In the 20th century, a Catholic world centered in Europe and North America sought to engage the liberal world order. Many believed the age of ecclesial conflicts with modernity to be at an end. With the coming of Pope Francis, the periphery is exerting its influence—and a political theology of confrontation is returning.

Barack Obama’s 2008 election promised a reform of American foreign policy. Ten years later, a new book by senior Obama official Ben Rhodes explains how forces both inside and outside the administration successfully constrained executive action.

A Palladium team embeds with the Gilets Jaunes in Paris. They return with on-the-ground observations about the riots, the movement’s desires, and France’s political winds.

Developments in technology and politics are leading to increasing competition for control over space. The liberal focus on time and progress seems ill-suited to such a reality. As a result, the spatial politics of history may well play a role in defining the future.

A team of Palladium correspondents spent a week in Xinjiang. They saw how the Chinese state uses Uyghur manpower and high-tech Maoism to suppress Islam and extremism.

The prospect of mass political violence is a growing theme in American discourse. However, the pacifying effects of liberal political structures have made such an outcome virtually impossible.

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.

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.

The liberal order is being challenged both within and abroad. Palladium is exploring the world which comes after it.