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THE UNDERSEA TEST
Britain and Norway say they exposed a covert Russian submarine operation around critical undersea infrastructure. Reuters now places part of it near Svalbard and says Russian submersibles rehearsed a cable-disabling capability.
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THE POWER IS IN THE DEPENDENCY
If you wanted to understand power in 2026, you could do a great deal worse than to ignore the flags for a moment and look instead at the plumbing — at the bank account, the magnet factory, the package manager, and the cable lying in the dark on the seabed.
7 min readTHE CABLE WASN'T CUT
At 03:17 the cable failed. At 03:19 it came back. Nobody noticed.
17 min readAmerica Wants to Economically Isolate Iran. China Shows Where the Limits Begin.
Washington has threatened to sever every economic lifeline sustaining Tehran. But years of sanctions have pushed much of Iran’s remaining China trade towards independent refiners, opaque intermediaries and non-dollar channels with less exposure to the US system.
26 min readThe Chokepoint Paradox
The dependencies that made globalisation work are becoming instruments of power. But trying to eliminate them may be just as dangerous.
20 min read