Emerging Middle Eastern alliances are often dismissed as inconsequential because regional states have a long record of weak and fragmented cooperation. This article argues the opposite: it is precisely the fragility of these alliances that makes them dangerous. Ambiguous commitments, existential threat perceptions, and nuclear capabilities combine to magnify escalation risks, even from routine military incidents.
Read more...Nuclear proliferation is no longer driven primarily by rogue ambition or regional instability. It is increasingly a rational response to a global order in which legal restraints on force are eroding and security guarantees appear contingent and unreliable. As military power displaces law as the ultimate arbiter of security, nuclear weapons reassert themselves as the only credible deterrent against coercion—pulling multiple threshold states toward rapid proliferation and dangerous alliance entanglements.
Read more...Over the past two decades, use of U.S. military force has shifted from an exceptional act governed by law and public accountability to a flexible, discretionary instrument of policy. This article examines how post-9/11 legal authorities, institutional convergence, and secrecy have eroded the boundaries between war, intelligence, and governance—producing a system of permanent, unbounded conflict.
Read more...U.S. militarism has not remained confined to foreign battlefields. Over the past two decades, doctrines, technologies, and reflexes developed for war abroad have migrated into domestic governance. Immigration enforcement, protest policing, surveillance, and political investigations increasingly operate through militarized frameworks that treat civic life as a security problem—quietly reshaping democracy without declaring its suspension.
Read more...For more than a century, the Philippines has been afflicted by recurring internal conflict—colonial rebellion, communist insurgency, separatist war, Islamist militancy. This article argues that these episodes are not discrete failures but manifestations of a persistent condition of managed instability, structurally conditioned by the country’s incorporation into U.S. grand strategy beginning in 1898. From counterinsurgency as governance to modern access agreements, the Philippines has been treated less as a sovereign project to be completed than as a strategic position to be held—an approach whose risks are now sharpening under renewed great-power competition.
Read more...Since decolonization, Africa has experienced a succession of wars whose combined death toll likely reaches into the tens of millions—mostly from indirect causes such as displacement, famine, and state collapse rather than combat itself. This article surveys major post-1960 conflicts, argues against monocausal explanations, and examines how persistent misreading of African political dynamics has led to repeated and costly foreign policy failures, particularly by the United States.
Read more...The 2025 National Security Strategy is being read as another Trumpist manifesto, but buried in the text is something far more consequential: Washington’s first formal admission that Full Spectrum Dominance is dead. The NSS concedes that the US can no longer fund the military, industrial, and diplomatic machinery required for unipolar primacy, and quietly writes the obituary for the post–Cold War order it was supposed to sustain.
Read more...DARPA once defined the frontier of U.S. technological power, developing the foundations of stealth, networking, and precision-guided warfare. Today its most capable prototypes routinely die in the “valley of death,” casualties of political caution, industrial consolidation, and perverse incentives that punish programs for succeeding. This article examines how DARPA went from the nation’s most creative engine of capability to an agency whose breakthroughs are celebrated but rarely fielded—and what this reveals about America’s broader institutional decline.
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