It is almost a truism that Trump's foreign policy is incoherent. He has started a war with Iran while he coddles Putin, Xi, and Kim. The Wall Street Journal has documented Chinese shipments of components used in Iranian missile and drone production, while Western officials have reported that
Personalist leaders suffer from a recurring vulnerability: isolation. The isolation is not physical, but epistemic. It is a product of fear, mistrust, and hubris. Their ministers fear them, they mistrust their ministers' intentions, and they trust their own judgement above all others. This means that personalist leaders often have
The more I think about AUTOWARCOM, the less convinced I am that it is a good idea. There is an important caveat at the outset. We do not yet know exactly what AUTOWARCOM will look like. Its structure, authorities, relationship with the services, and acquisition responsibilities remain to be determined,
Economic theory begins with scarcity. If a good is scarce relative to the demand for it, people are willing to give up something else to obtain it, whether through money, barter, or some other form of exchange. A price is therefore a signal reflecting both the relative scarcity of a
Concern about AI has become very public and is now reaching a level where there are calls for legislation, but what are the real risks? Overstating these risks can be as damaging to policy as understating them. China and Russia will not slow their AI engineering programs because of Western
The defense primes, companies such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, were shaped in their modern incarnations by the consolidation of the 1990s following the end of the Cold War and the "peace dividend". At the Pentagon's 1993 "Last Supper", senior defense officials
A United States departure from NATO would not end American exposure to European insecurity. It would dissolve the institutional machinery that has contained that insecurity, weaken the credibility of American commitments elsewhere, impose substantial economic costs, and increase the probability that a future European crisis would cross the nuclear threshold.
When Pete Hegseth says “warrior ethos,” it sounds performative, like a character from a badly scripted film trying too hard to be taken seriously. While comical in its earnestness, it is also dangerous rhetoric from a Secretary of Defense (or War, as is his preference), as it betrays a fundamental
Comparative advantage is the economic principle that a country, firm, or individual should specialize in producing the goods or services they can make at the lowest opportunity cost, even if others are absolutely more efficient at producing everything. At the national level, this means countries export the goods for which
We have come to expect strategic incoherence bordering on malfeasance from the Trump administration, but we are entering a period in which four interacting geopolitical risks threaten to upset an increasingly precarious equilibrium. The first is the continuing conflict with Iran, which has given Tehran considerable leverage. Iran is now
Three recent developments illustrate the consequences of declining confidence in the United States as the principal guarantor of the postwar security order. Under President Trump, American credibility has deteriorated as alliances have been treated transactionally, diplomacy has become inconsistent, and the war with Iran has consumed significant stocks of critical
Conservatives have come a long way since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in National Review’s inaugural issue that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” At its