REGIONS

In 1925, power in Asia was visible: gunboats on rivers, foreign police in Chinese streets, tram boycotts you could photograph. In 2025, it’s programmable: licenses that renew on a clock, standards embedded in software, compliance that lives in dashboards. That is the most important change over the hundred …

Francesco Sisci Just hours before Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York, the most important and iconic American city, Dick Cheney, the heart and mind of traditional, centrist conservative America, passed away. Perhaps a new America is born with the virtual competition between two rare specimens of …

Lyle Goldstein Trump’s boat strikes risk escalating into a new forever war and may invite a Chinese military presence in Latin America Aerial view of a US strike on an alleged drug boat that left Venezuela. Image: X Screengrab Having once promised to halt America’s “endless wars,” Donald …

Mireille Bogas Anyone who thinks gold’s surge into the stratosphere represents irrational exuberance isn’t paying attention to the wretched state of the Group of Seven (G7) economies. As the price of gold skyrockets, it serves as a sentinel, warning us of deeper systemic issues festering beneath the surface. …

Raymond Vickery The United States still has the ability to keep the Russia-India relationship from expanding. Russian president Vladimir Putin arrives in New Delhi on December 4 for two days of talks in the 23rd annual India-Russia Summit. He will be greeted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with …

Over the past two decades, Southeast Asia has faced a conflict that is no longer overt but has left behind a trail of escalating tensions. These tensions stem from actions that fall into a “gray zone,” carried out gradually and systematically. This strategy has been used by China …

U. S. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine. Recently, a set of U. S. draft proposals for peace was leaked, but European powers have proposed their own counter-proposals. U. S. …

Dragos Ionita Japan and China are in their most dangerous diplomatic crisis in years as escalating tensions over Taiwan have cancelled earlier hopes of post-pandemic improvement. After COVID-19 restrictions were mostly lifted by 2023, relations between Beijing and Tokyo seemed to slowly improve. However, by late 2025 a …

Adrian Gvinda “Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees,” said the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși when he left his master, Rodin. He wasn’t rebelling for rebellion’s sake; he was claiming the space to become himself. He spoke of art, but he might as well have been speaking of …