Liberty vs Old Dominion: How the World Watches Two Has-Beens Bicker Over the Remote
Liberty vs. Old Dominion: A Cage Match Sponsored by Everyone Else
By our man in the cheap seats, watching empires negotiate the fine print
PARIS—If you squint at the headlines long enough, “liberty” and “old dominion” start to look like the same tired couple in a long-running sitcom: one swears this season they’ll finally break up, the other hides the passports. From the outside, the rest of the planet tunes in less for the plot twists than for the laugh track. After all, everyone else has already binge-watched Rome, Britain, Spain, and the Ottomans attempt the same script, right down to the surprise cancellation.
Global audiences now recognize the tropes. Liberty strides in wearing borrowed revolutionary garb—think 1776 cosplay stitched from Twitter threads and venture-capital T-shirts—promising open borders for data, capital, and, if we’re feeling generous, people. Old Dominion answers in tailored nostalgia, smelling faintly of mothballs and gunpowder, reminding the room that someone has to keep the lights on and the shipping lanes insured. Both insist they are the underdog. Both have merchandise.
Consider the Suez, that overachieving trench currently blocked by a single container ship having an existential crisis. To the liberty camp, the incident was a teachable moment about fragile supply chains and the need for decentralized everything—blockchain lifeboats, if you will. To the dominion crowd, it was proof that only nation-states (preferably with aircraft carriers named after geriatric politicians) can unclog the arteries of commerce. The rest of us simply wondered why humanity still moves 90 percent of its stuff on floating steel rectangles operated by sleep-deprived humans who can’t find the restroom key.
Zoom out and the pattern is everywhere. In Hong Kong, liberty once wore black T-shirts and practiced archery with umbrellas; today it hides in courtrooms, learning that dominion keeps the minutes. In the EU, Brussels plays dominion to Big Tech’s liberty, wagging a regulatory finger while quietly relying on American cloud servers to store the same finger-wagging memos. Meanwhile, the global South watches both sides argue over intellectual property waivers like divorced parents fighting custody of the Netflix password.
Even climate diplomacy has become a custody battle. Liberty demands open-source solar panels and wind farms named after inspirational teenagers; dominion counters with national security exemptions and the strategic importance of coal in case the weather refuses to cooperate. The planet, ever the neglected child, files another complaint with the UN and is told to wait until after the commercial break.
Financial markets, those mood rings of geopolitics, have priced in the stalemate. Cryptocurrencies promise liberation from central banks, then immediately build their own central banks—only with more pastel logos. CBDCs (central-bank digital currencies) wave the flag of sovereign control while quietly copying every libertarian innovation except the part about privacy. Investors hedge both sides, then brag about “optionality,” a word that translates roughly to “we have no idea who wins, but we’ll charge a management fee anyway.”
And yet, for all the cynicism, the stakes remain absurdly high. Taiwan’s semiconductor fabs—arguably the single point of failure for everything from PlayStations to guided missiles—sit at the crossroads of liberty’s free-market fairy tale and dominion’s territorial bedtime story. One clumsy misreading of the script and the global economy skips straight to the series finale, no spin-offs allowed.
So what does the international peanut gallery conclude? Simply this: the duel between liberty and old dominion is less a clash of ideologies than an indefinite co-production. Each needs the other for dramatic tension, like Batman without the Joker, or capitalism without critics. The rest of us buy tickets, livestream the blooper reels, and pray the collateral damage stays safely offshore—at least until the next shipping lane decides to have a midlife crisis.
In the meantime, keep your passports updated, your VPNs subscribed, and your irony detectors fully charged. The show’s been renewed for another season, and rumor has it the writers are planning a musical episode. Spoiler alert: the chorus is already stuck in everyone’s head, humming the same line over and over: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, now available in augmented reality.”
