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 ...

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 ...

For years, international discussion of China’s economic rise has focused on how it has built a manufacturing and export powerhouse and used industrial policy to support such efforts at a continental ...

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 ...

For decades, Beijing has used trade not only as a means to generate economic growth but also as a geopolitical tool to attract investment, strengthen its industrial base, expand its economy, and ...

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 ...

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 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 ...