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How China Is Building an Architecture of Control Across the Heart of Asia

In the years following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, much of the world treated the region as strategically peripheral - unstable, [...] More

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Can America’s All-Volunteer Force Survive the Next War?

“It made sense for the United States to transition from this mixed force of conscripts and professionals to an All-Volunteer Force. It has enabled us [...] More

Not the Destroyer of Worlds: Why Compute is Humanity’s Most Vital Defense

Eighty years ago, the architects of our first dual-use revolution whispered that they had “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Today, a new power [...] More

The Compute We Cannot Power

On September 9, Oracle reported a cloud backlog of $664 billion — up $209 billion from a year earlier, an order book the size of a mid-cap national [...] More

25 years after 9/11. Whatever happened to mass-effect terrorism?

One remaining mystery about 9/11 is why there have been no attacks of comparable scale since. But, with the combination of new motivations, enhanced [...] More

Twenty-Five Years Later, Remembering 9/11

In “Aftermath,” a 1919 retrospective poem on his war, Siegfried Sassoon asked: “Have you forgotten yet?” “Look up,” he appealed, “and swear by the [...] More

China’s Challenge to Western Alliances

At the 25th anniversary session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an alternative model to Western [...] More

The AI We Cannot Deploy — And What Is at Stake

Last week, I argued in these pages that the United States is buying an army it cannot command — writing procurement checks at a scale its adversaries [...] More

Inside Trump’s Massive Venezuela Oil Deal

“A major oil agreement has been announced between the government of the United States and the [Venezuelan interim] regime of Delcy Rodriquez. I know [...] More

The New Economics of Warfare: David vs Goliath

The most important lesson emerging from the Iran conflict may not actually be about Iran. It is about the changing economics of warfare and what [...] More

The Nuclear Umbrella is Bent, Not Broken

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Still Matters Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press make a compelling argument in a recent article about the future [...] More

The Cost of Squandering America’s Reputation

Make no mistake: the United States is weaker today than it was yesterday, and the day before that.Many of our closest allies have moved from fear to [...] More

Blowing up Boats: The Numbing Effect of Repetitive Illegality

Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. campaign against alleged drug trafficking small boats off the coast of several South American nations, continues [...] More