Geopolitics and international relations

Why Germany could not pay the 1919 reparations, and what they would do to Europe.

Conflict as bargaining: commitment, credible threats and focal points.

Tests the popular comparison of America with ancient Rome and finds deep differences.

How ExxonMobil acts like a sovereign power, from the Valdez spill to 2011.

Energy and geopolitics in 2020: US shale, Russia, China and the Middle East.

Kissinger's life and years in power, where realism, secrecy and strategy met.

After the Cold War, conflict will follow cultural and religious fault lines.

How the British Empire shaped the modern world, from globalisation to democracy.

Lee Kuan Yew's views on China, the United States and world strategy, by topic.

Insider account of the financial-warfare machinery that isolates Iranian banks.

Competing regional ideas of legitimate order and the balance of power.

Insider account by the US official who designed the Iran sanctions programme.

How chips became the key to economic and military power, made in a few chokepoints.

Why AI and synthetic biology will spread fast and cheaply, and how to contain them.

How trade and payment chokepoints became instruments of state coercion.

Current account of the cross-strait risk that prices every Taiwanese asset.

How the US made sanctions and economic warfare its main tool of coercion.

Insider manifesto by Palantir's CEO on tech and national power.

Six friends, including Acheson, Harriman and Kennan, who shaped US foreign policy.

Insider account of the Bradley programme and operational testing.

The argument that Taiwan's chip industry protects it from Chinese attack.

Lockheed Martin as a case study in the contractor-state relationship.

Popular account of competitive devaluation as policy.

How minor metals are mined, traded and hoarded.

Power in a networked age; connection as the source of advantage

The rare metals behind green tech and devices, and China's hold on their supply.

Lithium, cobalt and nickel supply chains behind the EV build-out.

Insiders on Pentagon-Valley contracting where Palantir won

Cognitive psychology applied to how leaders misperceive each other in foreign policy.

Military spending measured against the economy that has to carry it.

An analysis of political hostage-taking by terrorists in the modern world.

The danger of a terrorist nuclear bomb in an American city and a call to prevent it.

Why policies backfire in a networked world, drawing on complexity theory and history.

How geography, demography and shale energy set America up to dominate as others age.

Asia as one order from Saudi Arabia to Japan, linking five billion people by trade.

Why the US-guarded trading order is ending, and what that means for supply chains.

A scenario of a nuclear strike on the United States, built on expert interviews.