Geopolitical Risk Hotspots

How Operation Epic Fury is a signal of broader shifts underway in the emerging postliberal, multipolar world.

A. RAND on understanding China’s national security decision-making. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation has developed TIDALWAVE an AI model of a US-China war.

B. The Center for a New American Security contended a month ago that the United States was not ready for a drone war. Is Operation Epic Fury a test run?

C. The commercialisation of space surveillance.

D. Australia and critical minerals.

E. Does President Donald Trump have an endgame for Iran? (Regime change is the ends or strategic objective; will the means deployed be sufficient?) This question crosses ideological lines - Jacobin’s Arron Reza Merat also asks it. A second order effect of Operation Epic Fury is that leftist advocates are framing the second Trump administration as imperial.

F. The MAGA (movement) plot to take down Canada.

G. On Anthropic as a United States supply chain risk. Aspects of this stratagem were addressed in two James Rickards books on geopolitical risk: Sold Out! How Severed Supply & Surging Inflation Will End Consumer Choice (London: Penguin Business UK, 2022) and MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy (New York: Portfolio, 2024). The past week’s events are not the strategic surprise that the pro-Anthropic / Silicon Valley / disruptive innovation school of thought has portrayed it as. Chris Miller also offers a view - his book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022) has become a bestseller and probably the most recent influential book on the intersection of geopolitical risk, disruptive innovation, and critical technology.

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Technology Strategy, created by Professor Jason Davis.

I. Bloomberg on societal collapse and how to avoid it.

J. Financial Times asks: can India quit coal?

K. The Hoover Institution has released the 2026 edition of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review.

L. The paperback edition of Ted Seides’ influential book So You Want To Start A Hedge Fund? Lessons for Managers and Allocators (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2026) is coming out on 8th March 2026 in Australia.

M. Professor Eric Kaufmann offers the first class of his Intro to Political Science for the Peterson Academy.

N. Professor Stephen Walt on America as the predatory hegemon.

O. Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury and the implications for Iran.