During the Syrian conflict, the feedback loop between Western journalists and pro-rebel social media accounts legitimized prominent ISIS supporters. This arose from a media environment where industry pressures create perverse incentives and a flawed epistemology.
A close look at America’s geopolitical situation reveals striking similarities with the late British Empire, but an alternative model like the Eastern Roman Empire could provide a more sustainable way forward.
Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis’ book Sea Power has ambitions to be the next classic text on the subject, but the expansionary neoliberal vision it offers is uncreative, obsolete, and could lead to war.
The realist school of foreign policy has long predicted a post-liberal geopolitics. Rather than an existential crisis, the current landscape is merely the latest move in a very old game.
Macau is a meeting point between the West, China, and Africa. The broader Lusosphere is well-placed to play the same role globally.
Pierre Trudeau’s legacy is as the Prime Minister who made Canada a liberal and multicultural success story. However, Trudeau’s own writings reveal deep contradictions between liberal theory and the realities of sovereignty and power.
Patterns of land usage have a profound effect on history and the structure of society. Understanding this fills an important hole in Western political discourse.
The Belt and Road Initiative has made waves as China’s largest regional development push to date. It also has the potential to start reshaping international norms. But understanding the project’s structural logic requires looking through Chinese political lenses.
In defending its legitimacy, a major claim of the liberal international order is that liberal democracies virtually never go to war against each other. In reality, the mechanisms of this peace have little to do with anything inherent in liberalism.
Narratives about the Vietnam War view it as as either unwinnable, or undermined by American domestic opposition. In fact, there was nothing to be won. America had already sacrificed its only potential allies as incompatible with international liberalism.
Advocates of decentralized government view charter cities as a way to route around slow, legacy governments, and usher in political and market liberalism. Reality tells a different story.
The rhetoric of a new Cold War with China is popular across the political spectrum. But China is not the USSR and these differences make for a very different geopolitical game.
Eastern Europe has clashed with Brussels about the continent’s ideological foundations. Now it is building the political and economic momentum to shape its future.
Jair Bolsonaro is known as Brazil’s controversial right-populist. But he also reveals deep class divisions in the country’s politics and how it remembers military rule.
The liberal order is being challenged both within and abroad. Palladium is exploring the world which comes after it.