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When Threats Move Faster Than Institutions

A major aspect of the national security story of the past year comes down to one gap. Our adversaries, and increasingly the machines they use, now [...] More

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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

Dark Transits are a Stopgap not a Solution

Washington has accomplished an important feat by stealthily moving oil through the Persian Gulf despite Iran’s proclaimed closure. But the means it [...] More

The Bells are Ringing Again, and This Time Sweden is Inside the Alliance

On August 25, CIA Director John Ratcliffe landed in Moscow. He met Russian officials, warned them against attacking NATO, raised Moscow’s support for [...] More

We Are In An Unpredictable War Of Attrition

We are squarely in the target sights of ‘Unintended Consequences.’What do I mean by this? Think of it as a broad spectrum of possible consequences [...] More

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