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China and Russia Are Pressuring Japan on Two Fronts. Is a Pacific Pincer Taking Shape?
Putin's Kuril landing is not a bilateral Russia-Japan sovereignty dispute. It is the northern half of a coordinated Sino-Russian pressure campaign on Tokyo —...
Trump’s Board of Peace Faces a Gaza Governance Crisis It May Not Be Able to Solve
The Board of Peace is not a ceasefire-management mechanism drifting toward failure. It is a governance model built with the same structural fault line...
The Yen Intervention Was Never About the Yen
The joint US–Japan yen intervention was not a currency-stability measure. It was Washington making sure Tokyo could keep funding its $550 billion commitment to...
The Market Isn’t Smarter Than the CIA. It’s Just Closer to the Leak
Six weeks before US and Israeli aircraft killed Iran's supreme leader on February 28, a cluster of new, previously dormant crypto wallets began buying...
Putin’s Kuril Islands Visit Exposes Japan’s Russian Energy Dilemma
Japan's protest over Putin's visit to the Kuril Islands is loud because its response is capped: Tokyo cannot meaningfully sanction the one Russian energy...
How the Mecca Pact Rewires Tehran’s Nuclear Calculus
On August 7th, with American warships blockading Iranian ports and Iranian fast boats still harassing tankers off the Omani coast, the leaders of Saudi...
Hormuz Is Yesterday’s Crisis. Bab-el-Mandeb Is Tomorrow’s
On Tuesday, three Houthi ballistic missiles slammed into the Tihamah, an Egyptian-owned cargo ship easing through Bab-el-Mandeb's eighteen-mile channel. A fourth missile hit the...
Why Is the Real Fight Over the UN Security Council Happening Outside It?
Eighteen Years, Zero Texts
On July 28, the UN General Assembly did what it has done every year since the effort began: it rolled Security...
Vienna Backchannel: Is Europe Building Its Own Ukraine Endgame?
A Room in Vienna That Washington Did Not Book
In July, in a private room in Vienna, three men who used to run European foreign...
El Tigre, Ceuta, and the Illusion of a Unified Right
On 7 August, Abelardo de la Espriella — a Colombian-Italian-American lawyer nicknamed "El Tigre," whom Donald Trump had called a future "great president" months...