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geopolitical

On this Memorial Day, American servicemembers remain deployed across the world. Many are in harm’s way. This simple fact makes the day less abstract, more real. Memorial Day is not only about wars filed away in history, but also about lives lost in service to the nation and the obligations those losses place on the living.For those who served in combat, the day is intensely personal. It is a day of names, missions, and memories that never fade away entirely. Three of the fallen return to me every year: Cpl. Andrew J. Kemple, 2nd Lt. Tracy Lynn Alger, and Sgt. The post The Lessons of Sacrifice appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Editor’s note: This is the ninth article in an 11-part series examining how the United States should organize, lead, and integrate economic statecraft into strategy, defense practice, and the broader national security ecosystem. The special series is brought to you by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and War on the Rocks. Prior installments can be found at the War by Other Ledgers page.In September 2010, after a Chinese fishing trawler captain was detained near the Senkaku Islands, Beijing halted rare-earth exports to Japan. The embargo lasted weeks. China showed, on a U.S. treaty ally, how a supply chain could be The post Rebuilding American Manufacturing: A Keystone for Economic Statecraft appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2004, I was a boot (translation: brand new) first lieutenant in 1st Battalion, 7th Marines at a retransmission site in the middle of nowhere, al-Qa’im, Iraq. I heard a sudden explosion and small-arms fire two kilometers away. The battalion radio net burst with chatter, with someone saying there were three casualties: two urgent surgicals (send help quickly!) and one routine (no rush to provide aid). Someone in the operating center asked about the status of the routine casualty, and the radio crackled with the kind of transmission that changes everything. “It’s Whiskey Six, he’s KIA [killed in action].” I The post The U.S. Military Lacks an Ethics Doctrine. Combat Effectiveness Suffers appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2019, the Missouri River flooded at historically high levels and damaged 137 facilities, destroyed 1.2 million square feet of workspace, and flooded 3,000 feet of runway at Offutt Air Force Base. Repairing the installation cost $1.2 billion. The Trump administration and Department of Defense justified $1.2 billion in budget reductions to the U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Defense Department climate programs as cuts to “woke” climate or environmental initiatives, but a singular event caused sufficient damage to erase those savings.The lethality of American presence in the Pacific depends upon the resilience of bases, ports, and The post An Inconvenient Reality: Climate-Preparedness Cuts Are Lethality Cuts appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war. The perspectives gathered here are varied, candid, and often surprising, together forming a more complete picture of Ukraine as it really is.Frontline and StrategyЦензор.НЕТ — The post Understanding the Value of Ukrainian Railways appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

We had been tracking the contact for six hours.The acoustic signature was ambiguous. The geometry was incomplete. The tactical picture had shifted twice in the preceding hour.I ordered battle stations anyway. Not because I was certain, I was not. I ordered it because the decision window was closing. Waiting for certainty was no longer a strategy, it was a risk. That moment — the space between incomplete knowledge and irreversible action — is where submarine command lives. It is where I spent 14 years.Modern militaries have spent decades trying to eliminate that space. Networked sensors, satellite surveillance, and instantaneous communications The post Leading in the Dark: How Submarine Commanders Think Under Uncertainty appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Why are there more antennas on Svalbard than anywhere else on Earth? Svalbard of all places, where cats and childbirth are banned and there are more polar bears than people? This cluster of islands in the Arctic, one thousand kilometers from Norway, is key to everything from your weather forecast to your car’s navigation. At 78 degrees north, Svalbard is the highest-latitude satellite ground station on Earth and is a crucial point in humanity’s growing dependence on space. In fact, the polar regions — the Arctic and Antarctic — are both crucial to space access.The polar regions are the only The post The Road to Space Runs through the Poles appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Is it too late to stop criminals and American adversaries from exploiting AI to conduct cyberattacks or design novel pathogens? Has regulation kept pace with the threat civilian drones pose to critical infrastructure? AI researcher Lennart Heim, Army drone strategist Paul Lushenko, and CEO of Sentinel Bio Claire Qureshi join Jonathan to discuss the trade-offs between protecting the public and letting the private sector forge ahead. The conversation gets into synthetic DNA, the risk of drones at the FIFA World Cup, and whether the U.S. government should get early access to Silicon Valley’s newest large language models.Image: T. T. Paris The post Synthetic Biology, Drones, and AI: The Risks of Dual-Use Technologies appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2025, Nazmelis Zengin wrote, “The Fragility of U.S. Space Power in a Multipolar World,” where she argued Washington’s space superiority could be challenged if the United States doesn’t rethink its course, taking lessons from mid-tier space powers. A year later, we asked Nazmelis to revisit her arguments.Image: NASA Kennedy Space Center/NASA/Chris Swanson via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2025 article, you argued that American space dominance could be challenged if the United States doesn’t alter how it systematically thinks about adaptability, resilience, and co-development, taking lessons from mid-tier space powers. In late 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” The post Washington Shouldn’t Fly Solo on Building Space Superiority appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

The 11th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) concluded on May 22. Held every five years, the conference offers an opportunity to evaluate the treaty’s implementation, respond to technological and geopolitical developments, and reinforce states’ commitment to the treaty. For the third time in a row, the conference failed to reach consensus on a final document.We asked five experts for their perspectives on what the conference achieved — or failed to achieve.Read more below.Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Host of War on the Rocks’ Thinking the Unthinkable PodcastWhile the The post What Did the NPT Review Conference Achieve? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

When news broke that North Korea had revised its constitution, analysts in the West and across the Korean Peninsula rushed to declare it the formal death of Korean reunification as a policy objective. The changes were hard to ignore. Pyongyang stripped all references to a unified Korean nation, codified a territorial clause treating the Republic of Korea as a separate foreign state, vested direct nuclear weapons authority in Kim Jong-un personally, and concentrated near-absolute executive power in the supreme leader alone. On the surface, it looked like the official burial of seven decades of unification ideology.That reading is seductive. It’s The post What Everyone is Missing About North Korea’s Reunification Strategy appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Sea control has changed. In recent years, there has been a quiet revolution in maritime strategy that has seen navies increasingly expected to exert greater levels of control over more of the world’s oceans, more of the time. Whether it is NATO forces protecting critical maritime infrastructure in the Baltic, Pacific Island nations requiring maritime domain awareness to protect against illegal fishing, or Chinese coast guard and maritime militia vessels occupying features in the South China Sea, navies across the globe are confronting major challenges and are being forced to operate in new and novel ways. Behind all of this The post A Sea Control Revolution? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2024, when Jiangsu Delong, the world’s second-largest stainless-steel producer, filed for bankruptcy, several Chinese firms and state-owned enterprises quietly absorbed its Indonesian assets. Among them was China First Heavy Industries, a state-owned enterprise founded in 1954 as one of China’s early Soviet-backed industrial projects. Today, China First Heavy Industries supplies military-grade metals to China’s military, including reactor vessels for nuclear submarines. For a manufacturer embedded deeply in China’s naval industrial base, securing nickel feedstock for specialty steels is crucial.The episode reveals China’s strategy for critical minerals: Incentivizing access to upstream assets for Chinese firms reduces the risk of supply The post Control Without Ownership: How China’s Party-Business Networks Dominate Indonesia’s Mineral Supply Chains appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Rose Gottemoeller joined Ryan in Washington. They discussed how the West might think about relations with Russia once the war with Ukraine ends, as well as nuclear diplomacy and other critical issues. Gottemoeller was the deputy secretary general of NATO and, before that, served as a senior State Department official. She is currently at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and has a new book out called Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and US-Russia Relations after the Cold War (Stanford University Press).Image: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons Image: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons The post What Would Relations with Post-War Russia Look Like? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***IranThere has been increasing chatter that Washington and Tehran are nearing an agreement that might wind down the war launched by the United States and Israel on Feb. 28. The truce that took effect seven weeks ago has been a prickly affair, with occasional fire at Gulf states and tit-for-tats at sea — including in recent days, which have seen U.S. forces strike missile sites and vessels in southern Iran as well as shooting down The post Hollow Deals, Tricky Negotiations, and State Visits appeared first on War on the Rocks .

economic

A pair of children’s shoes is an odd place to look for the changing dynamics of American power. But stick with me because, after the past year, it is one of the clearest places to see them.Long before those shoes reach a store shelf, tariffs have raised the cost of materials, components, and importation. Oil touches nearly everything else: synthetic fabrics, foam, adhesives, packaging, and freight. When both shocks arrive together, companies cut margins, cut orders, cheapen materials, delay investment, and eventually pass the pain on to consumers. Now, multiply that across the economy, and you start to see the The post Glass Jaw? The New Economic Fragility Recasting American Power appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Among some nuclear strategists, military officers, and lawmakers, a belief bordering on the canonical has taken root that the United States is on the short end of a “deterrence gap” with Russia and China. Both countries, and especially Russia, possess theater-range nuclear weapons, whose comparatively small yield is thought to lower the threshold for their use. The relative dearth of these capabilities on the American side, so the thinking goes, denies Washington the ability to answer a limited regional nuclear strike with a comparable response and thus deter such an attack in the first place. Adversaries may therefore see an The post Contriving Imaginary Gaps in Nuclear Deterrence appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

On April 15, technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel published a two-hour interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. For roughly forty minutes, Patel asked one question six different ways. The question was this: If American-made compute trains AI models with the serious cyber-offensive capabilities Anthropic’s Mythos Preview demonstrated — and that compute is sold to a strategic adversary — what responsibility does the seller bear?Huang’s answers hovered a safe distance away from the question. AI is a “five-layer cake,” he told Patel, and ceding any layer to China would be industrial suicide. The Chinese, he argued, already have enough compute to do The post How America Lost Its Most Important Defense Tech Habit appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

What would happen if you woke up one morning and the internet was gone — not from a software glitch, but because someone had simply cut the wire?Threats to critical undersea infrastructure are rapidly escalating. In 2023, the Balticonnector pipeline and several Baltic data cables were damaged. A year later, four Red Sea cables were cut, disrupting a quarter of data traffic between Asia and Europe, with further incidents across the Baltic. In total, between January 2024 and July 2025, roughly 44 incidents of cable damage were recorded. Not all were deliberate, but Russia’s activity has grown brazen. In 2025, The post Deterring Russia Beneath the Waves: Securing NATO’s Critical Undersea Infrastructure appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

One of the most effective counter-drone systems in the largest drone war in history between Ukraine and Russia is a German anti-aircraft gun designed during the Cold War. The Gepard — a self-propelled 35 mm cannon that first entered service in 1976 — has earned recognition from Ukrainian military experts as the most effective weapon against Shahed-type drones, at a cost of a few thousand dollars per engagement. Meanwhile, one of the more novel counter-drone technologies amounts to a sharpened prong mounted on another drone that lances its target mid-flight — a 12th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.Then there is The post Fences Not F-35s: Drone Attacks and the Illogic of Gulf Procurement appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war. The perspectives gathered here are varied, candid, and often surprising, together forming a more complete picture of Ukraine as it really is.Frontline and StrategyГазета— Gazeta The post Building a Better Ukraine Requires Accessibility Reforms appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In late February 2026, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to foreign shipping. What began as a chaotic wartime closure has, in the past few days, hardened into something more consequential: an official sovereign toll regime, codified in Iranian law, and priced in cryptocurrency.On May 18, Iran operationally launched the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a formal state bureaucracy with its own internet domain (pgsa.ir), account on X, and contact email. Since then, Tehran has delineated a “management supervision area” across the strait and announced a transit-permit scheme that converts Hormuz from an international waterway into a vetted toll plaza.Under the The post The Toll Booth at the Throat of World Trade appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

On May 8, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan broke a grueling six-month stalemate by passing a landmark $25 billion defense budget, catching many observers off guard. The vote brought sudden end to an agonizing legislative deadlock that had pushed U.S.-Taiwanese relations to the edge. For months, long-simmering frustration in Washington over Taiwan’s defense trajectory has threatened to boil over, catalyzed by an unprecedented bipartisan open letter from U.S. senators, demanding that Taiwan authorize the pending defense packages. The optics grew even more fraught as Cheng Li-wun, the newly elected chairwoman of the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s largest opposition party, embarked on a controversial “peace” The post Between Beijing and the Budget: The Domestic Realities of Taiwan’s Defense Spending Drama appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

On May 26, India hosted a formal meeting of the foreign ministers of the Quad — comprising the United States, Australia, India, and Japan. Since its initial creation in 2007 and revival in 2017, foreign policy analysts have debated the usefulness of the organization, which was designed as a group of democratic states that could work together to counter growing Chinese power and influence. Under the second Trump administration, some analysts have expressed growing pessimism about the group’s effectiveness, given the president’s apparent lack of interest in attending a meeting with heads of state. Nonetheless, U.S. Secretary of State Marco The post Does the Quad Still Matter? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2023, the NATO Baltic Defense College in Tartu, Estonia devoted its entire annual conference to the Interwar Period (1919 to 1939), a theme repeated at subsequent conferences sponsored by national militaries and academic societies throughout the United States and Europe. Western scholars and foreign policy analysts, provoked by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, seem persuaded that we are living at the close of another interwar era — one in which an egotistical European power shatters a decades-long continental truce, established and upheld by an international rules-based order, by invading a smaller neighbor ostensibly to defend threatened national minorities. A The post The Rain in Spain Falls Harder on Ukraine: Rethinking the Spanish Civil War Analogy appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2024, Michael Swaine wrote, “How to Stop the United States and China from Sliding into War,” where he identified areas that could increase the possibility of an armed conflict between the United States and China. Two years later, after recent talks between President Trump and President Xi, we asked Michael to revisit his arguments.Image: U.S. Department of StateIn your 2024 article, you flagged a rising possibility of major armed conflict between China and the United States. That was before American forces became militarily involved in Iran. Does that involvement change your calculus? And critically — does it deter Beijing, The post Will China and the United States Pursue Strategic Stability? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

When President Donald Trump repeatedly pressed regional leaders on Abraham Accords expansion late last month — framing Arab-Israeli normalization as a debt owed and a condition for a settlement to end the Iran war — he apparently commented there had been silence on the other end of the line.Arab and Muslim states are not silent because they lack a position on normalization. Indeed, collectively they have already articulated one through the Arab Peace Initiative ­— the 2002 proposal that offered normalized relations between Israel and over 50 countries. In exchange, it required Israel to fully withdraw from occupied territories, agree The post Wrong Audience, Wrong Ask: Why Trump’s Abraham Accords Gambit Falls on Deaf Ears appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

The Battle of Midway has assumed a place in American naval lore that has put it on par with other great battles in world naval history. What Salamis was for the Greeks, Trafalgar for the British Royal Navy, and Tsushima for the Japanese, the clash northwest of Midway Island on June 4, 1942, represents for the U.S. Navy. It was a moment of heroism, professional skill, and victory, which came to define how the Navy viewed itself for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.Unlike those other great battles, however, Midway was a decidedly modern naval operation. It involved The post Revisiting The Importance of the Battle of Midway appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

China’s plan to become a world leader in AI by 2030 is a fixture of practically every Congressional briefing and expert commentary on Beijing’s AI ambitions. The plan’s logic — introduced in 2017 — was simple and alarming: Beijing would direct capital, mobilize its firms, recruit talent, and execute with the strategic patience of a state-led innovation ecosystem. Nearly a decade later, that frame has only hardened. Beijing’s recently issued 15th Five-Year Plan directs Party organs to take “extraordinary measures” to strengthen technological self-reliance and launch a new “AI+” initiative to integrate AI across the nation’s strategic sectors. Beijing has The post Forged in a Knife Fight: China’s Brutal Domestic AI Competition appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

When is the risk of war the highest? And what should the United States be doing about it? One of the most important but underappreciated questions in international politics is how states think about the future balance of power. Countries that believe their position is improving often choose patience. Those who fear their position is deteriorating may feel pressure to act before their advantages disappear. In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dean Cheng, Mira Rapp-Hooper, and Amanda Hsiao to explore how Chinese leaders may be thinking about time, power, and Taiwan. This episode is sponsored by Kibu, which ensures you always know The post Is Time on China’s Side? Beijing’s Taiwan Calculus and the Balance of Power appeared first on War on the Rocks .