Analysis

The Belt and Road Western analysts argue about today is mostly the project portfolio of 2013-2018. The current program is smaller, greener, and far more cautious.

The diplomatic restoration is mature. The strategic alignment is not, and the analytical mistake is to confuse the former for the latter.

The old export-control regime was about specific products. The new one is about a class of capability. That distinction is doing the policy work.

Brexit as identity is settled. Brexit as policy is being quietly unwound on most files where divergence costs more than it pays. Nobody is allowed to call this realignment.

You don't have to control a country's banks. You just have to make sure no bank that matters will touch them.

The SCO can issue a communiqué. It cannot resolve the India-Pakistan dispute, the India-China border, or the Iran-Saudi tensions inside its own widening membership.

Islamabad's old assumption was that the Afghan Taliban would deliver Pakistani Taliban suppression as a thank-you for twenty years of safe haven. The Afghan Taliban has not delivered. The question is why Islamabad ever expected it.

Industrial policy is back. The interesting question is no longer whether, but on what theory — and most of the post-2020 measures are operating without a clear theory at all.

Lula 1.0 wanted a UN Security Council seat. Lula 2.0 wanted South-South leadership. Lula 3.0 wants to be the broker — between the West and the rest, between Russia and Ukraine, between OPEC+ and the climate agenda.

Removing tariffs is the easy part. Building the customs, transport, and payment plumbing that makes a tariff cut operational is the next twenty years of African economic diplomacy.

Article 5 says each ally will take 'such action as it deems necessary.' The word 'deems' is doing all the work.

Cutting a bank off SWIFT does not freeze its deposits. It cuts its ability to coordinate settlement with the rest of the planet.

The speech said everything has changed. The procurement system, the Defense Ministry organogram, and the political culture that treated defense industrial policy as embarrassing — none of those have changed enough to deliver the speech's promise.

ASEAN doesn't have a foreign policy. ASEAN has ten foreign policies organised by a consensus norm that prevents any of them from forcing the others.

The IMF lends. The pound stabilizes. The military's share of the economy grows. The next currency crisis arrives. The IMF lends again. The pattern is now the policy.