Monday 16 February 2026 The World Wide Web was born from a very small problem with very large implications: how to help scientists share documents across borders, institutions and computer systems without first agreeing upon a single master catalogue. In 1989 at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system that would let information live in many places but be connected by links. What made this idea politically, not merely technically, disruptive was its refusal of central permissi

Monday 16 February 2026 To speak of courage in war is to risk flattening it into cliché. Medals, speeches and recruitment posters prefer bravery to be clean, declarative and upward-looking. The lived reality of front-line soldiering is neither clean nor declarative. It is endurance under conditions that erode certainty, comfort and often dignity. The guts required to fight on the front line are not a momentary surge of heroism but a sustained, grinding commitment to remain pr

Monday 16 February 2026 In early February 2026 NATO agreed a quiet but symbolically loaded rearrangement of who sits at the top of several of its operational headquarters. The United States will, over time, hand the command of two four-star Joint Force Commands to European allies—Joint Force Command Naples in Italy and Joint Force Command Norfolk in Virginia—while European allies will also take rotational responsibility for Joint Force Command Brunssum. As a result, all three

Monday 16 February 2026 The proposition that Russia is a terminally declining power — and therefore no longer a strategic threat to the United States — has become fashionable in certain policy circles in Washington. It is invoked to justify the gradual American pivot away from Europe and towards other theatres, most notably the Indo-Pacific. Yet the argument rests upon a chain of assumptions, each of which merits careful scrutiny. Decline is not the same thing as irrelevance;

Sunday 15 February 2026 Patriot has become, in Ukraine, less a single weapons system than a test of whether modern air defence can be made to pay for itself under the pressures of massed strike warfare. It is asked to do three things at once—protect cities, protect strategic infrastructure and protect political confidence—while facing an adversary who can choose when to strike, what to expend and how to compose an attack. A cost–benefit judgement about the Patriot in Ukraine

Sunday 15 February 2026 In 1949, as Europe was still excavating herself from the rubble of the Second World War, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel whose reputation has grown with each decade that has followed. The book is remembered for its vocabulary — Newspeak, doublethink, Big Brother — but at its heart lies a geopolitical idea: the notion of permanent war. In Orwell’s fictional world, Oceania is locked in endless conflict with Eurasia or Eastasia. The