The United States is no longer relying on markets alone to price critical minerals. Through trade law, procurement rules, and allied coordination, Washington is bounding how prices form inside preferred supply chains.
Populism does not arise because voters reject democracy. It arises when democratic systems remove major economic and social decisions from public contest and insulate them from political challenge. When elections no longer change outcomes, disruption becomes the only remaining lever. What looks like instability is often delayed system feedback from depoliticised governance.
China is not preparing to fight for Iran. It is doing something more consequential: managing the Iran file as part of its western energy and security perimeter, using diplomacy, regional mechanisms, security signalling, and deniable support to prevent isolation or collapse.
The June 2025 war did not eliminate Iran’s nuclear risk or restore stable deterrence. It damaged the verification framework that made coercion credible, replacing a manageable threshold problem with enduring strategic ambiguity. In doing so, it narrowed military options, raised the cost of escalation, and pushed diplomacy back to the centre not by choice, but by constraint.
Artificial intelligence is collapsing the cost of cognition at a measurable rate. But labour markets, legal systems, and regulators still price work, responsibility, and permission as if cognition were scarce. The result is not mass automation, but institutional strain: tasks disappear before roles do, liability concentrates upstream, and governance lags by design.
Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is warning voters about the dangers of immigration at the very moment Japan becomes structurally dependent on foreign workers. As births collapse and the workforce shrinks, immigration is no longer a policy choice but an economic necessity, raising an uncomfortable question about the honesty of Japan’s political debate.
Big Tech’s web of AI cross-investments looks like cooperation, but it is a ceasefire forced by compute and power scarcity. As constraints tighten, this détente will give way to control, consolidation, and vertical integration.
OpenClaw and Moltbook mark the shift from AI that advises to AI that acts. As autonomous agents execute tasks without direct supervision, they create real harm without clear defendants. This article examines how OpenClaw and Moltbook expose a growing liability vacuum that law and regulators will be forced to confront
This is the second article in a series examining why artificial intelligence can raise productivity without raising living standards. While the first piece focused on how AI increases output per hour, this follow-up explains why Britain’s economic structure absorbs those gains instead of translating them into broader prosperity.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to lift productivity in parts of the US economy. In Britain, it is not. The difference is not technological capability, but institutions, incentives, and who is allowed to capture the...
Israel’s conscription dispute is not mainly about religion or identity. Under the pressure of war and court rulings, the state is building special ultra Orthodox service units that restrict women’s routine presence, while draft legislation leans toward targets and gradual measures, leaving the manpower burden concentrated on those already serving.
The war in Ukraine did not create Western misjudgment about Russia. It exposed it. From officer culture and battlefield adaptation to industrial capacity and social endurance, assumptions formed after 1991 collapsed under the pressure of industrial war.
The Middle East security architecture does not exist in any meaningful sense. Fragmented regional actors, weak institutions, and rival alignments leave Iran negotiating deterrence bilaterally rather than regionally.
Elon Musk has consolidated his artificial intelligence venture xAI into SpaceX in a deal valued at around 1.25 trillion dollars, framing the merger as a response to a deeper constraint now shaping AI’s future. Behind the valuation story lies a harder question about power, infrastructure and limits that SpaceX alone cannot wish away.
For more than forty years, the Chinese economy has sustained growth, industrial upgrading, and social stability under a system Western economics said could not function. It was not just cheap labour, exports, or repression. It was an institutional invention that fused markets with state power. The uncomfortable question is no longer why the Chinese economy rose, but why prevailing theory still cannot explain it.
Telegraph Online long read A war with Iran would not be decided by intent or rhetoric, but by logistics. The United States can sustain an intense campaign for only a few days before stocks run out.
The rise of the £5 latte is not a story about coffee prices. It is a case study in Britain’s rentier economy, where access is priced higher than production and ownership is rewarded over work.
Conversational AI is no longer just answering questions. It is shaping belief, identity, and decisions in moments of vulnerability. As people turn to chatbots for therapy, relationship advice, and emotional support, the risk is no longer theoretical. When fluent language nudges users toward despair, self harm, or even suicide, the absence of accountability stops being a technical issue and becomes a public safety failure.
Military deployments, diplomatic signalling, and regional positioning around Iran are no longer isolated acts of deterrence. They are forming a process that advances even in the absence of a formal decision. This essay examines how force posture, political sunk costs, and incompatible assumptions may already be constraining the ability of any actor to stop escalation once it begins.
A widely shared analysis claims China has “missed its chance” and is locked into economic decline. Even accepting its data, the conclusion does not follow. This rebuttal examines how selective metrics, historical analogy, and irreversibility claims are used to turn ambiguity into certainty—and why that reasoning fails under scrutiny.
The dollar still dominates global finance, but states are no longer willing to rely on a single set of payment pathways. From instant domestic systems to new cross-border settlement platforms, a parallel financial infrastructure is taking shape — less about replacing the dollar than about reducing dependence on it.
Russia now controls most of Donbas. What remains is a fortified Ukrainian army compressed into Kramatorsk and Sloviansk and sustained by just two vulnerable supply routes. Rather than storming these fortresses, Russian forces are methodically degrading the roads and rail lines that keep them alive. The decisive question is no longer territory, but whether Ukraine withdraws in time.
At Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest American military installation in the Middle East, subtle changes are underway. US fighter aircraft have deployed forward, an aircraft carrier has entered the region, and logistics activity has surged. The evidence points to preparation for conflict with Iran, while stopping short of a decision to fight.
China is not racing the West to build smarter artificial intelligence. It is racing to embed AI into everyday digital life, turning messaging, shopping, and payments into a single action layer. That shift may matter more than any benchmark result.
Britain and China do not disagree because of tone or diplomacy. They disagree because they are educated into different histories. Britain teaches continuity and inheritance. China teaches rupture and coercion. When British officials visit Beijing, the signals London believes it is sending are not the signals China receives. This gap explains why the same gestures feel reassuring in Britain and provocative in China.
Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Keir Starmer’s China visit rests on a deeper assumption rarely examined in British politics: that Britain is still entitled to leverage over China. This article rebuts her claims point by point, showing how history, power, and reality no longer support that belief.
American protection is no longer automatic. Europe is exposed, China is unavoidable but risky, and Britain is rebuilding optionality. Keir Starmer’s Beijing visit reflects a deeper structural shift in the Western system.
Britain and its allies left thousands of Islamic State detainees in Kurdish run camps as a temporary solution to a politically toxic problem. Now that system is breaking down. As Western governments engage Syria’s new leadership and Kurdish control erodes, the contradiction at the heart of detention by remembering is becoming impossible to ignore.