Knowing The World

Will Europe be mastered by history in 2023?

One of the standard aphorisms in my political risk business — used to describe whether a country is rising or falling — is as brutal as it is profound. Either a country is mastering history, so the shorthand goes, or history is mastering it. There is little doubt that Europe, over the last sleepy generation,…

A story for the next US presidential election

Back in the 2000s, during the month-long book tour for our best-selling “The Godfather Doctrine,” my co-author and great friend Wess Mitchell came upon a hypothesis as to why our book had done so unexpectedly well. Since time began, Wess hypothesized, human beings have primarily learned about life through the telling of stories. For example,…

The midterm map says America will turn right

The pioneering 20th-century Kenyan aviator Beryl Markham put it well in explaining the intellectual usefulness of maps: “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not … I am the earth in the palm of your hand’.” And for all the fog obscuring the outcome of the 2022 US midterm…

Rishi Sunak and the revenge of the grown-ups

A famously frustrated Bill Clinton once explained the paradox of American politics like this: While the American people emotionally liked the Democratic Party — loving its nurturing focus on taking social care of the country — it still tended to vote for a colder, more distant, law-giving Republican Party. The Democrats were the “Mommy Party”…

Putin’s rattling of nuclear weapons, the danger they pose worldwide – and the role of the Nobel Peace Prize

As Max Hastings’ hugely enjoyable most recent book, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 makes abundantly clear, during the Cold War millions of people went to bed terrified of a nuclear conflict breaking out. However, since the implosion of the Soviet Union, the world has increasingly perceived the threat of nuclear war as highly unlikely.…

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