Taking a deep dive into the Iran war memorandum of understanding – an agreement as delicate as it is consequential for the future of American power in the Middle East.

States are over-securitizing inputs and under-governing outputs, leaving the most consequential domains of AI power largely unregulated and open to capture.

The debacle surrounding the launch of Fable by Anthropic is only the tip of the iceberg of dual-use AI. If effective safeguards are not established, the AI arms race ensures that dangerous models will fall into the hands of bad actors.

Geoengineering risks transforming the climate itself into an arena of geopolitical competition, where the atmosphere, sunlight, and weather systems become objects of strategic control.

Administrations from both sides of the aisle have left US critical minerals supply chains highly vulnerable amid a return to great power politics. But stockpiling initiatives like ‘Project Vault’ suggest that Washington is beginning to remember the old truism that economics and geopolitics are inseparable.

The New York Fed’s vault remains the largest sovereign gold repository in the world, but recent withdrawals suggest that geopolitical considerations are increasingly tilting the balance toward domestic storage, even among longstanding US allies.

Faced with geopolitical setbacks across Eurasia, Moscow is turning to Central Asia - one of the few regions where Russian institutional influence persists in structured form - to solidify its influence amid a shifting global order.

Water is no longer a local or technical issue. It is a question of global stability, and the world's institutions need to start treating it as one.

Vietnam’s Starlink pilot reflects a new regulatory template for governing foreign-controlled endpoints, one that accepts the new geopolitical reality that AI compute facilities, cloud infrastructures, and data centers are assets of strategic concern to states.

Structural indicators of hegemony like military, institutional, and financial capacity suggest that the US global power is far more likely to decline than collapse outright.

What does victory for Beijing in the US-China AI competition look like? Tighter control for the CCP at home and elevated criminal, military, censorship, and data security risks abroad.

A field guide to the four theories that actually explain international relations. None alone can explain the evolution of international society. But taken together, they are the best and only way to decode complex international events.

If Vienna fails to restore its fiscal credibility, it risks becoming a “rule taker” rather than a rule maker at a time when Europe faces multiple geopolitical challenges.

The 2024 XZ incident illustrates how open-source software (OSS) has become strategic infrastructure in the global economy, opening up new strategic vulnerabilities and new pathways to geopolitical leverage.

From the Sahel to Iraq, authority is produced through negotiation among distributed actors rather than imposed by centralized institutions. US diplomacy continues to ignore these sovereign ecosystems at its own peril.

The security of a few narrow waterways underpins much of the global economy, and one of them has effectively been closed.

Turkey’s dealmaking in Somalia over the past decade tends to be assessed in isolation. But when the whole picture is considered a new model of middle power engagement begins to emerge, complete with new risks and structural dependencies.

Examining the great power interests and religious millenarianism fueling the US-Israel Iran war.

Short-term, the policy of arming and supporting ethnic proxies could hasten the demise of the Islamic regime in Iran. But the longer-term blowback against US interests may not be worth the risk.

Iran’s national security is no longer defined solely by armies, weapons, or borders—it now hinges on something far more fundamental: water.