I write about AI and Geopolitics
Bill Friend The Promise We Haven’t Kept World Refugee Day comes around every year on June 20. We treat it as a time to honor the courage and endurance of people forced from their homes by war, persecution, and collapse. But if we are honest with ourselves, it is also a day of indictment. The global theme … Read more
The U.S.-Iran MoU and the Architecture of Privatized Geopolitics The Surface On June 17–18, 2026, in Evian-les-Bains, France, U.S. President Donald Trump and representatives of Iran signed a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding. The headlines called it historic. The terms, at first glance, sounded like a textbook diplomatic breakthrough: Iran would forego nuclear weapons, accept unrestricted … Read more
Enabling abuse through the mislabeling of terrorism isn’t an abstract risk. It’s already built into how states, institutions, and even the UN system talk about, regulate, and punish “terrorism,” often at the expense of civil society and ordinary people. Why I chose this fight I chose the title “Enabling Abuse Through the Mislabeling of Terrorism,” … Read more
Why Civilian Immunity Fails Without Consequence The targeting of civilians in war bothers me to a degree I can’t begin to express. I’ve seen so much of it lately. Children pulled from rubble. Families burned in their homes. Whole neighborhoods erased, then explained away by men in suits. It made me wonder where this came … Read more
A Fetus in the Womb The most honest thing anyone can say about artificial intelligence right now is that we don’t know what it is yet. Not in the dismissive sense — the technology is real, the capabilities are genuine, and the implications are serious. But in the literal developmental sense: the architecture that will … Read more