By: John Hulsman

Dr. John C. Hulsman is Senior Columnist at City AM, and Founder and Managing Partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk consulting firm. More of John’s work is available on his substack

Emmanuel Macron has cast himself as France’s defender against extremism

John Hulsman

You can tell a lot about a person by what they place in their study, their “room of one’s own”, as novelist Virginia Woolf put it. The clues of who a person is – and what they value – are often in plain sight. Newly re-elected French President Emmanuel Macron is no exception to this [...]
Ukraine is the victim of Europe’s refusal to wean itself off of Russian gas

John Hulsman

Either you master history or history masters you. Decades worth of political risk analysis can almost always be boiled down to this aphorism. In the case of Europe’s dealings with Valdimir Putin, rather than mastering history, Europe has vainly tried to take a holiday from it; we’re now watching the doleful results. First, let’s dispense [...]
On the global stage, is 2022 the happy new year we’ve been hoping for?

John Hulsman

As ever, Oscar Wilde put it best: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Optimism, the most underrated quality in our cynical age, is necessary to get through the day. Analytically, it is also often of more use than the doom and gloom that passes for the [...]

Supping with the devil: Germany must wake up about Nord Stream 2

November 19, 2021

As far back as the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer put it very well in political risk terms when he said in “The Squire’s Tale” of Canterbury Tales, “He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon”. In mercantilist Germany’s case—where its foreign policy is all too often only an excuse for its export-driven [...]
Britain’s foreign policy rests on a new incarnation of the ‘Anglosphere’

October 22, 2021

Exactly twenty years ago I was one of a very small group of people to formulate the concept of the Anglosphere in international relations. It found that seven out of 10 of the world’s freest economies were former colonies of an eighth. For better or for worse, Bahrain, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, [...]
The long shadow of Merkel: Germany has a future of delay and gridlock

September 24, 2021

The German public have a deep-seated, if misplaced, love for Angela Merkel. It centers around the notion that mutti (or “mommy”, as the Germans somewhat creepily call her) managed, through the skillful use of tactics, to keep many of the perils of her age away from placid Germany. Merkellism’s reliance on managing crises rather than [...]
A requiem for Afghanistan and America’s nation-building foreign policy

September 4, 2021

The past two weeks have left me, like so many others, sick to my stomach, looking at the unnecessary, tragic chaos accompanying America’s panicky withdrawal from Kabul. As heart-wrenching as pictures of the suffering and chaos are, they are largely beside the strategic point. Worse, they are being used by the very US foreign policy [...]
China’s cover up of Covid exposes a rotten regime built on deceit

August 19, 2021

Too often, conspiracy theories rest on the erroneous assumption that our enemies are both highly evil and highly competent. Most of the time, the opposite is true. The description of Watergate in the peerless thriller All the President’s Men, offers us a more accurate picture: “Forget the myths you’ve read about the White House, these [...]
The damning case against China over Covid-19 deserves proper attention

June 1, 2021

As John Stuart Mill so eloquently wrote: “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” Fortified by this moral admonition, I went on to write an April 2020 piece in CapX, charging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with direct culpability in the spread of [...]
Belarus’ act of aviation piracy and kidnapping proves the obvious: anyone can bully the EU

May 25, 2021

Yesterday, within about five minutes of one another, both my partner and a colleague drolly made the same comment: “I know Ryanair is tough about customer service, but I didn’t realise you had to pay extra to avoid being kidnapped.” There were, of course, referring to the dreadful act of piracy that occurred over the [...]

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