster with far less time for global leaders to adapt, so the perils are greater—notwithstanding AI’s considerable promise.

The Industrial Revolution rewired history. It shifted power from agriculture to industry, from landed aristocracies to barons of manufacturing, and from empires to nation-states that could produce, mobilize, and innovate at scale. Out of that upheaval rose capitalism and communism, mass politics and mass warfare, and eventually the cataclysms of two world wars.

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