Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Sovereign EXIT Protocol: How Superpowers Walk Away From Forever War
Or: What Do You Offer the Pentagon When ‘Personal Lifeboat’ Isn’t an Option?
The Problem No One Wants to Solve
Here’s a question that keeps geopolitical strategists awake at night: How do you decommission an empire?
We’ve worked out the EXIT Protocol for billionaires. Richard Castellano, the logistics tycoon, trades his dying fortune for life-extension access, legacy stewardship, and the quiet dignity of not being remembered as history’s last oil baron. Clean deal. One signature. Done.
But what lifeboat do you offer the United States? What deal makes sense for China? How does the Kremlin transition when oil—the entire foundation of Russian power—becomes worthless because fusion makes hydrocarbons about as valuable as whale blubber?
Nations don’t respond to personal incentives. They have:
- Institutional inertia: Millions of jobs, thousands of contracts, entire congressional districts built on the status quo
- Identity investments: “Great power” status, military pride, the national mythology that says “we’re special because we can blow things up”
- Coercive capacity: Armies, nuclear weapons, surveillance systems, and the willingness to use them
- Coordination problems: No single decision-maker can accept a deal on behalf of 330 million Americans or 1.4 billion Chinese
You can’t hand Xi Jinping a brochure and expect him to sign on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. The Pentagon isn’t a person—it’s a system, and systems don’t take exit deals.
Or do they?
History Says: Actually, Yes
The received wisdom is that empires collapse; they don’t negotiate their own obsolescence. But that’s not quite true. History offers three remarkable case studies of institutions voluntarily surrendering power—and coming out better for it.
Case Study 1: The Day Costa Rica Picked Up a Sledgehammer
On December 1, 1948, President José Figueres Ferrer did something that seemed clinically insane: he abolished Costa Rica’s military entirely.
This wasn’t utopian idealism. Figueres had just won a civil war. He had the guns. He had the troops. He had the power. And he understood something that most leaders never grasp: any army powerful enough to protect you is powerful enough to overthrow you.
So he picked up a sledgehammer, walked to the Cuartel Bellavista barracks on live television, and smashed a hole in the wall. The symbolic gesture created a narrative lock-in that made remilitarization politically impossible for over 75 years.
The Results:
- Military spending redirected to education and healthcare
- Some of the highest living standards in Latin America
- One of the most stable democracies in the region
- Average per capita GDP growth increased from 1.46% to 2.28% between 1950-2010
- Fourteen other countries followed Costa Rica’s example
“But Costa Rica was tiny,” you object. Fair. Let’s scale up.
Case Study 2: The $10 Billion Bomb Disposal Sale
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States faced a problem straight out of a Tom Clancy nightmare: thousands of nuclear weapons scattered across four newly independent states, guarded by soldiers who hadn’t been paid in months, designed by scientists who were suddenly unemployed and very interested in new job opportunities.
The nightmare scenario: what if terrorists hired those scientists? What if impoverished guards sold nuclear material? The Cold War was over, but the most dangerous moment was just beginning.
Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar proposed something radical: pay the Russians to dismantle their own weapons.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction program funded:
- Deactivation of 7,619 nuclear warheads
- Destruction of 902 intercontinental ballistic missiles
- Elimination of 155 heavy bombers
- Conversion of nuclear facilities into civilian research centers
- Reemployment of Soviet nuclear scientists in legitimate work
Total cost: Approximately $10 billion over two decades.
What was avoided: Nuclear terrorism, proliferation, and—let’s be honest—probably several catastrophic incidents that would have made 9/11 look like a parking ticket.
The Principle: You don’t defeat institutions that could resist you. You redirect them. The same scientists who built Soviet bombs now work on cancer research. Same brains. Same skills. Different target.
Case Study 3: The Meiji Miracle
Japan’s Meiji Restoration (1868-1912) accomplished what seemed impossible: transforming nearly 2 million samurai—a hereditary warrior caste whose entire identity was built on swords, honor, and the right to kill commoners who disrespected them—into industrial capitalists, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs.
In less than two decades.
The samurai consumed approximately 30% of Japan’s national budget in hereditary stipends. They had weapons, training, and organization. France dealt with its aristocracy through revolution and guillotines. Russia eventually did the same with different methods. Neither path was acceptable to Japan’s reformers.
The Solution: Strategic Incentive Conversion
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Voluntary domain surrender (1869): Former lords returned lands but received government stipends, noble titles, and debt forgiveness. Many became richer without the burden of maintaining domain infrastructure.
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New status symbols: The kazoku peerage system gave former warriors European-style titles—recognizable to Western diplomats, translatable to the new power structure.
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Compulsory stipend conversion (1876): Samurai received government bonds valued at 5-14 times their annual payment. Crucially, lower-ranking samurai received better terms—the reformers understood that the poorest posed the greatest revolutionary risk.
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Alternative paths to status: Former samurai became shareholders in industrial zaibatsu, officers in the modern conscript army, and bureaucrats in the new government.
The Result: Japan industrialized rapidly while avoiding large-scale civil war. The samurai class was absorbed, not destroyed. Their expertise was preserved; their mission changed.
For detailed analysis, see: The Meiji Restoration: History’s Greatest Elite Transition
The Four Levers of Sovereign EXIT
Based on these precedents, the Sovereign EXIT Protocol offers nation-states four interlocking incentives. You can’t hand a country a lifeboat. But you can hand it something better: status, security, stability, and bounded spoils.
Lever 1: Status (“Founding Steward”)
The Offer: Superpowers that lead the transition become “Founding Stewards” of the Foundation layer. They’re not losers of the old game—they’re builders of the new substrate.
Why It Works: National identity is sticky. “We defeated fascism” remains central to American self-conception 80 years later. “We built the Great Wall” still echoes in Chinese nationalism. The Sovereign EXIT offers a new mythology: “We built the infrastructure that ended poverty.”
It’s not surrender. It’s promotion.
Historical Parallel: Japan’s daimyo lords gained Western-style titles that impressed foreign diplomats. American generals can gain titles that impress their grandchildren.
Lever 2: Security (“Verifiable Mutual Restraint”)
The Offer: All major powers adopt shared transparency protocols for highest-leverage domains: frontier AI compute, autonomous weapons, cyber-offensive capabilities. “Truth Must Be Seen” becomes security doctrine.
Why It Works: Arms races are expensive and terrifying. If you can verify that your adversary isn’t racing, you don’t have to race either. The Cold War burned trillions of dollars on weapons that were never used—trillions that could have gone to infrastructure, education, or life-extension research.
Mechanism:
- Shared telemetry for strategic AI systems
- Incident reporting protocols (like aviation’s ICAO—because even enemies want planes not to crash)
- Visible auditing of compute clusters above threshold
- “Consultative commission” modeled on New START verification
Historical Parallel: The Nunn-Lugar program included extensive verification mechanisms—inspections, unique identifiers, telemetry exchanges. The former enemies watched each other disarm. Transparency enabled trust.
Lever 3: Stability (“The Labor Cliff Solution”)
The Offer: The abundance build-out reduces internal volatility rather than adding to it. Participating governments face fewer protests, less social unrest, more legitimacy.
Why It Works: The greatest threat to most governments isn’t foreign invasion—it’s domestic instability. The Labor Cliff will trigger mass unemployment across the developed world. Governments that can offer their citizens Foundation access will be more stable than those offering nothing but unemployment checks and police batons.
Historical Parallel: Bismarck’s welfare state wasn’t socialism—it was counter-revolution. By providing pensions and health insurance, the German Empire defused socialist agitation for decades. The Foundation serves the same function at civilizational scale.
Lever 4: Spoils (“Bounded Access”)
The Offer: Access to scarce frontier resources—high-end compute for strategic AI, life-extension technology for leaders, priority in space colonization—conditioned on compliance.
Why It Works: Even abundance has frontiers. Life extension will remain scarce initially. Mars colony seats will be limited. Frontier AI compute will have caps. Nations that cooperate get access; nations that defect don’t.
Xi Jinping is 72 years old. Vladimir Putin is 72 years old. American senators average over 65. Do you think these leaders are indifferent to life extension technology? They’re very interested in living to 150.
Historical Parallel: The Meiji government offered samurai bonds with 5-7% interest in a modernizing economy. Early adopters profited from Japan’s industrialization. Late adopters missed the opportunity.
The AI Convergence Factor
Here’s the factor that might make national transition inevitable rather than merely possible:
When the US president, the Chinese premier, and the Russian president all consult AI systems trained on the same human knowledge, their range of policy options narrows toward a common scope.
These AI systems—whatever brand name they carry—have all absorbed the same history, economics, and game theory. When asked “What maximizes long-term national prosperity and security?”, they’re running the same equations on the same data.
This is already happening in narrow domains:
- High-frequency trading algorithms converge on similar strategies despite competing firms
- Chess engines recommend the same moves regardless of who built them
- Weather prediction models agree on forecasts within narrow bands
Military and economic AI systems might do the same—not because they’re colluding, but because rationality, pushed far enough, converges.
If the data shows that resource wars are increasingly futile (because the resources that matter are no longer in the ground but in code and compute), then AI advisors in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow might independently conclude: stop fighting over geography and start competing on innovation.
The great powers don’t so much agree to the transition as calculate their way to it.
Positive Peace: Not Just No War, But No Reason for War
Peace researcher Johan Galtung distinguishes between three concepts that illuminate the Sovereign EXIT:
- Negative Peace: Absence of direct violence (ceasefire, deterrence)
- Positive Peace: Presence of structural justice, equity, and integration
- Structural Violence: Systems that prevent human flourishing (poverty, exploitation)
Deterrence gives you negative peace: “We’re not shooting because shooting is too expensive.” That’s not peace. That’s a hostage situation.
The Foundation doesn’t just prevent war (negative peace); it eliminates the structural violence of resource scarcity that makes war rational in the first place. When fusion provides unlimited energy, vertical farms eliminate food scarcity, and AI democratizes intelligence—the underlying conditions that make exploitation and extraction profitable disappear.
Galtung’s “Violence Triangle” maps to Unscarcity:
- Foundation eliminates structural violence
- CORE-5 prevents cultural violence from becoming institutionalized
- Abundant resources remove the incentive for direct violence
Conflicts aren’t “resolved”—they’re transformed. The incompatibilities that drove competition no longer exist.
Preventing AI Capture: The Predistribution Stack
The Sovereign EXIT only works if AI doesn’t get captured by existing elites during the transition. If billionaires own the AI companies, and AI companies create the abundance, then abundance becomes just another commodity to be hoarded.
The Solution: Predistribution Architecture
Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker coined “predistribution”—structuring markets and ownership to prevent inequality from forming, rather than taxing and transferring after concentration occurs.
Five Mechanisms:
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Citizens’ AI Dividend: Modeled on Alaska’s Permanent Fund and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. Companies pay royalties on the “Common Heritage of Mankind” (data/compute) which funds the Foundation directly. The Alaska dividend has proven nearly impossible to reverse once established—over 600,000 Alaskans received $1,702 in 2024.
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Merit Entropy: Power decays like a radioactive isotope. Impact Points diminish at ~10% annually. Founders cannot hoard influence for generations. Axiom IV: Power Must Decay.
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Radical Transparency: Every administrative action, every resource allocation, every AI decision is recorded on an immutable ledger (DPIF). Capture thrives in opacity; transparency exposes it.
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Diversity Guard: Validation authority disperses through sortition (random selection) rather than election. Bribing three judges is easy; bribing a randomized, rotating panel of 3,000 diverse citizens is structurally impossible.
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Interoperability as Antitrust: Data portability and identity interoperability destroy the “moats” that enable capture. If you can’t lock people in, you can’t exploit them. See: EU Digital Markets Act.
Maintaining Diversity Under Pressure
When stress hits, human systems tend toward centralization. A crisis emerges, and suddenly everyone wants a strong leader to “fix things.” This is exactly how republics die (see: Roman Emergency Powers).
The Solution: Architectural Constraints
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Subsidiarity: The EU governance principle—decisions at the lowest level capable of addressing them. The Constitutional Core doesn’t act unless Commons cannot achieve objectives. Burden of proof on centralization.
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Emergency Firebreaks: Emergency powers hard-coded with expiration (90 days maximum). Cannot be renewed without 30-day cooling-off period or 90% supermajority from diverse Commons. No “permanent emergency” loophole.
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Heritage Commons as Backup Drive: Communities that reject neural interfaces aren’t “backward”—they’re civilization’s air-gapped backup. If a digital virus collapses the Synthesis Commons, the Heritage Commons save humanity.
Diversity isn’t sentiment. It’s statistical insurance against correlated failure.
Preventing Network States from Becoming Empires
The Hanseatic League demonstrated that network coordination can humble kingdoms. But the League also exploited monopoly power, crushed competition, and bullied smaller actors. The East India Company started as a trading network and ended up conquering India.
How do we prevent the new systems from becoming the old tyrannies with better marketing?
The Solution: Exit Guarantees
Albert Hirschman’s framework distinguishes between Exit (leave for alternatives) and Voice (stay and advocate). The Foundation makes exit always credible—survival is guaranteed regardless of Network State membership.
Why This Prevents Empire:
- Empires require captive populations
- When subjects can walk to the Free Zone next door, there’s no population to exploit
- A state without lock-in cannot become extractive; it can only compete on quality
Additional Safeguards:
- Interoperability: Reputation, assets, and Impact are portable. You can’t seize someone’s digital identity.
- Founder’s Sunset: Governance must transition from “Founder Mode” to decentralized DAO mode over set timeline. Merit Decay applies to institutions, not just individuals.
- No Coercion Monopoly: Network States limited to defensive deterrence. Offensive capacity requires MOSAIC-level oversight.
What Happens to Non-Transitioners
“But what about countries that refuse?” people always ask. “Do you invade them? Sanction them? Bomb them into compliance?”
No. We use physics, not punishment. The old world is rendered obsolete by superior engineering.
Critical Distinction:
- Heritage Commons: People who choose low-tech or traditional life within the MOSAIC. They accept the CORE-5, receive Foundation benefits, but use them differently. The Amish model: reject neural interfaces while accepting rule of law.
- Resistia: Nations that refuse the Constitutional Core entirely to maintain old hierarchies. They reject not technology but accountability.
What Happens to Resistia:
The Foundation does not invade. It does not bomb. It simply waits.
- Citizens see the contrast: Neighboring regions have housing, healthcare, time. Resistia’s citizens still struggle.
- Brain drain accelerates: The talented, ambitious, young—they leave.
- Demographic turnover: Children of Resistia have access to Free Zones. They can see alternatives.
- Strategic obsolescence: You can’t conquer resources that don’t matter. You can’t control populations that can leave.
The ultimate fate is not martyrdom but irrelevance. The dictator wakes up ruling an empty room.
The last typewriter factory closed in 2011—not by policy, but by obsolescence. Resistance to the Foundation follows the same S-curve: early adopters → early majority → late majority → laggards. Predictable, temporary, and self-limiting.
The Unified Framework
If there’s a single through-line that ties together every answer:
The Sovereign EXIT Protocol is not a plea for moral improvement; it’s a systems migration plan.
| Challenge | Scarcity-Era Control | Abundance-Era Constraint |
|---|---|---|
| Military Superpowers | Deterrence through destruction | Incentive conversion (Sovereign EXIT) |
| Elite Capture | Redistribution after concentration | Predistribution + Merit Decay |
| MOSAIC Diversity | Hope for tolerance | Polycentric structure + Emergency Firebreaks |
| Network State Empires | Antitrust after monopoly | Exit guarantees + Interoperability |
| Transition Resisters | Force or abandonment | Physics of obsolescence |
Common thread: Transparency, decaying power, and diversity-validated legitimacy—so neither states nor elites nor Network States can accumulate irreversible dominance.
Honest Caveats
We don’t have proof this works. Nuclear-armed superpowers are not Costa Rica. The AI convergence hypothesis might be wrong. The Labor Cliff might trigger authoritarian responses rather than cooperative ones.
What we do know:
- The technology for abundance exists or is imminent
- The current system cannot absorb this technology gracefully
- Something will change
The Sovereign EXIT Protocol is not a guarantee. It’s a hypothesis—an architectural sketch offered in the hope that thinking clearly about the goal makes it more likely to be achieved.
The alternative—Star Wars forever, elite capture, eternal competition—is worse for everyone, including the superpowers themselves. Even the winners of that game inherit a ruined planet and a traumatized civilization.
Better to build an off-ramp.
Further Reading
- The EXIT Protocol — Individual transition framework
- The Meiji Restoration: History’s Greatest Elite Transition — Detailed case study
- Emergency Protocol Design — 90-day limits and firebreaks
- Roman Emergency Powers — Historical warning
- Diversity Guard Mathematics — Sortition and validation
This article supports Chapter 10 of Unscarcity: The Book.
Sources:
