The United States fought a shooting war over a strait it does not own, moved to disable a court it never joined, and drew a UN human rights referral from its own southern neighbour. All in seven days.

Chinese dominance in Rare Earth Elements (REE) is setting Washington on a mission worldwide to secure alternative sources. As REE becomes the oil of the 21st century, the strategic imperative seems to have left Colorado’s potential behind. This article asks if exploitation under environmental protection oversight at home would be the sound choice.

Recording of Daryl Wallace’s talk introducing Papua New Guinea at 50 years since independence from Australia. Covers history, geopolitics and economy.

Analysis: UNA members who care about multilateralism can see the gap between the scale of the problem and the strength of the tools on offer. Here is a balanced look at where the Secretary-General's stance is strong, where it strains against political and structural reality, and the questions our chapter should be asking as this process moves ahead.

Scientists — including a Boulder-based NSF NCAR researcher — retired the extreme RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 "worst-case" climate scenario in new CMIP7 projections because real-world emissions never matched its doomsday assumptions, lowering the plausible worst-case warming from ~4.5°C to ~3.5°C by 2100. This is a sign that climate policy and cheaper renewables are working, not that climate change was overstated — the UN and WMO continue to warn of "climate chaos" and a 75% chance of temporarily exceeding 1.5°C sometime in 2026-2030.

This week’s news from across the world covering Russia-Ukraine, NATO and Trump, India, Pakistan and China. https://youtu.be/7J5qNmJuut0

Why Rules-Based Orders Fail - by Ben Steil

For a brief period after the Cold War, Americans persuaded themselves that the liberal order had become self-sustaining. And yet, any rules-based system elaborate enough to govern and interpret its own operations will eventually confront questions that its rules cannot answer.

Originally published at Project Syndicate

It's easy to think of UN dues as money that leaves the country. The reality is closer to the opposite: U.S. investment in the United Nations is one of the most cost-effective tools in the American foreign policy toolkit, because it leverages resources from 192 other member states to advance goals the United States would otherwise have to fund - and staff, and defend - entirely on its own…

Critics sometimes frame the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as distant, aspirational, or irrelevant to American communities. In practice, the 17 SDGs function more like guiding stones or a shared compass for measuring progress on poverty, health, education, clean water, gender equality, and economic opportunity, and that compass points just as usefully at Boulder, Denver, and Pueblo…

Here's where the abstract case for the UN becomes concrete for our members. These figures (based on 2024 data) show that U.S. investment in the UN isn't a one-way transfer - it circulates back into American, and specifically Colorado, communities and businesses…