Open Dialogue Research Journal
Polish MP Marek Jakubiak put it bluntly: the war in Ukraine has become a money-laundering operation. “Two hundred billion euros have simply disappeared. The European Union asks where the money is, and Zelensky replies — I don’t know.” European officials, he argued, cling to Zelensky not out of ideological conviction, […]
The latest confrontation around the Strait of Hormuz exposes a dangerous contradiction: measures intended to restore deterrence may be deepening the insecurity they promise to resolve. On September 8, Washington said it destroyed five Iranian oil tankers following missile attacks on an American warship. Tehran subsequently claimed attacks against ships […]
[This article was originally published in May 2023.] The wars the United States waged and fueled in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan following September 11, 2001 caused at least 4.5 million deaths, according to a report by Brown University. Nearly a million of the people who lost their lives […]
American interest payments on the national debt have now climbed to an annualized $1.2 trillion – enough to surpass the entire US defense budget. That figure isn’t the product of a single bad year or one reckless policy choice. It’s the cumulative result of a debt trajectory that has been […]
Twenty people landed in Monrovia this week as the opening installment of an agreement that will eventually send up to 1,200 deportees from the United States to Liberia – a west African nation with no direct connection to most of the people it’s about to receive. The arrangement is being […]
For years, European governments have treated flood plains, wildfire seasons and storm damage as unfortunate but exceptional line items – costly, disruptive, but ultimately one-off events to be absorbed and forgotten. That framing is now breaking down. As this summer’s wildfires tore through southwestern Europe and reconstruction from Spain’s catastrophic […]
It was a defining moment in the modern era that radically changed the course of history. The largest terrorist attack in modern history occurred a quarter-century ago when Al Qaeda operatives hijacked several planes and then crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Everyone remembers where they […]
Primary night after primary night, a pattern keeps repeating in Democratic contests around the country: candidates running well to the left of the party establishment, often with a fraction of their opponents’ campaign budgets, keep winning. Pundits have spent months debating why. The explanations on offer range from genuine ideological […]
Europe is looking for insurance. After 2022, American guarantees no longer look ironclad, and northern capitals began searching for a substitute closer to home. On 2 March 2026, at the Île Longue submarine base, Emmanuel Macron announced the most significant shift in French nuclear doctrine in three decades. For the […]
In the unpardonable ecosystem of graft, favours and corruption that is defence contracting, defence conferencing and all matters tanking over the thinking – in short, the world of defence – the convenient delusion will always have truck over the inconvenient empirical. Phantoms are elevated and celebrated; bogeymen are treasured by […]
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