Dick Cheney and George W Bush at the White House on 14 December 2007. Cheney was part of a group of Bush Jr advisers who called themselves ‘the Vulcans’
Let’s get one thing straight: the story of Dick Cheney is not one of accident. It’s a story of intent. And if you want to understand the post-9/11 world—if you want to understand Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, surveillance, even the modern deep suspicion of government—you have to understand Cheney. And to understand Cheney, you need to understand the Vulcans.
The name sounds like science fiction, but that’s the wrong genre. This isn’t Star Trek. This is Julius Caesar. It’s realpolitik, Machiavelli, Clausewitz. The Vulcans were a tight-knit group of Republican foreign policy veterans—almost all Cold War-era operators—who came together in the late ’90s to mentor George W. Bush on the complexities of global power before his run for president.
This wasn’t a think tank. This wasn’t a study group. This was a war cabinet in waiting.
Condoleezza Rice was a key player. So were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Stephen Hadley. But the beating heart of it—the flint-faced, steel-spined core—was Cheney. He wasn’t just the vice president. He was a former White House Chief of Staff under Ford. He ran the Pentagon under George H. W. Bush during Desert Storm. He knew how the machine worked, and more importantly, he knew how to pull its levers without drawing attention.
When 9/11 hit, the Vulcans didn’t need to learn anything. They already had a blueprint.
And that blueprint was decades in the making.
Remember: these were Cold Warriors. They came of age believing that peace came through strength, and strength came from dominance. Not diplomacy. Not nuance. But force projection. They believed the U.S. had the right—no, the obligation—to shape the global order, and that failure to do so would invite chaos. Or worse, irrelevance.
So when planes hit the Twin Towers, the Vulcans didn’t flinch. They moved. Iraq was already on the list. So was Afghanistan. So was expanding the surveillance state. The Patriot Act didn’t come out of nowhere—it was the natural extension of a worldview that saw safety as something that had to be wrestled out of the hands of enemies, foreign and domestic.
And Cheney? He was the quiet storm behind it all. While Bush gave speeches about freedom, Cheney was in the bunker, on the phone, in the meetings. Saying the things no one wanted to say out loud: We may have to get our hands dirty. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. The American people don’t want to know the details, they want to be protected.
This wasn’t democracy in bloom. This was the cold logic of empire maintenance. Of preemptive war. Of indefinite detention. Of waterboarding.
What made the Vulcans unique wasn’t that they were hawks. The U.S. has always had hawks. What made them different was that they were disciplined. They were coordinated. They were ready the moment they got the keys to the castle. And Cheney was their dark architect—less interested in appearances, more in outcomes. More in the shadows than in the spotlight.
You can debate their legacy—and we should. You can argue whether their actions made the world safer or simply accelerated its descent into endless war. But what you can’t argue is this:
Cheney and the Vulcans didn’t react to history. They wrote it.
And they did it in ink that still hasn’t dried.
Rudolf Hess in his cell at Spandau prison in 1986. The last surviving member of Hitler’s cabinet.
Look at him in that photo. Spandau Prison, 1986. A man with the hollowed-out look of someone who hasn’t just outlived his generation, but his purpose. A man who once stood at the very center of one of history’s most catastrophic regimes—and who, by the end, seemed more like a confused relic than a war criminal.
But it didn’t start that way. Rudolf Hess was not some bureaucratic footnote in Nazi history. He was there at the beginning. A true believer. Not the kind of man who drifted into the Nazi Party by accident or opportunism, but one who sought it out—and threw himself into it with a fervor that bordered on religious.
Born in 1894 in Alexandria, Egypt, into a wealthy German merchant family, Hess had the kind of upbringing that could have led to a quiet life of privilege. But World War I changed that trajectory. Like so many others in his generation, he went to war, was wounded in combat, and came out of it disillusioned, humiliated by the Versailles Treaty, and hungry for something greater.
Enter Adolf Hitler.
Hess met Hitler in the early 1920s, during the turbulent Weimar years. He didn’t just sign up—he became one of Hitler’s most devoted followers. He worshipped him. Not in the political sense, but in a deeply personal, almost spiritual way. He was there for the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. He served time with Hitler in Landsberg Prison, where he helped transcribe and edit Mein Kampf. Imagine that: the second man in the cell, quietly writing down the ideological fever dream of the century.
When Hitler rose to power, Hess wasn’t just brought along—he was elevated. He became Deputy Führer in 1933, effectively the second-in-command in name, if not always in influence. He managed party affairs, acted as Hitler’s proxy, and signed laws on his behalf. In Nazi Germany, Hess was everywhere. He was part of the machinery that dismantled democracy, crushed dissent, and built the totalitarian state that would plunge the world into war.
But then… the strange turn.
In 1941, just weeks before Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—Hess got in a plane and flew solo to Scotland. Alone. With no authorization. No entourage. He crash-landed and claimed he was there to negotiate peace between Britain and Germany.
To this day, no one fully understands why. Was it a rogue peace mission? A desperate ploy to prevent a two-front war? A symptom of psychological collapse? Hitler was furious. He stripped Hess of all titles and cast him out of the Nazi inner circle. The once-loyal disciple was now a pariah.
And yet, when the war ended and the Allies put Nazi leadership on trial at Nuremberg, Hess was still there. Not for commanding armies or masterminding genocide, but as a symbol. A symbol of the regime’s early ideological zeal—the kind that made everything else possible.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment. And because of Cold War politics, he served that sentence alone from 1966 until his death in 1987. The Soviets refused to allow his release, even when the other war criminals were gone. He spent over 40 years in captivity. Not just forgotten by history—trapped in it.
He died at 93, the last living link to Hitler’s original cabinet. The last echo of a group of men who tried to reshape the world by force and left it shattered.
And that’s the thing about Hess. He wasn’t a mastermind. He wasn’t brilliant. He wasn’t even particularly effective. But he was early. He was there when it started. When the future was still plastic. He didn’t build the gas chambers, but he helped build the idea of a Reich that justified them. And in that sense, his fingerprints are on the crime scene—whether or not the weapon was in his hand.
So when you see that photo—this old man, stooped and spectral—you’re not looking at a prisoner.
You’re looking at a warning. About how dangerous belief can be, when it’s untethered from morality. About what happens when you give yourself so completely to a cause that you forget the cost.
And about how history sometimes punishes not with execution, but with isolation.
1867 photo of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last Shogun of Japan. He resigned his position that year, marking the end of the almost 7-century reign of the Shoguns, who ruled Japan for most of the period from 1185 to 1868.
It’s 1867. And the man in this photograph—Tokugawa Yoshinobu—is doing something that almost no one in power ever does willingly.
He’s stepping down.
Voluntarily. Deliberately. And in doing so, he brings the curtain down on seven centuries of military rule in Japan. Let that sink in. For Americans, that would be like a system beginning with the Magna Carta and ending today. We’re not talking about a brief dynasty or a political movement. We’re talking about a civilization-defining system—the rule of the Shoguns, the military strongmen who effectively ran Japan from the time of the Mongol invasions to the dawn of the steam engine.
And Yoshinobu? He was the last man to hold that title.
But here’s where it gets even more fascinating. This wasn’t the ending anyone expected. Not in blood, not in civil war—though Japan almost went that way. Instead, it ended in something that looks suspiciously like modernity creeping in through the cracks of tradition.
By the 1860s, the Tokugawa Shogunate had been in place for over 250 years. It had survived internal rebellions, kept the emperors sidelined as figureheads, and enforced a policy of near-total isolation from the outside world. No trade. No foreign influence. No modern weapons. Just samurai, rice taxes, and an iron grip on the feudal order.
But history doesn’t stand still.
The world was changing. Western powers were knocking on Japan’s door—literally—with steamships and cannonballs. Commodore Perry arrived from the United States in 1853 with what historians often call gunboat diplomacy—a not-so-subtle invitation to open your ports or watch your cities burn.
The samurai, for all their honor and courage, were suddenly looking very medieval in a world of rifles and railroads.
And Tokugawa Yoshinobu? He saw it coming.
Unlike many of his predecessors, Yoshinobu was educated, cosmopolitan, even reform-minded. He understood that Japan could no longer hold the world at bay with swords and ceremony. But by the time he rose to power in the 1860s, the tide was already turning against the Tokugawa.
Factions in the south—particularly in Satsuma and Chōshū—wanted power returned to the emperor. They wanted modernization. They wanted a Japan that could compete with the West on its own terms. And they saw the Shogunate as a fossil standing in the way of survival.
Yoshinobu could have fought. He had armies. He had allies. He had the weight of history behind him. But he chose something else: he resigned as Shogun in 1867. He handed power back to the emperor—ending the Tokugawa reign, ending the Shogunate, and triggering what we now call the Meiji Restoration.
That’s what makes this photo so powerful. It’s not just a portrait. It’s a snapshot of the moment an entire world stepped aside. The samurai era wasn’t over yet, but it was dying. And the man in the frame knew it.
Think about that: a man born into one of the most powerful political dynasties in history… willingly steps away. Why? Because he sees what so many rulers do not—that clinging to power in a dying system is not strength. It’s delusion.
What came next was one of the most radical transformations any nation has ever undergone: industrialization, conscription, Western-style schools, railroads, telegraphs, and eventually empire-building on a global scale.
But it started here. With this man. In this moment.
Tokugawa Yoshinobu: the last Shogun. Not a warlord dragging his country into the past, but a man who saw the future coming—and, however reluctantly, stepped out of its way.
The first McDonald’s in Moscow that drove the city mad, 1990
It’s hard to describe just how weird this moment must have felt.
It’s January 31st, 1990. The Soviet Union is still standing—but just barely. Food shortages, economic stagnation, political turmoil. The country is teetering on the edge of something no one quite understands yet.
And into this steps a cheeseburger.
Not just any cheeseburger. A Big Mac. And fries. And Coca-Cola. Served with a plastic smile and a cash register that actually works. Right in the heart of Moscow.
This wasn’t just the first McDonald’s in Russia. It was the first Western fast food restaurant to open its doors on Soviet soil, and it landed like a spaceship.
They expected maybe 5,000 customers that day. They got over 30,000. People lined up for hours in subzero temperatures, some dressed in their finest clothes—suits, dresses, fur coats—because to them, this wasn’t lunch. It was contact with another civilization. A bite of the West. A literal taste of capitalism.
Think about it. For decades, the Soviet Union had defined itself against the West—against American consumerism, gluttony, and decadence. And now? A golden-arched temple to all those sins was doing business in Pushkin Square. And people were losing their minds over it.
One woman reportedly wept after her first bite. Others saved the packaging as souvenirs. Some customers didn’t even eat their meals—they took them home to show their families, like sacred relics of a new world arriving.
And here’s where it gets really wild.
This wasn’t just a marketing stunt. It was the culmination of 14 years of negotiation between McDonald’s Canada and the Soviet government. That’s right—Canada, not the U.S., because even global corporations knew the Cold War was a minefield. The company built its own supply chains, trained thousands of Russian employees in Western-style customer service (something practically alien in the USSR), and even built a potato-processing plant because Soviet potatoes didn’t make good fries.
This was soft power with a sesame seed bun.
The symbolism was deafening. At a time when ration cards were still common, when people stood in endless queues for butter and toilet paper, here was this impossibly clean, fast, brightly-lit oasis serving burgers in 50 seconds flat.
It wasn’t about the food. It was about what the food represented.
For some, it was hope. For others, betrayal. A friendlier kind of invasion. The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.
And the timing? Perfect. Within two years, the Soviet Union would collapse. The Iron Curtain would fall. And capitalism, in all its chaotic, garish glory, would flood in.
But the first breach in the dam wasn’t a warhead or a treaty.
It was a McDonald’s.
A place that sold freedom for $3.75 a combo.
Japanese pilots receive final orders before taking off for Pearl Harbor, 1941
Look at this photo. Freeze this moment in your mind.
It’s sometime in the early morning hours before the most consequential surprise attack of the 20th century. These are Imperial Japanese Navy pilots, lined up with the kind of rigid formality that defined a society steeped in hierarchy, obedience, and martial precision. They’re receiving final instructions—orders that will launch them into the skies toward Pearl Harbor.
And here’s what you need to understand: these men knew what they were doing. This wasn’t a training exercise. This wasn’t just another bombing run. This was a declaration of war by other means. These young aviators were the tip of the spear, carrying the ambitions of an empire—and the weight of a gamble so massive it’s hard to believe it wasn’t fiction.
The mission? Paralyze the United States Navy in one devastating strike. Hit them so hard, so fast, that America would have no stomach to fight. Yamamoto, the architect of the plan, knew better. He famously said: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” But for now, that sleeping giant was asleep.
These pilots stood in formation, bowed slightly, saluted with quiet discipline. And behind the calm was finality. There would be no radio contact after takeoff. If captured, no acknowledgment of affiliation. This was not just a mission—it was a statement. It was Japan’s answer to embargoes, to humiliation, to Western dominance in the Pacific.
And it was a shot fired before the declaration of war had even been delivered.
That’s what makes this photo so chilling. These young men—almost all in their twenties—were preparing to deliver one of the most controversial and infamous blows in modern warfare. In the minds of their commanders, this was a strike of necessity. In the eyes of the world, it would be called infamy.
But in this moment, before the engines roared to life and before Hawaii woke to the sound of bombs, there was only the stillness. A ceremony. A bow. A farewell. The kind of disciplined calm that comes when men believe they’re stepping into history.
Some would never return. Others would live to see Japan burned, bombed, occupied. But on this morning, their eyes were fixed on the horizon. On glory. On duty. On an uncertain future they had been taught to meet without fear.
And when they took off, history followed them—screaming.
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