2026 will be the year of hard decisions: Brahma Chellaney says India can no longer afford reactive diplomacy

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India’s long-prided nonalignment policy has run its course, with the year 2025 exposing the fragility of these ties, said geostrategist Brahma Chellaney. He said for long India’s independent course in world affairs seemed effective, as its nonalignment ensured warm ties with rival powers.

In a column for Nikkei Asia, Chellaney said that a series of external shocks this year revealed India’s structural weaknesses in India’s foreign policy. The cumulative effect of these shocks was a broader loss of strategic room for maneuver, said Chellaney.

The “most jarring shock” came from Washington, said Chellaney, adding that US President Donald Trump’s policy towards a “rising India turned overtly punitive”. The 50 per cent tariff was more than a trade dispute, he said, adding that it was a political signal that India was less of a strategic partner and more of an economic rival to be squeezed.

The Year That Took India and Pakistan to the Brink

Audrey Wilson

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In May, India and Pakistan faced off in their worst military conflict in decades, perhaps permanently altering the status quo on the subcontinent. The crisis began with a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. New Delhi quickly—and without concrete evidence—blamed the violence on Islamabad; a few weeks later, India launched missile strikes against militant targets in Pakistan, which swiftly retaliated.

The resulting confrontation lasted four days and killed dozens of people, including civilians. It saw faster escalation than ever before and the first full-scale use of combat drones between the two nuclear-armed countries. The fighting ended abruptly with a cease-fire that generated further disagreement and both India and Pakistan claiming that they had won. Ultimately, the brief military skirmish may have raised the risks of a future war.

Afghanistan-Tajikistan: Border Clashes

Afsara Shaheen

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On December 23, 2025, at least five security personnel, including three Afghan nationals and two Tajikistan Border Guards, were killed in a cross-border armed clash along the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border, highlighting persistent instability along Afghanistan’s northern frontiers. Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security confirmed that two of its border guards were killed after armed assailants opened fire from Afghan territory. The exchange of fire erupted when attackers launched an assault from Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province, specifically from the Shahr-e-Buzurg District, and from Chah Ab District in the neighbouring Takhar province. Tajik border forces retaliated, killing at least three attackers during the confrontation. Later on December 26, 2025, Tajikistan asked the Taliban to issue a formal apology and step up security along the shared border following the incident.

This incident followed a series of deadly cross-border attacks in December and November 2025, marking a sharp escalation in violence along the Tajikistan-Afghanistan frontier.

Bangladesh is worshipping Islamists as heroes. Jamaat is having the last laugh

Deep Halder

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Bangladesh’s July revolution is beginning to resemble a tragedy devouring its own. What started as a students’ revolution against corruption and authoritarianism is now corroding the very ideals on which the country was formed.

Abu Sayed’s death at the hands of the police during the 2024 students’ uprising had turned the movement bloodier. And the recent killing of yet another young leader from the revolution, Osman Hadi, has taken it further—triggering attacks on media offices and cultural centres, stoking rampant anti-India rage, and revived calls for azadi in Kashmir.

As tragic as these deaths are, the fallen “heroes” of the revolution have been deified in today’s Bangladesh. Their Islamist agendas, so far hidden under the garb of a fight for democracy, have a disturbingly large number of takers among the country’s youth.

China hiding missiles on merchant ships for a Taiwan war

Gabriel Honrada 

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China appears to be experimenting with missile-armed merchant ships, probing whether commercial hulls packed with concealed firepower can deliver surprise salvos and tilt the naval balance in a Taiwan or US-China clash. This month, multiple media sources reported that China appears to be testing the rapid militarization of commercial cargo ships as part of a broader effort to expand naval firepower at lower cost and with greater ambiguity, according to satellite imagery.

Images circulating online show a Chinese container vessel at a Shanghai shipyard – the Zhongda 79 – a 97-meter container ship equipped with containerized vertical launch missile cells with a 60-round capacity, phased-array radars, close-in weapon systems (CIWS), and electronic countermeasures, suggesting a modular “arsenal ship” concept that could quickly convert civilian hulls into combat platforms. The Zhongda 79 may be an experimental prototype designed to verify containerized weapon systems that can be rapidly installed and removed, in line with China’s military-civil fusion (MCF) strategy.

New Pentagon report on China’s military notes Beijing's progress on LLMs

Jon Harper

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The Defense Department’s latest report to Congress on China’s military developments stated that Beijing has been catching up with the United States in the race for new generative AI capabilities. This year’s iteration of the annual study was quietly released by the DOD this week before the Christmas holiday.

“In 2024, China’s commercial and academic AI sectors made progress on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based reasoning models, which has narrowed the performance gap between China’s models and the U.S. models currently leading the field,” Pentagon officials wrote. Those types of tools can generate software code, text, images, audio and other media following human prompts.

“LLMs and LLM-based reasoning models are useful for a range of military applications, including coding tasks to assist cyber operations, question-answering tasks to assist military decision-making, and synthetic content tailoring to assist influence operations. The [People’s Liberation Army, or PLA] continues to use [military-civil fusion, or MCF] mechanisms to ensure China’s academic and commercial AI communities provide robust, continuous support to military research and development projects,” the new Pentagon report noted. “These mechanisms provide the PLA with an opportunity to incorporate recent private sector AI breakthroughs into military systems.”

The National Security Strategy Paper on China

Mel Gurtov

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The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper, released this month, is filled with nasty, nativist language and half-truths straight out of the Project 2025 playbook. But amidst the bluster about historic success in strengthening national security and claims about resolving wars is a stark reminder of the direction US foreign policy is taking, which looks to be a world divided into American, Chinese, and Russian spheres of influence.

That would explain why Latin America receives so much more attention in the NSS paper than China or Russia. The theme of strategic competition with those two countries that was emphasized in Trump’s first national security overview has vanished. Now, China is viewed mainly as an economic rival. That is surely welcome news in Beijing.

How Much “Weaponization” Can the Global Economy Take?

CARLA NORRLÖF

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STOCKHOLM – In January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement, alleging that the previous administration had exploited the interlinkages between law enforcement and intelligence to target political opponents. While critics dismissed the order as theatrics, loyalists applauded what they saw as a bold stand against partisan excess. Yet beneath this spectacle de jure looms a much larger story, involving energy pipelines, shipping routes, global trade, and financial flows.

Students of international affairs have long examined how asymmetrical economic relationships can be used to gain strategic advantages. A seminal twentieth-century contribution was Albert O. Hirschman’s 1945 National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, which demonstrated that dominant powers in unbalanced trade relationships can leverage their position to extract political concessions from weaker partners. Similarly, in the 1980s, David A. Baldwin’s Economic Statecraft catalogued many different forms of economic leverage, arguing that sanctions, aid, and trade incentives can serve the same coercive functions as military power.

America’s world turned upside down

Bill Emmott

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2025 was defined by AI exuberance and America First, as technological advances gathered momentum while the Trump administration sought to radically reshape the international order.

A storm rolls in over the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc.

It has been a dark and stormy year, although not in as benign a sense as the much-mocked melodrama by Edward Bulwer-Litton from which this paraphrase of his opening line derives, nor as funny as the Peanuts cartoons that played on it. The year has blended dangerous geopolitical turmoil and extraordinary political destructiveness with a powerful surge of technological development that could presage either prosperity or calamity – or perhaps both.

As such, for this author the year’s principal themes are best evoked not by the purple prose of Victorian gothic fiction but by one famous quotation from an Ancient Greek historian and two famous book titles from past eras.

The Greek historian is Thucydides (who else?) and the quotation his poignant description of the might-is-right era of the Peloponnesian War, nearly 2,500 years ago. That was a time, as he wrote, when some felt that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’.

Why Is the United States Drawn to War? - FPIF

Emanuel Pastreich

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The United States is drawn to war on every front, like a moth to a candle. It does not matter that Americans are sick of foreign wars stretching back 25 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Venezuela, wars that have bankrupted the nation. It has no effect that the United States lacks the economic, technological, and manufacturing capacity necessary to sustain a conventional war. Nor would the United States likely win an unconventional war employing nano-technology, bio-technology, and information warfare.

The critics allowed to appear on TV like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs attribute this war-mongering to the foolishness and the ignorance of political leaders like Donald Trump, or to the incompetence of bureaucrats. They intentionally avoid any analysis of the economic structure of the United States, or the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of policy. Their only explanation for the drive for war is the foolish actions of a “few bad apples.”

U.S. Pledges $2 Billion for U.N. Aid but Tells Agencies to ‘Adapt, Shrink, or Die’

Nick Cumming-Bruce

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The Trump administration said on Monday that it would provide an initial $2 billion next year to fund humanitarian aid coordinated by the United Nations but urged humanitarian agencies to deeply overhaul the way they deliver assistance.

The move will likely keep the United States as the biggest international aid donor in 2026, even as it drastically scales back the level of support traditionally provided by American administrations.

The announcement was a relief for underfunded agencies that provide food, shelter, medicine and other types of aid around the globe, and it was welcomed with cautious optimism by some prominent international humanitarian organizations that have been dismayed by President Trump’s push to slash aid.

For Zelensky, Just Keeping Trump Talking Counts as a Win

Constant Méheut

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A new round of peace talks between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Trump on Sunday seems to have produced little beyond a promise to meet again next month and a reminder of how distant a peace deal remains.

Yet for Mr. Zelensky, even a stalemate in the discussions counts as a measure of success.

Following setbacks in U.S. support for Ukraine this year, one of Mr. Zelensky’s main priorities when meeting Mr. Trump has been to prevent talks from derailing. After the meeting, Mr. Trump signaled that he would remain engaged in the negotiations — a win for Ukraine given his repeated threats to walk away. Mr. Trump also backed away from setting another deadline to reach a peace deal, after having previously floated Thanksgiving and Christmas as target dates.

Russia Threatens to Toughen Its Stance on Ending the War in Ukraine

Neil MacFarquhar and Ivan Nechepurenko

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With talks on ending the Ukraine war making little progress on the toughest issues, Russia issued a dramatic threat on Monday to harden its stance, linking the potential change to what the Kremlin called a failed Ukrainian drone attack overnight targeting a rural residence of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Ukraine immediately denied any such attack, accusing the Kremlin of inventing a pretext to undermine the peace talks being orchestrated by the Trump administration. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who met with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Sunday to discuss a possible deal, called the Russian allegation a “complete fabrication.”

Although both Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky gave an upbeat assessment of their talks, no concrete progress was reported on the two thorniest issues — Russia’s demands that Ukraine cede significant territory in the country’s southeast, and security guarantees that would protect Ukraine against future Russian aggression.

Mr. Trump said that he heard about the alleged attack from Mr. Putin himself during a previously scheduled phone call early Monday to discuss the peace talks. “I was very angry about it,” he told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, though he conceded that he had no independent confirmation that it had occurred.

Assumptions – A Fatal Oversight - Military Strategy Magazine

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There has been a lively discussion in the open press concerning the appropriate strategy for Afghanistan. Stimulated by repeated top level administration reviews (Bush 2008, Obama 2009, proposed Obama Dec 2010) the chattering classes have spilled barrels of ink discussing what an effective strategy might look like. In fact, “Afghanistan strategy” results in over 28 million hits on Google. Yet most commentators – and to be fair, most administration personnel – are not really speaking about strategy but rather about what goals are appropriate for Afghanistan. This means that most of the discussion is simply wasted. A discussion of goals avoids the difficult task of developing a genuine strategy.

Professor Eliot Cohen has provided a thoughtful outline for strategy. He starts with the requirement to make assumptions about the environment and the problem. Once the strategist has stated his assumptions, then he can consider the ends (goals), ways (the how) and means (resources) triangle. This is where most discussion of strategy stops. However, Cohen states an effective strategy must also include prioritization of goals, sequencing of actions (since a state will rarely have sufficient resources to pursue all its goals simultaneously) and finally, a theory of victory (“How does this end?”)

Inside America’s next information war

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Earlier this year, as North Korea began sending more soldiers to Russia to assist in its war against Ukraine, Maggie Feldman-Piltch turned to a group of adult content creators for their help.

The creators had noticed an uptick in subscribers from the DPRK who suddenly had access to a less restrictive internet environment than they were used to back home, including adult content recommended by their Russian counterparts.

Feldman-Piltch requested that the creators do things such as open a refrigerator on camera or casually mention needing to go to a doctor’s appointment while filming.

A short time later, a North Korean soldier was interviewed by Ukrainian media, where he talked about wanting to experience ordinary activities like going to a grocery store and pushing a shopping cart. Several of the creators recognized the soldier’s voice as one of their clients. It was mission success.

A Country and a World Out of Balance

Richard Haass

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On the domestic front, even a short list would include: the longest-ever government shutdown; the national debt surpassing $38 trillion; persistent inflation, along with increased joblessness and inequality amid accelerating, AI-fueled economic growth; growing political violence; efforts to seal the southern border to illegal immigration coupled with mass deportations; the deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles and several other American cities; attacks on universities and on programs meant to promote diversity; the imposition of massive import tariffs; reductions in public-sector employment, including the US Agency for International Development; and considerable defunding of scientific research.

Foreign-policy developments were no less momentous. The United States joined Israel in launching armed attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, setting its weapons program back years. A US diplomatic push did not achieve peace in Gaza, but it did bring about the release of the Israeli hostages and thousands of Palestinian prisoners, and an uneasy, incomplete ceasefire. Another diplomatic push to end the war between Russia and Ukraine has also failed so far to deliver peace but has succeeded in aligning the US with Russia and further distancing it from Europe.

Russia’s Descent Into Tyranny

Nina Khrushcheva

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After February 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his so-called special military operation—a full-scale invasion of Ukraine—the popularity of George Orwell’s 1984, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime built on mass surveillance and constant propaganda, soared in Russia. As Christmas approached that year, one Saint Petersburg bookstore tied together copies of 1984 as a garland above the cash register. Another set up an entrance display of patriotic books—along with a mug depicting Orwell’s face and a caption referencing the novel’s shadowy, supposedly omnipotent leader. “Let Big Brother think that there is tea in this mug,” it read.

The trendy Moscow bookshop Respublika placed Orwell’s works all over the store. In a quiet protest against the Kremlin’s demands to reject all cultural products from “unfriendly countries”—including France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—Respublika continued to sell Ed Sheeran’s new album and the Rolling Stones’ old vinyl. Its bestsellers included American and British authors, along with Russians who had fled the country, such as Boris Akunin and Dmitry Bykov. But in the years since the war began, Akunin and Bykov have been accused of “extremism,” their works added to an official list of 5,000 banned titles. Respublika took those books off the shelves and relocated the not-yet-forbidden Orwell to the second floor, in case a government inspector checked in.

America Needs Economic Warriors

Navin Girishankar

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For the greater part of the last decade, the United States and China have been locked in a cold war, fought as fiercely over economic and technology advantages as over military advantages. In Washington, there has been bipartisan support to respond to China’s dumping of subsidized goods, its acquisition of dual-use technologies, its rampant intellectual property theft, and its coercive practices. As a result, the last three U.S. administrations have deployed a slate of economic security policies to safeguard U.S. markets, supply chains, and assets, and to rebuild the U.S. industrial base to gain the upper hand on Beijing.

The first Trump administration, for instance, levied tariffs on China to rebalance trade and halt discriminatory policies related to technology transfer, IP, and innovation. The Biden administration then dramatically expanded export controls—tools originally designed to prevent weapons proliferation—to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors that are critical to the artificial intelligence race. Upon returning to office in 2025, President Donald Trump has more aggressively used tariffs to reset economic relations with China. All three administrations, meanwhile, embraced industrial policy, with varying approaches to state intervention in markets to promote supply chain resilience: President Joe Biden used subsidies and tax cuts to encourage the reshoring of chipmaking and Trump has taken government equity stakes in a number of companies in strategic sectors, including chipmaking and critical minerals.

​​The Houthi Model – Non-State Actors and Multi-Drone Capabilities

Cole Black

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Since the outbreak of war in Gaza, regional conflict in Yemen has escalated into an international crisis. In November of 2023, the Iran-backed Houthi movement began targeting merchant and naval vessels transiting major trade routes in the Red Sea to apply economic pressure against Israel and its allies’ actions in the Gaza Strip. By exerting control over global supply chains reliant on the shipping chokepoint of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden, the Houthis hope to elevate their regional importance and reinforce their sovereignty. A cornerstone of the Houthi strategy is their “uncrewed aerial vehicle air force,” an arsenal of technologically sophisticated drones imported directly from Iran or assembled from a combination of foreign and domestically manufactured components. Drone strikes – especially the advanced type utilizing multiple drones simultaneously – support the Houthis’ narrative of fighting for independence and national sovereignty against an oppressive coalition of external powers. Branding themselves as technologically sophisticated freedom fighters of the true Yemeni state rejects outside designations (and redesignations) of the Houthis as a terrorist or insurgent group. Drone attacks are central to both the military and propaganda strategy of the Houthis; examining the dimensions of their drone operations, both practical and symbolic, in the context of the “Houthi Model” of state-building, gives greater clarity to the trajectory of multi-drone terrorism in the future for similar groups.

Conflicts to Watch in 2026

Paul B. Stares

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For the past eighteen years, the Center for Preventive Action (CPA) has surveyed American foreign policy experts to assess the risk posed to U.S. national interests by ongoing and emerging sources of armed conflict around the world.

The logic of this exercise is straightforward: U.S. policymakers often find themselves blindsided by conflict-related crises that divert attention and resources away from other priorities and even lead to major military interventions that cost American lives. Those involved frequently lament afterward that officials should have done more to avert or prepare for these crises. Thus, the purpose of the Preventive Priorities Survey (PPS) is not just to alert busy U.S. policymakers to incipient sources of instability over the next twelve months but also to help them decide which are most pressing.

The need for U.S. policymakers to look ahead and actively lessen conflict-related risks grows every year. The world has undeniably become more violent and disorderly. Indeed, the number of armed conflicts is now at its highest since the end of World War II. An increasing proportion of those, moreover, are interstate conflicts, reversing a post–Cold War trend. The United States is uniquely exposed to the growing risk of armed conflict, as no other power has as many allies and security commitments.

America Needs Economic Warriors

Navin Girishankar

For the greater part of the last decade, the United States and China have been locked in a cold war, fought as fiercely over economic and technology advantages as over military advantages. In Washington, there has been bipartisan support to respond to China’s dumping of subsidized goods, its acquisition of dual-use technologies, its rampant intellectual property theft, and its coercive practices. As a result, the last three U.S. administrations have deployed a slate of economic security policies to safeguard U.S. markets, supply chains, and assets, and to rebuild the U.S. industrial base to gain the upper

Buffering The South: Israel’s Multi-Track Strategy In Syria

Scott N. Romaniuk

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Israel’s current role in Syria is best understood as a three-track strategy: creating facts on the ground in the south-west, shaping Syria’s internal balance through selective relationships with minority armed actors (especially Druze networks), and probing for a diplomatic security arrangement that locks in Israeli red lines while avoiding the costs of a long-term occupation.

The main shift during the latter half of December has been the synchronisation of these tracks: ground activity in Quneitra and in and around the UN-patrolled separation area has coincided with renewed attention to covert Druze support and more explicit Israeli public discussion of an ‘agreement’ conditioned on a deep demilitarised belt extending well beyond the 1974 lines.

A Year of Global Protest

Chloe Hadavas

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This year brought hope to skeptics who have doubted young people’s ability to spur political change.

We often hear that Gen Z is disillusioned with democracy and checked out of politics, especially in the West. But following Bangladesh’s 2024 movement—which is widely considered the first successful “Gen Z revolution”—powerful youth-led movements have swept the world, from Africa, to Latin America, to South Asia. Although each movement has its own domestic causes, all have been triggered by deep public anger over a combination of perceived corruption, cost-of-living crises, and widespread economic discontent.

The Cyber Wars That Weren’t

Derek Ray 

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At the onset of the Israel-Iran conflict, news websites warned the public of the possible collateral damage the Israel-Iran fight could generate in cyberspace. The ominous warnings about the hacktivists flocking to both sides of the conflict were remarkably similar to those issued at the onset during the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts. Yet, despite the participants of these conflicts standing as some of the most cyber-capable states in the world, activities in cyberspace failed to translate into a meaningful battlefield effect, drawing into question the military utility of offensive cyber operations. This article analyzes the use of offensive cyber operations across the Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Hamas, and Israel-Iran conflicts and outlines lessons learned for how offensive cyber operations can factor into future conflicts.

Jumping the Gun? Timing Cyber & Kinetic Attacks

The onset of hostilities in all three conflicts included a flurry of cyber activity seemingly in tandem with attacks in the physical domain. Yet, there are meaningful differences regarding the nuanced timing of these cyberattacks that are indicative of two distinctly different offensive cyber strategies.

The Quantum Era Crept Up While You Were Watching AI

Catherine Thorbecke

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Step aside, artificial intelligence. Another transformative technology with the potential to reshape industries and reorder geopolitical power is finally moving out of the lab: quantum.

The United Nations dubbed 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. It’s been marked by a flurry of announcements — and a mountain of hype — around a mind-boggling field of science long dismissed as perpetually a decade away from usefulness. But that’s how people talked about AI, too, before ChatGPT spurred the current global arms race and investor euphoria.

Quantum technology taps the odd mechanics of quantum physics — how particles behave at the atomic level — to create computers, sensors and communications gear that are exponentially more powerful than today’s. Classic computers process information in bits, which can be represented as “0” or “1.” Quantum computers use qubits, which — bear with me for a moment — can exist in a superposition of both states at the same time. That allows them to evaluate a vast number of possibilities at extraordinary speed.