Sunday 24 May 2026 The United States Congress has long cultivated the appearance of binary politics. Democrats and Republicans stand on opposite sides of the aisle, cable television compresses every controversy into partisan theatre, and presidents speak as though they govern two hostile tribes locked in perpetual combat. Yet moments of geopolitical strain often reveal a more complicated reality. The latest Senate vote on the War Powers Resolution concerning the ongoing confl

Sunday 24 March 2026 The overnight use of an Oreshnik hypersonic missile against Kyiv, together with a massed barrage of drones and conventional missiles directed against residential districts and civilian infrastructure, marks another stage in the transformation of Russia’s war in Ukraine from a campaign of territorial conquest into a campaign of strategic intimidation. The attack, which Ukrainian officials said damaged schools, apartment buildings, markets, water infrastruc

Saturday 23 May 2026 The search for peace in Ukraine repeatedly founders upon a problem that diplomats often prefer not to discuss openly: the ideological rigidity of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Wars are frequently sustained by logistics, economics, military momentum or alliance systems. Yet some wars persist because the political imagination of one leader cannot accommodate compromise without perceiving it as civilisational defeat. The war in Ukraine increasingly

Saturday 23 May 2026 The political trajectory of Tulsi Gabbard has always possessed a curious theatrical quality. She was never entirely comfortable inside the Democratic Party, yet she also never seemed fully assimilated into the ideological machinery of Trumpism. Her rise within the second administration of Donald Trump therefore carried within it the seeds of inevitable conflict. She was simultaneously too independent for the loyalty culture of modern Republican populism a

Friday 22 May 2026 For most of the history of European integration, the European Union has operated upon a binary premise. States were either “inside” the Union, possessing voting rights and representation within the European institutions, or they were outside it, negotiating trade and political arrangements from afar. The pathway from one condition to the other was usually slow, bureaucratic and legally rigid. Candidate countries waited in a sort of diplomatic antechamber, o

Thursday 21 May 2026 The murder of Patrice Lumumba remains one of the defining political assassinations of the twentieth century. It was not merely the elimination of a charismatic African nationalist during the chaos of decolonisation. It became a symbol of the violent intersection between Cold War geopolitics, European commercial interests and the unfinished collapse of imperial rule in Africa. More than sixty years after his death, questions continue to circulate not only