Vol. III, No. 70
Covering 11 August - 24 August 2025
Monday, August 25, 2025
Late edition · A Relentless publication
The Relentless Dispatch
All the fortnight that mattered, in technology and in the world, read next to what we were building at the time.
ALASKA

Trump rolls out the red carpet for Putin, and gets nothing for it

The American president hosted the Russian president on American soil for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, ending Putin's isolation with a warm welcome, and came away with no ceasefire, no concession, nothing. The aggressor got the summit. Ukraine got left in the cold, then summoned to Washington to be managed.

President Trump hosted Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 for the first US-Russia summit since the invasion of Ukraine, greeting the Russian leader, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, with a red carpet, a warm handshake and every honour of a state visit, ending three years of Western efforts to isolate him in a single afternoon. And in exchange for restoring Putin to the world stage, the president secured nothing: no ceasefire, no withdrawal, no concession, only vague talk of a future deal on terms that appeared to favour the aggressor. Putin got the summit, the legitimacy, the images of himself received as an equal on American soil, and gave up nothing for it. Three days later, Trump summoned Zelensky and a phalanx of anxious European leaders to Washington, where the Ukrainian president, having learned from a disastrous earlier encounter, was careful and deferential, and the Europeans pressed for the security guarantees they now understood they would have to provide largely themselves.

The summit crystallised the reversal this paper has tracked all year: an America that treats its adversaries as partners and its allies as problems, that rewards aggression with legitimacy and asks the invaded to be grateful. Putin, who launched the largest war in Europe since 1945, who bombs Ukrainian cities nightly, who is wanted for the abduction of children, walked the red carpet in Alaska and flew home with his isolation broken and his war intact, having conceded nothing. The message to every aggressor watching, and to every ally, was unmistakable: aggression is rewarded, alliances are conditional, and the way to be received with honour in the new American order is to be strong and ruthless enough that the president respects you. It was, in the pure sense, a triumph of the transactional over the principled, and the person who triumphed was the one who had invaded his neighbour.

GAZA

Famine is formally declared, as Israel presses to take the city

The world's authority on hunger formally declared famine in Gaza on August 22, the first ever declared in the Middle East, confirming what the images had already shown: that mass starvation had taken hold across the northern part of the territory, the result of nearly two years of war, blockade and the collapse of aid. The declaration, fiercely disputed by Israel, deepened its international isolation to levels unseen in the conflict, even as its forces pressed forward with the offensive to seize and occupy Gaza City, driving hundreds of thousands of already-starving, already-displaced people south once more, into an area that offered no safety and no food, in a war that had long since exhausted the world's capacity for horror and found new depths regardless.

IN BRIEF

The state takes a stake; the capital is federalised; a tech tribute

In a striking assertion of state power over private enterprise, the US government took a roughly 10 percent equity stake in the chipmaker Intel on August 22, the government becoming a shareholder in a company it deemed strategically vital, a move toward a kind of American state capitalism that would have been unthinkable to the free-market party a generation ago. President Trump federalised the police of Washington, DC, and deployed the National Guard on its streets on August 11, citing crime, extending his pattern of asserting direct control over cities he does not govern. And India marked its Independence Day on August 15 under the shadow of the tariff rupture, its prime minister striking a defiant note about self-reliance.

The Column

The wolf gets the carpet, and the world takes the lesson

The American president rolled out a red carpet for a war criminal this fortnight and got nothing for it. The commentary is fixed on the humiliation of getting nothing. The graver thing is what the carpet itself, gift and not exchange, teaches every ruler watching.

By Zainab Zaheer

The American president rolled out a literal red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska this fortnight, honoured an indicted war criminal with the full ceremony of a great-power summit, and came away with nothing, no ceasefire, no concession, not even the appearance of one. The commentary has settled on the humiliation, the deal-maker who got no deal, and that reading is fair as far as it goes. But it treats the ceremony as mere packaging around a failed negotiation, and I think the ceremony was the substance, and that to understand what actually happened in Alaska you have to take the carpet seriously as an act in its own right, because ceremony is never neutral, and this one taught a lesson that will outlast the empty communique.

Marcel Mauss, studying how honour and obligation move through societies, showed that the gift is never free and never merely symbolic: to give is to establish a relation, to assert something about the giver and the receiver and the bond between them, and the gift creates obligation, or asserts hierarchy, or confers recognition, and it does real social work regardless of what is said aloud. A gift given without any return demanded is not nothing; it is a statement, and what it states is that the mere existence of the recipient, the mere fact of the relationship, is worth honouring for its own sake. This is exactly what a state ceremony is, a gift of recognition, the most valuable thing one sovereign can bestow on another, and it is why such ceremonies are normally withheld from pariahs and extended only to those a state wishes to legitimise. To give the full gift of recognition to an indicted war criminal, and to demand nothing in return, is therefore not a failed transaction. It is a completed gift, and the thing it confers, legitimacy, honour, the standing of a respected equal, was delivered in full, for free, and cannot be taken back.

The counterargument is serious and I hold real respect for it, because it is the argument of experienced diplomats and not of fools. Diplomacy, they will say, requires talking to monsters; you do not make peace with your friends; every negotiated end to every war has required treating with people who belong in the dock, and a leader who refuses the ceremony of engagement on grounds of the other party's guilt is indulging his own moral vanity at the expense of the lives a settlement might save. The carpet, in this view, is just protocol, the necessary theatre that makes negotiation possible, and to read grave meaning into it is naive. I grant the premise entirely: one must talk to monsters to end wars, and the refusal to negotiate with the guilty has its own body count. But notice the distinction the objection erases, the distinction between engagement that extracts and engagement that merely honours. Talking to Putin to wring a ceasefire from him would be the diplomacy they are describing, the hard bargaining with a monster for a concrete good. Honouring Putin with the full ceremony and extracting nothing is not that; it is the gift without the exchange, the recognition without the return, and it is precisely the thing experienced diplomacy is supposed to withhold until the concession is in hand. The carpet was rolled out before anything was obtained, and nothing was obtained, and so it was not a negotiating tactic. It was a tribute.

And tributes teach. This is the part that reaches past the single humiliating summit, and it is why I cannot treat the carpet as a mere gaffe to be laughed at. Every ruler with an appetite for a neighbour's land was watching Alaska, and what they saw was the precise sequence that instructs: a man invades a country, murders its civilians, earns an arrest warrant, waits, and is rewarded not with isolation but with the highest honour the international order can bestow, delivered personally, on a red carpet, by the most powerful state on earth, in exchange for nothing at all. The lesson, stated as a rule any strongman can carry home, is that aggression is not merely unpunished but honoured, that the pariahhood which is supposed to be the aggressor's cost evaporates on a long enough timeline, and that one need not even concede anything to have it lifted; one need only wait for a patron who values the spectacle of the summit over the substance of a settlement. That lesson is now taught, and it cannot be untaught, and it will be studied in every capital that has ever eyed a border.

I write from a part of the world that has watched the powerful honour each other's crimes for a very long time, and has learned to read the ceremonies more carefully than the communiques, because the ceremonies are where the real message lives. The words of a summit are for the press; the carpet is for the other rulers, and it speaks a language older than any treaty, the language of recognition and honour and who is admitted to the circle of the respectable. This fortnight that circle opened, on a red carpet, in Alaska, to a man who earned exclusion from it, and it opened for free, and every aspiring aggressor on earth received, at no charge, the most encouraging lesson the international order can teach: that the wolf gets the carpet, in the end, if he simply keeps being a wolf and waits for a host who prefers the ceremony to the substance. The humiliation of getting no deal will be forgotten by autumn. The gift of the carpet, and the lesson it taught, will be remembered by every predator who was watching, and they were all watching, and they all took the lesson home.

Field Notes
A Relentless build, told plainly

The day I threw out Salesforce's own core object and built my own

This fortnight's front page is about rewarding the wrong thing. This is about a choice at the heart of my work that looks, to outsiders, like heresy: taking the standard, out-of-the-box centrepiece of a system and replacing it with something I built myself. No client is named.

By Alosh Paul

There is a moment in enterprise software that separates the people who shape their tools from the people their tools shape, and I want to describe one, because it is the clearest example I have of a philosophy that will get a fuller treatment in these pages before long. For a large real-estate acquisition operation, I did something that many Salesforce practitioners would consider close to heresy: I took the platform's own central, standard object, the Opportunity, the out-of-the-box centrepiece that the entire system is designed around and that the vendor and every consultant urges you to use, and I set it aside, and I built a custom Pipeline object of my own to replace it. I threw out the standard thing that everyone says you should use, and built the thing the business actually needed instead.

Why would anyone do that, when the standard object is right there, free, supported, blessed by the vendor, the path of least resistance that every best-practice guide recommends? Because the standard object was built for a generic sales process, an imagined average of what a thousand different companies might do, and the actual acquisition process of this actual business, buying houses at scale, with its specific stages, its specific decisions, its specific data, its specific way of working, did not fit the generic shape. And here is the choice that moment forces, the choice at the heart of my whole trade: you can bend your business to fit the tool, contorting how you actually work to match what the out-of-the-box object assumes, accepting the friction and the compromise and the quiet daily cost of doing things the tool's way instead of your way, or you can bend the tool to fit your business, building something that matches how the operation actually works, at the cost of more effort now and the discipline to maintain what you have built. Most people, under deadline, take the first path, because it is faster and safer and nobody gets blamed for using the standard thing. I took the second, deliberately, and I would do it again.

The custom Pipeline object fit the business like a tool made for the hand that holds it, because it was. It captured exactly the stages the acquisition process actually had, held exactly the data the business actually used, enforced exactly the way of working that made the operation efficient, instead of forcing the operation to bend around a generic object built for someone else's imagined average. It cost more to build, and it required the discipline to maintain a thing I owned rather than one the vendor maintained for me. And it was worth it many times over, because a tool shaped to your actual work makes the work flow, while a tool your work must bend around imposes a tax on every single transaction, forever, invisible and compounding. I will write more, before long, about this choice and the conviction behind it, because it is the deepest belief of my working life and the most consequential decision anyone building a serious system makes: whether to accept the tool as it comes and reshape yourself around it, or to take control of the tool and shape it, with effort and conviction, around the work it actually has to do. This fortnight's field note is just the seed. The argument is coming.

The Ledger
AI
A quieter fortnight for AI. The government's equity stake in Intel, though, signals a new industrial policy in which the state directly backs the chipmakers the AI build-out depends on, blurring the line between public and private in the race for compute.
Data centers & power
The Intel stake is, at bottom, a chip-and-compute play: the government securing the semiconductor manufacturing that the AI build-out, and its power-hungry data centres, cannot proceed without. State capitalism in service of the machine.
Rates
The Fed holds amid a weakening labour market and the shadow over its own data; a September cut looks increasingly likely as the economy cools and the political pressure mounts.
Real estate
US 30-year mortgage 6.58 percent (August 21), easing as the economy softens and cuts approach. The thaw continues, driven by weakness rather than strength.
India tech
India marked Independence Day under the tariff shadow, its leaders preaching self-reliance, a theme that will only grow as the American relationship sours. The strategic drift toward hedging, and toward China and Russia, accelerates.
What we called wrong
Nothing to retract. The Alaska column extends this paper's long theme of incentives and rewarded behaviour: a system gets what it rewards, and rewarding aggression, however it is dressed up as dealmaking, teaches every watching aggressor that aggression pays.
The Back Page

The word "famine"

The word was finally used this fortnight, officially, formally, by the body whose job is to declare such things: famine, in Gaza, the first ever formally declared in the Middle East. It is worth dwelling on the word, because words like this are used with great care and great reluctance, precisely because they carry enormous weight. "Famine" is not a synonym for hunger or shortage or even severe malnutrition; it is a technical threshold, defined by specific, terrible measurements, mass death from starvation, extreme malnutrition rates, whole populations without food, and it is declared only when the evidence is overwhelming, because to declare it is to indict the world for having allowed it. For months, aid agencies had warned it was coming, had described the trajectory, had pleaded for the action that would prevent it, and the warnings, as warnings in this paper's pages so often are, were disputed, minimised, deferred, until the thing itself arrived and could no longer be denied and the word had to be used. There is a bitter familiarity to it, the forecast catastrophe that officialdom refuses to name until it is undeniable, the warning heeded only when it is too late to be a warning and has become instead a description. The famine was predicted. The prediction was resisted. The famine came anyway, as predicted, and now it has a name, formal and terrible, and the children it is killing are past the point where naming it can save them. The word was used this fortnight, at last. It should have been unnecessary, because the thing it names should have been prevented, and the warnings that it was coming had been there, unheeded, all along.