A Fitting Coda to a Year Like No Other — Occasionally we seem to bear witness to something important. It's the unsettling feeling of looking into the void of unwritten history and the weight of uncertainty bearing down. It makes life seem interesting. And ominous. I was too young to remember 9/11, only the barely concealed awkwardness of a father…

This summer, I took classes at Harvard Extension School, a division of Harvard University devoted to adult and distance education. One of the classes was International Conflict and Cooperation, and we were tasked with writing policy memos on various subjects. Below is the prompt for the first of the four…

Herding Cats Never Seemed Easier — Last week was significant for geopolitics. Strange bedfellows where invited into an alternative group of countries to the American-led international order. Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have received invitations to join the original nations of the BRICS grouping. This expansion of the BRICS grouping…

American Military Leadership Wants Credit — At long last, after 2–1/2 months of a grueling counteroffensive, Ukraine is finally making progress in the southern front in Zaporizhzhia oblast. Despite naysayers claiming the offensive is a “failure” or has ground to a halt, it is actually going at a reasonable pace given the nature of the conflict…

Its a Necessary Evil — Very few who have seen war see anything good in it, and I have always taken their word for it. It is never something that should be sought out. But, the fact is wars happen and we can never know when someone else might seek it out. It is always…

A Breakthrough in Vilnius — If you had asked me if Ukraine would ever be a NATO member back at the beginning of 2022, I would have said possibly, but in a few decades. At the time, Ukraine was in the midst of a frozen conflict with Russia, with Russian proxies fighting an ostensible war…

A Mercenary Army Invades the Developing World — Russia’s Wagner Group, a private military company (PMC), has been escalating its involvement in numerous African nations by offering military and security assistance. This expansion is facilitating the growth of Moscow’s reach across Africa. In recent times, Wagner and its 10s of thousands of mercenary contractors, has emerged as a…

The Pathway to 2050 — The impacts of climate change are becoming more and more acute. We’ve seen record flooding in Florida, record heat in Texas, Northern Mexico, and South Asia, and continued increases in global temperatures. With sea levels set to rise several feet by the end of the century, and temperatures set to…

A Primer On The Return of History — For decades, globalization has been the primary trend driving economic growth and development worldwide. A symbiotic relationship between advanced and emerging market countries developed, centered on relatively unfettered trade and financial flows. This relationship benefited both developed and developing nations, with trade playing an integral role in the process. Developing…