What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations [the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, SCO] have in common? With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world’s democratic bloc of nations. “I told Putin… Let us …

The Logic of Escalation in an Unraveling War In the spring of 2018, four years before his second invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered an unusual speech about the growing strength of the Russian military. “To those who in the past 15 years have tried to accelerate an …

Easy Money, Hard Choices Coming on the heels of the pandemic-induced economic slowdown, the inflation crisis of the past two years seemed to catch much of the world by surprise. After three decades in which prices grew slowly across the world’s advanced economies, suddenly the United Kingdom, the United States, …