Throughline Synthesis is the published work of Scott Ortkiese.

I am Scott Ortkiese, President and CEO of Faulkner Capital Holdings. I spent my working life in structured finance and capital markets, which is to say I spent it reading documents most people never see and learning what they actually mean. I write here about war, energy, sanctions, and the financial machinery that ties them together.

A book, complete October 2026

The Decline of the American Empire and Rise of the New Multi-Polar Order

Three years of work and several thousand pages of research. Four parts, sixteen chapters, on how American primacy ends and what is being built in its place. The articles on this site are that argument worked out in public.

Read the Introduction, and see which articles feed each chapter.

Why this site exists

I was born in 1956. I grew up inside postwar American abundance and I believed the story that came with it: that the United States was a country of laws, that its power was mostly spent on decent ends, and that the people running it could tell the difference. I no longer believe most of that. What I have watched instead, over a working lifetime, is the capture of the American state by concentrated wealth, and the conversion of foreign policy into a revenue line.

The serious work on this is already being done. Scholars, former officials, military analysts, and investigative reporters have documented most of it. The problem is where that work sits: in academic journals, in three-hour interviews, in outlets almost nobody reads, while the decisions get made off cable-news talking points.

And much of it is never written down at all. It stays in the heads of the people who lived it, and it comes out only in conversation. So I go to them. I travel to where the decisions actually land, I sit with the people who made them or absorbed them, and I test what I think I am seeing against what they know firsthand. What appears here is what survives that test.

I take the primary record, the filings, the transcripts, the budget documents, the things officials said on camera before they had a reason to deny them, and I lay it out until the argument is unavoidable.

How I work

Three rules govern everything published here.

• Show the receipts before drawing the conclusion. A reader handed the evidence does not need to be told what to think.
• Follow the money. The stated reason for a war and the reason it continues are rarely the same, and the second one is usually written down somewhere.
• Read the other side. Russian, Iranian, Chinese, and Global South sources belong in the analysis alongside Western ones, not as a gesture toward balance, but because leaving them out produces conclusions that turn out to be wrong.

I name sources. I quote at length. I would rather be accused of overloading a piece with evidence than of asserting something I cannot document.

The archive

Nearly three hundred articles are published here, running through the war in Ukraine, the war with Iran, the sanctions regime, the private credit and artificial intelligence capital cycles, and the long argument about American decline that sits underneath all of them. Some of the work also appears in Russian translation. Start anywhere:

• US Politics73
• Iran and the Middle East60
• Ukraine and Russia57
• Empire and Decline55
• Markets and Finance40
• Energy and Climate32
• AI and Tech Capital31
• Media and Propaganda31
• Europe and NATO23
• China and Asia12

Broadcast and research work

Over the last three years I have provided research to, been interviewed by, or appeared as a panelist on:

• Russia. RT, Rossiya 24.
• Kazakhstan. Khabar 24.
• China. CGTN, Phoenix InfoNews.
• Japan. NHK World-Japan.
• South Korea. Arirang TV.
• Singapore. CNA.
• Indonesia. Metro TV.
• Vietnam. VTV.

I publish in English, Russian, and German.