Newsletter
8 February 2026 The Three-Limbed Leviathan The most successful con in contemporary public life is the idea that power lives in separate drawers. Economics is for “markets,” finance is for “experts,” and the military is for solemn speeches and distant deserts. This is the polite fiction: that a major
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7 February 2026 The Return of Fear as Strategy One of the more tiresome superstitions of our age is the notion that history ended in 1991 and that all who still speak its language must be either nostalgic, paranoid, or—worst of all—unfashionable. Yet the world has been busily
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6 February 2026 A 170-year-old doctrine, the “Lord Palmerston Playbook,” is presented here as the strategic template behind modern irregular warfare: shifting from overt conquest to the internal destabilisation of rival states in the name of preserving a global “balance of power” that keeps London’s financial center
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5 February 2026 “The mistake made by the industrialized and developed world is we all sort of fell in love with the design of these things, but forgot that in order to design something you have to be able to build it... Today it’s heavily concentrated in the hands
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4 February 2026 Israel’s Supreme Power—and Talent for Self-Inflicted Injuries There is a particular kind of Western bedtime story—peddled by diplomats, swallowed by pundits, and repeated by the incurably well-meaning—which claims that the Middle East is a region waiting to be “stabilised,” as though
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2 February 2026 When Kindness Becomes Self-Deception This article is a continuation of our series on the Muslim Brothers—their doctrine of political patience, their genius for institutional mimicry, and their habit of advancing not by open conquest but by moral insinuation. If earlier instalments established the Brothers as
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30 January 2026 There are few frauds more profitable—or more intellectually lazy—than the modern habit of taking a serious issue and turning it into an all-purpose gag. “Islamophobia” began life as a clumsy label for genuine prejudice; it has since been refined into a fortified accusation whose
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29 January 2026 There are moments when geopolitics drops the euphemisms and speaks, with the crudity of a drumbeat, in the language of ultimatum and scripture: an American president crowing over a past “Midnight Hammer” and promising an even “far worse” sequel, while the Iranian Supreme Leader reaches back to
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28 January 2026 The military offensive launched in January 2026 by the Syrian transitional government against the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) has precipitated one of the most significant geopolitical realignments in the modern history of the Middle East. What began as an uncompromising attempt
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28 January 2026 A Bridge My two published articles—introduced under “Forging the Tools of Thought”—were written as a paired foundation. In “A Memorandum on the Solvability of Human Problems,” I set out an orientation: the conviction that human problems are not fated to remain permanent fixtures of history,
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Published in Kurdistan Chronicle Khaled Salih, January 20, 2026 In an age when the word “Kurd” is still uttered in the corridors of power as though it were a clerical error on the map of the Middle East, there arrives a book that refuses to ask for recognition and instead
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25 January 2026 The Moral Lighthouse Sweden, in the European imagination, is a kind of moral lighthouse: rational, tranquil, administratively competent, and endearingly convinced that decency is a sufficient border control. It is a country that has elevated “civil society” into a civic religion—complete with state subsidies, official interlocutors,