Every piece where Institutions is the variable that does the work.
SIPRI's 2025 numbers: an eleventh straight record year, Europe up 14%, Germany up 24%, Ukraine at 40% of its own GDP, and NATO signed up to 5% targets by 2035. The one major spender that fell: the United States, down 7.5%. The rearmament is real, and it is changing hands.
Sep 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Two billion people voted in the biggest election year in history, and for the first time in about 120 years of records, every governing party facing a developed-world electorate lost vote share. The pattern had one overwhelming correlate, and 2025's elections began testing whether it fades with it.
Sep 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Three years in: $30.7 billion awarded, nearly $450 billion of private projects announced, 4-nanometre production running in Arizona, and the law's biggest single bet converted into a 9.9% government stake in Intel. An audit of what the CHIPS Act has actually built, and what has slipped.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
78 gigawatts of reactors are under construction worldwide, the most in decades, and half the capacity is Chinese, approved at a metronomic ten reactors a year. The West, meanwhile, finished two projects a decade late and started selling reactors to data centres. An audit of the revival.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read
The Salar de Atacama holds 9.2 million tonnes of lithium in brine, the biggest such reserve on earth. In December 2025, a Codelco-SQM joint venture handed the Chilean state majority control of it through 2060, in the middle of the worst lithium price crash on record. Most resource nationalism is announced at the top of the cycle; this deal was signed at the bottom.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
Groningen closed by law on 19 April 2024 with hundreds of billions of cubic metres still underground, because the ground above it would not stop shaking. A democracy chose earthquakes over energy in the middle of an energy crisis. The bill, the lawsuits, and the lesson.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read