- Back
- Russia and Europe
- Middle East
- China and the Far East
- Latin America
By Ted Nordhaus and Mark Lynas - Nuclear winter, by contrast, would destroy civilization beyond repair within months or years. Yet unlike climate change, which has preoccupied activists for decades, it is largely ignored. Conflicts between nuclear-armed adversaries remind us that no other risk to human societies remotely rivals nuclear warfare. Read More
By Eric Schmidt - Henry had a simple model of geopolitical progress: You try to figure out what the other side wants, understand its motivations and pain points, and then find something that is possible and that it will see as an improvement. He was a fearsome negotiator with an impressive grasp of other countries’ history and an ability to assess their leaders realistically and to think three moves ahead. He viewed American culture as not strategic in this way: We tend to approach adversaries with a list of demands when we should have a conversation about a stable long-term...
By John G. Ferrari | Elaine McCusker | Todd Harrison - The new Pentagon leadership has set itself up to potentially oversee fundamental changes that could dramatically improve military warfighting capabilities for decades to come. In addition to realigning the defense budget, organizational structures, and acquisition policies to support warfighters, key decisions are still pending on how and where America will defend its security and prosperity. Read More
By Mike Gallager - Japan undergirds U.S. power in the Pacific. It has one of the world’s largest economies ...It’s time to take a lesson from Mr. Ohtani and swing for the fences, moving beyond a narrow focus on sectoral trade deficits. America must build new institutions designed to defend both countries from the Chinese Communist Party’s economic aggression, the way our alliance already defends us from Chinese military aggression. Economic aggression has generated China’s trillion-dollar—and growing—trade surplus, backed by suppressed domestic demand, subsidies for strategic industries and intellectual-property theft on a staggering scale. Joining forces with Japan against this...
The Editorial Board - Feb. 15, 2024... the military threat in space is real and growing. Russia and China are working hard to develop space weapons. A Pentagon official told Congress last year that “Russia has fielded several ground-based lasers that can blind satellite sensors and has a wide range of ground-based electronic warfare systems that can counter the Global Positioning System,” satellite communications, radars, and space-enabled weapons guidance. China “has already fielded ground-based counterspace weapons, including electronic warfare systems, directed energy weapons, and direct-ascent (DA) anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles designed to disrupt, damage, and destroy U.S. satellites,” the same Pentagon...
By Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis - Much like the nuclear arms race of the last century, the AI arms race will define this current one. Whoever wins will possess a profound military advantage. Make no mistake, if placed in authoritarian hands, AI dominance will become a tool of conquest Read More
By Mike Pence - As the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Ed was a leading voice of conservatism for more than 50 years. Under his leadership, Heritage became both a center for scholarship and a powerhouse of strategic influence. What concerned him, as always, was the long-term health of the American Republic, and the strength of the institutions that would defend it for generations to come. Ed didn’t just build up institutions; he cultivated a movement that brought ivory tower ideas into the public square and never lost sight of the moral and spiritual foundations of liberty. Read More
By Gerard Baker - But the power of our example would never have been enough without the example of our power. In the absence of sustained military commitments, strategic engagement and repeated sacrifice, there was nothing guaranteed about the victory of our ideas. We need to remember that truth as we survey the world today. Not since the worst days of the Cold War, perhaps not since the 1930s, have we faced such a combination of threats to our freedom and prosperity, to our very existence. A touching faith in the supposed universality of our ideals and the inevitable rightness...
By Walter Russell Meade - Kissinger understood something that too many Americans, on the left and right, find difficult to grasp: Power and morality aren’t opposites. Rather, power is the platform that makes moral action possible for a state. And morality isn’t a set of rules and laws that states are expected to obey. Rather, in international relations, morality involves creating an order that prevents the anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare. Such an order gains legitimacy not by its perfect adherence to a religious or secular moral code, but by its ability to preserve values and conditions that allow...
By John Ellis - Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education...
By Paul A. Gigot - The relevant questions are: How did we get here? And what to do about it? The answer to the first question is that we forgot the lesson of history. One of my military mentors was Andy Marshall, the legendary Pentagon strategist, who liked to say that peace is best understood as an interlude between wars. Robert Gates issued a similar warning as he retired as defense secretary in 2011 when he said that, when wars end, the U.S. always makes the mistake of drawing down defenses and leaving ourselves vulnerable. We ignored him. So what...
By Gary Saul Morson - Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle.... during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured ... and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine.... In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism ...Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any...
By Walter Russell Mead - A war over Taiwan would devastate the economies of both Asia and the globe....the most important international development on President Biden’s watch has been the erosion of America’s deterrence. The war in Ukraine and the escalating chaos and bloodshed across the Middle East demonstrate the human and economic costs when American power and policy no longer hold revisionist powers in check. Washington’s attention is understandably fixed on the threat of a wider Middle East war.... But if the erosion of America’s deterrent power leads China and North Korea to launch wars in the Far East, it...
By Walter Russell Mead - Why are so many actors challenging American power in so many parts of the world? Because the U.S. is losing its power to deter....the erosion of deterrence usually begins gradually and ends suddenly. Emboldened by American failures to respond effectively (as when Mr. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when President Obama failed to enforce his “red line” in Syria, or when China built and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea), our adversaries gradually lost their inhibitions and dared to challenge us more directly in more damaging ways. Read More
By John Walters – By and large, we do not believe that there are individuals with great ruling talent who “thirst and burn” to shatter the existing order for the sake of dominating others ... a fundamentally different type of human being: animals of prey, a profoundly different human type from the rest of us. ...Is Lincoln's warning grounded in a timeless truth?... We need only think of Stalin, Mao, and, of course, Hitler. Can we learn from this terrible history?...Specifically, are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping just such individuals?....they now largely control the levers of power and use that power in a brutal...
By David Satter - The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors....The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history… it …would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization… In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its...
By Bjorn Lomborg - … the global elite has an unhealthy obsession with climate change.... First, it has distracted the Western world from real geopolitical threats. …the United Nations…whose main purpose is ensuring world peace—was focused instead on “climate catastrophe,” ... This at a time when nuclear weapons are posing the biggest risk of literal mutually assured destruction in half a century….Second, the narrow focus on immediate climate objectives undermines future prosperity…the best economic estimates … all show that the total impact of unmitigated climate change—would be ... less than a 4% hit to global GDP by the end of...
By John Bolton - First, Washington and its allies must immediately increase defense budgets to Reagan-era levels relative to gross domestic product and sustain such spending for the foreseeable future. Federal budgets need substantial reductions to eliminate deficits and shrink the national debt, so higher military spending necessitates even greater reductions domestically. So be it. Neither the obese welfare state nor massive income-redistribution schemes protect us from foreign adversaries. Higher levels of economic growth, freed from crushing tax and regulatory burdens, will underlie the necessary military buildup. Read More
By Sadanand Dhume - China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, ,,.Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken. .... Ironically, scientists in communist China need to care less about ideology than their American counterparts. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health requires some prospective researchers to demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” in order to receive funding". Read More
By Hal Brands - To succeed against a rising China, the U.S. must relearn the lessons of containment. Containment yielded an epochal U.S. victory because it was well-suited to long-term rivalry—the very quality that makes it relevant today. Read More
By Matthew Kroenig - Instead of pursuing 1990s-era fantasies about reducing the role of nuclear weapons, Washington needs to understand that, for the first time since the Cold War, it is entering a long-term strategic-arms competition. This time will be even more dangerous because the U.S. now faces multiple nuclear-armed rivals. America needs to strengthen its strategic forces to provide an adequate deterrent for itself and the more than 30 formal treaty allies that rely on U.S. nuclear weapons for their security. America won the last Cold War in part because it outcompeted the Soviet Union in strategic forces. Washington...
By Robert D. Kaplan - Standing in contrast to these misdeeds are the records of three great Republican secretaries of state who shepherded American diplomacy during the middle and late phases of the Cold War: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker III. Their successes were inextricable from their understanding of America as a nation-state, a worldview that put the needs of the U.S. above all else. Read More
By William Schneider Jr. - Beijing is adding warheads, missiles and subs at an alarming rate. The goal is global dominance. The military threat from Beijing is accelerating at a pace few anticipated. Recently released satellite imagery shows that China is rapidly constructing nearly 300 hardened underground silos in its western desert to house intercontinental ballistic missiles. This indicates that the Chinese have dramatically increased their operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads beyond even what was forecast by the Defense Department a year ago. Read More
By Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov - The crux of our argument is simple: Science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster. In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job...
By Gerard Baker - The larger truth is that the people who control America’s leading cultural institutions and now its government have been eagerly manufacturing ideological rope for the Chinese hangman….The intellectual movement to which they subscribe has been the force behind the planned destruction—of the principal pillars of America’s authority in the world: the idea that the greatest nation on the planet was founded on universal ideals of human freedom and dignity. …How can a nation prevail in a global ideological struggle when its leaders believe its values are intrinsically evil? … Read More
By Gerald F. Seib - Yet both the economic vulnerability and geopolitical risk are more acute than that picture makes it appear. A single company in Taiwan, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. , makes almost all of the world’s most sophisticated chips. It is the world’s most important semiconductor company, and its 11th most valuable one. And what if that Taiwanese company becomes a Chinese company? Chinese President Xi Jinping this month repeated his intention to complete “reunification” with Taiwan, and the head of U.S. forces in the Pacific recently warned China could invade Taiwan by 2027 to do exactly that. While other military leaders...
By Bill Gertz - China's large-scale military buildup, regional coercion, and economic aggression are part of plan for global domination, experts told Congress on Thursday. The nuclear and conventional weapons buildup, militarization of islets in the South China Sea and global infrastructure investments aimed at controlling nations are signs Beijing has emerged as America's most significant national security challenge, a panel of specialists told a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "The Chinese Communist Party is engaged in a total, protracted struggle for regional and global supremacy," retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence...
By Seth Cropsey - Roughly concurrent offensive operations in two hemispheres would overstress American and allied resources. Taiwan must become capable of defending itself. But more broadly, the U.S. must begin thinking about its strategic challenges globally, not in regional segments. This is a contest for Eurasia—and thus for the world. Read More
A critical achievement of modern civilization may rest on the fate of these two small countries, in danger of being swallowed by imperial neighbors. Russia wants to absorb Ukraine and rule its people. China wants to absorb Taiwan and rule its people. The two powers isolate and degrade their much smaller neighbors at every turn and invoke stale grievances to justify conquering them outright. They have served notice on the world that they are prepared to make war to impose their will. Frantic countermeasures are under way, focused for the time being on averting an invasion of Ukraine or a...
Over the past two centuries, global life quality has dramatically improved, to a large extent because of an incredible increase in energy, mostly from the harnessing of fossil fuels. That has made agriculture, industry and transportation vastly more productive. Average life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and real income has increased tenfold. We risk all that progress if we just stop using fossil fuels. The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by...