By Robbin Laird At the end of August, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, Narendra Modi did something leaders seldom do in front of cameras: he pressed Vladimir Putin to end his war. Despite the organization’s name, the summit was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Modi told…
By Robbin Laird Canada can credibly become a more consequential middle power, but not merely by declaring one. The Carney government has moved faster than recent governments on defence spending and EU cooperation; however, Canada still lacks the export infrastructure, industrial capacity, military readiness, and execution machinery required to turn…
By Robert Czulda In Polish public debate, a range of controversial topics continuously divides society. Yet one issue stands out as not only contentious but profoundly unpopular: the return of compulsory military service, colloquially known as “zetka” (zasadniczna służba wojskowa). Driven by the precarious security situation along Poland’s eastern border,…
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…
