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.
Bolivia, 17 October 2003: a Chicago-educated technocratic president fled the country by helicopter after sixty-seven people were killed in two weeks of road blockades organised by a coca-grower congressman named Evo Morales. This week the streets of La Paz are blocked again. Morales is sixty-six, banned from running for office, and back at the architect's table.
Berlin, 18 June 1887: the German chancellor signed a secret three-year treaty with Russia at the same time he was bound by a public treaty against Russia. The arrangement held the European peace for three more years. Then his emperor died. Trump and Putin visited Beijing within a week of each other this month.
Seoul, 15 August 1974: a 22-year-old woman watched her mother die at the National Theatre. Two presidencies, an assassination, an impeachment and a prison sentence later, the same arc is being walked in Peru. Keiko Fujimori is in her fourth presidential runoff on 7 June.
At dawn on 30 September 1980, four Iranian F-4 Phantoms refuelled in the air over the border, climbed deliberately high, then dropped to the deck and bombed Iraq's Osirak reactor. It was the first attack on a nuclear plant in human history. Forty-six years later something flew at the UAE's Barakah.
Reykjavík, 12 October 1986: Reagan and Gorbachev nearly abolished all nuclear weapons and signed nothing. The press called it a disaster. Within five years the Cold War was over. In Beijing this month, Trump and Xi did the same.
Paris, 29 June 1853: Napoleon III handed a prefect a map and told him to air the city, unite it, beautify it. Three hundred and fifty thousand poor Parisians were pushed out of the centre. Lagos is doing the same thing this week.
Rome, 67 BCE: the grain ships could not get past the pirates. The Senate handed one man the entire Mediterranean, and he cleared it in three months. The Republic never recovered. The Strait of Hormuz, May 2026: same chokepoint, same emergency, same temptation.
In 1684 Pope Innocent XI bound the Habsburg empire, Poland, and Venice into a coalition against the Ottomans with an exclusivity clause: no separate peace. Fifteen years later, at Karlowitz, the Ottomans lost most of Hungary. On 15 May 2026 the IDF chief was received in Abu Dhabi.
In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and embraced peaceful coexistence with the United States. By 1960 the Soviet Union had withdrawn more than a thousand advisors from China and the alliance was broken. On 14 May 2026 Xi Jinping told Donald Trump in Beijing that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon. China is Iran's patron.
On 31 August 1907 Britain and Russia ended a century of Great Game rivalry by carving up Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet into spheres of influence. The countries themselves were not consulted. Seven years later, the First World War. On 14 May 2026 Donald Trump arrives in Beijing to do the same kind of business with Xi Jinping.