Allies Are Not Friends: The Evolutionary Truth People Forget Before They Get Conquered

Bryant McGill · Allies Are Not Friends: Geopolitics as Evolutionary Strategy

**Links**: [Blogger](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/allies-are-competitors.html) | [Substack](https://bryantmcgill.substack.com/p/allies-are-not-friends-the-evolutionary) | Medium | Wordpress | [Soundcloud 🎧](https://soundcloud.com/bryantmcgill/allies-are-not-friends-geopolitics-as-evolutionary-strategy) **In the Friendly Spirit of Competition: The EU and the UK Can Go Fuck Themselves** There is a children's version of geopolitics that adults keep repeating because it feels civilized: allies are friends, the West is a unitary team, cooperation is progress, and shared values guarantee good faith. That story is not merely wrong—it is **maladaptive**. It is the kind of moral bedtime story that gets nations and empires **killed**, the same way naïve animals get killed: by assuming that proximity implies benevolence. In the real world, "ally" does not mean friend, it means **temporarily aligned competitor**—a rival who shares enough overlapping interests to coordinate during emergencies, while simultaneously seeking advantage over you in every non-emergency moment. That isn't cynicism; it's **evolutionary mechanics** operating at state scale. If you forget this, you're not "optimistic." You're being domesticated. You're becoming the substrate other actors walk on. The line people keep misattributing to Shakespeare—“keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”—doesn’t come from Shakespeare at all; it lands in popular culture via _The Godfather Part II_, as Michael Corleone’s explicit doctrine of proximity-as-control. The half-truth embedded in the aphorism is also the trap: it trains the mind to fixate on enemies. But **the real danger is not your enemies**. Enemies you already model as adversarial; you watch them, counter them, prepare for them. **The damage comes from allies**, because the human brain—drugged on social hormones and narrative comfort—slips into the oldest cognitive error in history: it confuses **coordination** with **care**. Allies get invited into the courtyard while enemies batter the gates. Allies provoke complacency; enemies provoke vigilance. And unearned trust—this assumption that shared alignment means shared interest—becomes the lever they use to extract concessions no enemy could ever demand outright.

Here is the rule that governs everything from wolf packs to nation-states: **competition is default, alignment is conditional, and betrayal is always latent.** Alliances are not marriages. Alliances are not families. Alliances are not trust ceremonies. Alliances are _contracts written in the language of necessity_. The moment the necessity fades, the contract starts bleeding. And the most humiliating part? The way someone became your ally can be reversed just as quickly. **You can help them become NOT an ally**, which should always be on the table—because these actors will overreach, and they can be dangerous. Ally does not mean kumbaya. ## THE DARWINIAN FRAME: SELECTION PRESSURE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS Everything that follows rests on a premise so foundational it is rarely stated explicitly: **every durable system humans inhabit—biological, institutional, economic, cultural, technological—operates according to Darwinian mechanics.** Selection pressure, variation, retention, and extinction are not metaphors borrowed from biology and applied loosely elsewhere; they are the governing dynamics of all competitive environments in which resources, attention, legitimacy, or survival are at stake. Institutions evolve. Narratives mutate. Norms compete. Technologies select for behaviors that reinforce their own persistence. Nothing that endures does so accidentally, and nothing that dominates does so without conferring adaptive advantage to itself, often at the expense of alternatives. What confuses modern observers is not the presence of Darwinian dynamics but their **camouflage**. As I wrote in ["Prestige Networks: Transatlantic Blame from the Civil War to Modern America"](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/xclub.html): _"In advanced societies, selection rarely presents as open violence or explicit domination; it presents as professionalism, ethics, consensus, safety, best practice, or inevitability."_ The mechanism is unchanged. Systems that reward alignment reproduce; systems that punish deviation contract; systems that control the definition of legitimacy control the fitness landscape itself. To misunderstand this is to mistake surface rhetoric for underlying mechanics. To deny it is to opt out of agency within it. This is why the sentimental vocabulary of alliance is a trap. **Friendship is reciprocal affection. Alliance is reciprocal utility. Friendship is moral intimacy. Alliance is conditional coordination.** Friendship assumes loyalty as a baseline. Alliance assumes **advantage seeking** as a baseline. If you treat an alliance like a friendship, you deserve what happens next—not because you are bad, but because you are **non-adaptive** in a competitive field. And non-adaptive organisms get eaten. ## THE ALLY PARADOX: THEY HELP YOU IN WAR SO THEY CAN COMPETE WITH YOU IN PEACE The function of an ally is not to "support you." The function of an ally is to prevent you from collapsing in a way that destabilizes their own environment. **The ally wants you alive enough to deter mutual adversaries, and weak enough not to outgrow their leverage.** The ally will applaud your strength in public while shaping your constraints in private. This is not a conspiracy. It's ecology. Institutions aren't saints; they are organisms. They seek survival, advantage, and position within the fitness landscape. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling theology in a lab coat or diplomacy in a bedtime story. That's why "ally" contains a hidden insult: it implies parity. It implies that they are on your level, contending in the same arena. A genuine subordinate is called a dependent or a client. A genuine friend is called a friend. **An ally is someone who needs you in one theater and competes with you in another.** If you're honest, you'll admit it: most of the "ally drama" we see in headlines is not betrayal—it's simple resentment that the public is being forced to witness the underlying mechanics that were always there. And sometimes your allies do more damage than your enemies through the competitive field. Because at least with enemies, you're watching. With allies, you let your guard down. That's when they fuck you. ## THE EU AND UK: CAMOUFLAGE AS DOMINATION STRATEGY If you want the cleanest example of ally-as-competitor behavior, look at Europe—especially the EU/UK prestige ecology—because their primary skill is not raw force projection; it is **legitimacy capture** and the export of governance grammar. These academies are not neutral salons; they are long-lived, fitness-maximizing institutional organisms, and in a Darwinian contest for cognitive primacy you model them with the same seriousness reserved for nation-states. Their behaviors—funding flows, appointments, journal control, export controls, sovereign AI projects, regulatory grammars—belong to the analytic category of power projection and substrate control. In ["Prestige Networks"](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/xclub.html), I documented the operational signature of the European prestige ecology: **export causality, import stewardship**. They push blame outward while pulling authority inward. They diagnose disorder as originating elsewhere—in America, in American platforms, in American "excess"—while claiming refinement and moral seriousness at the center, expanding administrative authority over solutions through surveillance, data governance, AI ethics frameworks—without fully owning domestic failure modes. This is _exactly_ the "ally-as-competitor" mechanism in polite clothing: they remain allied in defense posture while competing for epistemic primacy and jurisdictional control. The contemporary European scientific nexus operates with the same logic through updated infrastructure. The Alan Turing Institute, ALLEA (All European Academies), the Nordic research consortium, Denmark's Gefion supercomputer, Norway's Olivia supercomputer—all framed as "neutral" scientific endeavor while explicitly targeting "sovereign AI" and "national security." Research Minister Oddmund Hoel stated it plainly: _"To keep up with the AI race, we must be less dependent on foreign players... It is crucial to ensure Norwegian knowledge readiness and national security."_ That's not partnership. That's competition dressed in academic robes.

This is how you dominate a competitor without firing a shot—you convince the world that you are the adult in the room and they are the reckless teenager who needs supervision. You don't defeat them militarily; you defeat them **administratively**, by turning their behavior into something that must be "regulated," "governed," "ethically constrained," "harmonized," "standardized." And once a competitor accepts your governance grammar, they've accepted your jurisdictional dominance—because the power isn't in the rule, it's in who gets to define the rule. ## THE ASML CHOKEPOINT: WHEN AN "ALLY" HOLDS YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN HOSTAGE Now splice this into the substrate war. In ["Greenland and Freedom City: The Win-or-Die Fitness Contest for Primacy"](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/america-will-not-be-ruled.html), I framed the actual stakes: this is not random chaos; it's a Darwinian contest for control of the physical substrates AI runs on—rare earths, energy, cooling geography, fabs, fiber, and emerging orbital compute. Within that context, "ally" becomes a misdirection term because **alliances don't erase rivalry over substrate control; they only suppress it until it becomes undeniable.** Which brings us to the example I raised publicly: **ASML**. The Dutch company ASML holds an absolute global monopoly on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tools—without which no advanced semiconductor below 7nm can be manufactured. When an "ally" possesses a strategic monopoly—especially a monopoly that gates technological sovereignty—your alliance becomes conditional on their internal politics. **That's not partnership; that's a leash.** When Belgium's defense minister admitted Europe couldn't defeat the United States militarily in Greenland but hinted at a "Plan B," the response was obvious: _"I bet their plan B involves quiet leveraging of ASML (the Dutch EUV lithography monopoly) through tight EU partnerships. America is already working on breaking that dependency. Literally, they can just stfu."_ The ally does not need to bomb you; they only need to remind you that your next-generation capability pipeline runs through their valves. That's leverage, not friendship. That's a choke point disguised as cooperation. ## THE UK'S "SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP" IS NOT LOVE. IT'S ACCESS. The UK is a particularly elegant specimen of this pattern because it can operate as both participant and mask: close enough to the US to extract intimacy and influence, European enough to shape the broader prestige grammar, and historically skilled at _appearing_ less strategic than it is. This is why "special relationship" language is dangerous—it frames geopolitics in the vocabulary of affection rather than advantage. That's not analysis; it's hypnosis. The UK has always been exceptionally good at institutional continuity: shifting outward posture while maintaining inner strategy. It is not about hating the UK; it is about refusing to be anesthetized by the romance narrative. Once you see this clearly, the posturing around regulating platforms, "information safety," "AI ethics," and cross-border "responsible governance" stops reading like moral concern and starts reading like what it often is: **competition for narrative sovereignty**—the right to define what counts as legitimate speech, legitimate innovation, legitimate politics, legitimate defense. The pressure campaign against X is not a content dispute; it's a jurisdictional enforcement test. It is the same pattern: Darwinian selection wearing a civilized mask. ## RECENT RECEIPTS: THE ALLIES SHOWING THEIR COMPETITIVE HAND When the EU announced it would halt trade deals following Trump’s tariff threats over Greenland, my response was immediate: **“Fuck them to the ends of the Earth. And never forget once that just because someone is your ally doesn’t mean they’re not your competitor.”** It’s all in the spirit of competition, my friends—because I’m not seduced by the delusion that allyship equals friendship. Nor will I let them gaslight me into believing otherwise, especially through demands that I “behave appropriately,” because that is exactly how the superior predator wins: by forcing the prey to self-censor, self-limit, and comply. When someone called Americans "psychopaths for not knowing where their country came from," my reply was simple: _"We know perfectly well where it came from and more so than you have ever considered until this moment."_ The documented historical continuity from Victorian prestige capture through X-Club institutional warfare to modern European AI nexuses—[that's the receipt](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/xclub.html). Americans aren't so stupid that we don't recognize the playbook when we see it running again. The outrage over Greenland, over tariffs, over alliance "violations"—it's the sound of competitors realizing their leverage is being called. They operated under the assumption that America would remain an audience—applauding architecture while supplying labor, innovation, and risk. That assumption is no longer safe. Once the ritual is recognized as psychological preparation for permanent subordination, it loses efficacy. ## THE ONLY WIN CONDITION: TREAT ALLIES AS COMPETITORS BY DEFAULT The final point must land like a guillotine: **if you treat your allies like friends, you will be managed like a pet. If you treat your allies like competitors, you will be respected like a sovereign.** A real competitor respects power, boundaries, consequence, and capability. A fake friend respects your vulnerability only long enough to monetize it. And nothing is more pathetic than a nation that confuses alliance membership with immunity from rivalry. That nation is not sovereign; it is _insured_—and insurance is not power. It's dependency with paperwork. So yes: call allies when the house is on fire. Coordinate when war demands it. Share burdens where alignment is real. But outside those emergencies, treat them exactly as nature intended: **as rivals inside a temporarily shared trenchline**. Make disalignment always possible. Make overreach always punishable. Make dependency always temporary. Because the moment an ally realizes you have forgotten the competitive field, your status shifts instantly—from partner to prey, from sovereign to resource, from peer to bitch. And that, in the end, is the evolutionary truth: there is no kumbaya in the substrate war. There is only alignment gradients, choke points, and winners who refuse to be ruled. In Darwinian terms, that is not arrogance; it is simply rooting for one's lineage to survive. **In the great contest of life, clarity is not commentary but competence—and America will retain it.** The way they became your ally—through shared threat, mutual convenience, historical accident—is exactly as reversible. **You can quickly help them become NOT an ally, which should always be on the table.** Because these actors will overreach, and when they do, you need to be ready. Ally does not mean friend. It does not mean kumbaya. It means: _useful until proven otherwise, dangerous if you forget it._ **Further Reading:** - [Prestige Networks: Transatlantic Blame from the Civil War to Modern America](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/xclub.html) - [Greenland and Freedom City: The Win-or-Die Fitness Contest for Primacy](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2026/01/america-will-not-be-ruled.html) - [Manufacturing Sovereignty: The Deep Architecture of American Power](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/06/manufacturing-sovereignty-abridged.html) - [John Nash’s Unparalleled Legacy in the Changing Climate of Societal Transformation](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/01/john-nash-more-than-beautiful-mind.html)