On August 19, the Ukrainian parliament voted overwhelmingly to confirm Ukraine’s new defense minister, ending weeks of uncertainty at a crucial phase of the war. For more than a month, Ukrainians had ...

How many nuclear weapons is enough? The question has haunted policymakers and scholars for 80 years. Early in the Cold War, the United States expanded its nuclear arsenal rapidly in response to the ...

For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has bedeviled U.S. presidents. The 1979 Iran hostage crisis helped doom Jimmy Carter’s reelection bid. The Iran-contra scandal in the mid-1980s badly tarnished ...

When people think about the risks of mixing AI and armed forces, their thoughts often drift to one famous film franchise: the Terminator. Its premise is simple. American scientists invent a ...

The debate about American grand strategy has long been shaped by familiar schools of thought: restraint, liberal internationalism, and primacy. But the intellectual movement that provided the ...

For more than 25 years, Thailand’s conservative establishment and opposition forces have been locked in a struggle for the soul of the country. Royalists want palace institutions insulated from public ...

The Middle East has oil, China has rare-earth elements,” Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared in the early 1990s. This quote has been repeated a lot lately as Beijing has used its near monopoly on ...

The Chinese call these abandoned structures lanwei lou, a phrase that literally means “rotten-tail buildings,” signifying a project gone awry, a plan in suspension. The inhabitants of rotten-tail ...

Over the past decade, there has been a growing consensus that democracies around the world are facing a crisis from within. According to a 2025 Pew survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents in 23 ...

The erosion of those countries’ industrial capacity ultimately weakens their ability to compete with and resist China economically, diplomatically, and militarily. And the United States cannot win a ...

Travelers returning from China often report having seen the future. The country’s advances in frontier commercial technologies are visible in the robots that make and serve food in restaurants; the ...

Africa’s fertility rate is still roughly double that of Latin America and South Asia, and the median age in sub-Saharan Africa today is 19.5 years, compared with 29.0 in South Asia, 34.0 in South ...