President Putin has said that he is open, at any time, to talks with an American interlocutor. Why then, has no one come forward? Why, when there is growing anxiety amongst the American public that the war in Ukraine seems locked into forever escalation, and fears are...

The backlash has started. It has been slow to emerge, and is lagging that of the US, yet it has begun in earnest. It is, as Wolfgang Münchau, a former FT journalist and editor of EuroIntelligence, has observed: “a seminal shift (for Europe), with important...

More than a year into Russia’s Special Operation, the initial burst of European excitement at western push-back on Russia has dissipated. The mood instead has turned to “existential dread, a nagging suspicion that [western] civilisation may destroy itself,” Professor...

The economic forces – those post war strong tailwinds – that have shaped the last 35 years, and which accelerated gilded journeys through the western “plentiful era,” are no longer blowing in a favourable direction. They were already slowing, but now are reversing....

The sense that things are bad, and getting worse, is palpable. There is an undeniable eschatological tint to today’s zeitgeist. Spiralling geo-political factors all suggest extreme turbulence ahead. Biden and the Democrats discover – to their surprise – that they are...

The message sent by the Chinese Defence Minister’s three-day visit to Russia is clear. His reception – a high-profile event – was intentionally invested with high visibility. And at its symbolic centre was a meeting with President Putin on (Orthodox) Easter Day which...

The question posed at this point is: Is the collective West nearing the end of a cycle? Or are we still in mid-cycle? And is this a four-generational mini-cycle, or an epochal point of inflection? Is Russo-Chinese Entente and the global tectonic discontent with the...

Consequential Strategic Change – Upon leaving his meeting with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping said to Putin, “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years – and we are driving this change together”. The ‘Entente’ was sealed during hours of talks over two days, and...

Hysterics at the Chinese balloon overflying the US – taken to volume 11 – through scrambling a hush-hush Raptor jet (F-22) to ‘pop’ it, and then bally-hooing the ‘pop’ as Raptor’s first ever ‘air-to-air kill’, may be a source for quiet derision around the world, yet...

There is too much ‘noise’ in the system, and it is obscuring the view. Davos has always been ‘weird’. But this year, the kookier aspects were so obvious. The WEF is dying on the vine. The ‘vision’ seems ever more fantastical, and the hubris – inherent in the...

The key to China’s security riposte to the US is linked to two words that go unstated in US formal policy documents, but whose silent presence nevertheless suffuses and colour-washes the text of the 2022 National Defence Authorisation Act. The term ‘containment’ never...

Jeffrey Tucker, in a piece entitled How Close Is Total Social and Economic Collapse?, writes, “Economies and societies fall apart slowly, then a bit more, then all at once. We seem to be in the middle period of this trajectory [in the US]. The slow part began March...

Biden says he wants – through diplomacy – to achieve a nuclear deal with Iran – i.e. a JCPOA ‘Plus + Plus’. The Europeans desperately concur with this aspiration. But the ‘deal protocols’ that his ‘A-Team’ inherits from the Obama era have always contained seeds to...

On the 17 September 1656, Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant Puritan, who had won a civil war, and had the English king beheaded in public, railed against England’s enemies. There was, he told Parliament that day, an axis of evil abroad in the world. And this axis – led by...

“Two years, three years, five years’ maximum from now, you will not recognize the same Middle East”, says the former Egyptian FM, Arab League Secretary General and Presidential Candidate, Amr Moussa, in an interview with Al-Monitor. Mousa made some unexpected points,...

The precision attack on the Saudi "jewel in the crown," crude-processing installation last week, is also a precision assault on Saudi credibility, on the believability of the US security "umbrella,' and a humiliation for Trump, and particularly to America’s image as a...

A little more than a decade ago, I was asked to address a London dinner-table of about twenty Gulf “figures” – a mix of Ambassadors and those with “ties to power”. All represented the cosmopolitan, rich élite of the Gulf. Then, towards the evening’s end, talk turned...

The Wall Street Journal has an article whose very title – Ambitions for an “Arab NATO” Fade, Amid Discord – more or less, says it all. No surprise there at all. Even Antony Zinni, the retired Marine General who was to spearhead the project (but who has now resigned),...

The Middle East is metamorphosing. New fault-lines are emerging, yet Trump’s foreign policy “hawks” still try to stage “old movies” in a new “theatre.” The “old movie” is for the US to “stand up” Sunni, Arab states, and lead them towards confronting “bad actor” Iran....