Not happening. The relationship is so hard-baked into the psyche, dependencies and ecosystems…

Agenda? European strategic autonomy. Reality? Bowing to US demands for AfD representation.

One thing to remember about these dinners. Everyone attending will probably have got bios, asked who they were sitting next to or sitting opposite, etc.

The most interesting story in global markets right now isn’t “Sell America.” It’s that reallocating capital toward faster-growing, less-correlated economies could raise returns and reduce risk at the same time. My Essay for #Bloomberg on why this is good news! www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Someone who rose without trace…

Who could have guessed that the answer to the question of how to deal with a sleazy, greedy regime would not be to find a sleazy, greedy representative.

college application help is my go-to example for how American guanxi works - in its most powerful form, it can't be a simple market transaction, but still grows out of business and power relationships

The Dirty Secrets. What we actually know about the Epstein network. open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...

Bad news from BIS. High-debt countries might find themselves unable to fight inflation or stimulate growth effectively. www.bis.org/publ/work132...

Like Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez leaving south Texas.

“Brexit, just the beginning”

Who might stop an attack on Iran? The regionally resentful. open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...

Who goes Nazi? (Aug 1941) by Dorothy Thompson “Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. harpers.org/archive/1941...

The End of China’s Central Military Commission open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...

North American Death Squads

Having seen Mark Carney operate around the edges of WEF for 15 years I can only be grateful that decency and intelligence and realism still have a place in democratic public life. This is a speech that any Western leader could have given. You might be asking why yours didn’t…

Holed up in Davos with the last mulitlateralists – scientists! www.linkedin.com/posts/monck_...

Risks in the age of WhatsApp diplomacy. Trump attempts to humiliate Macron. Macron’s message reveals how easy it is to divide Europe – as if that needed saying – and that Russia is on the way back in.

Claire Atkinson let me share some pre-Davos thoughts open.substack.com/pub/themedia...

Bored of peace 🕊️ www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

The flaw of democracy was always that failure to deliver would not produce regeneration but revenge.

Russia’s peace negotiator writes:

Journal’s only running 2.0.0

🏔️21C Capitalism’s Quriltai. My lookahead to Davos, and what it tells us about the ways of the world. open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...

US foreign policy redux. - Venezuela. We’ll take it. - Greenland. We want it so 🇷🇺 and 🇨🇳 can’t - Ukraine. We’ll spilt with 🇷🇺 - Taiwan… who knows?

“The ‘Donroe’ doctrine taking shape is simpler than Monroe’s ever was. It’s easier to bully your friends than confront your adversaries.”https://open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p/rushmore-revenge?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Anti-European “satire” on X.

More of a delegation. And yes. A single Brit will join.

Watch Iran’s Praetorians, Not Its Protesters open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...

🤔

This is the sort of statement that was expected from every university president and law firm partner over the last year. That those statements weren’t made played a huge part in where we are now and people will remember.

The Telegraph gives voice to a range of views reflecting strands of the British establishment on Greenland. They foreground the peculiar British conviction that surrendering before you’re asked constitutes diplomatic cunning.

Sadly the same tone of distant, amused observation informs much political commentary. There’s a time for seriousness and it passed a long time ago.

England’s Glorious Revolution wasn’t a vote. It was seven men signing a letter inviting a foreign army to invade. Newsletter on why America will need its own elite rescue operation. 👇 7thin.gs/p/americas-n...

This is the “diplomatic” explanation, remember.

An enjoyable historic romp across historic civilisational collapses with a knowing nod towards current events from Adrian...

The Last Shipment – From Sutton Hoo to Caracas – on great power exhaustion and the places no one is watching open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...

🇩🇰 Danish PM responds to US threats: “It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the need for the United States to take over Greenland… Denmark - and thus Greenland - is part of NATO and is therefore covered by the alliance's security guarantee.”

The MA War Studies programme at King's College London is led by someone who predicts race-based civil war driven by multiculturalism, guests on far-right podcasts, loves Orbán's Hungary, and echoes the Kremlin's talking points. And they say academia is woke...

A reminder of Fiona Hill’s 2019 testimony on Venezuela and Ukraine.

Von Hammerstein-Equord: “Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.”

🧵🇻🇪 THREAD: Venezuela and the Westphalian Exception I watched the Panama invasion from the foreign desk at CBS News. Everyone's asking if Maduro is the new Noriega. Wrong question. The right one? Why do we pretend sovereignty ever applied south of the Rio Grande? www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

“Misinformation isn’t universal or a general condition of our media ecosystem. Instead, it's specifically associated with radical-right populist parties that spread misinformation as a political strategy.”👇

Happy New Year folks. Here’s what 2026 already has figured out. open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...

RIP

A writer becomes a day labourer and learns something about the fentanyl crisis… which is really, of course, a “no social safety net” crisis

1/ Remarkable scoop from Amwaj: Iran and Israel have been exchanging messages through Russia to prevent escalation. Not a ceasefire or a deal. Just “mutual announcements to a mutual friend” that neither side will strike first. That mutual friend is Vladimir Putin. amwaj.media/en/article/e...

Estonia’s spy chief on Russia and Europe re-arming: “Russia clearly sees value in … promot[ing] the idea that an arms race is pointless – that it diverts money away from other areas like social welfare and that, ultimately, it's harmful to Europe itself.

Syria: Ground Zero For The Imploding World Order open.substack.com/pub/7thing/p...