Essays

Long-form writing from leading scholars and commentators on history, statecraft, warfare, philosophy and culture.

A Ukrainian military cemetery for soldiers who have died in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
essays

Ukraine’s painful endgame

The era of magical thinking by Ukraine and its Western allies is over. In the absence of a formal peace treaty, Ukrainian security can only be guaranteed by arming Kyiv to the teet..

Owen Matthews August 29, 2025
A destroyed Russian tank with the image of a dove painted in the Ukrainian national colours, in Irpin, Ukraine.
essays

Russia’s reckoning is coming

Beyond the bluster of his meeting with President Trump, Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Isolated, outmanoeuvred, and stalled on the battlefield, Russia is tottering financially and m..

Peter Caddick-Adams August 27, 2025
Rudolph Müller, View of the Acropolis from the Pynx (1863).
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The classical key to the AI revolution

Only by reviving the classical conception of democracy, distinct from liberal democracy, can our societies reconcile the myriad opportunities and challenges unleashed by Artificial..

John Tasioulas August 21, 2025
Vladimir Putin's East German Stasi identification card issued while he worked as a KGB agent in Dresden in 1985.
essays

Putin, the once and future Chekist

It is only by understanding the phenomenon of Chekism that you can truly understand the Russian leader.

Gordon Corera August 20, 2025
Khrushchev and Kennedy in Vienna, 1961.
essays

The enduring allure of the summit

The tortuous practice of Russian-Western summitry has, for all of its all-too-frequent failures, occasionally produced impressive results.

Sergey Radchenko August 14, 2025
Albert Bierstadt's Yosemite Valley, 1863.
essays

The case for a conservative canon

Conservatism, once grounded in enduring moral and cultural truths, has lost its poetic soul.

Michael Lucchese August 13, 2025
Train crossing Stockport viaduct on the London & North Western Railway, c 1845.
essays

How the Georgians embraced energy abundance

Europe must rediscover the Georgian hunger for abundance and offer vigorous support to today’s equivalents of Arkwright, Hargreaves, Watt, Wedgwood, and Stephenson.

David Cowan August 7, 2025
General Douglas MacArthur watches as representatives of Japan stand aboard USS Missouri prior to the signing of the Instrument of Surrender ending the Second World War.
essays

Japan under Pax Americana

The American occupation of Japan, imposed in the wake of the Second World War, employed an uneasy combination of liberty and repression. Yet it allowed a new nation to emerge from ..

Christopher Harding August 6, 2025
The two French Revolutions. A contemporary engraving after Louis Lafitte.
essays

Sell Fukuyama, buy Kuehnelt-Leddihn

The Austrian-born polymath Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has returned to relevance as a prophet of the West's crisis of democracy.

Gerald Warner August 5, 2025

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