Looking at the World at Low Power
A pathologist’s reflections on America, architecture, and the world beneath the headlines
1. Fifty Years in America
This year has special meaning for me.
Fifty years ago, in 1976, I left Iran and came to the United States. It was America’s Bicentennial. I was a young immigrant arriving in a country celebrating two hundred years of history.
Tomorrow, America celebrates its 250th birthday.
As I reflect on those fifty years, I find myself filled with gratitude.
This country welcomed me. It educated me. It allowed me to become a physician, raise a family, pursue ideas freely, and build a life I could never have imagined as a young man arriving from another part of the world.
Like every nation, America has strengths and weaknesses. It has made extraordinary contributions and serious mistakes. Loving a country does not require pretending it is perfect. Gratitude gives us the freedom to think honestly rather than defensively.
2. Begin at Low Power
Over the years, friends have asked me what I think about Iran, China, Russia, Israel, Ukraine, global trade, tariffs, oil, and the changing world order.
I usually hesitate before answering.
Not because I do not have an opinion, but because I rarely begin where the question begins.
As a pathologist, I spend much of my day looking through a microscope. One of the first lessons pathology teaches is that before looking at individual cells, you begin at low power.
At low power you are not chasing details.
You are learning the architecture.
Over the years I have realized that I approach almost everything this way. Medicine. Scripture. History. Economics. Human relationships.
The larger pattern often explains what initially appears confusing.
Perhaps that is why I have found myself thinking about geopolitics in the same way.
Most conversations begin with today’s headlines: Iran, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, oil, tariffs, the Red Sea.
Those are important questions.
Yet I wonder if they are often examined at the wrong magnification.
Headlines can resemble individual cells on a pathology slide. They may be important, even alarming, but difficult to understand until the architecture beneath them becomes visible.
That is the purpose of these reflections.
I am not trying to persuade anyone to adopt my political conclusions.
I am simply trying to step back, lower the magnification, and look at the larger pattern before examining the individual pieces.
3. The Architecture Beneath the Headlines
The first pattern that comes into view is the architecture of the postwar international order.
Long before the United States became the dominant global power, Britain understood the sea.
Britain was an island nation. Its survival and prosperity depended on ships, ports, trade routes, finance, insurance, and naval power. The British Empire was more than territory. It was a maritime system.
Gibraltar. Malta. Suez. Aden. Singapore. Hong Kong.
Those places were gates.
Britain understood that commerce depends on movement. Ships have to move. Cargo has to move. Capital has to move. Risk has to be measured. Ports have to remain open.
After the Second World War, Britain was exhausted. The United States emerged with unmatched industrial power, financial strength, and naval reach.
America inherited much of that system and expanded it.
The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe. Bretton Woods placed the dollar at the center of the international financial system. NATO helped secure the Atlantic world. American naval power helped keep major sea lanes open.
When President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971, the architecture changed again. Confidence in the system increasingly rested on something broader than gold: productive economies, capital markets, international trade, military alliances, energy flows, insurance markets, and the expectation that goods could continue moving across the world.
That expectation depends on several layers working together.
4. Finance, Insurance, and the Sea
One layer is finance.
Wall Street represents capital, investment, credit, debt, liquidity, and the ability to move money across great distances.
Another layer is insurance.
Lloyd’s of London reminds us that commerce depends on the ability to measure and price risk. Ships sail because cargoes can be insured. Banks finance trade because risk can be evaluated. Manufacturers plan because they can estimate costs.
A third layer is maritime security.
For decades, the United States, together with allies and partners, has helped protect many of the world’s principal sea lanes.
The Fifth Fleet operates around the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
The Sixth Fleet works throughout the Mediterranean.
The Seventh Fleet operates across the Western Pacific.
Those fleets are supported by alliances and basing agreements extending through Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and many other locations.
Place those locations on a map and a pattern begins to emerge.
Ships leaving Northern Europe pass through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. Many continue through the Suez Canal, enter the Red Sea, pass Bab el Mandeb, cross the Indian Ocean, transit the Strait of Malacca near Singapore, and continue toward East Asia.
Energy leaving the Persian Gulf passes through the Strait of Hormuz before joining those same sea lanes.
Grain moving from the Black Sea reaches the Mediterranean through the Bosporus and Dardanelles under Turkish control.
Trade between the Atlantic and Pacific is shortened dramatically by the Panama Canal.
Trace those routes slowly and the map begins to change.
You stop seeing only countries.
You start seeing passages.
Gates.
Straits.
Ports.
Canals.
Places where the entire system narrows.
5. The Global Mall
Most of us never think about the systems beneath ordinary life.
We rarely think about the wiring behind the lights in our homes or the highways that bring food to our grocery stores.
We simply expect the shelves to be full.
That is why I sometimes think of the postwar order as something like a global mall.
The comparison is imperfect, but useful.
A person walking through a mall does not usually think about the loading docks, security personnel, insurance policies, maintenance crews, or the complex choreography of daily deliveries.
He assumes the stores will open.
But someone has to maintain the structure.
Someone has to keep the lights on.
Someone has to secure the loading docks.
Someone has to make sure deliveries continue to arrive.
For much of the past eighty years, whether wisely or unwisely, the United States has carried that role for large parts of the international trading system.
America became, in some sense, the world’s mall manager.
That role has been expensive. It has created resentment. It has drawn America into conflicts that many Americans understandably question.
Walking away from the role would also carry costs.
If the mall manager leaves, the stores do not simply keep functioning on their own. Other powers test the doors. Regional actors probe weak points. Shipping routes shift. Insurance costs change. Energy prices respond. Consumers far away eventually feel the effects.
Only when something interrupts the flow does the hidden architecture become visible.
6. Risk Changes Everything
California provides a useful example.
Many homeowners have experienced insurance premiums rising, or insurers leaving the market altogether, after repeated wildfires.
The houses themselves did not suddenly become different.
The probability of loss changed.
Insurance companies price risk.
Global shipping works the same way.
A drone does not have to sink every tanker.
It only has to increase the probability of loss.
Once that happens, insurers adjust premiums, shipping companies alter routes, banks reassess financing, and energy markets respond.
A relatively inexpensive weapon can influence billions of dollars of commerce because it changes expectations rather than simply causing destruction.
The Houthis provide a clear example.
They sit near Bab el Mandeb, the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Even without closing the route completely, repeated attacks make passage more costly and less predictable.
Ships reroute around southern Africa.
Transit times lengthen.
Fuel consumption increases.
Insurance costs rise.
Those additional costs eventually work their way into the prices paid by businesses and consumers far from the Middle East.
7. Russia, Ukraine, and the Warm Seas
Russia makes more sense to me when I look at geography before ideology.
Russia is enormous, but its access to open seas has always been constrained. Much of its northern coastline is limited by ice, distance, and harsh conditions. The Black Sea gives Russia one of its most important southern routes toward the Mediterranean and the wider world.
But the Black Sea route narrows.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet must pass through the Bosporus and Dardanelles to reach the Mediterranean. Those straits are controlled by Turkey.
That makes Crimea, Ukraine, the Black Sea, and Turkey part of one strategic picture.
Crimea gives Russia naval depth in the Black Sea.
Ukraine sits along the northern coast of that same sea and occupies the land between Russia and much of Europe.
Turkey controls the gate.
The war in Ukraine can be examined morally, politically, militarily, historically, and economically. All of those lenses have value.
At low power, geography still presses itself into the picture.
Russia has long feared encirclement and has long sought buffers, ports, and access to warmer seas.
That does not justify Russia’s actions.
Geography does not excuse aggression.
But geography often reveals why certain regions become contested again and again.
8. Chokepoints and Pressure
Once I began looking at the world through this architectural lens, many contemporary policy choices appeared more connected than they first seemed.
Gibraltar guards the entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic.
Suez links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.
Bab el Mandeb links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.
Hormuz controls the exit from the Persian Gulf.
Malacca connects the Indian Ocean to the Pacific.
Panama shortens the route between the Atlantic and Pacific.
The Turkish Straits connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
A disruption in one of these places can alter shipping, energy, insurance, military planning, and political behavior far away.
A mine, a missile, a drone, a blockade, a canal slowdown, a political crisis, or even drought affecting canal traffic can change expectations across the system.
The global economy runs through geography.
It passes through narrow places.
9. Policy at Low Power
Efforts to secure energy routes, confront disruptions in the Red Sea, address vulnerabilities at the Panama Canal, strengthen alliances in the Pacific, maintain influence in the Mediterranean, or respond to conflict in the Black Sea can be understood as attempts to reinforce the underlying infrastructure of global commerce.
Others will reach different conclusions.
My purpose is simply to describe the architecture I think I see.
I am not claiming every American decision has been wise. Clearly, many have not been. Power always brings temptation, and nations rarely see their own motives clearly.
At low power, these events appear less random. They look less like scattered headlines and more like stress points in a larger structure.
Whether any particular interpretation proves correct is ultimately for history to judge.
10. Architecture Matters
For me, the larger lesson is that architecture matters.
In medicine, healthy tissue depends on structures that quietly sustain life.
In economies, commerce depends on financial systems, insurance, geography, ports, canals, straits, fleets, treaties, and secure movement.
In civilizations, institutions often outlive the people who build them.
When those structures work, we barely notice them.
When they fail, everyone suddenly becomes aware of what had been holding things together.
Perhaps that is one of the greatest lessons pathology has taught me, and one that has quietly shaped my fifty years in this country.
Begin at low power.
Do not start with the most inflamed cell.
Do not ignore it either.
First, understand the architecture.
I came to America during its Bicentennial.
Now, as the country reaches its 250th birthday, I feel grateful not only for what America gave me, but for the way these fifty years have taught me to look beneath the surface.
The world is noisy.
The headlines come quickly.
Beneath the noise, there is structure.
Begin at low power.
Understand the architecture.
Then zoom in.