Friday 17 April 2026 The war is no longer hypothetical. On 28 February 2026 the United States commenced sustained military operations against Iran — and with that decision, the latent constitutional machinery governing American war powers began to move from theory into practice. At the centre of that machinery lies the War Powers Resolution, a legal instrument at once precise in its language and ambiguous in its operation. To understand its present significance — and its limi

Friday 17 April 2026 The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is often analysed through the prism of oil markets, naval deployments and great power rivalry. Yet this narrow lens obscures a far more insidious and potentially catastrophic consequence: the slow unravelling of the global food system. As crude oil tankers idle or reroute at immense cost, a parallel crisis unfolds in fertiliser markets, agricultural production and ultimately the price of bread. The danger is not merely

Friday 17 April 2026 The Russian economy in the spring of 2026 presents a paradox familiar to students of wartime political economy: outward resilience masking inward exhaustion. Beneath the veneer of continued fiscal solvency and elevated hydrocarbon revenues lies a system increasingly constrained by labour scarcity, capital misallocation and structural fragility. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a geopolitical shock of historic magnitude — has intensified these contrad

Thursday 16 April 2026 The recurring wars between Israel and Hezbollah form one of the most persistent and structurally unresolved conflicts of the contemporary Middle East. Unlike conventional interstate wars of the twentieth century, these confrontations have developed into cyclical eruptions of violence—periods of uneasy deterrence punctuated by sudden escalations—each round leaving Lebanon further entangled and Israel no closer to a decisive strategic conclusion. To under

Thursday 16 April 2026 The suggestion that large language models might one day predict judicial decisions with reliable accuracy sits at the intersection of two very different conceptions of law. On the one hand stands law as a system of patterns, precedents and observable behaviours, susceptible to statistical modelling. On the other stands law as a human institution of judgment, discretion and moral reasoning, shaped by experience, context and the often unpredictable dynami

Thursday 16 April 2026 The early decades of the twenty-first century have exposed a paradox at the heart of modern warfare. States that possess overwhelming advantages in firepower, intelligence and financial resources increasingly find themselves unable to translate these advantages into decisive victory. Instead they encounter drawn-out conflicts characterised not by triumph or defeat, but by exhaustion, ambiguity and political stalemate. Nowhere is this phenomenon more sta