Every magician knows that their trick works because the audience looks at the hands. The hands move visibly, dramatically, and convincingly. We are drawn to where the action is, and we follow the movement. And while this captures our attention, something else happens: in the other hand, a secret compartment, behind the curtain, in the pocket of a volunteer who does not yet know they are part of the act.
Marketing and PR work the same way. We are shown the product, the brand, the story; while the fine print, the trade-offs, and the long-term costs are tucked out of sight. It is the same trick, just with a different set of hands, and on a different kind of stage.
Global politics is another arena where the magic happens. The visible layer (wars, elections, sanctions, summits, the daily percussion of crisis) is real. But it is also, partly, the magician’s hands. While we watch them in real time, a slower and more consequential game is being played in the structural layer underneath: the patient, decades-long contest over who depends on whom, and what that dependence is worth when the moment to use it arrives.
A Benign Example
People in the graphics industry will remember when Adobe announced it was discontinuing perpetual licences and moving its entire creative suite to a subscription model. Millions of designers, photographers, and video editors found themselves paying monthly for access to tools they could no longer buy and use indefinitely. Their initial outrage was real and largely ineffective. Because by that point, the dependency was already complete. Years of integration, years of file formats and workflows and muscle memory, had made the switching cost prohibitive. Adobe did not need to force anyone; the structure did it for them.
Microsoft followed a similar path of switching from versioned licenses to subscriptions. Their Office applications switched from a physical product in a box with a license to use as long as the operating system allowed it to function, to a cloud-based SaaS subscription model. The millions of private and corporate users had become so dependent on the tools they use each and every day, so normalised as de-facto standard on their computers, that a replacement seemed impossible and a switch to Office 365 inevitable.
This is the grammar in its most familiar form. A dependency is created; gradually, through genuine utility and through rational individual choices made one at a time. It is normalised until it becomes how things work, invisible as infrastructure, assumed as a given. Then it is leveraged: the terms change, the price rises, the conditions shift, and the dependent party discovers that an exit costs more than compliance. Finally, value is extracted; not by force, but by the simple fact that the alternative is worse.
Adobe and Microsoft are a relatively benign examples. The software still works. Your files still open. The leverage is financial and the stakes are professional.
Let’s scale that grammar up.
My Trigger
There is a detail buried in the news cycle that most people missed. In August 2025, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan flew to Washington and signed a peace agreement brokered by Donald Trump. The headlines focused on the handshake, the flags, the historic nature of a decades-old conflict apparently resolved. What the headlines did not focus on was a clause in the accompanying memoranda, establishing something called TRIPP (the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity”) – a transit corridor through the South Caucasus; a region that has long been a crossroads between Europe and Asia, rich in energy resources and a historical battleground for empires. The corridor is to be developed and managed by a US-controlled company, granting Washington exclusive operational rights over a strategically critical passage between Central Asia and Europe.
I read about TRIPP almost by accident. And it triggered the recognition that the most consequential things happening in the world are almost never the things that take center stage, but seem mere byproducts of the larger, more visible events.
This is not a conspiracy argument. It is a structural one.
The Corridor as Dependency Instrument
To understand why TRIPP matters beyond its headline, you need to understand what a transit corridor actually is at the structural level. It is not just a road or a railway. It is a dependency relationship made physical. Whoever manages the route collects the toll, sets the terms, and can (under sufficient political pressure) close the gate.
The South Caucasus has been a contested transit space for centuries, and the current moment is no different in grammar, only in players and instruments. Russia and Iran have long controlled the primary north-south connections in the region. TRIPP inserts an EU-backed and US-managed east-west alternative directly across that axis: not with troops, but with infrastructure, contract law, and a 99-year operational mandate.
For Armenia, it represents economic opening after decades of isolation. For Azerbaijan, it reinforces its position as a transit hub. For the United States, it establishes a physical presence in a strategically critical region without a single soldier deployed. For Russia and Iran, it is a Western corridor running through what they regard as their sphere of influence, which they cannot block outright but have every incentive to complicate.
What is not in the headline is the grammar underneath. The dependency being created is not only Armenia’s or Azerbaijan’s on Western infrastructure investment. It is also the region’s gradual reorientation toward a connectivity architecture that serves Western strategic interests: in energy routing, in critical mineral access, in the containment of Russian and Iranian influence. The corridor comes with financing, with technical standards, with operational control embedded in a US-managed company. These are not neutral gifts. They are the first move in a sequence that takes decades to complete.
The public narrative is peace. The structural reality is the careful installation of a new dependency relationship in a region where the old ones are being contested. Both can be true simultaneously. That is precisely what makes the grammar so durable.
From Pipelines to Satellites
TRIPP shows how dependency is baked into physical infrastructure. Starlink shows the same logic embedding itself in the digital world, where the leverage is faster, less visible, and in some respects more intimate.
Starlink is the satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private aerospace company. It provides broadband connectivity to underserved regions globally: ships, remote communities, disaster zones, and (most consequentially) active combat operations. Ukraine has been operationally dependent on Starlink for military communications since shortly after the Russian invasion in 2022. It is not an exaggeration to say that Starlink is embedded in the functioning of Ukraine’s armed forces at every level, from frontline coordination to drone operations.
This is a dependency that was created with extraordinary speed, normalised through genuine military necessity, and has already demonstrated its leverage in documented and public ways. In 2022, Musk acknowledged limiting Starlink coverage near Crimea to prevent what he described as a potential escalation, after Ukrainian forces attempted to use the network to coordinate a submarine drone attack on Russian warships. A private individual made a unilateral decision that directly affected the operational capacity of a sovereign nation’s military during wartime. No democratic body authorised it. No treaty governed it. No international framework existed to contest it.
The grammar operates across multiple layers simultaneously. At the military layer, a dependency was created through urgency: Ukraine needed communications infrastructure and Starlink was available, functional, and rapidly deployable. Normalisation happened within months, as Starlink became integrated into military doctrine, logistics, and field operations. The leverage was demonstrated almost immediately; not through malice, but through the simple fact that a private actor’s commercial and personal judgments now intersected with sovereign military operations.
At the commercial layer, Starlink is building a global internet infrastructure that will, over time, become the connectivity backbone for regions that currently have none. The communities, governments, and industries that build on that infrastructure will become dependent on it in precisely the way that European industry became dependent on cheap Russian gas: gradually, rationally, and with costs that rise every year.
The space debris generated by the satellite constellation is an additional dimension; Starlink’s current scale makes future competitor constellations more dangerous to deploy, functioning as a structural barrier to alternative providers that requires no legal protection to enforce.
At the data layer, the network carries traffic. Traffic generates data. Data about usage patterns, locations, communications volumes, and network behaviour across military, governmental, and civilian users globally flows through infrastructure owned by a single private company with no public accountability obligations commensurate with its strategic reach. This is not a theoretical concern. It is the next move in a grammar that is currently in its normalisation phase: the point at which the infrastructure feels like a utility and the dependency feels like simply how connectivity works.
The cognitive capture mechanism is already operating. Starlink is framed as democratising internet access, as a lifeline for isolated communities, as a symbol of private sector innovation outpacing governmental bureaucracy. All of this is partly true. None of it addresses the structural question of what it means to have critical global communications infrastructure (military, civilian, and governmental) owned and operated by a single individual with effectively zero accountability to any public or democratic body.
The Grammar Does Not Change
And these cases are not exceptional.
Look at the Chinese state-owned shipping company COSCO acquiring majority control of the port of Piraeus during Greece’s debt crisis, converting European financial vulnerability into Chinese logistical presence at the Mediterranean’s largest container hub. Look at Monsanto systematically acquiring independent seed companies across two decades, combining patented genetic traits with herbicide licensing to make seed-saving (the practice through which farmers reproduced crops for ten thousand years) a contract violation, until a single company’s genes were present in the overwhelming majority of American staple crops. Look at Apple, whose ecosystem of hardware, software, and services is designed with a coherence so complete that exit requires not just switching a device but reconstructing an entire digital life, generating more revenue per user precisely because the switching cost rises with every additional service adopted. Look at the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme, through which a generation of European NATO members committed their air defence to a single American platform, embedding dependency on US maintenance contracts, software updates, and operational clearances into the sovereign military capacity of allied nations for the next forty years; a dependency dressed, at the moment of signing, as interoperability and shared defence burden.
Different domains. Different decades. Different actors. But the grammar does not change.
The Grammar, Stated Plainly
Across these cases (Adobe’s subscription switch, TRIPP’s corridor politics, Starlink’s satellite dependency) the same sequence repeats.
A dependency is created, usually through genuine utility or rational necessity. It is normalised until it feels like infrastructure rather than a relationship. It is leveraged when conditions change or the dominant party’s interests require it. The mechanism is obscured through complexity, through narrative, through the sheer temporal distance between the moment of creation and the moment of consequence. And value is extracted (financially, politically, strategically) from the party that is now too embedded to exit.
Two features reliably make this pattern invisible until it is too late to interrupt. The first is temporal displacement: the gap between the moment a dependency is created and the moment its leverage is exercised can span decades, separating cause from effect across electoral cycles, corporate leadership changes, and generations. The second is cognitive capture: the dominant story supplied by the dominant actor reshapes not just what we are told but what questions feel askable. When the pipeline feels like a peace project and the satellite constellation feels like a humanitarian gift, the structural question (who controls this, and what happens when their interests diverge from mine) does not arise naturally. It has to be forced.
This is the magician’s real skill. Not the hands moving around, but the misdirection that makes you forget to watch the stage.
Why It Matters That You Can See It
I am not arguing that every infrastructure project is a trap, or that every dependency is malicious, or that the actors involved are uniquely villainous.
Adobe and Microsoft are not evil. The architects of European gas policy were not traitors. NATO is not a Bond villain organisation. The grammar does not require bad actors. It only requires the normal operation of self-interest within systems that have no mechanism for seeing their own long-term structural consequences.
What I am arguing is that the grammar is learnable. And it’s unfolding in real time. The same pattern recognition you apply when you notice your phone ecosystem has made switching prohibitive, or when you feel the moment a service you rely on changes its terms and you realise you have no real alternative: that recognition can be applied to the structural layer of politics, technology, and economics where the most consequential decisions about collective life are actually made.
TRIPP will not be in the news again until something goes wrong. Starlink will not be seriously scrutinised until the leverage is exercised in a way that cannot be ignored. By then, the dependency will be so normalised that the scrutiny will feel like closing the gate after the horse has bolted.
And the grammar doesn’t stop at geopolitics or infrastructure. It’s at work in the tools and treatments we’re developing today, before we’ve fully grasped their long-term consequences. Consider ‘cosmedical’ solutions like Ozempic, which can be both life-saving and ‘life-styling’. Consider the quiet consolidation of AI infrastructure: hospitals, newsrooms, and legal practices are building core workflows around a handful of platforms whose pricing, access terms, and data policies they do not control and cannot meaningfully contest.
So here is the challenge: the next time you see the magician’s hands at work, ask yourself what’s happening behind the curtain. Who depends on whom? And what happens when they decide to use that dependency?
The grammar does not require villains. It only requires an audience that has forgotten to watch the stage.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/magicians-hands-grammar-hidden-dependency-roland-biemans-hurme
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