The Architecture of Certainty
At the Strait of Hormuz this week, commercial vessels are still queuing for passage — more than a dozen a day, according to shipping trackers — even as strikes resume somewhere over Iran and a ceasefire that was...
Theme archive
Musings on China and the West
China, the West, strategic rivalry, civilisational contrast, and changing global influence.
The Forest Does Not Fall At Once
The woman who grills chicken over charcoal at the mouth of my soi has raised her prices twice since the second week of July.
A Cartography of Ghosts
Navigating the Regimes of Industrial Economism
When Leadership Confronts Reality
The Collapse of Consent
Sophisticated State Failure
How the West learned to Decay Without Falling
Most Hated Nation
Nation-state legitimacy and the exhaustion of political imagination
How We Learn to Love the Fire
Acceptance of War in a Fracturing World
The Folly That Is AUKUS
An inquiry the state would not hold
The War That Cannot End
On the Productive Machinery of Permanent Conflict
Monsoon Before The Storm
The Gathering Pressures of a Multipolar World
When The Masters Stop Learning
In the early 1980s I found myself walking factory floors in a Japan many American executives still assumed was an industrial backwater.
United in Principle
The Lingering Death of an Empire on Paper
The Passport and the Psyche
Today I collected my new Australian passport from the embassy here in Bangkok.
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Long-form essays and reflections on the future of everything. Read and support on SubstackPatreon / Published daily