No Guardrails: What Happens When Everything Lets Go at Once
The Sovereign's Notebook | Power Moves Special Edition | February 23, 2026 | đ Free
On February 5th, 2026, a treaty expired.
Most people didnât notice. The news cycle had moved on â tariffs, Iran, the Fed, the Bitcoin crash. One more headline in a season of headlines. But this one was different. This one was the kind of thing that doesnât make noise when it happens. It makes noise years later, when historians try to identify the moment the world changed.
The New START treaty â the last legally binding nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia â expired at midnight. With it went fifty years of limits, inspections, and verifiable constraints on the two countries that together hold roughly 85% of the worldâs nuclear weapons. The UN Secretary-General called it a âgrave moment.â The arms control community called it the end of an era. Trump called it an opportunity to negotiate something better and said, when asked about the expiration: âIf it expires, it expires.â
If it expires, it expires.
That sentence is doing a lot of work. Unpack it and you find the governing philosophy of this entire geopolitical moment â a deliberate willingness to let the inherited architecture of post-WWII order dissolve, with the confidence that something better, or at least something more favorable to American interests, can be built in its place.
Maybe that confidence is justified. Maybe it isnât. But the sovereign individual doesnât wait to find out. He reads the present clearly and acts accordingly.
And the present, right now, in February 2026, looks like this: all the guardrails came off at once.
The Architecture of Restraint â and Its Dissolution
To understand whatâs happening, you have to understand what the post-1945 international order actually was. Not the idealistic version â the ârules-based international orderâ that politicians invoke like a prayer â but the structural version. The actual machinery.
It was a system of mutual restraints. Not trust â restraint. Nuclear treaties that limited arsenals and mandated inspections, not because the US and Russia trusted each other, but because neither could afford the alternative. Trade agreements that created interdependencies, not because nations believed in free markets, but because economic entanglement made war expensive. International institutions â the IMF, the World Bank, the UN Security Council â not because anyone believed in global governance, but because they provided channels for managing conflict without shooting.
Every single one of these restraints has been under pressure simultaneously in the last several years. And in the last several months, several of them have snapped.
The New START treaty: gone. For the first time in more than half a century, there are no binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia â the two countries that together hold the vast majority of the worldâs nuclear weapons. UN News
The Strait of Hormuz: threatened. Iranâs Revolutionary Guard running live-fire drills through the worldâs most critical oil chokepoint â 31% of seaborne crude â while nuclear talks proceed in Geneva and US carrier groups sit within striking distance of Iranian nuclear sites.
The tariff architecture: dismantled. The global trade system that the US built and enforced for 70 years is being restructured by executive order, with allies and rivals receiving the same treatment, the same pressure, the same transactional logic.
And underneath all of it, the dollarâs structural position â the petrodollar system that has underwritten American dominance since 1974 â is being quietly challenged by every one of these developments simultaneously.
This is not a crisis. This is a transition. And transitions are the most dangerous periods in any power system â precisely because the old rules no longer hold and the new ones havenât been written yet.
Bitcoin at $64,000: What the Number Is Actually Saying
Bitcoin crashed to $64,270 overnight. Then bounced to $66,000. Then stabilized, shakily, as traders tried to read the macro environment and couldnât.
The mainstream read: geopolitical uncertainty is bad for risk assets. Bitcoin is a risk asset. Therefore Bitcoin goes down. Simple.
The sovereign read is more complicated â and more interesting.
Bitcoin has fallen more than 50% from its October 2025 peak of $126,000. That is a brutal drawdown by any measure. And the reason matters. This is not a crypto-native failure â no exchange collapse, no protocol exploit, no regulatory hammer. This is a macro repricing. Bitcoin is being sold because institutions that bought it in ETFs are de-risking in the face of genuine geopolitical and monetary uncertainty.
Hereâs the thing about that: it proves the critics right in the short term and the believers right in the long term, simultaneously.
In the short term, the critics are right. Bitcoin does not yet behave like digital gold in a crisis. When the Strait closes and the nuclear treaty expires and the tariff war escalates, institutions reach for gold first â and gold has been breaking records. Bitcoin goes down with the risk-on assets. The reflex isnât there yet. The crisis memory isnât encoded in the price.
In the long term, the believers are right. Because every one of the forces driving down Bitcoinâs price right now â geopolitical instability, dollar uncertainty, monetary policy unpredictability, the unraveling of the post-WWII financial architecture â is also the exact environment that makes the Bitcoin thesis more true, not less. The long argument for Bitcoin is: sovereign monetary systems will debase and destabilize. Look around. Is that argument becoming more or less credible?
The sovereign individual holds both truths at once. Short-term pain. Long-term thesis intact. The question is whether youâre positioned to survive the former long enough to benefit from the latter.
The Nuclear Silence Nobody Is Discussing
Here is the story that isnât getting nearly enough attention.
Russiaâs position, as of the treatyâs expiration: it considers New STARTâs obligations no longer binding and will determine its future actions based on the evolving strategic environment. Wikipedia Russia has said it will voluntarily observe the limits for now â but âvoluntarilyâ and âlegally bindingâ are not the same thing. One requires a political decision to continue. The other requires a political decision to stop. The difference matters enormously.
Without New START, âthere are no more guardrails on the sizes of the United States and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals,â as one nuclear security expert put it â a situation that hasnât existed in decades. NPR
The Trump administrationâs position is that it wants a new, better deal that includes China. China has refused, arguing it has a fraction of the US and Russian arsenal â roughly 600 warheads to their approximately 4,000 each â and wonât negotiate from that position. This is a reasonable negotiating stance that will likely not change anytime soon.
What this means, practically: we are in an interregnum. A period between rules. The old treaty is dead, the new one doesnât exist, and both sides are managing the gap through informal gentlemanâs agreements and political signals rather than legal obligations and on-site inspections.
In geopolitics, interregnums are when accidents happen. Not because anyone wants them to. Because the mechanisms that prevent miscalculation â the verification systems, the inspection regimes, the shared data â are the first things that disappear when trust breaks down and treaties expire.
The sovereign individual notes this not to panic, but to calibrate. The risk environment has changed. It doesnât announce itself with a market crash or a headline. It changes quietly, structurally â and then one day you look up and the map is different.
The Bronx Read
In the Bronx in the 1970s, the guardrails came off.
Not the nuclear guardrails â the civic ones. Redlining had stripped wealth from entire neighborhoods. Arson â landlords burning buildings for insurance money â was destroying the physical infrastructure. The city was functionally bankrupt. The police presence dropped. The fire departments were defunded. The subway was unsafe. The schools were underfunded. Every institutional structure that was supposed to provide stability, safety, and economic opportunity had either been weaponized against the community or simply abandoned it.
And what happened?
The people who understood the new reality â the absence of institutional protection, the vacuum where the guardrails used to be â built something. They built community organizations that provided what the city wouldnât. They built economic networks outside the formal system. They built a culture â hip-hop, graffiti, b-boy, DJ â that was not just art but a complete parallel infrastructure for identity, communication, and economic exchange.
The Bronx didnât thrive because the guardrails came off. It survived despite it, and built something that outlasted the crisis precisely because it stopped waiting for the institutions to come back.
That is the lesson for this moment.
What the Sovereign Individual Does When the Guardrails Come Off
First: resist the temptation to treat this as a single story. The nuclear treaty, the Strait of Hormuz, Bitcoinâs drawdown, the tariff war, the dollarâs pressure â these are not separate events requiring separate responses. They are one story. The story of a world order in transition. The framework for understanding it is unified even when the headlines are fragmented.
Second: hold hard assets with a clear purpose. Gold for the crisis reflex â it has the encoded memory, it performs when the fear index spikes. Bitcoin for the long thesis â the very forces making it painful right now are the forces that make the 5-year argument stronger. Understand what each asset is for and donât confuse them.
Third: reduce institutional dependency where you can. The guardrails coming off in geopolitics is a signal to reduce your exposure to institutions that assume the guardrails will hold. That means: self-custody for digital assets, diversified jurisdictional exposure where possible, skills and networks that donât require institutional intermediation.
Fourth: build in the current conditions, not the ideal ones. The sovereign individual who waits for stability before building is waiting for something that isnât coming on any predictable timeline. The Bronx didnât wait. The Bitcoin genesis block was written in the rubble of the 2008 financial crisis. The best time to build parallel infrastructure is when the main infrastructure is visibly failing.
And fifth â this one matters most â read the map honestly. The world is more dangerous right now than it was five years ago. Not catastrophically, not irreversibly, but measurably. The nuclear risk is higher. The geopolitical risk is higher. The monetary system is under more stress. The sovereign individual who acknowledges this clearly is better positioned than the one who tells himself that every dip is a buying opportunity and every crisis is temporary.
Some crises are temporary. Some are structural. Learn to tell the difference.
The Mythic Frame
In every transition myth â every story of an old order dying and a new one struggling to be born â there is a moment called the interregnum. The old king is dead. The new king hasnât taken the throne. The court is in chaos. The borders are vulnerable. The old rules donât apply and the new ones havenât been written.
This is that moment.
The sovereign individualâs role in an interregnum is not to restore the old order â itâs gone, and pretending otherwise is expensive. Itâs not to despair at the chaos â chaos is the condition, not the enemy. It is to build, with clear eyes, the structures that will survive the transition and be useful on the other side.
No guardrails doesnât mean no structure. It means you have to provide the structure â for your finances, your information, your community, your practice.
The guardrails came off on February 5th.
You already knew the world was different. Now the treaty confirms it.
Position accordingly.
â The Brilliant Mr. Pedro
đ» THE SOVEREIGNâS PICKS
Tools and texts for the sovereign individual. Amazon affiliate links â I earn a small commission if you buy, at no cost to you.
đ THE READ THIS WEEK The Sovereign Individual â James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg Written in 1997.
Describes the exact transition weâre inside right now. The chapter on what happens when nation-states lose their monopoly on violence and currency reads like a 2026 field manual. Non-negotiable for anyone trying to understand this moment. â The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
đ§ THE TOOL THIS WEEK Ledger Flex â Hardware Wallet
If your Bitcoin is on an exchange during a period of this much institutional volatility and geopolitical uncertainty â itâs not really yours. Self-custody is the foundational sovereign move. This is what I use. â Ledger Flex - Crypto Touchscreen Signer
đȘ THE BODY THIS WEEK Magnesium Glycinate â Thorne
Research Geopolitical stress is real stress. Chronic stress depletes magnesium. Magnesium depletion disrupts sleep. Disrupted sleep makes you reactive and short-sighted â the exact opposite of what this moment requires. This is in my nightly protocol. â Nectar Calm Magnesium and Ashwagandha Drink Mix
FTC Disclosure: Affiliate links above. Recommendations are always mine. The commission never changes the pick.