Draw the draft

Tehran, without raising its voice, had taught them something else: that in some places, survival still depended on reading a room, trusting strangers, and accepting help before you fully understood why you needed it.… By the time the plane dipped through the winter haze and Tehran spread out beneath them, the city looked calmer than the headlines had suggested—low concrete blocks, a necklace of highways, the Alborz Mountains faintly dusted with snow. Joris pressed his forehead to the window, while Min-seo adjusted the strap of her camera, already thinking about light and angles. They had met a year earlier at a flea market in Copenhagen, arguing cheerfully over a chipped enamel coffee pot. Since then, they had traveled light and impulsively, following cheap flights and half-remembered recommendations. Iran had come up the same way—“It’s complicated, but fascinating,” a friend had said, which was usually enough for them. On the fligh...

In London, the lights stayed on.… By the time the cranes rose over Royal Mint Court, Londoners had already learned to read geopolitics in steel and glass. The new Chinese embassy was enormous—deliberately so. Its setbacks complied with planning law, its façade nodded politely to British heritage, and its fiber lines were thicker than anything required for consular work. The debates in Parliament sounded procedural, but the briefings circulating in Whitehall were not. They spoke of SIGINT hardening, of RF-quiet rooms, of the peculiar way modern embassies were no longer buildings so much as platforms—nodes in a planetary system of data, logistics, and influence. Mara Ellwood watched the construction from across the Thames, nursing coffee gone cold. She was an analyst by trade, trained on the Cold War canon—Moscow Rules, dead drops, brush passes—but her last posting had cured her of nostalgia. Today’s intelligence didn’t live in alleyw...

"This is for a corporation that intends to own the future."… In the sterile, glass-and-steel heart of Beijing, the spring of 2026 arrived not with the blooming of cherry blossoms, but with the rhythmic tapping of keyboards and the hushed, efficient movements of the National People’s Congress (NPC). The Corporate Assembly To an outsider, the NPC looked like a legislature. To those inside, it was the annual board meeting of the world’s largest enterprise: China, Inc. Director Chen, a mid-level strategist in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, stood before a digital map glowing with the blueprints of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030). There was no “opposition party” to debate his projections. In this boardroom, the Communist Party acted as the majority shareholder, and the 3,000 delegates were the branch managers. Their goal was singular: High-Quality Development. “The mandate is clear,” Chen whispered to ...

If Russia or China refused to pay their rent and chose to seize the "property" instead, would the transactional alliances of 2026 hold, or would the world find that some costs cannot be shared?… In the frosty landscape of January 2026, the global order has transitioned from a structure of “all-in hegemony” to a cold, hard era of transactional realism. The following story explores this new reality, where territory is equity and alliances are managed like corporate portfolios. The Arctic Portfolio The air in the Oval Office was as crisp as the digital maps glowing on the monitors. On the screen, the “Donroe Doctrine” was in full effect. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had just finished a briefing on the “Enlist and Expand” strategy, a policy that viewed the globe not as a series of ideological commitments, but as a balance sheet of burden-sharing. “The 20th-century model is dead,” the President noted, circling the vast wh...