Economics
Iran War Forces India to Confront the Cost of Strategic Dependence
The Iran war is beginning to expose a vulnerability India has spent years trying to manage but cannot eliminate quickly: a country can be strategically autonomous in its diplomacy while remaining deeply dependent economically on…
Iran War Drives Oil Above $100 as Strait of Hormuz Crisis Deepens
Two weeks into the US-Israel war with Iran, the conflict is beginning to move from a Middle Eastern military crisis into a global economic shock. Fighting and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have severely…
Munich Security Conference Exposes a Transatlantic Alliance Being Rewritten
This year’s Munich Security Conference felt noticeably different from the confrontation that dominated the same meeting twelve months ago. In 2025, US Vice-President JD Vance shocked European leaders by arguing that Europe’s greatest threat came…
Takaichi Wins Historic Supermajority in Japan Snap Election
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has converted personal popularity into one of the largest parliamentary victories in modern Japanese history. In today’s snap election, her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won 316 of the 465 seats…
Trump Drops Greenland Tariff Threat After NATO Talks in Davos
Donald Trump has stepped back from one of the most extraordinary disputes of his second presidency. After repeatedly insisting that the United States needed to acquire Greenland, refusing initially to rule out coercive measures and…
Iran Protest Crackdown Deepens as Government Shuts Down Internet
Iran’s economic protests have developed into something much more serious than the demonstrations I wrote about two weeks ago. What began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over the collapse of the rial and rising living costs…
Iran Protests Spread as Currency Collapse Turns Into a Crisis of Political Legitimacy
Iran has entered 2026 facing another serious wave of anti-government protests, but this one began somewhere politically significant: Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. Shopkeepers began closing businesses and demonstrating in late December after the Iranian rial collapsed…
Trump and Zelenskyy Say Ukraine Peace Deal Is Close but Territory Remains Unresolved
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have ended another round of talks at Mar-a-Lago saying that a framework for ending the Russia-Ukraine war is closer than at any previous point in Trump’s second presidency. Trump said…
Israel Becomes First Country to Recognise Somaliland as Independent State
Israel has become the first country in the world formally to recognise Somaliland as an independent sovereign state, breaking a diplomatic isolation that has lasted more than three decades. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in…
EU Agrees €90 Billion Ukraine Loan but Stops Short of Seizing Russian Assets
European leaders have agreed to provide Ukraine with a €90 billion loan for 2026 and 2027, giving Kyiv a crucial financial lifeline as Russia’s war approaches its fifth year. The agreement reached at this week’s…
José Antonio Kast Wins Chile Presidency in Sharp Rightward Shift
Chile has elected José Antonio Kast president, completing one of the sharpest political reversals in Latin America this year. Kast defeated Jeannette Jara, the Communist Party member and former labour minister representing the governing left,…
Romania Water Crisis Leaves More Than 100,000 Without Safe Tap Water
More than 100,000 people in Romania’s Prahova and Dâmbovița counties have spent much of the past week without normal access to drinking water after a serious failure around the Paltinu reservoir and Voila treatment plant.
