Harmony by Restraining Order
Synopsis: Governments can’t grow cohesion, so they try to legislate it into being.
Theme archive
Musings on China and the West
China, the West, strategic rivalry, civilisational contrast, and changing global influence.
A Deeper Defeat
Synopsis: The Democratic sweep in the US mid-term elections is being widely read as a rebuke to one president.
Fractures in The Lie
Every awakening begins with ruptures in the lie
A Mandate for Life
Synopsis: Three people must be persuaded before any democracy changes how it explains and governs itself: the expert adviser who seeks only to please the client, the politician whose seat depends on present...
Advice Without a Passport
Why ethical principles cross borders while campaign tactics stay at home
Twenty Naza
A documentary, a word for the dead, and the distance between knowing and stopping
Dilemma of the Scriptwriters
Synopsis: Iran’s president spent some of his scarcest hours in New York with the analysts and journalists who draft Washington’s options, rather than with the officials who choose between them.
The Man Who Brings The Future
I have spent twenty years watching a certain kind of man arrive in this part of the world, and I have never once managed to like him.
Coffee Port
Before it was ever a front line, Mokha was just an aroma.
The Little Blue Book
And the fiction we nostalgically call the international order
Elasticity Has Its Limits
It might sound implausible, but a Patriot interceptor missile takes longer to build than a war takes to fight.
Misreading Xi
An Alternative Argument for Australia's Public Inquiry into AUKUS to Consider
Consent Without Consequences
A World Learning to Ask New Questions
The Invisible Architecture of Control
Cryptocurrencies and the Future of Human Agency
The Moment Power Chose Itself
America's Moment of Undisputed Leadership
Force Without a Mission
When a power keeps its strength but loses moral purpose
Everything Except Their Names
The accusation arrives early in the Bishkek Declaration, and it arrives with full force: strikes on Iranian territory violated the UN Charter, damaged international law, and put regional peace and stability at risk.
The Collapse of the Story
There was a time when power didn’t need to explain itself.
Beyond the Imperial Monoculture
Why Humanity Needs More Than One Story
Eighty Years Since the Quiet
I was born in 1945, into a world that had just finished screaming and had gone, for a while, quiet.
Source networks
Substack and Patreon stay alive.
RichardHames.com carries the official archive. The original networks remain the places to subscribe, support, and follow new dispatches as they travel.
Substack / Published periodically
The Hames Report
Long-form essays and reflections on the future of everything. Read and support on SubstackPatreon / Published daily