Immensely honored to have published an article in the latest edition of Horizons quarterly magazine: cirsd.org/en/horizons/h…

Honored because I genuinely think Horizons ought to be the best geopolitical magazine out there in the world today. The Editor in Chief is the great Vuk Jeremić (former Foreign Minister of Serbia, former President of the UN General Assembly and currently president of CIRSD) and their basic concept is to be what a great geopolitics magazine should be - but which so few are: a platform for genuinely diverse viewpoints from across the world, in the actual (and not liberal) sense of the word “diverse”.

The quality of the contributors is so awe-inspiring that I almost have imposter syndrome ☺️. In this edition they managed to bring together:

• George Yeo: the former Foreign Minister of Singapore whom I admire immensely (and cite all the time, including in my Horizons article!)

• Fu Ying: former Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of China and one of China's most senior and respected diplomatic voices

• Yan Xuetong: Director of Tsinghua's Institute of International Studies and arguably China's most influential international relations scholar (you might remember him from this x.com/RnaudBertrand/sta…)

• Kao Kim Hourn: the Secretary-General of ASEAN

• Moon Chung-in: Special Advisor to President Moon Jae-in of South Korea for Foreign Affairs and National Security

• Yao Rukun: who teaches International Relations and World Political Parties at the Party School of the Beijing Municipal Committee

• Kevin Rudd: former PM of Australia

• Thierry de Montbrial: founder and executive chairman of the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri),

And many others… In past editions they had contributors like Yang Jiechi, Viktor Orbán, Sergey Lavrov, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Nye, Elvira Nabiullina, and John Mearsheimer.

You might disagree with some of those (I certainly do, Rudd being one notable example) but that’s the whole point: geopolitics isn’t about finding the “correct” view or remaining in a safe space of “like-minded partners”, but about doing the hard work of understanding how others actually think. Because it's only through genuine understanding - not caricatures or strawmen - that you can identify where bridges might be built.

My own article in the magazine actually touches on some of this. I notably describe how - in my view - the West replaced strategic analysis with moral sermons or wishful thinking about China, which was extremely detrimental TO THEM because it led them to miss China’s actual transformation, something I’ve constantly warned about over the years.

We’re now waking up (and, to be frank, most are still asleep) with a China that’s simply so massive, so technologically sophisticated and so central that its mere existence in the world today generates a “geopolitical gravity” that’s redrawing the world order and renders ideology largely irrelevant - because in physics as in geopolitics, nothing escapes gravity.

I'm of course not making the point that, had we understood China correctly, the West could have "contained" it - I think the very notion of containment is abhorrent. The point is about adaptation and rooting one's actions in the world as it is and not as we wish it to be.