Shakespeare NOT Molière… in Algeria! Afrique says NO not NON Somewhere in Algeria this autumn, an eight-year-old child will walk into a classroom and encounter English before French. From the 2026–27 school year, third-year primary pupils will study English as…
The Fog Machine: The Generals of Wiesbaden There comes a point in every long war at which the fog of war ceases to provide an adequate explanation for persistent analytical failure. No serious observer should underestimate that fog, particularly in…
From Bess to the New “Pirates” Here We may now be entering an era in which states themselves rediscover why piracy was economically useful. Elizabeth I would have understood the attraction immediately. In the late sixteenth century England faced a problem…
SMOKE ON THE WATER: EUROPE AT 40°C Europe is getting hotter. That statement has become so familiar that it risks becoming economically meaningless. Temperatures rise, records fall, politicians discuss climate change, environmentalists demand faster decarbonisation and sceptics argue about attribution.…
BMI for Robots: It’s the Battery, Stupid. For more than a century, oil sat at the centre of geopolitics because modern industrial power depended upon concentrated, portable energy. Navies converted from coal to oil, armies mechanised, civilian transport exploded and…
A Glimmer of the Future: The Open-Source Cold War and What If China Wins AI by Giving It Away? For most of the artificial-intelligence revolution, we have been keeping score in a fairly obvious way. Who has the smartest model?…
The Children of a DeepSeek–Unitree Love Affair If DeepSeek provides the brain and Unitree provides the body, we should probably start paying rather more attention to the children. That sounds slightly frivolous until you look at what is happening in…
U.S. Capitalism….with Chinese Characteristics — Made in America For most of the modern era, one of the easiest ways to distinguish American capitalism from the Chinese economic model was to ask a deceptively simple question: who owns the companies? China’s…
Why China’s Favourite Colour Is…..Ultra Violet! China has just crossed a threshold in the semiconductor war which matters far beyond semiconductors. At the end of July 2026, Reuters reported that Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group had begun producing domestically developed…
The Mecca Defence Pact…a new NATO? Yesterday, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed an agreement which deserves considerably more attention than another Middle Eastern summit normally receives. Under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, an armed attack on any…