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 »

The Japanese Prime Minister’s Washington Visit: Converting Gulf Shock into a China Strategy

03/26/2026 By Robbin Laird The week Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi arrived in Washington, the news cycle was fixated elsewhere. Missile trails over the Gulf, images from the Iran war, and oil price charts spiking on every financial screen dominated the coverage. Yet in that same window, the Japanese leader walked into the White House carrying a portfolio of long-term energy and… Read more »

Brazil Between Hegemons: Anti Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the New Asymmetries of Its Foreign Policy

03/25/2026 By Kenneth Maxwell Brazilian foreign policy has long prided itself on a distinct grammar: sovereignty, non‑intervention, dialogue with adversaries, and strategic autonomy rather than bloc alignment. Layered on top of that diplomatic tradition, especially within the Brazilian left, sits a powerful anti‑imperialist political culture that reads world politics primarily through the lens of resistance to hegemonic power, above all that… Read more »

Admiral Brad Cooper: A Kill Web Practitioner

03/23/2026 By Robbin Laird The kill web concept, which Ed Timperlake and I have been developing and writing about for more than a decade, is fundamentally about replacing the linear kill chain with a distributed, interactive combat architecture. Rather than sequencing effects through a fixed hierarchy of platforms, the kill web operates through interlocking nodes, sensors, shooters, decision-makers, and enablers ,… Read more »