By Robbin Laird There are dates that carry weight beyond the events that fall on them, and September 11 is one of them. For anyone born in the last sixty years, the date needs no elaboration: it means the destruction of the Twin Towers, the wounding of the Pentagon, the…
Our newly published book, The Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese Dynamic: An Inquiry into the Evolving Global Order, argues that Australia and Brazil are authentic Global South actors, commodity-exporting democracies shaped over centuries by colonial extraction and structural dependence, a category entirely different from authoritarian powers such as China Russia which…
By Robbin Laird When the Valdai Discussion Club opens its twenty-third annual meeting on September 28, it will not be on the Black Sea coast. Invitations initially named Sochi, but organizers told participants in late August that the meeting was moving to the Moscow region, and two sources told the…
By Kenneth Maxwell Piddington is a small village and civil parish in Oxfordshire. Its population is 358. The British government proposed to house 1,250 male asylum seekers at a disused Ministry of Defence base nearby. The village voted yesterday (15 September 2026) in a referendum, with 89% participation, to leave…
By Robbin Laird In the United States, the news cycle belongs almost entirely to Donald Trump. In the Mother Country, it belongs, once again, to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. After six years in Montecito, Harry and Meghan are heading back to Britain, settling this fall in the Cotswolds…
Paris – France won €21.2 billion ($24.7 billion) of export orders for weapons in 2025, helped by India’s contract for 26 Rafale fighter jets and related armaments, the annual report of the armed forces ministry to parliament said. That 2025 value fell slightly from foreign arms orders of €21.6 billion…
By Robbin Laird The numbers tell a stark story. In early 2026, the United Kingdom fields a Royal Navy whose surface combatant force has shrunk faster than its modernization programs can backfill, while Iran has assembled a numerically larger and, in some respects, more dynamically evolving regional fleet. This is…
By Pasquale Preziosa In June 2026, the world watched with concern as the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz unfolded. Once again, a stretch of sea just a few dozen kilometers wide proved capable of influencing energy markets, military strategies, and political decisions of powers thousands of kilometers away. During…
