An OPEC for Lithium, World War Three, The Goulash Archipelago

Tech-wise, lithium is in everything from electric vehicles to mobile phones. And for an element so high up the periodic table, it's surprisingly hard to find. So, much like oil in the 1970s, are we on the brink of the major lithium miners forming their own cartel? Who's holding the cards here? Which nation might be about to become the next Saudi Arabia? And how will this changing strategic resource picture affect the decade to come?

Recent war games, simulating a great power conflict with China, resulted in US simulators being blown out of the bathtub. As Andrew Collingwood explains, America has spent twenty years gearing up to fight insurgencies. Now that the spectre of great power warfare has returned, it's not clear they have the right tanks and the right guns to take on a China that is going hammer-and-tongs for more materiel.

Finally, Hungarians have kept warm this winter by engaging in strategic ambiguities over Ukraine. They've invited the ire of the EU, but is their foreign policy just a reflection of the sort of strategic pivots that will required more and more of small states as the multipolar world becomes a reality? Philip Pilkington seems to think so.