On Sunday, 26 July 2026, Abbas Araghchi made a statement that read less like a protest than a strategic admission. Responding to a Ukrainian drone strike on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea, Iran’s foreign minister declared that the attack would not go unanswered, called it a breach of the UN Charter, and accused…
Dialogue can reduce the risk of miscalculation, but Washington and Beijing are building rival AI ecosystems that will increasingly force other countries to make practical choices. President Donald Trump recently distilled the strategic pressure shaping the artificial-intelligence contest into four words: “Whoever wins AI, wins.” His dismissal of warnings about potentially catastrophic AI risks exposes…
The strategic rivalry between the United States and China is reshaping the post-Cold War international order, with consequences for trade, technology, finance and security. Europe is deeply affected by this competition, but it does not constitute a third equivalent power. The European Union is an economic and regulatory heavyweight, yet it remains less politically and…
State of the world: many not-so-beautiful games The FIFA World Cup ended on 19 July with an apotheosis of the Spanish national team and a resounding boo for US President Trump. Whether one agrees or not with the appropriateness of these facts, there is a broader sense of a world caught up in an endless…
In my long (40 years), undistinguished career in marketing communications and journalism, I have had a chance to work with some very good and some not very good bosses. However, there was one in particular, who had common sense without being too common. He taught me a valuable lesson. In describing success, he said, “There…
Qatar is a tiny state with a population of around three million, in which foreign nationals make up approximately 76 percent of the population, while migrant workers account for nearly 90 percent of the labour force. And yet it plays an outsized role in global and regional politics, ranging from major investments in Africa and…
The end of the second world war ushered in a new era of change for humanity. Having tested out all of their new, shiny weapons on each other, the nation-states of Europe decided to tone things down for a while and to focus on rebuilding their war-ravaged continent. A key factor for the success of…
Part 2 of our talk with Ipsita Chatterjee, a human geographer interested in the economic, cultural, and geopolitical impacts of globalization. Ipsita is also a prolific author, and her latest book “The Alt-Right Movement: Dissecting Racism, Patriarchy, and Anti-immigrant Xenophobia” served as the basis of our discussion. To help me better understand this phenomenon, she took…
The attack on Ukraine has had tragic consequences for all Ukrainians and many Russians. The horror of families being killed and divided is a spectacle that nearly all Europeans believed had been banished forever from our Continent. Even most of the attacking troops and the Ukrainian population refused to believe it might happen. But the…
Whom to call when you want to talk to Europe was the famous question attributed to Henry Kissinger that pointed to the lack of a central node of international contact and decision-making in the European integration project. The question remained unanswered for decades, despite earnest efforts to provide a credible answer, notably with the establishment…