Category Archives: Coffee Break

Military dominance is often treated as strategic insurance. Yet history suggests that battlefield superiority can generate domestic political instability when the moral and reputational costs of sustained force penetrate the patron state’s political system. Examining France in Algeria alongside the contemporary U.S.–Israel alliance, this article argues that the decisive variable is not military capacity but legitimation capacity — the ability of a democratic society to sustain political consent under the burdens of prolonged external conflict.

In 1956, Britain’s Suez campaign collapsed not because its forces were defeated, but because sterling could not withstand financial pressure. The episode revealed a structural truth: military capability is subordinate to monetary autonomy. Today the United States is not Britain under Bretton Woods, but it faces expanding global commitments alongside rising debt, elevated interest costs, and industrial constraints. This article examines how financial markets, rather than battlefields, may ultimately define the limits of American power. A single geopolitical shock is manageable. A sequence of them may not be. History may not repeat—but it can rhyme.

The collapse of nuclear arms control is not returning the world to Cold War stability, but pushing it into a more complex and less governable nuclear order. As treaties lapse, latent up-arming capacity, compressed decision times, and multi-actor deterrence dynamics combine to raise systemic risk. This article examines how the erosion of formal limits—rather than malign intent—has made nuclear escalation easier, more opaque, and more dangerous, and why the United States bears central responsibility for dismantling the institutional architecture that once constrained catastrophe.