The Architecture of Multi-Polar Authoritarianism: How We Got Here and What It Means

04/01/2026 My previous article, “From Post-Cold War Settlement to Contested Global Order”, brought together the arguments of two books, my recently published books on the global war in Ukraine along with my forthcoming book with Kenneth Maxwel examining the Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese dynamic within the broader framework of Global China That article argued that the unipolar moment has ended, that… Read more »

Doubling Down on Missiles: Inside MBDA’s €5 Billion Bet on Europe’s Defense Revival

03/31/2026 By Pierre Tran Paris - MBDA, a European missile maker, will double investment to €5 billion ($5.7 billion) in 2026 to 2030 to boost production, and expects to increase output some 40 percent this year, chief executive Eric Béranger told March 26 a press conference on 2025 financial results. That increase in capital expenditure follows a previous plan to invest… Read more »

Looking Back at Iran’s Military Modernization: How China and Russia Transformed Tehran into a Precision-Strike Power

03/31/2026 By Robbin Laird Iran's military modernization is no longer primarily a story of indigenous ingenuity and sanctions evasion. It is a story of a deepening trilateral alignment in which China supplies the industrial, navigational, and chemical backbone; Russia contributes combat-tested operational doctrine and high-end sensor architecture; and Iran manufactures, deploys, and diffuses the resulting capabilities across a network of proxies… Read more »

What the Past Tells Us About Iran: Arms Transfers, Technology Flows, and the Architecture of a Threat

03/30/2026 By Robbin Laird The campaign against Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the culmination of a strategic trajectory that, if one had been paying close enough attention, was legible for decades. I have been paying that attention through fieldwork, through analytical commissions, and through the kind of practitioner-driven research that rarely makes the… Read more »

Federalism on the Move: How Americans Are Rewriting the Union With Their Feet

03/29/2026 By Robbin Laird The United States was not born as a centralized nation-state. It was improvised as a federation, then repeatedly re-engineered in crisis. From the loose league of the Articles of Confederation to the stronger architecture of the 1787 Constitution, from the Union victory in the Civil War to the centralizing wave of the New Deal and World War… Read more »

Building a Revamped Security Order in the Gulf

03/27/2026 By Robbin Laird The war with Iran has forced a clarity that years of diplomatic hedging obscured. So long as Tehran retains a robust power-projection toolkit and structural leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, it can hold the region and global energy markets at risk, regardless of the outcome of any single campaign. The central question is not how to… Read more »