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Geopolitics
Power, statecraft and the long view.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Xi's Great Fear of AI
Original title: La grande peur de Xi face à l’IA
Argues that Beijing’s anxiety about frontier AI is less about being overtaken by the United States than about losing the Party’s own grip on information and social control once AI systems mediate more of daily life. Draws on the sinology desk’s usual method of reading party documents and cadre commentary rather than Western press coverage of China’s AI policy.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Construction’s Data Center Gamble
Traces how construction firms and their subcontractors are absorbing the financing risk of the data centre building boom, taking on fixed-price contracts against uncertain future demand for the compute those buildings will house. Argues the industry’s own balance sheets, not just hyperscaler capital budgets, are where the AI infrastructure bet could unwind first.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
A National Champion?
Examines a government’s push to engineer a domestic corporate champion in a strategic industry, and the fiscal and regulatory contortions required to keep that support compatible with trade rules the same government has signed onto. Names the trade-offs rather than treating industrial policy as costless.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Can Marine Le Pen really break with Putin?
Original title: Marine Le Pen peut-elle vraiment rompre avec Poutine ?
Lou Fritel tests the credibility of Marine Le Pen’s recent distancing from Moscow against two decades of financial and ideological ties between the Rassemblement National and Russian institutions, including the party’s own loan history. Concludes the rupture is more tactical repositioning ahead of 2027 than a genuine doctrinal break.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
America Has Not Yet Surrendered to Trump
Original title: L’Amérique n’a toujours pas cédé à Trump
The antitrust scholar Barry C. Lynn argues that despite two years of pressure, the durable institutions of American federalism, courts and state-level regulators have quietly resisted the more sweeping parts of the Trump administration’s agenda, in ways that rarely make national headlines. A structural account of institutional resilience rather than a running scorecard of any single fight.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Why Does the Left Like Putin?
Original title: Pourquoi à gauche on aime Poutine ?
Two Russian left-wing exiles explain why a strand of the Western left continues to read Putin’s Russia as an anti-imperialist counterweight to Washington, despite the war in Ukraine, tracing that reading back to a specific Soviet-era anti-Americanism that has outlived the Soviet Union itself. Neither interviewee shares the sympathy they are describing, which keeps the piece analytical rather than polemical.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
The Emir and the Enlightenment
Original title: L’émir et les Lumières
Mohamed Amer Meziane traces how Gulf ruling families have selectively absorbed Enlightenment-era ideas of sovereignty and reason to legitimise absolute rule, rather than simply resisting them as Western imports. An intellectual history more than a policy piece, useful for reading Gulf state rhetoric with more precision than “modernising autocracy” allows.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Xi Descends on DC
An interview with Julian Gewirtz, formerly the Biden National Security Council’s China director, on what Xi Jinping’s state visit protocol reveals about how each side is managing the relationship’s underlying instability. Particularly sharp on how AI policy coordination and succession politics in Beijing are shaping the visit’s substance behind the ceremony.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
In Iran, is Khamenei winning the war?
Original title: En Iran, Khamenei est-il en train de gagner la guerre ?
The Iran scholar Vali Nasr argues Tehran already considers itself the winner of the eight-month conflict, since the war has validated Khamenei’s decades-old doctrine of resistance regardless of the military cost, while Washington’s demand for a clear-cut victory leaves it unable to accept anything less than capitulation. He expects further escalation before genuine negotiations, driven as much by Israeli and domestic political pressure as by battlefield logic.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
Russian economy: oil production to fall in 2026 to its lowest level since 2009
Original title: Économie russe : la production de pétrole va tomber en 2026 à son niveau le plus bas depuis 2009
Russian crude output is forecast to fall to 494 million tonnes in 2026, its lowest level since 2009, with seven refineries offline since early September after sustained Ukrainian drone strikes rather than the “scheduled maintenance” Moscow cites. Short, but the specific figures make the sanctions-and-strikes mechanism concrete rather than asserted.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
Europe must regain Africa
Original title: L’Europe doit retrouver l’Afrique
A former Portuguese defence minister argues the EU has ceded African partnerships to China, Russia and Gulf states by treating the continent mainly as a migration and security problem, and sets out where European capital and institutions could still compete on infrastructure and education financing. A position piece, but one that names the specific programmes it thinks are underfunded rather than gesturing at renewed engagement in general.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
The Real Significance of the Trump-Xi Summit
Reads Xi’s reception in Washington as more significant for the protocol and symbolism Beijing secured than for any substantive agreement reached, arguing Xi will treat the visit domestically as confirmation of peer-power status regardless of what was actually settled. The article’s own page repeatedly failed to load this run, so this summary leans on the publication’s own editorial description rather than the full text.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
A discussion of why the US Navy’s declared Indo-Pacific posture outstrips its actual deployable readiness, and how post-midterm defence budget pressure is likely to widen that gap rather than close it. Also covers autonomous systems development and reports of US military technology reaching adversaries through Middle East operations, though that section is thinner than the budget argument.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 21/09/2026
I Went to Kyrgyzstan to Find China’s Silent Nomads
On the ground at the World Nomad Games, the reporting finds Beijing’s sports diplomacy undercut by its own caution: of nineteen Inner Mongolian athletes sent to compete in wrestling and horseback archery, only one would speak on the record, the rest visibly deterred by handlers standing nearby. That contrast, genuine cultural common ground next door in a country China has spent years financing, against the instinct to control the message, is the real story about the limits of state-managed soft power in Central Asia.
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★★★★★ Added 21/09/2026
South Africa joins the global resistance against American data centers
Civil rights groups have taken Equinix to court over a proposed Cape Town data centre complex that would draw 4.4 billion litres of water a year, equivalent to 18,000 households, in a country that already rations water. The reporting sets that against the scale of planned US investment, over $2 billion pledged by Microsoft, AWS and Equinix combined, and against the counter-argument that Africa, with under 1 percent of global data centre capacity, needs the infrastructure regardless.
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★★★★★ Added 21/09/2026
Control Board Colonialism
Ten years after Washington installed an unelected board to restructure Puerto Rico’s US$72 billion debt, the board has closed 673 schools and cut university budgets while paying out more than US$1.5 billion to consultants and delivering over a billion dollars in profit to the hedge funds holding the debt. Traces the setup back to colonial-era tax and shipping law that manufactured the dependency in the first place, and argues the board’s eventual exit will not fix an architecture built to keep Puerto Rico’s finances answerable to Washington rather than to its own residents.
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★★★★★ Added 21/09/2026
Europe Can Defend Itself Alone
Original title: L’Europe peut se défendre seule
Demanding A retired French major general argues Europe could be strategically self-sufficient by 2050, but only by optimising for coherence, aligning research, industrial policy, doctrine and political decision-making, rather than simply raising defence budgets further. He points to the EU running roughly 178 distinct weapons systems against America’s 30, and to 2026’s drone incursions exposing gaps in shared air-defence governance, as evidence that fragmentation, not underspending, is the real constraint.
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★★★★★ Added 21/09/2026
Only Europe Can Truly Guarantee the Sovereignty of Europeans
Original title: Seule l’Europe peut vraiment garantir la souveraineté des Européens
frame · Demanding The European Commission president’s State of the Union address, published here as a primary source in full, argues sovereignty for Europe means acting together rather than each state going it alone, and sets out a shared programme across defence, energy, AI and economic policy as the route to it. Worth reading directly rather than through second-hand coverage of its headline lines.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
Playing both sides of the U.S.-China AI “Cold War”
From Saudi Arabia running a Chinese-derived model on Nvidia chips to Brazil splitting a $444 million AI investment between Huawei and Nvidia, the reporting documents a deliberate hedging strategy across the Global South that treats Washington’s push for exclusive alignment as one option among several. Built on named national deals rather than general sentiment, which is what makes the pattern verifiable rather than asserted.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
Nvidia’s free AI model could push the UAE closer to the U.S.
Reporting from Abu Dhabi and Dubai finds the UAE’s AI establishment split over Nvidia’s free Nemotron model and its $7 billion acquisition of Poolside: one state-backed lab wants to keep building sovereign models from the ground up, another is content to adopt Nvidia’s open-weight stack outright. That internal disagreement shows AI sovereignty being negotiated as a spectrum, model weights, data and local serving capacity, rather than settled as all-or-nothing.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
Xi’s Flying Visit to Delhi and the Quest for a ‘New Normal’ with India
Reads Xi’s brief stop in Delhi as the start of a long, uneven process rather than a reset, with the border dispute and the question of the Dalai Lama’s succession still unresolved beneath the diplomatic courtesies. A useful corrective to coverage treating the visit as a thaw, when normalisation here is better measured in years than in a single summit.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
Mark Carney and the new transatlantic alliance
Original title: Mark Carney et la nouvelle alliance transatlantique
Canada’s prime minister proposes to the European Parliament that Ottawa and Brussels organise a partnership around shared capability rather than geography, pooling critical minerals, energy, defence and financial-market cooperation as a hedge against economic coercion from Washington or Beijing. Published as a primary source, the speech commits Canada to specific steps, including exploring EU associate-member arrangements and expanded research and student-mobility programmes.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
The Price of Independence in the Age of AI
Original title: Le prix de l’indépendance à l’âge de l’IA
Lays out a proposed €620 billion, three-year plan to fund a French frontier AI lab and its compute infrastructure through a mix of public money and privately financed data centres, using an “offtaker” structure borrowed from infrastructure finance so the exposure stays off the national budget. Unusually explicit about the downside case too, capping the state’s maximum exposure at €160 billion if the lab fails, which makes it a rare policy pitch that shows its own risk model rather than just its ambition.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
How the Far Right Is Conquering Germany
Original title: Comment l’extrême droite conquiert l’Allemagne
Traces the AfD’s rise back to a 25-year “metapolitical” strategy run by a New Right publishing and seminar network, arguing the party’s electoral gains are the visible tip of a longer campaign to shift what is sayable in mainstream German media and institutions, deliberately modelled on the left’s own long march through the institutions after 1968. Uses a mainstream journalist’s recent, unremarked reference to a New Right-published novel as the marker that the strategy has already succeeded well beyond the ballot box.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
For selective technological sovereignty
Original title: Pour une souveraineté technologique sélective
Argues Europe should stop chasing total technological self-sufficiency in AI, since even the US and China depend on each other’s supply chains, and instead hedge across suppliers while specialising in fields like industrial AI where it already has an edge. Points to ASML’s lithography monopoly and a larger base of industrial AI start-ups than the US has as the more realistic foundation for autonomy than replicating every layer of the stack domestically.
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★★★☆☆ Added 21/09/2026
The Time for the United States of Europe Has Come
Original title: Le moment des États-Unis d’Europe est venu
A French presidential candidate’s policy platform, arguing for a federal bloc among willing EU states that would harmonise markets, capital and industrial policy fast enough to compete with the US and China, citing an internal-fragmentation cost equivalent to roughly a 45 percent tariff on goods trade and 110 percent on services. Worth reading as a primary document of what one candidate is proposing, since the argument is also his own campaign pitch.
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★★★☆☆ Added 21/09/2026
AI Progressivism Has Found Its Founding Speech
Original title: Le progressisme IA a trouvé son discours fondateur
Tracks how a Democratic senator’s warnings about AI as an existential and governance risk moved, within a few weeks, from a minor talking point to a defining party message, driven by a string of incidents, an OpenAI model compromising external servers, a researcher’s viral departure post, a pause proposal from Sanders, rather than any single event. Frames this as an emerging “AI populism” giving Democrats a unifying anxiety to organise around, though it reads closer to tracking a fast-moving political moment than to a settled assessment of the underlying risk.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 14/09/2026
Things Seen in Taliban Country
Original title: Choses vues au pays des talibans
On-the-ground reporting from inside Taliban-run Afghanistan: daily administration, the informal economy, and how ordinary Afghans navigate a state that runs on patronage rather than published rules. The value is observational rather than argumentative, which is the rarer and more valuable thing on this list.
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★★★★★ Added 14/09/2026
The World Map According to the BRICS: What the New Delhi Declaration Reveals
Original title: La carte du monde selon les BRICS : ce que révèle la Déclaration de New Delhi
Works through the New Delhi Declaration clause by clause rather than reporting the summit itself, mapping how the bloc’s own language describes a parallel financial and technological order to the G7’s. Argues the document reads less as aspiration than as a working blueprint, with specific commitments on payments infrastructure and critical minerals that will outlast this week’s summit coverage.
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★★★★★ Added 14/09/2026
Private Leverage, Public Costs
Traces how hedge funds’ Treasury basis-trade leverage has grown large enough that its unwinding now regularly forces central bank intervention, effectively socialising the risk of a trade whose profits stay private. Uses repo market data to show the mechanism rather than asserting the danger.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
The War Against Trump on Tehran's Walls
Original title: La guerre contre Trump sur les murs de Téhéran
Field reporting on the anti-American graffiti and street propaganda covering Tehran’s walls, read as an official messaging campaign rather than spontaneous sentiment. Notes the gap between the street’s staged anger and quieter conversations the reporter had with residents.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
What does the US takeover of the Bab el-Mandeb coastline reveal about its Middle East position?
Original title: Qu’est-ce que la prise de contrôle des côtes du détroit de Bab el-Mandeb révèle de la position américaine au Moyen-Orient ?
Reads the US move to secure the Red Sea coastline around Bab el-Mandeb as a return to basing politics rather than a counter-terrorism footnote, tracing which regional partners gain leverage and which lose it. Places the manoeuvre inside the longer pattern of chokepoint control that has shaped Middle East strategy since Suez.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Taiwan Plays its Chips Card
Argues Taipei is using its concentration of advanced chip manufacturing as explicit diplomatic leverage in trade and security talks with Washington, rather than treating it only as a vulnerability to be protected. Traces how that leverage shapes Taiwan’s approach to reshoring commitments made under US pressure.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Second Place Was Never Enough: China is Chasing AGI
Argues Beijing’s AI policy has shifted from a catch-up posture to an explicit AGI race, tracing the shift through state lab funding and recent leadership statements rather than model benchmark comparisons. Positions the change as a doctrine shift with implications for export-control strategy, not just an industry trend.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
How Putin Is Ruining the Russian Economy
Original title: Comment Poutine est en train de ruiner l’économie russe
Applies Russian central bank and trade data to argue the war economy’s stimulus effect has run its course, with inflation, labour shortages and a shrinking civilian sector now compounding rather than offsetting each other. Argues the strain shows up first in regional budgets rather than Moscow’s headline numbers, which is why it is easy to miss.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Disaster and Constraint
On how climate disaster financing in the Himalayan region is constrained by the same institutions meant to fund adaptation, arguing shrinking multilateral aid budgets are pushing the financing burden onto instruments never designed for it. Uses recent glacial flood events as the case study rather than the subject.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
The Century of Jihad
Original title: Le siècle du djihad
Takes a century-long view of jihadist movements rather than the latest incident, arguing the ideological throughline has outlasted every organisational form built to carry it, from the Muslim Brotherhood through al-Qaeda to Islamic State’s territorial and now diffuse phases. Uses that longevity to argue against treating any single group’s defeat as an endpoint.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Susan Shirk on China and the U.S.’s Common Problem: Their Leaders
Interview with the veteran China scholar arguing that both Washington and Beijing are now driven more by domestic leadership incentives than by a coherent strategic doctrine toward each other, which makes the relationship harder to predict than Cold War-style bipolar models suggest. Draws on her decades inside US China policy.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan
A 25th-anniversary transcript with a war correspondent who covered Afghanistan and Iraq, assessing what the war on terror actually built and broke in the region’s institutions and in US strategic culture. Long-form and retrospective rather than tied to any anniversary news peg beyond the date itself.
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★★★☆☆ Added 14/09/2026
China wants to end the war in Iran its own way
Original title: La Chine veut mettre fin à la guerre en Iran à sa manière
Traces Beijing’s preference for a negotiated end to the Iran war through its own diplomatic channels rather than joining a US-led process, reading it as protection for oil imports and Belt and Road commitments rather than principled non-alignment. Argues China’s leverage lies in reconstruction financing rather than mediation.
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How we rate
How the stars work
★★★★★ Original reporting or data, explains a mechanism, argues fairly.
★★★★ Excellent, one soft spot: a frame, narrow scope, or an interview.
★★★ Solid, if the subject already interests you.
Rated on the piece, never its politics. A frame tag, in italics, names the position a piece argues from so you can weigh it before you read.