British politics has experienced a decade of extraordinary instability, with six prime ministers since the 2016 Brexit vote, significantly exacerbated by the pervasive rise of smartphones. These devices have engendered a hyperfrenetic pace in Westminster, where MPs, ministers, and journalists are constantly connected, amplifying grievances and accelerating demands for drastic action, including prime ministerial ousters.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on April 27, 2026, to discuss the ongoing conflict in and around Iran, highlighting their Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty signed in January 2025. Russia has gained economic benefits from Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which increased global oil demand and prices, prompting the United States to temporarily ease sanctions on Russian seaborne oil exports as of March 12.
Russia faces significant strategic challenges in 2026, evidenced by Ukraine's new long-range FP-5 cruise missile strikes on a Russian defense industrial plant and damage to the Chonhar and Arabat bridges isolating Crimea. Despite Russia's losing trajectory across military, cognitive, moral, industrial, and economic dimensions, its strategic position could be reversed by external factors.
Myanmar's conflict-affected borderlands have become central to global rare earth supply chains, driven by accelerating demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles. Following the 2021 coup, Myanmar emerged as the world's third-largest rare earth producer, with extraction expanding rapidly in Kachin State. This expansion, largely fueled by China shifting environmentally destructive mining beyond its borders, operates under fragmented governance involving militias, armed actors, and opaque cross-border arrangements.
The 2025 G7 convened during a period of international instability, yet its meetings achieved meaningful progress on emerging technologies, particularly quantum and AI. The 2025 G7 cycle's outputs focused on defining the scope of cooperation rather than issuing a wide-ranging statement about geopolitical order, representing a fundamentally different perspective for middle powers.
The United Nations' Independent International Scientific Panel on AI (IISPAI) faces a critical challenge in balancing scientific credibility with political legitimacy to effectively shape global AI governance. Unlike its predecessors, the IPCC and IPBES, the IISPAI is mandated to produce annual reports and thematic briefs, accelerating its assessment cycles to keep pace with rapidly evolving AI technology.
The United States and Iran have plunged deeper into military escalation after a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter was downed near the Strait of Hormuz on June 9. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) retaliated with strikes on Iranian infrastructure, prompting Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to launch drone and missile barrages targeting 18 U.S.
The U.S. Army Special Forces (SF) model is fundamentally outdated, designed for a world that no longer exists and ill-equipped for contemporary battlefields characterized by mega-cities, electromagnetic spectrum saturation, and advanced adversary surveillance. The current structure leaves SF without a clearly valued role within a Joint Force that prioritizes decisive victory over SF's asymmetric shaping operations.
R.D. Hooker, Jr. challenges David Deptula's assertion that air superiority is more essential to victory today, arguing that overwhelming American airpower dominance in conflicts like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan consistently failed to deliver strategic success despite being purchased at extraordinary cost. Hooker contends that even the 1991 Gulf War, often cited as airpower's triumph, required powerful ground forces exceeding half a million troops to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, making claims of an air-won war highly questionable.
The US launched strikes on Iranian air defense and radar systems on June 10, 2026, targeting locations in Hormozgan Province, including Sirik, Bandar Abbas, Minab, and Qeshm Island. These actions, described by senior US officials as a "limited warning" and "warning shot," followed mounting pressure from Capitol Hill after Iran's reported involvement in the downing of a US Apache helicopter.
The 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States with 48 nations, highlights the enduring link between sports and global affairs, despite ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. Historically, mega sporting events like the World Cup and Olympics have offered opportunities for diplomacy, as seen with "ping-pong diplomacy" between the U.S.
The U.S. national security enterprise faces a dangerous inversion where supporting bureaucratic functions now hinder core operational missions, a phenomenon termed "the tail eating the dog." Decades of legislative drift and risk-averse management have transformed support roles—like legal, IT, and acquisition—into governing bodies that prioritize compliance over mission accomplishment.
President Donald Trump announced the US would strike Iran "hard" on Wednesday, following overnight exchanges of strikes between the two nations. US Central Command (Centcom) confirmed launching strikes at 17:15 Eastern Time against "multiple targets" in Iran, citing "unwarranted and continued aggression." This escalation follows a US strike on Tuesday after Iran allegedly downed a US Army helicopter, to which Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responded by striking US bases in the region.
Artificial intelligence and autonomous drone systems are fundamentally reshaping the battlefield in conflict, prompting discussions on the future of warfare and the limits of international law. A panel of experts, including an Adjunct Senior Fellow from the Center for a New American Security, a Senior Fellow from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor from the University of Notre Dame, will convene on June 9, 2026, to explore these critical technological developments.
President Donald J. Trump's ceasefire with Iran ended following the June 8 downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forces and subsequent missile launches toward Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, and Israel. Trump indicated Iran must "pay the price," prompting consideration of three strategic options.
U.S.-India relations stumbled badly during the second half of 2025, marked by a breach of trust over the May 10, 2025, India-Pakistan ceasefire and President Donald Trump’s imposition of 50 percent tariffs on Indian exports in August 2025. The February 6, 2026, interim trade deal provides an opportunity to repair ties, crucial for India's role in shaping the Indo-Pacific and competing against China.
India's space sector is undergoing a significant transformation, shifting from its historical government-centric model to one increasingly accommodating private enterprise following the 2020 space reforms and the Indian Space Policy (ISP) 2023. This policy redrew boundaries, allowing non-government entities (NGEs) to undertake end-to-end activities like building, launching, and operating satellites and launch vehicles, even engaging in asteroid mining, subject to IN-SPACe authorization.
China's expanding digital trade network, including platforms like LOGINK, eWTP, and Cainiao Network Technology, significantly challenges the enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). Forensic firm Oritain found that exposure to prohibited cotton among surveyed companies returned to pre-UFLPA levels, indicating a growing "gap between supply chain documentation and supply chain truth."
In 2026, artificial intelligence (AI) chip production has become a binding constraint on the pace of the AI compute buildout, with demand for computing power to train and deploy advanced AI models growing exponentially and outpacing manufacturing capacity. This scarcity elevates AI chips to a strategic resource for the United States, necessitating policy adjustments.
The 2025 U.S.-Chinese trade war, initiated by President Donald Trump's nearly 75 percent tariffs, quickly concluded with the U.S. folding due to China's strategic leverage over rare-earth elements. Beijing, controlling 90 percent of global rare-earth processing, retaliated with export controls, threatening American manufacturing and the U.S. defense industrial base.
China is actively engaged in adversarial distillation, a technique involving the unauthorized extraction of AI model capabilities from U.S. systems to enhance its own AI development, circumventing U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors. This strategic vulnerability allows Chinese developers to make faster and larger capability gains by leveraging U.S.
Gulf states' ambitious investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure, aiming for technological independence, paradoxically creates significant jurisdictional, technological, and security dependencies on the United States. The Trump administration's 'AI sovereignty' concept promotes deep reliance on US technology as a necessary cost for access to world-leading capabilities, backed by programs like the American AI Exports Program.
The private sector is playing a leading role in advancing artificial intelligence (AI), with commercial incentives significantly influencing how AI capabilities develop and diffuse, impacting U.S. national security interests. These interests include enabling beneficial AI uses, limiting misuse risks, ensuring reliable system behavior, and maintaining strategic geopolitical advantage.
The United States needs the trust of its allies and partners, not its adversaries, to effectively manage international conflicts like the one with Iran. While negotiations with adversaries require verification and clear costs/benefits, trust with friends is a massive amplifier, fostering common purpose, information sharing, and willingness to impose consequences.
Electricity has become a decisive enabler in contemporary warfare, with modern forces depending on its uninterrupted flow for operational tempo, sustaining radios, drones, C2 systems, EW equipment, and precision-guided weapons. In the ongoing Ukraine War, electricity is both a strategic target and a tactical necessity, as Russia deliberately strikes Ukraine’s national power grid.
On June 8, Yemen’s Houthis fired missiles at central Israel as the Jewish state and Iran exchanged fire for the first time since the April 7 ceasefire between the US, Israel, and Iran. The Houthis launched two missiles, one intercepted and one falling short, targeting the Tel Aviv area.
Ukraine's escalating campaign inside Russia, involving deep drone strikes on oil infrastructure, attacks on military airfields, logistics interdiction, and the assassination of senior Russian military figures like Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, aims to impose significant costs. While these actions, including targeting Moscow-area and St. Petersburg refineries, create command disruption and economic pressure, the author argues they are unlikely to force President Putin to negotiate peace.
The United States requires an economic pressure doctrine to guide its adversarial economic statecraft, based on an analysis of 20 prior and ongoing U.S. cases including embargoes, modern sanctions, technology denial, and trade coercion. This report proposes nine principles for American economic pressure, categorized into strategic and operational levels.
The 7 October 2023 Hamas attack prompted the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to launch Operation Swords of Iron in Gaza, confronting an extensive, complex tunnel system. This "Gaza Metro," estimated at 350-450 miles with 5,700 shafts integrated into civilian infrastructure, facilitates Hamas's offensive, defensive, logistical, and command and control operations, challenging IDF conventional superiority.
China is actively contesting information control across the Taiwan Strait through targeting undersea cables, satellite communication systems, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Taiwan, primarily connected by 15 undersea cables, experienced 28 human-caused incidents from 2022-2025, with three suspected as deliberate PRC sabotage. Taipei is hardening infrastructure and improving monitoring to deter further cuts, which could reduce bandwidth but not fully sever connectivity.
Terrorist groups such as Hamas, al-Qaeda, and ISIS are increasingly leveraging modern technologies, including social media and generative AI, to drastically shorten the time between radicalization, recruitment, and violent action. This digital shift allows them to operate effectively without physical caliphates, exposing many more people to propaganda and enabling rapid mobilization.
The United States security documents typically describe adversaries as threats or competitors, but rarely acknowledge that behavior patterns among interstate rivals, such as China, Russia, and Iran, differ fundamentally from those of mere threats or competitors. This article explores the advantages and risks associated with leveraging interstate rivalry frameworks for strategy development and planning.
On June 5, 2026, a new National Security Presidential Memorandum, NSPM-11, directed the secretary of defense to update Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 within 90 days, explicitly to keep pace with rapidly evolving AI capabilities. The article argues this update must expand the definition of a lethal autonomous weapon system beyond physical effectors like drones to include the AI software orchestrating the kill chain, which selects and engages targets without human intervention.
Turkey has frequently generated concern among Western analysts regarding its alignment with the United States and Europe over the past two and a half decades. These anxieties first arose in 2003 when the Turkish parliament voted against granting U.S. forces access to Turkish territory for the invasion of Iraq.
China began testing a different approach along the disputed Sino-Indian border in the Himalayas in 2020, using ten uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver supplies to soldiers in Tibet, replacing a 120-soldier, two-to-three-day journey. This demonstrates how drone logistics can reshape military deployment and sustainment, enabling forces to disperse into smaller, more remote units operating farther from established logistics hubs.