International Relations

This is a heavier post than the last few, and I want to say that plainly before I start. The 2026 Iran war has killed people — soldiers and civilians, including in a strike that hit a school. I'm not writing this to minimise that. I'm writing about the strategic and economic lessons analysts are drawing from it, because those lessons are genuinely reshaping how militaries and governments everywhere are thinking about the next decade, and that's the angle this series is built

I wanted to write about AI this week, and the more I read, the more I realised the actual story isn't "AI is getting smarter." It's "the world just started fighting over who gets to decide the rules for it" — and that fight is now a bigger diplomatic story than most actual treaties being negotiated this year. Here's the headline development: 2026 is the year AI governance went genuinely global for the first time. The UN backed something called the Global Dialogue on AI Govern

Last week was about a summit. This week is about the relationship that arguably shapes more of the global economy than any summit does: the one between the US and China, and the strange, deliberate way it's being managed right now. Here's the framing I keep seeing from analysts, and it's a genuinely useful one: 2026 is the year the US-China relationship split into two tracks. Track one is where they compete as hard as possible — AI compute, semiconductors, space, defense-indu

This week, I didn't have to read about a major summit happening somewhere far away. It happened about twenty minutes from where I do my homework. The 18th BRICS Summit ran September 12–13 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, with India holding the chairship for the fourth time since the grouping started. Watching the coverage, then watching my dad's WhatsApp forwards about traffic diversions on the same roads I take to school, was a strange way to be reminded that "international