As the world approaches catastrophic conflict, wealth and power remain invested in preserving the arrangements driving instability. Asking for peace has become almost absurd, while preparing for destruction is considered perfectly sensible.
Tag: geopolitical risk
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The Cost of Squandering a Superpower
America’s greatest strength was never simply its wealth or military power, but the international relationships that sustained them. As Washington undermines those relationships, the world is learning to become less dependent upon America, with consequences that could be difficult to reverse.
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strait of hormuz
The more instability surrounds the Strait of Hormuz, the more valuable it becomes. The paradox is that a prolonged conflict may be increasing the strategic importance of one of Iran’s most powerful sources of leverage.
Climate change becomes civilisational risk when insurance can no longer translate catastrophe into recoverable cost.
Never in the conduct of public affairs has so much risk been imposed upon so many by the reckless certainty of so few, and most of all by the belligerent incompetence of one man.
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Managed Peace
Managed peace is the hard, ongoing work of keeping real conflict from tipping a tightly coupled world into outcomes it cannot survive.
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The Mad King
The Mad King is usually treated as a personality problem. History supplies familiar figures. Erratic rulers, impulsive leaders, volatile decision makers whose behaviour appears to bend events. Yet this framing may be backwards. Instability at the top of power hierarchies may emerge not from individual psychology but from the structure of complex social systems themselves, […]
Geopolitical fuel panic accelerates renewable infrastructure uptake by making the strategic costs of fossil dependence impossible to ignore. When oil and gas supplies are threatened by war, chokepoints, sanctions, or market manipulation, renewables begin to look less like ethical aspiration and more like infrastructural self-defence. In that sense the transition is not driven by climate […]
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The Cost of (this) War
Each month this war continues at its present intensity, the world will incur economic costs that fall in the range of fifty to one hundred billion dollars. That is not conjecture pulled from air; it reflects the arithmetic of sustained energy shocks and their transmission through a tightly integrated global economy. When oil rises by […]
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Entropy is King
Entropy, and only entropy, is king. Highly ordered information systems do not rest on harmony. They are grounded in dissonance, volatility, and conflict, just as is extreme wealth sustained by the presence of its antithesis, the incoherent becoming, and always having been, the transmission medium of its inverse. This is not metaphor. It is structural. […]
