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

Japan’s Yoshihide Suga: New Prime Minister, same old problems

September 21, 2020

All my life I have been fascinated by island kingdoms with honour cultures off large, unknowable continents. For in both the UK and Japan, things are rarely as they seem, and subtext is all. For example, the key to understanding modern Japanese politics is to know that the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is not [...]
To understand Russian President Vladimir Putin, we must see the world through his eyes

September 14, 2020

One of the most valuable analytical lessons of all was explained to me succinctly by my foreign policy tutor during my happy days at St. Andrews. As he put it, the key to political risk analysis is not to imagine what you would do if you were in Fidel Castro’s shoes, but rather to empathize [...]
Putin holds all the cards in Belarus

September 7, 2020

One of the greatest problems in political risk analysis is that the heart so often gets the better of the head. Because we want a political outcome to happen, we think that it will. Karmic justice must apply to all situations in history, with the good rewarded and the bad punished. But this is to [...]
Pandemic hysteria is blinding us to the virus’s real risks

August 31, 2020

I have long held off writing this column, as I well know it will lead to some hysterical responses. Nevertheless, the credo of any good opinion writer surely must be to be fearless, to fly in the face of received opinion if the cause is just. And there has rarely been a greater need for [...]
By ignoring the Civil War in Libya, the EU risks its stability

August 24, 2020

The art of statecraft consists in large part of separating risks which cannot be tolerated from those which have to be lived with. This key political realist imperative is all but lost on the European Union. While EU leaders are focused on Belarus, which will remain close to regional power Russia whatever the outcome of [...]
In picking Kamala Harris, Joe Biden continues his successful front porch campaign

August 17, 2020

To know some history, to comprehend the story of the past, is the invaluable guide in understanding the political present. For example, if I had a pound for every time it has been printed that the upcoming 2020 US presidential campaign is unprecedented, I’d be rich. I confess my first thoughts were also along these [...]
Lebanon’s greatest tragedy is its political class

August 10, 2020

Following this past terrible Tuesday, it is easy to think about what happened in Beirut as a horrible act of God, of impersonal fate intervening to devastate this already crumbling country. But instead it is rage at Lebanon’s corrupt and incompetent political class that ought to be the dominant emotion. Following Tuesday’s gargantuan explosion — [...]
The duelling narratives that will define November’s US presidential election

August 3, 2020

There is a theory behind every presidential campaign, a basic narrative as to why the specific presidential aspirant and the specific moment are met, why the candidate is uniquely gifted to help the country through its present moment of peril. Of course, more often than not, this amounts to nonsense. For every Franklin Roosevelt or [...]
A grown-up Japan marshals the world’s anti-China coalition

July 27, 2020

Intellectual coherence has its advantages. While much of the western world has recently taken a holiday from history — as the US is weighed down by the melodrama of Donald Trump, the EU by the sleep-deprivation soap operas of its summit meetings, and the UK by profound confusions about how to respond to coronavirus — [...]
In allying with Iran, China signals the start of Cold War II

July 20, 2020

To read the lion’s share of today’s headlines, you would think the western world is in its final days, a Rome tottering on the edge of the abyss. And yet geopolitically, for all our leaders’ unheroic bungling of the coronavirus pandemic, our primary strategic rival China has had a far worse innings. Overconfident President Xi [...]

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