The Jordan Threshold We are not reading the obituary of three soldiers; we are reading the obituary of a specific era of American globalization. When the BBC and the Pentagon confirm that Iranian ballistic missiles and drones have pierced the defenses of a forward operating base in Jordan, killing two US troops and leaving one missing, the immediate instinct of the global media is to calculate the escalation ladder. Will President Trump order a retaliatory strike? Will the Strait of Hormuz be fully closed? These are the questions of the news cycle, the domain of the anxious and the reactive. But for those of us who track the architecture of power, the signal is far more profound. The incident in Jordan is not a spike in volatility; it is a regime change in the operating system of international relations. It signifies that the United States has crossed a threshold where the...