Headlines

Taiwan’s boom a leveraged bet on AI irrational exuberance

Taiwan has just vaulted past India to become the world’s No. 5 stock market, powered by an AI boom that’s fused investor frenzy with the dominance of the planet’s most critical chipmaker. The catalyst is unmistakable: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., up 46% this year,

Asia

Trump’s $1.5 trillion military splurge destined to backfire

Earlier this month, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood in front of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to defend the Trump administration’s record-breaking US$1.5 trillion military budget proposal for FY2027. According to the White House, this 66% year-over-year

Asia

Seoul’s blind spot, Beijing’s red line

On April 10, 2026, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung sparked controversy by sharing a social media video that compared wartime killings to the Holocaust and alleged that Israeli forces had tortured, and thrown from a rooftop, a Palestinian. Because the incident had occurred

Asia

Pete Hegseth’s desperate crusade for masculine validation

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine urged caution, presciently predicting that a ramped-up campaign against Iran could lead its leaders to close

Asia

The Iran miscalculations that we were warned about

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a war’s opening salvos — the silence of think-tank papers being quietly archived, of cable-news predictions being scrubbed from the chyron, of confident assurances that “this time it will be different” colliding with the

Asia