Planning, Not Masterplans

A Geographer’s Note on the Mundane Mechanics of Imperial Strategy and the Necessity of Counter-Planning

Jun 17, 2026

A dramatic, expressionist oil painting rendered in a dark, textured style, depicting a tense and claustrophobic scene in a smoke-choked planners' room.

As a geographer and sociologist, I have spent years studying regional planning and policy development and implementation, from evaluating local refugee policies to observing the strategizing phases of intercultural laws in Mexico City. What you learn very quickly in this field is that the concept of a flawless, omnipotent “Masterplan” is a complete myth.

Take the territorial zoning of a single street. You cannot simply draw a line on a map and declare it transformed. A street is already a living organism with its own material reality and history. Before a single policy changes, planners have to study the pedestrian frequency. They have to count every building, assess how it is currently used, identify the most frequented spaces, talk with pedestrians and residents, and engage in endless, repetitive talks with local “stakeholders.” Then come the whitepapers, the budgeting constraints, the implementation plans, and the consecutive evaluations. And just when the plan is set, a new administration comes in, or the material conditions change, and the entire process must iterate and adapt. And let’s not forget, in reality there are also planning cultures, and historical periods and visions of planning that influence this process, too.

If it takes this much bureaucratic friction, iteration, and socialization to change the trajectory of one single street, why do so many geopolitical analysts assume the most heavily resourced empire in human history operates through the incoherent decisions of a group of politicians? Or likewise assume that it operates via a flawless, omniscient Masterplan hatched in a single smoke-filled room?

When we look at global geopolitics today—specifically the U.S.-led imperial core’s actions against countries like China, Russia, or Iran—much of the alternative media space suffers from a cartoonish misunderstanding of how complex institutions and organizations work. If a U.S. military operation fails to achieve its maximalist goal, commentators immediately declare the empire “defeated” or incompetent.

But empires, like city governments, do not surrender when a policy fails. They evaluate, they consult their stakeholders, they conduct studies, and they adapt. To think that there is a grand masterplan or likewise to insist that there is no plan at all, are assumptions with political consequences. I want to explain why, from the perspective of someone who has spent years studying planning.

What Planning Actually Is

The conventional understanding of planning relies on a neat, conceptual division between setting objectives and executing them. While there is a kernel of truth here, this framework has almost no relationship to how massive, sprawling institutions actually operate.

In the popular imagination, a “plan” is a static blueprint—authored by a single mastermind or a small, shadowy cabal—that dictates a flawless, linear sequence of actions leading directly to a predetermined outcome. Because of this myth, when reality fails to match the cinematic image—when we instead see a mess of competing documents, multiple authors, iterative revisions, and reactive adaptations to changing conditions—outside observers immediately conclude that there is no plan at all. But this messy, iterative friction is exactly what planning looks like in any complex organization.

Let’s break down the actual sociological dimensions of this process and map them directly onto the imperial strategic architecture we observe today:

A plan is never a single, static document. It is a hierarchy and a network of documents. In fact, it is far more accurate to discard the noun altogether: rather than looking for a finalized “plan,” we must observe the continuous process of planning. This process is distributed across multiple institutions and organizations—public, private, semi-public, and informal. No single author controls every piece. Instead, coherence emerges from shared professional norms, common data sets, legal requirements, and institutional memory.

Consider a standard regional development plan. It does not live in one binder; it exists across multiple distinct phases and frameworks:

Strategic Frameworks: Setting the overarching vision and goals (e.g., “increase regional economic competitiveness by 20% over 15 years”).
Spatial Development Plans: Translating those abstract goals into physical realities like land use, infrastructure corridors, and zoning designations.
Sectoral Plans: Detailed blueprints for transportation, energy, housing, and environmental protection, each authored by specialized agencies with their own distinct expertise and constituencies.
Implementation Programs: The gritty realities of budgets, timelines, responsible agencies, and performance indicators for the next 3-to-5-year cycle (or for however long the time horizon has been calculated.)
Evaluation Reports: Assessments that measure progress, identify obstacles, and recommend adjustments.

Furthermore, planning is almost never a linear, one-off act. Even a finite project, like the construction of a building, has a long lifecycle embedded in shifting spatial realities. A building is not dropped into a vacuum; it is anchored in a physical environment—surrounding infrastructure, evolving neighborhoods, and broader regional ecosystems—that is constantly undergoing its own planning processes. The building simply becomes a node in that larger, ongoing web.

True planning, therefore, is a continuous, iterative cycle of formulation, implementation, evaluation, and revision. It contains explicit mechanisms for adaptation: contingency scenarios, feedback loops, and periodic review mandates. The fact that a plan changes in response to new conditions is, therefore, a sign that the planning process is actually working. Adapting to friction is simply a planner’s daily bread.

Imagine the waste management plan of a mid-sized city. It involves the municipality, the regional authority, the environmental agency, private contractors, and EU directives. It has short-term implementation schedules and long-term strategic goals, and it is routinely revised based on performance data. Now look at how that plan meets reality. When the city council sets out to pave a new road, it doesn’t just pour asphalt on day one. It holds three contentious budget meetings because initial projections fell through three times. It conducts a mandatory environmental review. A local citizen objects to that review, which triggers an emergency planning council hearing, which delays the timeline, which ultimately forces a renegotiation with the private contractor. You get the picture.

When this happens, no serious person points at the municipality and screams, “Aha! The city is in chaos! They have no plan!” We intuitively understand that navigating this grinding bureaucracy—that adjusting to friction—is part of the proccess of planning. Yet, when the exact same structural adaptation occurs at the level of imperial strategy, many will throw up their hands, point to the friction, and declare that the empire is in “chaos.”

Mapping the Imperial Process: The Case of Weaponized Energy

We can map the transatlantic strategic architecture regarding weaponized energy directly onto this mundane planning structure. I know global energy is a highly contentious topic, so let me preempt a common strawman right here: no, I am not arguing that the U.S. or the imperial structure intends to, or is trying to, successfully provide the world with energy. That is entirely beside the point.

The point is that the management of these energy flows—specifically their weaponization and denial—operates as a standard sectoral planning process. It has the exact same administrative rhythm as our city council. If we look at the paper trail, the “plan” reveals itself as an ongoing, layered system:

The Strategic Framework: The National Energy Policy (2001), born from Dick Cheney’s closed-door meetings with energy CEOs, serves as the foundational text. It sets the overarching, long-term goal: shift the center of gravity of global energy to the Western Hemisphere and reduce dependence on “foreign powers that do not always have America’s interests at heart.”
The Spatial Development Concepts: Reports like Brookings’ “Fueling a New Disorder” (2014) and the CFR’s “America’s Energy Resurgence” (2013) function as the spatial translators. They take the strategic goal and map it onto geopolitical scenarios, identifying the opportunities created by the shale revolution, defining critical chokepoints and corridors, and outlining the logic of “mutually assured denial.”
The Sectoral Plans: Next, military academia and think tanks translate these concepts into operational mechanics. The Naval Postgraduate School holds seminars on the “Reverse Oil Weapon” (energy as a domain of naval warfare); the Army War College publishes “Energy as a Strategic Weapon” (2015) for land-based denial; and CNAS drafts reports on energy as an instrument of great-power competition.
The Implementation Plans: Finally, these concepts hit the real world through budgets, force postures, and legal frameworks. This is NATO’s “Operation Arctic Sentry,” the US Navy’s Maritime Action Plan (MAP), or the SHIPS for America Act (2025).
The Evaluation & Reconvergance Mechanisms: Summits like Bilderberg, the Munich Security Conference (MSC), or WEF in Davos serve as the review boards. Agenda items like “Arctic Security” or “Energy Diversification” are simply the headings under which the assembled actors assess progress, identify obstacles, and coordinate necessary adjustments.

A concrete outcome of this iterative cycle is the policy trajectory regarding Iran: moving from the JCPOA, to “maximum pressure,” to covert escalation, to the current MoU negotiations. Each phase learns from the previous one. The overarching goal remains constant (neutralizing Iran as a sovereign threat), but the methods adapt continuously to friction.

None of this requires a single author, a single smoke-filled room, or a secret document labeled “The Masterplan.”

What it requires is an institutional ecosystem. Coherence is achieved through a shared strategic grammar, socialized across multiple institutions over decades, allowing different actors in different domains to produce documents that are mutually reinforcing. Because the people within these institutions share a common set of structural incentives and a common class position, explicit coordination is often unnecessary. Their plans align because their institutions are socially and materially aligned.

Multiple Authors, Multiple Audiences

Another interesting point is that different documents within a planning process have entirely different authors and audiences. A strategic framework is authored by high-level commissions (like the Cheney task force) for an audience of political principals and corporate stakeholders. An operational concept is authored by military-academic researchers (like the Naval Postgraduate School) for an audience of mid-career officers and defense planners. An implementation plan is authored by agency staff for an audience of program managers and budget officials. And so on …

This differentiation of authorship and audience is evidence of a mature, institutionally differentiated planning apparatus. The fact that the Cheney task force did not write the Naval Postgraduate School seminar, and the Naval Postgraduate School did not write the Bilderberg agenda, solely reflects how the planning function is distributed across a network of specialized institutions. Each contributes a piece to a larger architecture that no single actor fully controls, but which nevertheless produces coherent strategic outcomes.

Therefore, a distributed, networked planning apparatus does not signify the absence of a plan. The entire point of institutionalized planning in complex systems is that no one needs to be “in charge” in the sense of a single, commanding mind. The institutions themselves—through their procedures, their career paths, their funding streams, and their ideological assumptions over the decades or even centuries—produce coherence without a central planner.

The Feedback Loop in Action: The Iran Case Study

In urban and regional planning, plans are not simply executed and then abandoned. They are implemented, monitored, evaluated, and revised in a continuous cycle. An iterative feedback loop. If we look closely at the imperial strategic architecture regarding Iran, we can observe this exact iterative logic functioning:

Iteration 1 (Negotiated Constraint): The JCPOA (2015) was a plan for managing Iran’s nuclear program through “diplomatic” containment. It was subsequently evaluated under the Trump administration, deemed insufficient for broader regional containment, and discarded.
Iteration 2 (Maximum Pressure): The strategy revised into economic strangulation. When this was evaluated and deemed insufficient to produce Iranian capitulation, it escalated into kinetic action—the assassination of Soleimani and the covert sabotage of energy infrastructure—leading directly into the 2024–2026 war.
Iteration 3 (Kinetic War & Naval Denial): The war was evaluated in real-time. The Strait of Hormuz became actively contested. The naval blockade was established. The “Reverse Oil Weapon” concept—socialized in the Naval Postgraduate School a decade earlier—was officially operationalized. While the previous instruments of Iteration 2 were still being used.
Iteration 4 (Fragmentation & The MoU): Having failed to achieve total capitulation through military means, the strategy pivots again. The current MoU represents a fragmentationist approach—likely modeled after the strategies deployed against Venezuela or the framework of the so-called Board of Peace. It offers the local integrationist faction a path to liquidity while extracting almost irreversible concessions (such as the opening of the Strait of Hormuz and a nuclear freeze) in exchange for highly revocable promises. The concessions approach irreversibility because the trap is structural: signing the agreement binds Iran to a new diplomatic and infrastructural reality, making any future closure of Hormuz far more politically and economically costly on the international stage. Furthermore, this dynamic directly manipulates the balance of power between competing elite factions inside Iran, dictating who gains leverage and when. While the specific mechanics of these internal factional struggles and what this means for the future use of asymmetrical deterrents warrant their own dedicated analysis, the overarching imperial function at first glance seems to be to structurally fragment the target state's internal cohesion.

To be clear, the ink on this MoU is barely dry, and the geopolitical situation remains highly fluid. This is, necessarily, just a first impression of its strategic function. But whether this specific agreement holds, collapses next month, or mutates into something else entirely, its structural role remains the same: it is simply the latest data point in an ongoing iterative feedback loop.

Every single phase is an iteration, and each iteration learns from the friction of the previous one. The overarching goal remains constant: neutralize Iran as a sovereign, independent threat. But the methods adapt. This is not a “Masterplan” in the cinematic, cartoon sense, nor is it “chaos” or “no plan.” It is a planning process in the strict sociological sense: complex, multi-phase, multi-author, highly iterative, adaptive, and entirely coherent within its own strategic grammar.

The Depth of Detail: Scenarios, Budgets, Contingencies

Beyond iterative feedback loops, professional planning is characterized by its granular depth: the continuous generation of worst- and best-case scenarios, strict budgetary frameworks, and rigorous qualitative analysis among other things. The imperial planning apparatus demonstrates this level of detail, as well

The Brookings Fueling a New Disorder paper, for instance, explicitly models multiple scenarios for US-China energy relations, including the “mutually assured denial” equilibrium. Similarly, the Path to Persia framework outlines various instruments of pressure—sanctions, covert action, diplomatic isolation, energy disruption, and military strikes—as a modular matrix of options to be combined and sequenced according to situational friction. The Naval Postgraduate School goes a step further, actively wargaming these variables in their “Energy Defense” seminars to map out second- and third-order effects on global energy markets, alliance management, and adversary behavior.

Crucially, this planning extends beyond theoretical wargaming into hard fiscal realities and profound qualitative debates. The budgetary and operational dimension is codified in structural legislation. The SHIPS for America Act specifies the exact financial incentives and penalties required to rebuild the US maritime fleet, while the Maritime Action Plan dictates the precise percentage of strategic cargo that must be carried on US-built vessels by specific dates.

Meanwhile, the qualitative dimension of this planning process is vividly captured by the intellectual tension between figures like Ayşe Zarakol and Niall Ferguson at the 2026 Bilderberg meeting. Because such forums operate entirely behind closed doors, we must deduce the contours of the conversation from its participants. The presence of these specific historians suggests that the elite debate touched on how to fundamentally conceptualize the current hegemonic challenge: Are we reliving 1947, 1914, or the 17th century? This is a purely qualitative, historical debate, and it is precisely the kind of foundational question that shapes long-term imperial planning horizons and defines its underlying planning culture.

The Banality of the Masterplan: Spreadsheets, Metadata, and NATO

And, goodness gracious, yes, every regional, supra-regional, and even global institution runs on these exact same mundane processes we have mapped out so far.

While researching another piece on NATO, I recently came across a document titled the NATO Lessons Learned Handbook (Third Edition, published in February 2016 by the Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre with the help of US Navy Reservists). It is essentially a manual detailing how NATO plans to plan, and how it evaluates its own strategies.

Let me tell you: you will die of boredom if you try to read it. Its table of contents alone is a sedative, featuring gripping chapters like “Gathering Observations,” “Staffing Lessons Identified to Lessons Learned,” and an annex with a “Lessons Learned Capability Checklist” that rates organizations on their mindset, leadership, and tools. But this sheer, unadulterated boredom is the ultimate antidote to the “Masterplan” myth.

The handbook explains, with the unblinking seriousness of someone who has spent decades inside institutions, the grueling gauntlet an observation must survive to become a lesson. So, bear with me… When you submit an observation for review, you must first ask yourself: “Is this an objective observation and not just an obvious complaint about something or somebody?” Then: “Is this a problem with the system and not just a simple mistake by somebody?” And then, my personal favorite: “Would you spend your own money to fix this issue? Would you spend your own time fixing this issue?” (Okay then…)

If the answer to all of these is yes, your observation may proceed to the next stage of the process. There, it will be rigorously tagged with metadata (Date, Classification, Releasability, Title, NATO Main Capability Area). When analyzing a strategic failure, these planners do not consult a shadowy cabal; they use an HR-style brainstorming technique called “Five Times Why,” where staff sit around a table and repeatedly ask, “Why has this happened?” like middle-schoolers doing root-cause analysis. They even have strict administrative requirements reminding officers to properly tag the “Submitter” and the “POC” (Point of Contact) on their observation spreadsheets so the files do not get lost on the local server.

The “Bunker State” is held together by the exact same soul-crushing corporate bureaucracy as your local municipal zoning board. The NATO handbook literally contains a checklist for “Choosing Software Tools” that asks planners to seriously consider: What are the bandwidth requirements? Is the software easy to use? What report generation capability is needed?

Take, for example, how this document describes the military’s adaptation to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). When the imperial military machine encounters a lethal disruption like an IED, how does it adapt? Does an omnipotent planner snap their fingers? No. According to the handbook, the IED community follows a continuous learning cycle: they generate a report identifying what can be learned, pass it through multinational working groups to update “Standard Operating Procedures,” and then—I kid you not—they institutionalize the new procedures into training and communicate them to current staff “through newsletters and bulletins.”

Newsletters.

The handbook even pauses to remind its readers that audience formatting matters when sharing these lessons: “The way you present LL [Lessons Learned] information to a general who needs the information to make a command decision... will need to be different to the way you present LL information to a corporal who needs the information to improve his own daily working practices.” One can almost picture the general and the corporal, each receiving their appropriately formatted newsletter, the machinery of institutional learning humming quietly in the background.

This is it. This is the mystical, smoke-filled room. This is the supposedly omnipotent imperial “Masterplan.” A grinding, iterative bureaucratic loop of “Implementation and Monitoring.” When the empire fails, what does it do? It just opens a new spreadsheet, assigns a new POC, drafts a “Lesson Identified,” and modifies the pathway.

If you imagine that imperial strategy is hatched by cackling masterminds, this document will disabuse you. It is not a masterplan. It is worse. It is an institutionalized, self-correcting learning apparatus that iterates continuously, involves thousands of personnel across dozens of commands, and produces strategic coherence without a single author or a single document. That is how the empire actually thinks. In handbooks. In newsletters.

Of course, this is “just” NATO. When I speak of “empire,” I am always referring to a networked structure—a multi-layered cage of multiple nodes bound by shared class interests. But regardless of the specific node, the underlying point stands: this mundane, administrative machinery is the mystical process that leads to what outside observers call “plans.”

Transcending the "4D Chess vs. Chaos" Binary

To argue that an empire lacks a plan simply because its methods continuously change is to commit a profound category error. In complex systems, changing methods in response to material friction is the very essence of planning. Any rigid blueprint that fails to adapt to feedback is a plan guaranteed to fail.

This raises a necessary theoretical question: When does an adaptive planning process actually fail? The answer is when the foundational objective itself is shattered and must be entirely abandoned or substituted, rather than merely re-routed. Short of that, adaptation is simply the machine working as intended. The fact that imperial strategy regarding Iran constantly mutates—shifting from the JCPOA, to Maximum Pressure, to kinetic war, and now to the MoU—is proof of a functioning planning process, because the terminal objective remains entirely unchanged: neutralizing Iran as a sovereign, autonomous entity.

As we have seen, the sociological reality of planning within large, hegemonic institutions is that it is:

Distributed across a vast ecosystem of actors, agencies, and elite forums.
Differentiated by operational phase, target audience, and level of granular detail.
Iterative and cyclical, rather than strictly linear.
Adaptive to real-time geopolitical friction and structural feedback loops.
Coherent at the level of strategic grammar and shared class interest, even when specific tactical maneuvers drastically pivot.

The transatlantic imperial apparatus exhibits every single one of these characteristics. When we understand this, the prevailing geopolitical debate reveals itself as a false binary. The “4D Chess” camp correctly intuits this structural coherence, but falsely attributes it to one actor. Conversely, the “Chaos” camp searches for the wrong thing—a single, static, omniscient “masterplan”—and, upon correctly finding that it does not exist, falsely concludes there is no strategy at all.

The reality is one of institutional convergence. It is a dynamic distributed across a network of think tanks, military academies, corporate boardrooms, and elite gatherings, producing a fiercely coherent strategic posture without requiring a single author or a single master document. Recognizing this framework is undoubtedly unsettling, as it reveals an adversary that is deeply entrenched, adaptive, and institutionally resilient. But it is also vastly more politically useful because it accurately diagnoses how the imperial apparatus actually plans and operates which is the absolute and necessary precondition for organizing against it effectively.

Closing Note: Planning and Counter-Planning

There is a tragic irony here. The insistence that the empire has no plan is meant to be mobilizing: it is intended to tell people that the US-led imperial order is not invincible, that its actions are desperate and reactive, and that resistance can work. But by fundamentally mischaracterizing how imperial planning actually functions, this narrative serves only to disarm.

If you believe the empire has no plan, you will not study its planning apparatus. You will not trace the institutional paper trails. You will not identify the nodes in the network where elite convergence happens—and, most importantly, where it can be disrupted. Instead, you will cheer for the empire’s supposed blunders while the cage tightens.

The geopolitical debate over the empire’s competence often traps us in a false binary. On the one hand, if the empire were an omnipotent genius executing a flawless masterplan, resistance would be futile. But distributed planning is not omnipotent. It has gaps, contradictions, and points of friction where different institutional logics collide. A plan that adapts can also be forced to adapt in directions its authors do not choose.

On the other hand, if the empire were a chaotic, blundering mess with no plan at all, resistance would be unnecessary—why organize if the system is already collapsing? But that belief breeds passivity and spectator politics.

The truth—that the empire plans, and that its planning apparatus can be studied, understood, and contested—is the only position that makes organized counter-hegemonic and anti-imperialist work both necessary and possible. By recognizing that the empire does plan, we make its structural mechanics legible. The Brookings wargames, the maritime budget mandates, the Bilderberg debates, and the MoU’s sequencing trap are the visible artifacts of a massive, adaptive planning process that can be mapped and fundamentally countered.

Acknowledging this reality is not demobilizing at all. On the contrary, it is the vital precondition for any counter-strategy worthy of the name. You cannot dismantle a machine if you refuse to study how it is built.

They have their plans. They have their institutions. They have their handbooks and their Bilderberg meetings. The question is whether we are willing to do the equivalent work on our side: to build our own institutions, our own planning capacity, and our own long-term strategic horizons. Not to passively cheer for other countries, but to organize across borders. Not to wait for the empire to collapse, but to actively make it obsolete.

I hope this framework helps move us past the comforts of the chaos myth, revealing instead a system that can be studied, analyzed, and built against.

Addendum

These are the Notes and Interviews that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:

An knot that is difficult to untangle: On class analysis in anti-imperialist discourse

A Note on the Iran-US Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)

Od bunkra do wielobiegunowości // Nel Bonilla with Pawel Moscicki

Join the Conversation

As we conclude this analysis, I want to hear from you.

If you observe the geopolitical landscape, do you see the mundane machinery of the empire operating in plain sight? Where do you notice the institutional paper trails—the think-tank reports, the legislative mandates, the corporate bureaucratic loops that coordinate the “Bunker State”? Do you notice this nearly invisible imperial infrastructure in your own daily life, operating as quietly and persistently as a municipal zoning board?

Finally, the default trajectory I have described is only invincible if we refuse to study it. Where do you see genuine efforts—however embryonic—to do the equivalent work on the anti-imperialist and counter-hegemonic side? Where are the attempts to build our own institutions, our own rigorous planning capacity, and the shared, cross-border strategic horizons that might actually counter the cage?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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