Beijing Opens the Door—Just Enough to Peek Inside, Not Enough to Walk Through By Our Man in the Smog, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The People’s Republic has, in its own inimitable style, declared the “Beijing Open.” No, this is not a Grand Slam tennis tournament relocated to a city where the air itself could serve…
Autopen: The Signature That Travels the World While Its Owner Stays Home By Our Correspondent Who Has Signed Too Many Expense Reports to Ever Trust Handwriting Again PARIS—Somewhere in the Élysée Palace sits a squat beige machine that can reproduce Emmanuel Macron’s looping “E” and Napoleonic “M” faster than you can say “Article 49.3.” Across…
The 2025 UN General Assembly: A Global Gathering of the Usual Suspects and Their Pocketbooks The United Nations General Assembly’s 80th session convenes this September amid the familiar choreography of diplomatic theater—where grandstanding meets gridlock, and the champagne flows more freely than meaningful resolutions. Delegates from 193 member states will descend upon New York’s Turtle…
Good morning, planet. The phrase itself is a geopolitical anomaly—cheerful, optimistic, and about as reliable as a cease-fire in a sandbox. Every dawn, 7.9 billion humans attempt the ritual: a grunt in Lagos, a bow in Kyoto, a WhatsApp voice note from a cousin who definitely screenshotted your last conversation. Yet behind the pleasantry lurks…
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…
