Calling Ireland a tax haven is a good way to end a conversation before it starts. The phrase is politically loaded, slightly unfair, and — this is the problem — not entirely wrong. Ireland is not the Cayman Islands. It…
Germany did not win globalisation in general. It won a particular globalisation — one that handsomely rewarded countries willing to run persistent trade surpluses, hold wages down, starve domestic demand, and ride a real exchange rate that competitors locked inside the euro…
Germany’s New Defence-Oriented Counter-Intelligence Code The 2026 reform of the Militärischer Abschirmdienst (MAD), the German Military Counter-Intelligence Service, is not a merely technical amendment. It constitutes a comprehensive re-legislation of German military counter-intelligence law and represents one of the most significant transformations…
Germany is entering a decisive phase in the reform of its intelligence law. The debate is no longer limited to technical adjustments after constitutional litigation. It now concerns the future institutional role of the federal intelligence services, especially the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND),…
The Islamabad Memorandum of 2026 has been compared to the JCPOA — sometimes as its successor, sometimes as its replacement, sometimes as proof that diplomacy with Iran can work. The comparison is understandable but misleading. The two agreements differ in…
A recent Bank of Italy paper, China Shock 2.0: Structural Drivers and Implications for the Euro Area, argues that the post-pandemic surge in Chinese exports marks a new phase of competitive pressure on Europe. This is not simply a replay of…
Vienna Convention – Law Treaties 1969 art. 31-33 SECTION 3. INTERPRETATION OF TREATIES Article 31 General rule of interpretation 1.A treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of…
Europe 2031 is one of the most stimulating contributions to the current debate on artificial intelligence, technological sovereignty, and Europe’s place in a rapidly changing geopolitical order. Written as a fictional scenario rather than a conventional policy report, it succeeds…
When discussing the strategic, operational, and tactical levels, the first mistake to avoid is treating them as three rigidly separated steps in a hierarchy. It is not enough to say that the strategic level is “more important,” the operational level…
When U.S. Sanctions Meet EU Banking Rights: The CJEU’s Judgment in Jenec — Case C-81/24 On 11 June 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in Jenec, Case C-81/24, concerning access to basic banking services where a consumer…
This continues from the previous post. Those who do research in a law faculty don’t disappear. But the source of their value changes. The most fragile part of legal research is the part that resembles standardizable informational work: searching for sources,…
What will still matter when intelligence becomes cheap? This is the central question at the heart of the forthcoming volume Messy Jobs by Luis Garicano, Jin Li, and Yanhui Wu. Much of the debate on artificial intelligence is framed around a simple…
The euro area’s inflation shock of 2022–2023 was not simply a story about prices rising too fast, and what I find most instructive about it lies beyond the macroeconomic data. It was a stress test for monetary policy in an…
Innovation is not the same thing as invention. Invention produces novelty; innovation transforms novelty into value. That transformation depends on an ecosystem: capital able to finance uncertainty, markets large enough to reward scale, institutions fast enough to enable experimentation, and…
A vocabulary used loosely In contemporary legal and political debate, five expressions are made to carry a great deal of weight and are frequently treated as interchangeable: national interest, national security, essential (or fundamental) security interests of the State, public…
ABSTRACT Strategic analysis keeps failing (Kabul, Kyiv, the late recognition that artillery and industrial capacity would decide the war) not because individuals err but because analytical systems don’t learn. Three interlocking failures explain it. Empirical: the field keeps no score. It rewards visibility…
Arturo Artom’s La nuova intelligenza argues that we are living through a deep transformation in the way intelligence, work, education, and personal identity function. I chose to discuss it here because the questions it raises touch directly on what I see changing…
The European Commission’s new Communication on European Tech Sovereignty marks a significant shift in the EU’s digital policy agenda, and one that I consider among the most consequential of this Commission’s term. The message is clear: Europe can no longer rely primarily…
Governor Fabio Panetta’s “Concluding Remarks,” delivered on 29 May 2026, paint a picture of a surprisingly resilient global economy shaken by a new energy shock — and point to artificial intelligence as the decisive battleground for Italy’s future. Every year,…
Thomas Kuhn changed the way we think about scientific progress, and his framework remains, in my experience, one of the most useful tools for understanding what is happening in international relations and security today. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn…
Federico Fubini’s article on Donald Trump’s economic interventionism captures a crucial shift in contemporary capitalism. The phrase “a socialist in the White House” is rhetorically effective, but analytically imprecise — and getting the analysis right matters more than the rhetoric.…
Article 105 of the General Court’s Rules of Procedure deals with how the Court handles classified or security-sensitive information in a case. The core tension it resolves: normally both parties to a case must see all evidence (the adversarial principle),…
For years, screening foreign investments for security risks was something EU Member States could do but were not required to do. That has now changed. The European Parliament has approved a reform that makes screening mandatory in sensitive sectors —…
What the IAA is After the Net-Zero Industry Act, the Critical Raw Materials Act, and the Chips Act, it would be easy to dismiss the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA, COM(2026) 100 final) as one more entry in an already crowded…
On 30 September 1938, after returning from the Munich Conference, Neville Chamberlain addressed the British public first at Heston Aerodrome and later outside 10 Downing Street, where he declared that he believed it was ‘peace for our time. “This morning…
The adoption of an Italian National Security Strategy, defined by Article 5 of the Prime Ministerial Decree of 22 April 2026, marks a development I consider significant for the Italian security system. For the first time, Italy has a central…
The Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers of 22 April 2026 establishes the implementing regulation for Article 7-bis, paragraph 5, of Decree-Law No. 174 of 30 October 2015, concerning the management of crisis situations involving aspects of national security.…
The latest judicial setback for presidential tariff power did not come from the Supreme Court — and this is where the story, to me, becomes most interesting. It came from the U.S. Court of International Trade, in a case involving…
Financial markets are neither a casino nor a church — and understanding this is, I am increasingly convinced, essential for anyone who studies international law and national security. They are better understood as a distorted mirror in which human beings…
In the United States, one of the oldest constitutional arguments is also one of the most practical — and, for those of us who study the intersection of constitutional law and security, one of the most instructive: who gets to…
Robert H. Jackson, “The Challenge of International Lawlessness,” American Bar Association Journal, Vol. 27, 1941, pp. 690-693. Writing in 1941 as World War II shattered European order, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson confronts American disillusionment with international law…
Among the texts I return to when international law seems most under attack, Philip C. Jessup’s article “The Reality of International Law” was published in Foreign Affairs, Volume 18, Number 2, in January 1940. Jessup’s central argument is that international law is real, even though it…
At a moment when international law is routinely described as ineffective, selective, or even obsolete, Not Dead Yet – International Law in an Age of Uncertainty offers a deliberately counter-intuitive intervention — one that, as a scholar of international law, I…
Deterrence is one of those concepts that appears deceptively simple but reveals, on closer examination, a remarkable complexity. It refers to the ability to prevent an action through the threat of negative consequences. This mechanism appears in several contexts, including international politics, psychology, economics,…
The United States supported China’s accession to the WTO primarily because policymakers believed it would advance three interrelated objectives — and understanding what those objectives were helps explain, I think, much of the disillusionment that followed. Yes, there is a…
Critical minerals are no longer a narrow industrial issue. They are a structural component of power — the material foundation of batteries, semiconductors, defence systems, and the energy transition. The Memorandum of Understanding signed on April 24 in Washington by…
According to the paper published in January 2026 by Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi, Andrea Ferrero, Luca Fornaro, and Martin Wolf, titled Industrial Policies, Global Imbalances and Technological Hegemony, industrial policy is not just about helping domestic firms grow. It can also reshape trade…
Debate over Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is often framed too vaguely — and this imprecision, in my view, obscures where the real constitutional problem lies. The standard defense is familiar: the provision authorizes the collection of…
