Site icon 2PM

NATSEC Roundtable No. 17: Nashville and Peter Thiel

Web Smith

Peter Thiel closed his four-part Nashville lectures on October 19th with three tests for the empire that holds back the end of the world. He called the second test scripture. It is a payments thesis, and the operators reading this are already standing on the rails.

The lecture was titled “The New Rome,” the fourth of four closed-door sessions hosted by The Pamphleteer and Meriwether Academy at $100 a seat, with devices prohibited and the room asked to keep what it heard inside the building. Nathan Worcester reported from the room anyway, and his account, relayed in full within a day, is the most precise record of the night that exists. What follows leans on it, on the recordings of the first two nights that Politico obtained, and on an attendee’s account of the third.

The series ran September 28 through October 19, opening at the Grand Masonid Lodge of Tennessee on Broadway, and the first three nights built the frame the fourth one needed. Thiel cast AI regulation as the on-ramp to a one world government and accused Obama and Pope Leo of leveraging the technology’s unpopularity to boost their own, he spent a stretch of one night on effective altruism, which he said had brainwashed a share of the people building the models, and on night three he named the katechon of 2 Thessalonians 2, the restrainer that holds back the man of lawlessness, and suggested the great fortunes had a role in being it. The force to be restrained, in that telling, was globalism, with the ICC, USAID, and the SWIFT system named outright.

This is the seventeenth dispatch in the NATSEC series and the first one built on a sermon. It earns the slot because the sermon was about infrastructure.

BLUF

What Thiel said in the room

He opened with cities, which he treats as something nearer to the principalities and powers of Ephesians 6:12 than to any human institution, because they outlast the companies and the people inside them. He watched Mark Zuckerberg accept, from the Facebook board, that the company would one day die, and he called it a mistake to assume San Francisco will collapse under its own weight on any schedule at all; cleaning its streets, in his telling, is closer to negotiating with a demon. The city is the empire in miniature, and Spengler’s rootless city dweller, clever and practical and sterile, is its citizen.

From there the lecture traced the imperial line. Rome sits in a moral gray zone, neither Babylon nor the New Jerusalem, and its inheritance passed to Byzantium and then to the Holy Roman Empire, which Napoleon dissolved while his contemporaries compared him to the Antichrist. The War of the Spanish Succession was the last real attempt at a Catholic superpower, illustrated with Southey’s “The Battle of Blenheim,” and once the Bourbon and Habsburg question was settled, Catholic universalism never again organized Europe. Britain took the mantle, adopting Hobbes’s Leviathan as a sea power while keeping the philosopher at arm’s length, and Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” imagined a federation of the world that bound the British to their American successors. Truman carried that poem in his pocket.

America, in Thiel’s reading, copied Rome on purpose. The Federalist Papers authors wrote under Latin names, Washington sits on the currency the way Augustus once did, and the United States may be the only truly sovereign country left, with a president who functions as the mayor of the United States and the dictator of everyone else by way of the Five Eyes alliance, Echelon, SWIFT, and the reserve dollar.

Then came the three tests. A New Rome must be the military superpower, the iron kingdom of Daniel 2:40. It must be the financial superpower that controls the rails on which the world buys and sells, which is Revelation 13:17 read as infrastructure. And it must be the ideological or religious superpower that wins hearts and minds at global scale, the territory Matthew 24:24 warns about. Russia fails the test in his view; Moscow is not Constantinople’s heir, the Bolshevik break makes the line hard to trace, and he could not say whether Putin is more a Christian or more a former KGB man.

The last movement was about violence, and then about the room he spoke in.

The United States keeps the death penalty, stands apart from the developed world for it, and polices itself as hard as it polices everyone else, which Thiel read as proof that Americans have not been gelded and have not handed off their katechonic duties. He landed the old line that America is the only country where a revolution is impossible because it is the only country without an American embassy. Then he turned to Nashville, called it the global capital of Protestantism, a religion with no center, and told the people in the seats to take responsibility at the level of ideas and institutions rather than wait for someone else to do the restraining. He kept his own caveat in place. The katechon restrains the man of lawlessness and carries, in the same body, the risk of becoming him.

The rails that restrain are the rails that would license, and the difference is the law under which the switch gets thrown.

Three tests, scored

Run the three tests against the world as it stands and the United States passes all of them, which is the uninteresting conclusion. The interesting one is where the margins differ, because the margins tell you which test is still being contested.

Element Anchor The test Where the United States stands Read
Military superpower Daniel 2:40, the kingdom strong as iron Can it break every rival by force FY2027 request of $1.5 trillion for national defense, $1.15 trillion discretionary plus $350 billion through reconciliation, 4.6 percent of GDP, the highest single-year level since World War II Passes, and it is not close
Financial superpower Revelation 13:17, no buying or selling without the mark Does it control the rails of buying and selling Dollar at 56.7 percent of allocated reserves (Q2 2026), 50.1 percent of SWIFT payment value and 81.2 percent of trade finance (June 2026), 89 percent of global FX turnover (BIS, 2025) Passes; thinnest on reserves, widest on trade finance
Ideological or religious superpower Matthew 24:24, false messiahs and false prophets Can it win hearts and minds at global scale No clean number exists; Thiel answered with geography and named Nashville the capital of a religion without a center Passes on Thiel’s assertion, which this brief cannot score

The reserve figure is the one that has moved. The dollar held roughly 71 percent of allocated reserves around 2000 and holds 56.7 percent now, and the slide has been gradual enough that New York Fed researchers spend their time explaining how much of any quarter’s change is exchange-rate arithmetic rather than central banks selling. Over the same stretch the dollar’s share of payment messaging, trade finance, and FX turnover has held or risen. Central banks have diversified what they hold. The world has not diversified how it pays, and Thiel’s second test is a test of how the world pays.

The rail that moved, and the rails that did not

The challenger rail has a trajectory, and it runs the wrong way for the challenger.

Month Renminbi share of SWIFT payment value Note
August 2024 4.7 percent (approximate) Peak, built on Russia-related flows after the 2022 reserve freeze
February 2025 4.33 percent Fourth most used currency
September 2025 3.17 percent Fifth
November 2025 2.88 percent Sixth
December 2025 2.73 percent Sixth
January 2026 3.13 percent Fifth
February 2026 2.74 percent Sixth
June 2026 3.10 percent Fifth; the dollar carried 50.10 percent the same month

Sources: SWIFT’s monthly RMB Tracker and Global Currency Tracker releases, compiled via Boundary Advisors and Trade Treasury Payments. The August 2024 peak is approximate.

The renminbi’s climb was built on Russian trade rerouted after the February 2022 reserve freeze, and the share has given back a third of its peak while the infrastructure underneath it keeps growing. CIPS cleared roughly ¥180 trillion in 2025, about $25 trillion, across 176 direct and 1,514 indirect participants, and China-Russia trade now settles mostly outside the dollar. Volume is moving onto Chinese rails inside specific corridors. The global share of payment messaging is not following it, which is the distinction that matters for anyone whose supply chain touches those corridors, a problem we worked through in Weaponized Supply Chains two years ago.

Rail Where it stands Challenger Read
Reserve holdings Dollar 56.7 percent of allocated reserves, euro about 20 percent, renminbi about 2 percent (Q2 2026) Gold and euro diversification Eroding slowly; valuation effects explain much of each quarter’s move
Trade finance Dollar 81.2 percent of SWIFT trade finance value, renminbi 8.0 percent, euro 5.6 percent (June 2026) Renminbi letters of credit in China-linked trade Dominant
FX turnover Dollar on one side of 89 percent of global trades (BIS 2025), renminbi 8.5 percent None at scale Dominant and rising
Clearing and messaging CIPS at about ¥180 trillion in 2025 across 176 direct and 1,514 indirect participants; China-Russia trade settles about 87 percent outside the dollar CIPS, Russia’s SPFS Challenger growing fast inside specific corridors
Wholesale CBDC settlement mBridge at $55.5 billion cumulative by January 2026, about 95 percent e-CNY, run by the PBoC, HKMA, UAE, Thailand, and Saudi central banks mBridge Pilot scale
Dollar stablecoins About $270 billion outstanding (June 2026), USDT about $180 billion and USDC about $72 billion; GENIUS Act signed July 18, 2025, effective January 18, 2027 at the latest e-CNY, euro stablecoins under MiCA The dollar rail extending into software

Revelation 13:17, compiled

The stablecoin row is where the second element is being rebuilt in code. The GENIUS Act, signed July 18, 2025, requires one-for-one reserves in Treasury bills and cash, and Nellie Liang and Brent Neiman estimate at Brookings that first-round net demand for bills lands between $400 billion and $2.3 trillion by 2030, depending on whether the growth comes from abroad or from money funds that would sell the same bills to buy the coins. Either way, private digital dollars become a funding channel for the sovereign, which is the stated intent.

Tennessee’s junior senator, Bill Hagerty, wrote the law and said in August that he drafted it in part to guarantee dollar dominance over digital currencies and create structural demand for Treasuries.

The same paper names the tradeoff without flinching. If stablecoins route around correspondent banking, the leverage behind sanctions weakens unless issuers and wallets can block a transaction on a lawful order, so the authors recommend requiring exactly that. That is Revelation 13:17 stated as a compliance rule. Section 3(b)(2) of the Act takes effect January 18, 2027, platforms listing Tether need a documented basis to believe the issuer can freeze funds on a US order by then, and no foreign jurisdiction had received a Treasury comparability determination as of Monday, which happened to be the day the Treasury’s own comment window closed and the day Thiel took the stage.

The banking layer underneath it is being built by Thiel’s own circle.

Erebor, the Columbus bank that Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale founded with Founders Fund behind it, and which 2PM covered in January as the dragon-guarded mountain, told the OCC it intends to be the most regulated entity conducting stablecoin transactions and won its national charter in February. The restrainer is extending its rail into software, the extension carries the license switch with it, and the capital behind the extension shares a cap table with the lecturer.

Why Nashville

Thiel’s third test has no scoreboard, so he answered with a city, and he didn’t choose it at random.

Nashville has been called the buckle of the Bible Belt for generations: the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee and Lifeway sit in the metro, Thomas Nelson has published Bibles from the city for decades, the Gospel Music Association and the Christian music industry are headquartered there, and The Daily Wire moved its operation to Nashville in 2020.

A religion with no center still has a supply chain, and most of the American Protestant supply chain runs through one metro area.

The venue carried the same message. The Pamphleteer positions itself against corporate and progressive media, Meriwether Academy exists to build fraternal networks and boys’ schools, and the opening night was held in a Masonic lodge that opened the evening by distancing itself from the content. Thiel’s charge to the room was that the people who already own the ideas and institutions should act like the restrainer rather than wait for one.

The financial rail runs through the same state, and that is the part of the final lecture that was not theology. Hagerty wrote the law that extends the dollar into software, and two of Thiel’s three elements, the religious infrastructure and the authorship of the dollar’s next rail, already have a Tennessee address. A man who tells a room to take responsibility for ideas and institutions is usually describing a room that has already started.

Restrainer or catalyst

The tools that make the United States the katechon are the tools Revelation assigns to the beast, and Thiel alluded to this. The 2022 freeze of Russia’s reserves and the removal of Russian banks from SWIFT were the restrainer deciding who may buy and sell, and the GENIUS requirement that issuers and wallets block transactions on a lawful order is the same decision compiled into software. What separates the restrainer from the thing it restrains is not the instrument. It is the law under which the instrument is used and the breadth of the hand that holds it.

His critics make the inverse case from the same facts. The Vatican-adjacent press in March called his vision a superplutocracy that would monitor humanity in the name of guarding it, and the standing objection to the series is that the man warning about surveillance co-founded Palantir, a company whose commercial logic we laid out in The Drop Economy. Both sides are describing one machine from different ends, and the argument is over who holds the keys.

Three conditions would turn the restrainer into the catalyst, and each one can be watched. The license switch moves from a sovereign exception to a programmable default inside wallets and checkouts. The three elements migrate from a national government to a supranational one, which is Thiel’s one world government drawn as an org chart. The rails get turned inward on domestic commerce rather than outward on adversaries, which is what the mayor of the United States looks like on the day the mayor decides he is also the dictator.

What operators should do?

The second element is the one commerce operators sit on, and the third is the one they actually own. Six moves follow from that.

  1. Settlement is a choice, not a utility. Shopify, Coinbase, and Stripe put USDC on Base into Shopify Payments and Shop Pay in June 2025, with merchants paid out in local currency by default. A merchant that turns that on has joined the dollar rail’s software extension, and should know which rail it is on and under whose law it runs.
  2. Sanctions screening is now a product feature. The lawful-order obligations in GENIUS reach wallets and platforms on January 18, 2027, and OFAC exposure already sits at checkout for any brand selling across a border. Build the screening into the order flow rather than the finance team’s inbox.
  3. Corridor risk is rail risk. Hong Kong clears 76 percent of offshore renminbi payments, and China-Russia trade settles mostly outside the dollar. A supply chain that touches those corridors is settling on a challenger rail whether or not the invoice says so.
  4. Brands are the hearts-and-minds rail. Thiel’s third element is the ideological contest at global scale, and the storefront is the surface where that contest reaches a consumer every day. A publication that sells and a store that publishes are the same operation, both of them carry a flag, and we argued in December that defense itself is becoming a brand for the same reason.
  5. The restrainer funds itself through your float. Every dollar a merchant holds in a GENIUS-compliant stablecoin is backed by a Treasury bill or cash in the issuer’s reserve, which means the operator’s working capital has become part of the sovereign’s balance sheet. Price that into treasury decisions rather than treating stablecoin balances as cash with a yield.
  6. Nashville is a commerce market with a theology attached. The audience Thiel addressed owns churches, schools, publishers, and music catalogs, and it buys like a market with its own supply chain. Operators building in faith-adjacent categories should read the final lecture as a demand signal rather than a sermon.

What to watch

Seven things decide whether the second element holds through 2027, and each has a date or a trigger attached.

Indicator Date or trigger What it would signal Confidence
IMF COFER Q3 2026 release Late December 2026 A print below 56 percent sets a new three-decade low; a print above 57 percent is valuation, not buying High that it prints; moderate on direction
OCC final GENIUS rule Expected November 2026, per the Comptroller Starts the 120-day clock and sets the effective date near March 2027; a miss leaves the January 18, 2027 backstop as the operative date High
Treasury comparability determination for Tether’s home jurisdiction None scheduled as of October 19 Decides whether USDT, at about $180 billion, stays listed on US platforms after January 18, 2027 Moderate on timing, low on outcome
FY2027 defense appropriations and the $350 billion reconciliation Fiscal year began October 1 without enacted funding; Iran war supplemental reported at $80 billion to $100 billion Whether the military element is funded at the requested $1.5 trillion or settles near FY2026’s $1.01 trillion Moderate
SWIFT Global Currency Tracker Monthly A renminbi share back above 4 percent means a new corridor shock on the scale of Russia 2022 Moderate
mBridge membership and CIPS participant count Any expansion beyond the five founding central banks The challenger rail moving from pilot scale to a settlement bloc Low
Stablecoin supply against Bessent’s $4 trillion estimate Quarterly The market has sat near $270 billion to $300 billion for a year; growth from abroad is the scenario that creates net Treasury demand, growth from money funds is not Moderate

Confidence describes how reliably the indicator produces a reading on schedule, not the direction it will take. The broader monitoring posture from Monitoring the Situation still applies.

The verdict

The lecture will be read as theology, and the coverage will sort itself into the usual two piles: the billionaire with the Antichrist obsession, or the philosopher the press refuses to understand. Both readings miss the operative claim.

Thiel described the restrainer as a government that fields the strongest army, controls the rails of exchange, and wins the argument for hearts and minds, and then he looked at the room and told it that the third job was theirs.

On the numbers, the restrainer is intact. The army has been requested at a level the country has not funded since 1945, the rails carry half the world’s payment value and four-fifths of its trade finance, and the challenger rail has been losing share for two years. What has changed is where they’re building the rail. It is being built in software, under a Tennessee senator’s statute, on charters issued to banks from the lecturer’s own cap table, with a license switch written into the code because the Treasury’s economists asked for one.

The Katechon Economy is the business of holding the rails. Commerce operators do not get to choose whether they are on them. They do get to choose whether they know it, and the last Nashville lecture, read as infrastructure rather than prophecy, is the clearest account anyone has given of what being on them now means.

Peter Thiel has held a New Zealand passport since 2011, and for the better part of two years he has been tied, by the press and by his own itinerary, to Argentina. On its face that is a strange posture for a man who spent four Monday nights telling Nashville that America is the New Rome, the katechon that holds back the man of lawlessness, and that the people in the seats should take responsibility for its ideas and institutions. It is less strange once the lecture is read as a thesis about rails rather than a sermon about a country. The katechon in Thiel’s telling is not a static good. It is the empire best positioned to become the thing it restrains, and a man who believes that keeps a second passport the way an operator keeps a second rail.

His geography is what it looks like to hedge the restrainer failing, and he has been hedging since before he had a name for it. He told Nashville to stay and build. But just in case, he has the exits.

Research and Analysis by Web Smith

Sources

Exit mobile version