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Could China’s Consumption Trap Destabilise the Global Economy?
In 2025, China recorded a merchandise trade surplus of nearly $1.2 trillion—the largest ever registered by any nation. Yet, behind this extraordinary export performance lies a deep macroeconomic paradox. While the world’s second-largest economy produces more than any other industrial power, dominates global manufacturing in clean energy sectors, and remains…
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Can Specialised Infrastructure Become a Geopolitical Vulnerability?
As strategic commodities have become central to contemporary geopolitical competition, governments are racing to secure the supply resilience of strategic resources such as rare earths and speciality gases. However, industrial strategies concentrate on mining and processing, with less attention given to the important nub that production alone does not ensure…
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The West’s Strategic Blind Spot: Why Has Democratic Cohesion Become a Geopolitical Asset?
For much of modern history, geopolitics was mainly understood through the language of power. The relative strength of states rested on military capability, industrial capacity and technological innovation, as well as economic performance and diplomatic influence. While that logic remains an indispensable analytical framework, it is no longer sufficient on its own. Today, a…
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Was Khamenei’s Funeral Iran’s New Instrument of Strategic Diplomacy?
On 28 February 2026, an opening strike in the joint US-Israeli campaign that came to be called Operation Epic Fury killed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s second Supreme Leader, along with his wife, mother, daughter, son-in-law and infant granddaughter, at the Office of the Supreme Leader in Tehran. The war that followed…
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How Vulnerable Is the Global Economy to the Strait of Hormuz?
In recent months, the war in the Middle East has kept a narrow strip of sea at the centre of global coverage: the Strait of Hormuz. Stretching some 60 kilometers and narrowing to just 39 kilometres at its tightest point, the Strait has become a recurring reference point in discussions of…
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Did Trump Just Rebuild the Deal He Destroyed?
Eight years of maximum pressure, a war, and a dead supreme leader later, Washington’s framework with Iran looks a lot like the deal it walked away from in 2018. Did Trump just rebuild the deal he destroyed? On June 14, 2026, Donald Trump signed a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding with…
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Has Russia’s War Created a More Nuclear, Independent Pyongyang?
When Xi Jinping arrived in Pyongyang on 8 June 2026—his first overseas trip of the year—Kim Yo Jong had already demolished the diplomatic ground beneath him. Two days earlier she declared North Korea’s nuclear status an “irreversible and final conclusion,” dismissing denuclearisation as an “anachronistic dream.” Five days prior, Kim…
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Does America Have a Presidential Ethics Crisis?
The Pentagon’s $9.7 billion Dell contract is not, at its core, a story about corruption. It is a story about structural transformation—about how the ethical firewall separating public office from private wealth in the United States has been quietly dismantled, not by statute but by normalization. When a sitting president…
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Can Russia’s Economy Sustain Its Wartime Resilience?
For three years after February 2022, Russia’s wartime economy seemed to defy every Western expectation. GDP contracted a modest 1.4 per cent in 2022 — against the IMF’s initial projection of 8.5 per cent — and then surged: 4.1 per cent in 2023, 4.3 per cent in 2024 . Moscow…