The moves between the great powers, read in five minutes. EDITION 01 · AUGUST 2026August 6, 2026 · covers July 23 to August 6twice monthly Top line · this edition The past two weeks turned pressure on Russia into pressure on everyone who trades with it. The United States Senate…
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A six-part series on conflict, state fragility, resource pressure, and the structures that keep turning local crises into regional ones. I have traveled through parts of the Middle East: Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Dubai. Travel does not make anyone an authority on a region this large or…
Comments closedWhy studying abroad is infrastructure, not a vacation. This is the eighth post in a series on globalization, and the through-line has been simple. Nothing important gets built by one country alone. A Short History of Human Interdependence traced how far back that dependence runs. The Economics of Why explained why two countries both…
Comments closedWhy a richer developing world is in everyone’s interest In 1990, about 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. By 2025 that figure had fallen to roughly 830 million (World Bank, 2025), even as the world added more than two and a half billion people along the way (UN World…
Comments closedThe architecture of risk and reward. In 2015, Beijing published a document called Made in China 2025. It named ten industries: advanced manufacturing, aerospace, biotech, new-energy vehicles, AI hardware, robotics, and several others. It set targets, timelines, and financing. It coordinated ministries, state-owned enterprises, banks, universities, and provincial governments around…
Comments closedA Boeing 787, an ore-testing lab, and the chemistry behind half your dinner. Three things held up by villages of expertise no country could replicate — and what happens when one thread breaks. Bernard Philippe Markowicz May 16, 2026 In March 2021, a fire broke out in a single building…
Comments closedIt’s the topology, not the geography Post 4 of a series on globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking. On July 19, 2024, a flawed software update from a single cybersecurity vendor, CrowdStrike, took roughly 8.5 million Windows machines offline in about two hours: Hospitals turned away patients. Delta cancelled thousands of flights and…
Comments closedHow Countries Make What They Make The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) holds roughly seventy percent of the world’s mined cobalt, a metal essential to lithium-ion batteries, aerospace alloys, and a growing share of medical devices. It does not refine most of it. The ore leaves the country in trucks, crosses into…
Comments closedWe have always traded across distances. The hard questions are not whether, but on whose terms, and for whose benefit. Post 2 of a series on globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking. See the first post on Substack here. Early on… Archaeologists found obsidian tools at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in central…
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