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The most consequential period in any geopolitical transition is not the collapse. It's the shift that precedes it.

This is the sixth and final entry in the Pressure Points series, a collection of observations on resource scarcity, infrastructure fragility, and geopolitical leverage that informs the analytical foundation of the Hammurabi Code Series. If you're arriving here for the first time, the previous five entries are linked throughout this piece. Start anywhere. But this one is the...

By the time the regulation exists, the leverage is already in place.

There is a pattern I have watched repeat itself across resource sectors throughout more than three decades of legal practice. It is not dramatic. It does not make headlines when it happens. It happens quietly, incrementally, and entirely within the law.

The pattern is this: the legal and corporate mechanisms for resource exploitation consistently outpace the regulatory frameworks designed to govern them. This is not...

It isn't the shortage that reshapes geopolitics. It's who controls the shortage.

In the autumn of 1973, the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced an embargo on oil exports to the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The stated reason was political. Retaliation for Western support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The actual mechanism was resource control.

Within months, the price of oil had quadrupled. Gasoline lines stretched around city blocks in...

The sudden part is all anyone remembers. The gradual part is where everything was decided.

History remembers collapse. It does not remember the accumulation that preceded it.

We remember the stock market crash of 1929. We don't remember the eighteen months of deteriorating lending standards, overleveraged positions, and other ignored warning signals that made the crash inevitable before it happened. We remember the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many don't remember the decades of structural...

The mechanism is not scarcity. It is asymmetry.

When people think about water as a geopolitical issue, they think about scarcity. Drought. Shortage. The image of a dried lakebed or a depleted reservoir. The assumption is that water becomes politically significant when there isn't enough of it.

That assumption is incomplete in a way that matters enormously. Water doesn't become leverage because it is scarce. Water becomes leverage because it is unevenly scarce. Abundant in one location,...

Pressure Points - The geographic reality behind The Siberian Question

Fact No. 1 -

There is a body of water in Siberia that holds more unfrozen freshwater than all of the North American Great Lakes combined. It is over a mile deep in places. It is ancient, having formed twenty-five million years ago, and so biologically distinct that approximately eighty percent of its species exist nowhere else on Earth. It is larger in surface area than Belgium. Most people in the West couldn't find it on a...

Systems aren't designed to fail gracefully. They're designed to hold until they don't.

There is a specific moment in the life of any stressed system, a water network, a financial institution, a political alliance, when it crosses from stable to failing. Not gradually. Suddenly. The crossing itself takes seconds. What takes years is the invisible accumulation of pressure that precedes it.

This is the pattern I kept returning to while writing The Siberian Question.

Infrastructure, physical, legal,...

I'm having my second signing part on April 19 in Camarillo, California at a dear friend's house. It will be fun to do it again. Meet folks interested in my work, read an excerpt, answer some questions and maybe sell some books. It's a taste of a full time author's life I suppose. Not bad at all if I could make it work!

Lake Baikal is a massive crack in the earth, 400 miles long, 30 mile wide and 5000 feet deep in some areas. It's located in South Central Siberia directly north of Mongolia. As the value of water is increasingly recognized, this body of water in Russia will likely come into play.

The Siberian Question and The Price of Water are available now. Read the first chapter of either book free at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list

This excerpt takes place after the major decisions have already been made, when actors begin to understand the limits of what they can still control.

July 18, 2030 – Moscow, The White House

Sergei could not believe how bad things had gone since the destruction of the convoy. Over the following days, news of the conflict had gone from good to grim.

"This cannot continue, Marshal," Putin snarled at his supreme commander. "The debacle over Lake Baikal and now a cyber-attack at the hands of the...

For most of modern history, geography was treated as something static. Mountains are internal, rivers will always flow, and borders are fixed by both. The resources of a geography are fixed in place waiting to be used or defended. Climate change has quietly undone these accepted “facts.”

Lake Baikal holds roughly twenty percent of the world’s unfrozen fresh water. For decades, that fact was more trivia than strategy. It sits in Russia’s Siberia, a remote region, locked behind climate,...

A second excerpt from a forthcoming novel.

His chief aide was the first to speak. “To state the obvious, this is a game-changer, Minister. China’s demands, and willingness to back them with such extreme measures, signals a new level of confidence. Or recklessness.”

Yoshi nodded slowly, steepling his fingers under his chin. “Recklessness or calculation? That’s the question. And how does this affect Japan? How does it affect the region?”

Yoshi’s second aide interjected. “Minister, if Russia...

“The planets aligned the moment the Russians failed to take Ukraine quickly in 2022. The surprising resistance by the Ukrainians has caused Russia to become wholly dependent on China for nearly everything. Chairman Xi has been wrestling with how to deal with the ‘Let It Rot’ generation, as well as the men without women resulting from the One Child Policy. My predecessor, Wang Yi, is the true architect of the Outer Manchurian Project, having proposed the concept in the early years of Chairman...