One of the standard aphorisms in my political risk business — used to describe whether a country is rising or falling — is as brutal as it is profound. Either a country is mastering history, so the shorthand goes, or history is mastering it. There is little doubt that Europe, over the last sleepy generation,…
Author: John C. Hulsman, opinion contributor
Rishi Sunak and the revenge of the grown-ups
A famously frustrated Bill Clinton once explained the paradox of American politics like this: While the American people emotionally liked the Democratic Party — loving its nurturing focus on taking social care of the country — it still tended to vote for a colder, more distant, law-giving Republican Party. The Democrats were the “Mommy Party”…
America needs a strategic partnership with Uzbekistan
Historically, U.S. foreign policy has been replete with examples of over-involvement and under-involvement with the rest of the world. And we tend to go for ill-advised military adventures, which, when they inevitably go wrong, lead America to head for the exits, forgetting that the rest of the world continues to matter. So is the danger…
After the Queen: Charles has a tough act to follow. His weaknesses will make it harder
Even though Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was 96 when she died Thursday, I find the news almost impossible to comprehend. Growing up as a college, and then graduate, student at the University of St. Andrews, where Will and Kate met, I found the Queen was a living part of every day. Her picture…
A terror network’s struggle for influence in Afghanistan
The presence of al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, under the protection of the Taliban in a luxury villa in Kabul raises important questions about who is actually running the country and what this means for U.S. and allied interests. When U.S. forces killed al-Zawahiri on July 31, he was not just visiting Afghanistan’s capital city….
Don’t let Venezuela walk between the raindrops
As best I can tell, the American novelist W.E.B. Griffin popularized the phrase “walk between the raindrops” that means a person (or country) is not held accountable for nefarious actions. It is one of my favorite political risk quotes, since all too often in this mediocre age — and in defiance of how republics are…
Boris Johnson’s fate awaits Joe Biden
On the face of it, President Biden and outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could not seem to be more different. The Oxford-educated Johnson, a former star journalist, has made a living due to his felicity with the English language, long an enemy of the syntax-mangling Biden. Whereas Biden is famously tribal and family-oriented —…
Our changing energy landscape will stretch beyond Europe
In the early 2000s, the European Union commissioned a war game from my political risk firm to look at whether its then-current distribution of energy imports made strategic sense. The “Big Three” for European natural gas production were then Russia, Algeria and Norway, in decreasing order of political risk. Unsurprisingly, the outcome of the game…