The Global Cult of Gibbs: How One Man’s Name Became a Universal Password for Power Moves By the time the sun hit the marble façades of Brussels, “gibbs” had already ricocheted through seven WhatsApp groups in Lagos, two encrypted Signal chats in Kyiv, and a rather tense Zoom stand-up in Singapore. By sunset, it was…
The World Watches America Play Tag With Itself By Diego Morales, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large NEW YORK—Across the marble lobbies of five-star hotels from Dubai to Davos, television screens flickered this week with the same surreal tableau: grown adults in suits sprinting across manicured lawns, frantically tagging one another while bellowing the words “You’re it, communist!” and…
Billie Jean King Cup: The Last Diplomatic Court Where Nations Still Settle Scores with Tennis Balls Instead of Ballistic Missiles —————————————————————————————————————- From the VIP box in Seville’s Estadio de La Cartuja you can, if you squint hard enough, see the faint outline of the Guadalquivir River—where Spanish conquistadors once set sail to civilize the New…
The International Republic of Dolly Parton: How a Rhinestone-Studded Appalachian Soprano Became the UN Secretary-General We Never Had By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Gstaad and Dollywood Somewhere on the autobahn between Berlin and Bratislava, a Syrian refugee-turned-taxi-driver keeps a photo of Dolly Parton taped to his sun visor, right next to the mandatory EU fire-extinguisher….
**The United Nations: Humanity’s Most Ambitious Group Project That Refuses to End** In the grand theater of international relations, where nations perform an eternal ballet of cooperation and competition, the United Nations stands as perhaps humanity’s most expensive and elaborate piece of performance art. Born from the ashes of World War II—because nothing motivates international…
PARLAY: THE WORLD’S FAVORITE HIGH-STAKES CONVERSATION When the French coined “parler” they merely wanted to talk; when pirates hijacked it into “parlay,” they weaponised chit-chat into a temporary cease-fire so they could haggle over doubloons and throats. Today the term has metastasised across every time zone, a linguistic stowaway riding globalisation’s rum barrel. From hedge-fund…
**The Global Currency of Freedom: When Nations Trade Gold for Glory** In the grand bazaar of international diplomacy, where influence is bartered like spices in a Moroccan souk, the Medal of Freedom has become something of a luxury commodity—participation trophy for the geopolitically affluent. While Washington’s highest civilian honor was originally conceived as America’s way…
PARIS — Somewhere on the Left Bank, an aging diplomat stubbed out a Gauloise and muttered, “They’re putting the guy who wrote the Twitter thread into Hoover’s old chair.” He wasn’t wrong. The Senate’s 51–49 confirmation of Kash Patel as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is less a changing of the…
The Ghost in Every Passport: How a Failed Austrian Watercolorist Still Stamps the World’s Visas By the time you finish this sentence, roughly three new documentaries, two TikTok conspiracy threads, and one unfortunate mustache will have invoked Adolf Hitler. Not bad for a man who couldn’t even get into art school. Yet eighty years after…
When the Flag Drops to Half-Mast, the Dow Doesn’t Blink By the time the newsroom clock hit 11:00 a.m. in Brussels, the European Commission had already lowered its twelve-starred banner to half-mast for the latest school shooting in a country that still prints “In God We Trust” on its currency. By noon, the gesture had…
**Article 4: The Fine Print That Keeps the World Spinning (and Occasionally Imploding)** GENEVA—Tucked between the glossy brochures of global governance lies Article 4, that unassuming clause in the International Treaty on [Insert Acronym Here] which diplomats invoke at 3 a.m. when the can has been kicked so far down the road it’s technically in…
Jerusalem—population 900,000, contested percentage roughly 100—has once again reminded the world that some cities refuse to behave like mere dots on a map. While the rest of us argue over parking tickets, this limestone labyrinth is busy hosting a millennia-old multiplayer grudge match with no respawn button. From an international standpoint, Jerusalem is the diplomatic…
