Sophisticated State Failure
How the West learned to Decay Without Falling
Theme archive
Musings on Geopolitics and Power
Power shifts, conflict, empire, sovereignty, national interests, and the institutions that organise global affairs.
Most Hated Nation
Nation-state legitimacy and the exhaustion of political imagination
The Frame that Admits No Reply
Christine McDougall, who writes at Syntropic World and has spent twenty years building the models and the language her project needs, has published an essay called 95% Yanged Out. It’s a furious, exact, and, in large...
The Pause That Passes For Peace
Why Military Force is Never Sufficient
How We Learn to Love the Fire
Acceptance of War in a Fracturing World
Redacted!
Freedom of Information or the Manufacture of Ignorance?
The End of the Opposition
A New Working Grammar for Government
Industrial Economism – The Pathology & Its Cure
A Death Wish with a Business Plan
The Folly That Is AUKUS
An inquiry the state would not hold
The War That Cannot End
On the Productive Machinery of Permanent Conflict
Monsoon Before The Storm
The Gathering Pressures of a Multipolar World
When The Masters Stop Learning
In the early 1980s I found myself walking factory floors in a Japan many American executives still assumed was an industrial backwater.
Food: The Operating System Of A Dying World
I have spent much of my life staring at the dashboard of a civilisation that thinks it’s steering, while in reality its strapped to the front of a runaway helter-skelter, applauding its own acceleration.
United in Principle
The Lingering Death of an Empire on Paper
The Passport and the Psyche
Today I collected my new Australian passport from the embassy here in Bangkok.
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The Hames Report
Long-form essays and reflections on the future of everything. Read and support on SubstackPatreon / Published daily