Every day, we find the historical story hiding inside the headlines. Riveting narratives that connect the past to the present, and make you wonder what happens next.
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In 1925 the most valuable thing in America was a milky sap from trees on the far side of the world. Rubber ran every car, factory and phone line, Britain's colonies grew about three quarters of it, and Britain had just choked the supply: the Stevenson Plan restricted exports to drive the price from around thirteen cents a pound past a dollar. America, which bought most of the world's rubber, did not just pay. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover funded a global hunt for new supply, Harvey Firestone planted a million acres of Liberia, chemists chased synthetic rubber, and the cartel collapsed when the Dutch refused to join and flooded the market. Squeeze a customer hard enough and you do not make him pay; you teach him to never need you again. A century later it is copper for AI data centres and China's grip on rare earths, and the same scramble has begun.
Galați, Romania, 29 May 2026: a Russian Shahed-136 drone detonated on the 10th floor of an apartment building, wounding two civilians. NATO declined to invoke Article 5. On 7 March 1936 the Wehrmacht crossed the Rhine bridges; Britain declined to call it a casus belli. The decision in each case is the precedent.
Sunday 31 May 2026: the Israeli Golani Brigade raised the Israeli flag over Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon for the first time in 26 years. The same limestone hilltop has changed hands between every regional power that has wanted to control southern Lebanon for 850 years. The castle has not changed. The wars at its foot have.
Haarlem, spring 1637: a Calvinist printer publishes a satirical dialogue ridiculing tulip speculators. Two centuries later it is summarised by a Victorian journalist. May 2026: the IMF, the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan all reach for the same metaphor to describe the AI capex cycle. The metaphor was built to do moral work, not financial diagnosis.
Khalde, 15 July 1958: the first US Marines of Operation Blue Bat landed on a Lebanese beach full of sunbathers and brokered a new president inside three months. Beirut, May 2026: the same constitution is again deadlocked, this time over expat voting and a parallel Israeli air campaign. The compromise being negotiated this month is the seventh round.
Panama City, 23 May 2026: María Corina Machado announces from exile that she will return to Venezuela and run again for the presidency by the end of the year. Karachi, 18 October 2007: Benazir Bhutto's truck inched along Sharae Faisal Road at less than a kilometre an hour. Two suicide vests detonated near midnight. The procession through the city is the dangerous part of the return.
The Quad foreign ministers met in Delhi on 26 May 2026 and produced three concrete deliverables: a Fiji port, an undersea cable initiative, a critical-minerals framework. The same kind of public works the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization produced in 1955-62. SEATO was killed by a US president going to Beijing in 1972. The current US president has already been there.
Russia launched its largest attack of the war on Kyiv on 24 May 2026: 90 missiles, 600 drones, the third use of the Oreshnik ballistic missile. The historical pattern is the V-1 and V-2 Vergeltungswaffen on London 1944-45. The war ends anyway; the technology defines the next eighty years.
Colombia votes Sunday 31 May 2026 under armed-group drone-swarm attacks: 48 massacres in four months, 333 drone strikes last year. The closest historical parallel is the 30 January 2005 Iraqi election, when voters defied al-Qaeda's 'war on democracy' to produce 58 percent turnout, and then the constitution that followed bled the country for ten years.
Miami, 22 May 2026: a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida indicted 95-year-old Raúl Castro for the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft. The same Miami court did the same thing to Manuel Noriega in 1988. Twenty-two months later, twenty-seven thousand US troops landed in Panama.
Doha, expected Sunday 25 May 2026: a 60-day Iran-US Memorandum of Understanding ends the US Navy's 50-day blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, releases $12 billion in frozen Iranian funds, and opens negotiations on uranium enrichment. The legal-word substitution, the public-and-secret pairing, the time-limited window are the exact template that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.