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Our Top Briefings
Israel strikes Iran
Thought you could have a nice, relaxed, geopolitics-free weekend? Perhaps pop down to Home Depot if you get time? Wrong. Following a day of mysterious security alerts for US and Israeli diplomats in the Middle East (suggesting they had intel something was up), Israel has now struck targets in Iran. The dust is still settling, […]
Latest Stories
What’s up with European bonds
Move aside US Treasuries, it’s European bonds getting all the attention right now. You see, it turns out Japan offloaded $13B worth of German bonds back in April, even after Friedrich Merz looked set to restore Berlin’s political stability and fiscal sustainability. Who cares? One’s care-factor might depend on what drove Japan’s decision to sell: It also […]
Why the world is having fewer babies
Why are a bunch of ex-diplomats talking about babies and birth rates? Sure, it’s like a mango sorbet palate-cleanser amid all the war and rumours of war. But natality is also one of those slow-moving forces that can completely transform our world. How? Last century, the dominant narrative was that populations were too big, with leaders in China, Vietnam […]
China Spying on Russia? Parsing the NYT’s Scoop
The folks at The New York Times dropped an intriguing little nugget over the weekend, reporting they’d received an internal Russian intelligence memo warning that Beijing is a) spying on Russia’s war in Ukraine, b) spying on Russia’s presence in the Arctic, and c) covertly recruiting Russian academics, journalists, researchers, arms-makers, and beyond. So first… where might this report have come from? The NYT notes it […]
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Meet the Team
The only briefing designed by former diplomats

John
Former diplomat in Beijing and Shanghai. Mandarin speaker. Helen constantly says my jokes are ‘drier than dust’, but she’ll have to do better than that to stop me.

Helen
Former diplomat in Tel Aviv and Hong Kong. Better Mandarin speaker than John, who reminds me that just because I went to Harvard doesn’t mean I’m always right.

Jeremy
Former diplomat in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Lima. Spanish speaker. Awarded Peru’s Presidential Medal for Distinguished Service for… well, distinguished service.