Behemoth vs. Leviathan: Which Path Will zEUS Choose?

The question is not whether the American empire is fading or thriving, but rather whether it knows what game it is playing. Grand strategy, once the province of pipe-smoking men scribbling over maps in walnut-paneled rooms, now flickers in the blue haze of cable news and Twitter threads. The sound of helicopters has been replaced by the hum of semiconductor fabs, but the question remains unchanged: where is the frontier, and who decides what it should cost?

Enter Donald J. Trump, a man whose relationship with historical context is—charitably—nonlinear. Amid the slurry of slogans and tariffs, one oddly specific reference emerged: his admiration for William McKinley’s economic policy. This was no idle footnote. Trump, in channeling McKinley, was doing more than slapping tariffs on Chinese steel. He was resurrecting a moment when the United States turned inward to build outward—when protectionism was not a retreat, but a staging ground for projection.

McKinley’s tariffs, passed in the twilight of the 19th century, were not merely economic defenses—they were a prelude to war. The Spanish-American War, with its jingoistic journalism and splendid little victories, would follow in short order. The new empire required ships, steel, sugar, and soldiers. Tariffs were the forge. In this light, Trump’s economic nationalism, for all its chaos and contradiction, had a certain ghostly resonance. He was not just taxing imports—he was, knowingly or not, reviving a doctrine that weds domestic industrial strength to future military readiness.

Of course, this was not quite McKinley redux. Trump, as ever, was caught mid-echo, citing a past he neither fully understood nor intended to reproduce. The tariff was a symbol, not a strategy. The war footing was never coherently articulated. And yet, the specter remains: the notion that economic sovereignty is not a retreat from power, but its raw material.

Taft’s Quiet Rebellion and Dewey’s Design

But to understand where Trump truly belongs, one must look not to McKinley, but to the man McKinley’s successors tried to forget: Senator Robert A. Taft. If McKinley was the architect of imperial readiness, Taft was the quiet undertaker of entanglement. His America was not the nation on horseback but the republic behind a hedgerow—guarded, constitutional, and reflexively suspicious of alliances signed in faraway capitals. To Taft, NATO was not a shield but a snare, a pact that threatened to drag the United States into the wars of other men under the illusion of shared values.

Robert A. Taft (Left) vs Thomas E. Dewey (Right)

Taft’s critique was not wrong; it was merely premature. He saw, long before it was fashionable, the cost of permanent commitments and the slow erosion of congressional authority in the face of executive warcraft. But in 1952, caution was no match for charisma. Taft’s moment passed not because his ideas failed, but because his rival had a better producer.

That rival was not Eisenhower—at least not yet. It was Thomas E. Dewey, two-time presidential loser, governor of New York, and quiet schemer of the Republican realignment. Dewey’s genius was not rhetorical. He had all the charm of a tax attorney at a funeral. But he understood structure. He grasped what the party needed before the party itself did: a candidate who could beat the Democrats, command the military-industrial moment, and slap a general’s smile on the new world order.

Dewey’s move was surgical. He bypassed Taft’s isolationist conservatism by drafting Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander with the name recognition of a Hollywood icon and none of the ideological baggage. To balance the ticket, he added Richard Nixon, a young anti-communist with enough aggression to placate the right and enough ambition to frighten the left. In one stroke, Dewey didn’t just win the nomination—he hijacked the soul of the party, rewiring it from Midwestern caution to Atlantic ambition.

And so the strategic die was cast—not in smoke-filled rooms, but in a bright, glassy consensus that the Cold War would be fought not from the shadows, but from conference tables, carrier decks, and treaty halls. Taft’s America had been a republic. Eisenhower’s would be an empire in denial.

Eisenhower’s Ascent and the Strategic Schism

In the mythic retelling of American military leadership, both Eisenhower and MacArthur occupy pedestals—but only one was permitted to cross the Rubicon into elected power. The comparison is not only compelling; it is, in a sense, the origin myth of postwar American strategy.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, one day before D-Day

Douglas MacArthur was, by all accounts, the more theatrical of the two. He carried the aura of a Roman proconsul returned from Gaul, full of thunder and quotations, draped in a cape of legend and self-regard. His command in the Pacific was not merely military—it was metaphysical. He saw himself as destiny’s instrument, not Washington’s. That he was eventually dismissed by President Truman is one of the few moments in American history when the republic formally rebuked its own reflection in empire.

Eisenhower, in contrast, emerged not as a conqueror but as a coordinator. His genius was not in battlefield flourish but in systemic cohesion. He commanded armies across nations, balanced the egos of Patton, Montgomery, and de Gaulle, and managed the most complex military undertaking in history without appearing to sweat. He did not win Europe by force of personality but by architecture of alliance. His victory was not just over the Nazis—it was over the chaos of coalition itself.

Stripped of their ambitions, these two men stand as avatars of strategic instinct. MacArthur was the Leviathan of the Pacific—a unilateralist, heroic, and absolute. Eisenhower was the Behemoth’s architect—a creature of infrastructure, treaties, and careful calculation. One man sought to shape the world by command; the other by coordination.

Choosing Eisenhower over MacArthur was not just an electoral decision. It was a strategic fork—the moment America decided that its postwar order would be built not by sword but by structure. NATO, the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, and eventually the European Union—they are all, in some dimly lit strategic genealogy, Eisenhower’s grandchildren.

MacArthur, exiled to the dustbin of potential authoritarians, became the road not taken. But like all such roads, it did not disappear—it merely waited for a less decorated man to wander down it decades later.

The Strategic Duality of Rising Powers

This internal divide—between commanding by coalition and dominating by force, between building systems and asserting will—is not uniquely American. It is not even uniquely modern. It is, in fact, the strategic adolescence of every state that dares to rise above regional obscurity. The moment a power becomes more than local, it must ask itself the question that no army can answer: do we expand inland, or do we sail?

Japanese Nanshin-Ron (source)

Japan, in the prelude to its imperial zenith, faced precisely this crisis. The factions weren’t metaphorical—they wore uniforms. The army backed Hokushin-ron, the “Northern Advance” doctrine aimed at Siberia and Central Asia. The navy promoted Nanshin-ron, the “Southern Advance” toward the Pacific archipelagos, resource-rich Southeast Asia, and ultimately, collision with the United States. These weren’t rival ideas at cocktail parties; they were competing operational blueprints, each with its own institutional base, budget, and blood cost.

The outcome hinged on a Soviet border skirmish in 1939—the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, a relatively obscure affair to the Western canon, but existential to Japan. The army lost. Hokushin-ron collapsed. The navy ascended, and with it, Pearl Harbor steamed into history. That pivot didn’t just determine Japan’s World War II—it redefined the entire Pacific century.

And so the pattern holds.

France—split for centuries between its continental obsession with Germany and its maritime empire in Africa and Asia. Russia—forever torn between fortress mentality on land and its lust for warm-water ports. China, now in its globalist second act, is juggling the concrete silk of Central Asia and the liquid choke points of the South China Sea. Britain, at the zenith of its own empire, had to choose repeatedly between intervening on the continent and policing the seas that stitched together its imperial web.

These are not ideological questions. They are structural. They emerge not from speeches, but from geography, logistics, and the stubborn arithmetic of power projection. Every serious power eventually becomes a schizophrenic strategist, pulled between the logic of the land and the seduction of the sea.

The United States, for all its superpower pomp, is no different. It is merely later in the cycle, and—ironically—less self-aware of it.

zEUS at the Crossroads

Which brings us, not by accident but by the cold pull of geography and history, to the present—where the Pacific theater no longer whispers in regional tones, but thunders with systemic consequence. Europe, once the marble stage upon which America performed its grandest postwar experiments, has begun to feel like a museum of relevance. NATO persists, its rituals intact, but its strategic novelty withered. The Indo-Pacific, by contrast, is all sharp edges: archipelagos laced with tension, cyber frontiers bristling with silent warfare, and seabeds rich in rare earths and rarer certainties.

Here, the United States is no longer the high priest of liberalism—it is the realist chessmaster, cloaked in the language of denial strategies, deterrence posture, and export controls. The old grammar of “shared values” has given way to the steel syntax of “supply chain resilience.” Gone are the grand institutions of multilateralism. In their place: AUKUS, QUAD, IPEF—a taxonomy of urgency, each letter an admission that the game has changed and that America, at least in the East, has traded the parliament for the perimeter.

And so, the riddle sharpens. Which path will zEus, America’s mythic alter ego, now choose? Will he lumber inland like the Behemoth, mapping alliances and containment lines across the Eurasian landmass in preparation for long wars of attrition and siege? Or will he dive with the Leviathan, seizing maritime chokepoints, defending the invisible sinews of global commerce, fighting not for land, but for the flow itself?

Perhaps, as is so often the case in late empire, he will do neither—stalled not by indecision, but by drift, handing strategy over to algorithms, bureaucracies, and the quiet tyranny of incrementalism.

But if there is still intent behind the posture—if there is still a glimmer of design beneath the doctrine—then the Pacific is not just the new center of gravity. It is the proving ground. The Leviathan stirs. The Behemoth waits. And zEus, half-god, half-machine, must now choose—not just a weapon, but a world.

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In Episode 10 of Global Insights by Geopolitics.Asia, we exhibit an age where empires drift and algorithms whisper strategy, our newest episode dives into the ancient fault line of American power—land or sea, order or dominance, Behemoth or Leviathan. With a newly forged voice powered by the zEus engine, our reimagined hosts guide you through the hidden architecture of grand strategy, from McKinley’s tariffs to Pacific flashpoints, Taft’s quiet resistance to Eisenhower’s system logic. This isn’t just a podcast—it’s a descent into the machinery of history, told with wit, weight, and a touch of myth. Welcome to the turning point.

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