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 together constitute a sustained analytical argument about the transformation of the international system.

Individually, each book addresses a discrete set of questions: one concerns the origins, conduct, and consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the other examines how middle powers navigate the expanding reach of Chinese economic power and how that reach is reshaping the global order.

Read together, however, they form a single integrated thesis.

The unipolar moment that followed the Cold War has ended, and the order that is taking its place is neither simply multipolar in the classical sense nor a restoration of Cold War bipolarity.

What is emerging instead is a fractured, coalition-driven system defined by the rivalry between authoritarian and democratic blocs, by the systematic weaponization of economic interdependence, and by the rising significance of middle powers whose choices will determine whether competitive coexistence or deeper confrontation becomes the organizing logic of the twenty-first century.

The first book’s central interpretive move is to refuse the conventional reading of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as an aberration or a product of Vladimir Putin’s personal pathology or an unforeseen rupture in an otherwise stable European order.

Instead, the invasion is treated as the culmination of long-ignored structural tensions that were never resolved after 1990. The dissolution of the Soviet Union left a band of ‘awkward states’, Ukraine and Belarus most prominently, too central to European security to be safely neutral yet never fully integrated into a stable architecture of collective defense or cooperative security.

The failure to settle spheres of influence, to manage Russian grievances about NATO enlargement constructively, or to give substance to frameworks like Partnership for Peace created a strategic vacuum that Moscow eventually filled by force.

In this reading, Putinism is not simply nationalism dressed in imperial garb. It is a fused ideology that combines imperial memory, civilizational rhetoric, and a security doctrine that views a Western-oriented, democratic Ukraine as existentially intolerable, not primarily for military reasons but because a successful Ukrainian democracy would discredit the authoritarian Russian model at its most sensitive border. The 2022 invasion thus becomes the logical terminus of a long structural conflict over European order rather than a sudden personal aberration by a single leader.

The argument does not stop at European borders. The Ukraine war quickly outgrew its regional origins. Asian powers, Middle Eastern suppliers, and Indo-Pacific democracies are drawn into the conflict in ways that transform it from a European territorial dispute into the ‘furnace’ in which the emerging global order is being reforged. The war becomes the defining event not just for European security but for the international system as a whole, the moment when post-Cold War assumptions about liberal internationalism, economic interdependence as a peace mechanism, and American strategic primacy were simultaneously placed under maximum stress.

A central analytical theme across both volumes is the consolidation of a loose but strategically effective authoritarian alignment among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. The cooperation among these states is transactional rather than formally institutionalized: there is no Warsaw Pact, no formal treaty, no shared ideology in any coherent sense. What exists instead is a marketplace of coercion, a set of bilateral and multilateral relationships in which each actor supplies what the others need in exchange for resources, technology, political cover, or market access.

Russia’s battlefield and economic weakness following the invasion creates a structural demand for external lifelines. Munitions, drones, soldiers, finance, and alternative markets flow from China, Iran, and North Korea in exchange for discounted energy, diplomatic support, and technology transfers.

The result is Moscow’s progressive ‘strategic subordination’ to Beijing: currency data, stock-exchange behavior, energy pricing, and investment patterns reveal how rapidly Russia’s financial operating system has pivoted into a yuan-centric orbit effectively controlled by the Chinese party-state. Russia transitions from price-setter to price-taker, from great power to dependent raw-material supplier, a profound geopolitical transformation accomplished not through military conquest but through the quiet mechanics of financial and commercial dependency.

The second book expands this picture into the concept of ‘Global China’: a twenty-first-century informal empire built not through territorial conquest but through finance, infrastructure, ports, technical standards, and digital systems. Belt and Road investments, port acquisitions from Latin America to the Mediterranean, renminbi swap lines, and the quiet advancement of Chinese technical standards in telecommunications and digital infrastructure embody what scholars of British imperial history would recognize as a Gallagher-and-Robinson logic, deep influence without formal rule.

Xi Jinping’s opportunistic use of Trump-era tariffs and subsequent American economic pressure is read as sophisticated statecraft: Beijing presents itself as defender of globalization and multilateral norms precisely as it uses ‘dual circulation,’ Made in China 2025 industrial policy, and global standards work to advance a parallel, China-centric economic order.

The two books thus frame the changing global order as a double movement. Russia’s violent revisionism in Europe anchors one pole of the authoritarian project, dramatic, destructive, and militarily costly, but strategically significant in testing Western resolve and consuming democratic resources. China’s global economic and informational penetration builds the other, more durable pole, patient, cumulative, and far more difficult to counter through any single policy instrument.

Opposing the authoritarian axis is a set of layered democratic coalitions from the formal institutions of NATO and the European Union to looser ‘Coalitions of the Willing’ that increasingly integrate Indo-Pacific democracies into European security and vice versa.

The Ukraine war functions as a catalyst for a European ‘awakening.’ Frontline states, Poland, the Baltic republics, Finland, and Sweden, innovate in defense doctrine and procurement. Germany, after decades of strategic drift enabled by cheap Russian energy and post-Cold War complacency, undertakes a historic reorientation toward infrastructure investment and defense industrial leadership. The United Kingdom and France deepen their bilateral relationship into domains of nuclear stewardship and complex deterrence planning that would have seemed politically inconceivable a decade earlier.

A central and recurring insight across both books is that industrial policy has become grand strategy. The West’s capacity to sustain Ukraine across multiple years of high-intensity warfare, through armaments, ammunition, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, software, and drones, forces a fundamental rethinking of what democratic defense industrial bases must be capable of producing.

The concept of ‘intelligent mass’ emerges as the analytical alternative to ’boutique scarcity’: the West must marry large-scale production capacity to agile software development and networked sensing systems. Ukraine’s own wartime industrial renaissance producing significant proportions of its equipment under fire, transitioning from aid recipient to doctrinal and industrial pioneer provides an unexpected proof of concept for how democracies can relearn the disciplines of scale and resilience when survival demands it.

These coalitions are analyzed not as static institutional arrangements but as adaptive ecosystems that link disparate capabilities into integrated webs of support. SIGINT from Mediterranean bases, maritime patrol aircraft over the Indo-Pacific, commercial synthetic aperture radar satellites, Japanese space assets, South Korean artillery production, and European defense manufacturing are treated as components of a single war-support architecture. That architecture, the analysis argues, is the prototype for future democratic security arrangements across regions and its emergence already erodes the intellectual conceit that economic globalization can be insulated from geopolitical rivalry.

The second book shifts analytical focus from the major power rivalry to the strategic predicament of middle powers, arguing that the character of the emerging order will be decisively shaped by how states like Brazil and Australia manage the fundamental tradeoff between economic interdependence and sovereign strategic autonomy under conditions of intensifying Chinese pressure.

Both countries are deeply economically intertwined with China. Yet their strategic environments, institutional anchors, and political responses diverge sharply in ways that illuminate the choices all middle powers now face.

Brazil operates far from Chinese military power and within BRICS, a multilateral club explicitly positioned as an alternative to Western-led international institutions. Its relationship with China is commodity-heavy: soy, beef, iron ore, and oil constitute the core of the bilateral trade relationship. Increasingly, however, the relationship extends into finance, with significant yuan-denominated trade, currency swap lines, and large-scale Chinese investment in energy infrastructure, electricity grids, and electric vehicle manufacturing. Brazilian multinationals and global financial actors demonstrate that the country is more than a raw-materials appendage of China’s industrial economy.

Yet the tilt of Lula da Silva’s diplomacy, the composition of an expanded BRICS, and the centrality of Chinese capital to Brazilian development finance all raise uncomfortable questions about whether Brazil is drifting perhaps without fully intending to toward the core of a multipolar authoritarian orbit.

Australia presents a sharply contrasting case. Characterized as an ‘information nation’ on the strategic frontline of Chinese power projection, Australia is deeply dependent on Chinese demand for iron ore and other resources yet simultaneously embedded in a dense U.S.-led security system, ANZUS, the Quad, and most consequentially AUKUS, through which Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarine capability. Chinese economic coercion, manifested in targeted tariffs and import restrictions on Australian goods following Canberra’s call for an independent inquiry into COVID-19 origins, tests the hypothesis that trade dependency buys political deference. Canberra’s response, market diversification, tightened investment screening, and deepened alliance commitments, demonstrates the limits of economic leverage against societies with strong internal consensus on security priorities and meaningful access to alternative partners.

In both cases the underlying strategic problem is identical: middle powers must either construct sufficient sovereign capability, in defense, industry, technology, and diplomatic coalition, to maintain genuine room for maneuver or risk sliding into de facto client status. Japan, South Korea, and Poland are presented as examples of middle powers choosing the sovereign path through major rearmament programs and defense-industrial innovation. Brazil’s ambiguous alignment and Australia’s navigated dilemma between economic accommodation and alliance-anchored resistance together map the spectrum of choices available to states that lack major power resources but face great-power pressure.

Running as a continuous thread through both volumes is a broader argument about the tools and constraints that define competition in the emerging order. Economic interdependence, once theorized as the primary mechanism by which globalization would produce peace among major powers, has been systematically converted into an instrument of coercion. Sanctions, export controls, energy leverage, port and submarine cable infrastructure, critical minerals, and semiconductor technology have all become weapons in great-power competition.

The analysis emphasizes the bidirectionality of this dynamic: Western sanctions on Russia represent historically unprecedented economic warfare but have demonstrated only partial effectiveness, while China’s use of trade restrictions as political leverage against Australia produced backlash effects and accelerated the diversification it was designed to prevent.

Simultaneously, gray-zone operations, cyberattacks, information warfare, maritime militia operations, proxy forces, and even the fentanyl trade as a form of societal coercion, become central instruments through which adversaries compete below the threshold of open conflict.

The Ukraine war itself is conducted under the ‘nuclear shadow’ that creates de facto sanctuaries: nuclear deterrence constrains deep strikes into Russian territory by NATO, and conversely into NATO territory by Russia, shaping military doctrines that rely instead on horizontal escalation, economic warfare, and proxy support rather than direct great-power collision. This logic is extrapolated into Indo-Pacific scenarios, particularly concerning Taiwan, where planners must assume geographically and domain-constrained conflict conducted under the deterrent umbrellas of major nuclear arsenals.

The combined effect is a global environment characterized as ‘order within chaos’: multiple overlapping and competing blocs, no clear ideological bipolarity of the Cold War variety, rapid and disruptive technological shifts, and succession risks in hyper-personalized authoritarian systems both Putin’s and Xi’s that could generate discontinuities larger than any of their policies to date. In this environment, prediction is systematically impossible. The serious task for strategy becomes managing uncertainty, preserving optionality, and designing coalitions and capabilities robust enough to function across divergent futures.

Bringing the two analyses together, the changing global order appears as an unfinished struggle among three distinct logics.

An authoritarian revisionist logic, exemplified by Russia’s war of territorial conquest and China’s patient construction of an informal economic empire, treats force, coercion, and controlled interdependence as legitimate instruments for revising borders, norms, and hierarchies of global power.

A democratic adaptive logic, visible in NATO’s industrial reconstitution, the Indo-Pacific alliance architecture, and the operational innovations of states like Ukraine and Poland, seeks to rebuild industrial capacity, innovate operationally under conditions of active conflict, and construct flexible coalitions capable of outperforming rigid authoritarian institutions.

A middle-power sovereignty logic, in which states like Brazil, Australia, India, and others decide through their economic, defense, and diplomatic choices whether the system hardens into rival blocs, remains fragmented and transactional, or moves toward a managed form of competitive coexistence.

Durable triumph for either side is treated as unlikely in a world of nuclear deterrence and deep economic interdependence. What remains as a realistic strategic objective is competitive coexistence: an international arrangement in which democracies accept China and eventually a post-Putin Russia as enduring major powers whose core interests must be accommodated, while insisting on enforceable limits to territorial coercion, clear red lines on revisionism, and sufficient industrial and technological foundations to make those insistences credible rather than aspirational.

Achieving that outcome, however, depends on choices being made now. Sustaining Ukraine to a negotiated outcome that does not simply represent a pause towards a wider war, investing in intelligent mass production rather than boutique defense capabilities priced beyond democratic budgets, constraining vulnerabilities to authoritarian economic leverage through strategic diversification and friend-shoring, and giving middle powers credible democratic alternatives to authoritarian-anchored financial and infrastructure networks, these are the policy imperatives that follow from the analytical framework the two books together develop.

In their totality, these volumes advance a single compound argument. The old unipolar rules-based order, organized around American primacy and the assumption that liberal economic integration would progressively domesticate geopolitical rivalry, has ended as an operative framework.

In its place, a contested and coalition-driven international system is taking shape, one in which the critical independent variables are not only the trajectories of American and Chinese power but the adaptive capacity of democratic alliances, the industrial and technological foundations of credible deterrence, and the sovereign choices of middle powers positioned at the fault lines of Global China and the global war in Ukraine.

The outcome of this emergent contest is genuinely uncertain which is precisely the condition that makes the analytical contributions of both books so timely and consequential.

This article is the second piece in a five part series.

The Global War in Ukraine: An Essay on the Changing Global Order

And forthcoming later this year:

By Robbin Laird

A recent article by Stephen Kuper entitled, “Japan accelerates dual-use technology cooperation and development: Opportunities for allied nation industrial cooperation,” provided a thoughtful opportunity to revisst my early argument shaped in a discussion with David Beaumont on my concept of embedded logistics.

This article draws on both of these articles to take forward a way to look at the way ahead in implementation of such a strategy.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s commanding two-thirds supermajority following Japan’s February 2026 snap election provides the parliamentary leverage to fundamentally recalibrate Japan’s security posture, particularly in dual-use technology integration and defense industrial cooperation.

This transformation arrives at a critical moment when traditional defense logistics approaches have proven inadequate, as starkly illustrated by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and accelerating Indo-Pacific strategic competition.

The convergence of Japan’s enhanced defense mandate with Australia’s evolving force posture requirements creates an unprecedented opportunity to operationalize “embedded logistics”, a framework that moves beyond coordination toward genuine industrial integration among allied nations.

The question is whether we can translate strategic concepts into concrete institutional arrangements that create shared industrial capacity where it’s needed most.

The Enterprise Challenge and Dual-Use Integration

Traditional allied defense cooperation operates through discrete national programs with occasional coordination. Each nation maintains separate supply chains, independent manufacturing facilities, and nationally bounded logistics networks that occasionally intersect through formal agreements. This approach proves increasingly inadequate when confronting adversaries who can exploit seams between allied systems and vulnerabilities of geographically concentrated industrial capacity.

Enterprise-level thinking for contemporary defense logistics demands something fundamentally different: truly integrated networks where allies share not just information, but actual logistics infrastructure, industrial capacity, and operational responsibilities.

Japan’s accelerated focus on dual-use technologies – cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, space capabilities, semiconductors, and advanced sensing and communications – provides concrete foundations for building these integrated networks. The Takaichi government’s commitment to increase defense spending toward 2 percent of GDP by 2027, pursue counterstrike capabilities, expand defense exports, and clarify Self-Defense Forces legal status creates both demand and political space for new industrial cooperation forms.

The critical question becomes how to translate political will and strategic necessity into operational capabilities that serve multiple national interests simultaneously while maintaining security, sovereignty, and operational effectiveness across different national systems.

Operationalizing Integration: The PACT Model and Australian Opportunities

The Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR) has demonstrated exactly how to achieve this integration through its PACT conference program, connecting Japanese dual-use technology companies with U.S. government defense contracting opportunities. The model brings together defense officials, contract requirements writers, industry representatives, and military liaison officers for structured problem-solving rather than traditional networking.

PACT meshes government projects with allied dual-use technology solutions. When the U.S. Marine Corps releases Requests for Information tied to Project Dynamis, PACT participants have already formed cross-border teams, understand operational requirements, and know how to respond effectively. This demonstrates that coalition interoperability extends beyond technical standards to encompass institutional arrangements enabling rapid capability integration.

The embedded logistics framework extends this model beyond procurement to encompass manufacturing, distribution, and surge capacity. Australia’s existing industrial relationships with Northeast Asian partners provide ideal foundations. South Korea’s vehicle manufacturing operations in Australia could serve as starting points for enhanced production capabilities. By having the United States, Japan, and South Korea jointly invest in Australian production facilities for common weapons systems and ammunition, allied nations could create genuinely shared industrial assets enhancing collective capability while strengthening individual national positions.

Japan’s dual-use technology focus creates natural integration points. Cybersecurity requirements across defense, critical infrastructure, and manufacturing create shared needs transcending national boundaries. Artificial intelligence applications in autonomous maritime systems align with Australia’s northern approaches defense requirements and Japan’s maritime domain awareness priorities. Semiconductor and advanced sensing technologies serve both commercial and military applications across all three nations.

Geographic diversification of critical manufacturing capabilities reduces collective vulnerability while providing Australia enhanced industrial capacity. Producing materials closer to potential employment locations rather than shipping across contested ocean distances improves operational efficiency and strategic resilience. Most importantly, embedded logistics creates shared stakes: when allied nations have joint investments in Australian production capabilities, they develop vested interests in Australia’s security that reinforce formal commitments with economic incentives.

The Adaptability Imperative: Ukraine’s Lessons

The Ukrainian conflict has illustrated that modern warfare demands the ability to sustain, adapt, and surge capabilities at unprecedented speed and scale. Ukrainian forces have demonstrated remarkable creativity in employing weapons systems in unintended ways, finding innovative solutions when ideal capabilities were unavailable, and rapidly scaling production under extreme conditions. Adaptability or creatively employing available resources – may prove more valuable than having precisely the right equipment for anticipated scenarios.

Rather than fixating on delivering specific capabilities through lengthy acquisition programs, allied militaries might achieve better results by developing flexible systems and maintaining institutional knowledge to employ them in novel ways when circumstances demand adaptation.

Japan’s emphasis on dual-use technologies directly supports this imperative. Commercial innovations with civilian and military applications create inherent flexibility. Cybersecurity capabilities for critical infrastructure serve military requirements. AI applications for autonomous commercial systems adapt to military autonomous systems. Space capabilities support both civilian and military communications and sensing.

The embedded logistics concept directly supports adaptability by creating diverse, geographically distributed production capabilities that can be rapidly reconfigured to meet changing requirements. Instead of depending on single-source suppliers or geographically concentrated facilities, embedded logistics creates multiple options that can be activated and scaled according to operational needs.

From Concept to Implementation: Institutional and Trilateral Integration

Embedded logistics and Japan’s dual-use technology acceleration require fundamental institutional innovation. Success demands defense organizations develop new capabilities for articulating not just immediate needs but potential future requirements across scenarios, creating mechanisms for expressing demand signals enabling proactive capacity development rather than reactive crisis response.

Australia’s National Support Division creation represents important steps toward institutional arrangements capable of managing complex relationships – sustained strategic partnerships enabling rapid adaptation and surge capacity rather than transactional procurement. However, institutional change requires corresponding cultural shifts and operational practice evolution.

Effective logistics enterprises require improved coordination across government departments traditionally operating independently. Infrastructure investments serving both civilian and defense logistics requirements, emergency management capabilities supporting both disaster response and military logistics – coordinated approaches could achieve multiple objectives more cost-effectively than separate programs while respecting different agency mandates.

Japan’s dual-use technology emphasis inherently demands cross-governmental coordination. Cybersecurity spans defense, critical infrastructure, and commercial sectors. Autonomous systems serve both civilian and military applications. Effective integration requires mechanisms transcending traditional departmental boundaries – and for Australia, coordinating across allied national systems.

The PICHTR-PACT model offers proven mechanisms for industrial-level coordination, but scaling to comprehensive logistics enterprises requires corresponding governmental coordination: standing trilateral working groups, shared planning processes, coordinated investment frameworks enabling rapid decision-making with appropriate oversight.

The economic dimension proves equally critical. Traditional defense cooperation focuses on burden-sharing and cost allocation, but embedded logistics reframes discussions around capability building and economic resilience. Japan’s dual-use investments serve both defense requirements and critical infrastructure protection, military applications and civilian commercial opportunities, defense needs and commercial competitiveness.

For Australia, embedded logistics investments strengthen civilian economic sectors while building defense capabilities, creating jobs and technological expertise serving both military and commercial purposes. Joint investments by Japan, the United States, and South Korea create defense industrial capacity while strengthening Australia’s overall manufacturing base, developing skilled workforces, and creating technological capabilities driving broader economic development.

Japan’s Takaichi government mandate creates specific trilateral cooperation opportunities. The two-thirds supermajority provides parliamentary leverage for defense industrial cooperation with limited obstruction, while explicit dual-use technology focus creates natural integration points with both Australian and American capabilities.

For the United States, Japan’s strengthened posture aligns with Indo-Pacific strategy, particularly in distributed manufacturing. Enhanced dual-use collaboration can expand joint capability development in missile defense, undersea systems, space domain awareness, and AI-enabled intelligence. For Australia, reinforced opportunities exist in autonomous maritime systems, resilient communications, cyber defense, and critical minerals processing – clear crossover opportunities with AUKUS Pillar 2, potentially providing Japanese integration pathways into shared supply chains.

Embedded logistics provides concrete mechanisms for trilateral integration. Rather than three bilateral relationships, it creates genuinely trilateral arrangements where all three nations share interests in Australian-based production capabilities, Japanese dual-use technologies, and American operational requirements.

Conclusion: Seizing the Opportunity

Several specific next steps could translate strategic concepts into concrete programs.

First, expanding the PACT model to explicitly include Australian participants and requirements would create immediate operational connections between Japanese dual-use technologies and Australian capability needs.

Second, identifying specific dual-use technology areas where joint investments in Australian production facilities serve all three nations’ interests would move from frameworks to concrete programs – autonomous maritime systems representing an obvious candidate given Australian geographic requirements, Japanese maritime priorities, and American distributed operations concepts.

Third, developing trilateral coordination mechanisms enabling rapid decision-making with appropriate oversight would create governmental infrastructure required for success. Fourth, pilot programs demonstrating embedded logistics principles would build political support and refine implementation approaches through focused demonstrations showing concrete benefits.

The Ukrainian conflict has demonstrated that adaptability may prove more valuable than preparedness. The ability to rapidly reconfigure logistics networks, repurpose capabilities, and sustain operations across vast distances with uncertain supply lines determines operational success as much as specific capabilities.

Japan’s defense transformation, with explicit dual-use technology focus and enhanced defense industrial cooperation, creates unprecedented opportunities to build this adaptability through allied integration. Embedded logistics provides concrete mechanisms for moving beyond coordination toward genuine enterprise-level cooperation serving multiple national interests simultaneously.

For Australia, these developments offer pathways to enhanced capability that strengthen rather than complicate alliance relationships. By becoming the geographic foundation for embedded logistics infrastructure serving Japanese dual-use technologies and American operational requirements, Australia enhances its own industrial capacity while strengthening collective allied capabilities.

The question is whether bureaucracies accustomed to national approaches and bilateral cooperation can develop institutional agility for genuine trilateral integration. Japan’s strengthened political mandate creates space for innovation, but translating political will into operational capabilities requires sustained effort across multiple governments and organizations.

As global security challenges evolve unpredictably, nations succeeding in creating integrated defense logistics approaches through embedded infrastructure and dual-use technology cooperation may find themselves better positioned not just to respond to immediate threats, but to adapt to challenges not yet emerged. In an era where adaptability may prove more valuable than preparedness, embedded logistics approaches seamlessly integrating allied industrial capacity become essential elements of national security strategy.

The convergence of Japan’s defense transformation, Australia’s evolving requirements, and proven dual-use technology integration models creates conditions for success. The imperative now is implementation – moving from strategic concepts to concrete programs proving themselves through results.

The opportunity is unprecedented; the question is whether we can seize it effectively.

Note: I have discussed at some length Ukraine as a laboratory of war in my new books focused on the global war in Ukraine.

 

By Robbin Laird

Over the course of 2026, I am completing a series of interconnected books that examine what I believe represents a fundamental inflection point in modern history.

These works are not independent scholarly exercises but rather pieces of a larger analytical puzzle, each contributing to our understanding of what I term the Age of Chaos, a period characterized not by the breakdown of order per se, but by the transition from one global system to another, with the final destination far from clear.

The intellectual journey behind these books reflects more than four decades of work in strategic analysis, beginning with my studies under Zbigniew Brzezinski at Columbia University during the Cold War, continuing through the post-Soviet transition, and extending into our current era of profound transformation.

What distinguishes this body of work is its foundation in field research and engagement with military practitioners rather than Washington-based theoretical frameworks.

As General Patton observed, if everyone is thinking alike, someone isn’t thinking. My approach has been to challenge conventional wisdom by listening to those actually implementing change on the ground.

In this article, I want to share the analytical framework that connects these books and explain why I believe we are witnessing not merely a period of heightened tensions or cyclical instability, but a genuine systemic transformation that will define the coming decades.

In this five part series I will lay out my assessment of the evolving global system and the challenge of competitive coexistence which now faces the liberal democracies.

In my 2026 books, I have tried to make sense of a world in which the familiar reference points of the post–Second World War era have eroded without yet being replaced by a stable new order. Rather than assuming that we are living in a rules‑based “global order,” I argue that we are living in a contested global system whose basic organizing principles are up for grabs. The question of what that system will look like a decade from now is wide open, and it is this uncertainty that frames the arguments and case studies across my recent work.​

To get at this problem, I have approached it from several directions: the global war in Ukraine, the evolving role of middle powers such as Australia and Brazil in relation to China, the transformation of Western militaries, the emergence of maritime autonomous systems, the leadership challenge of managing chaos rather than discrete crises, and the lived experience of institutions like the United States Marine Corps and Coast Guard as they try to adapt. Each of my 2026 books picks up one or more of these threads, but they are meant to be read as a connected exploration of the same underlying dynamics.

A central theme in my recent writing is that the “post‑war order” has effectively come to an end, even if many of its institutions and habits of thought remain. The rise of a multi‑polar authoritarian world, the return of large‑scale interstate war in Europe, and the assertive strategies of powers such as China and Russia have shattered the notion that the liberal order could be globalized on Western terms.​

In myco-authored  book on The Australian, Brazilian and Chinese Dynamic: An Inquiry into the Evolving Global Order, we examine this shift through the lens of middle powers navigating what we call “Global China.” Australia and Brazil face very different regional realities, but they share a common challenge: how to secure their national interests and values when major‑power competition is reshaping trade, technology, security partnerships, and the information space. The choices they make illuminate the broader strategic options available to states that are neither hegemons nor passive rule‑takers.

My work on The Global War in Ukraine: An Essay on the Changing Global Order and the companion volume The Global War in Ukraine, 2021–2025 treats the Ukraine conflict not simply as a regional war but as a crucible of this evolving system. Ukraine has become the focal point of a dispersed global contest involving sanctions, energy politics, information operations, armaments production, and alliance cohesion. It is “global” not because armies are fighting on every continent, but because the war’s consequences are being mediated through an interconnected system in which distant actors can shape outcomes without deploying divisions to the front.

Across these studies, I argue that we are no longer in an era defined primarily by discrete crises that can be solved and put behind us. Instead, we face what I call the “age of chaos,” in which overlapping disruptions in security, technology, economics, and domestic politics combine to create persistent turbulence. The very tools we rely upon, digital networks, global supply chains, AI‑enabled systems, both connect and destabilize the system.​

In Mastering Chaos: Shaping a Way Ahead for Chaos Management, I develop this argument in organizational and leadership terms. Traditional crisis management assumes that leaders can isolate a problem, mobilize resources, and then return the system to a previous equilibrium. Chaos management begins from a different premise: that there may be no stable equilibrium to return to, and that leadership is about continuously shaping the environment rather than simply reacting to individual shocks.

This theme is taken further in Mastering Chaos: The Leadership Insights Trilogy, where I explore how leaders at different levels can cultivate the mindset, networks, and institutional flexibility required to operate in this environment. Here I connect strategic analysis with practical lessons from military and civilian organizations that have had to function under conditions of persistent uncertainty. The trilogy is meant as a bridge between my more strictly strategic books and those focused on organizational behavior and personal leadership.

One of the more personal projects in my 2026 portfolio is Listen to Lead: How Empathy and Better Conversations Transform Your Work and Life. At first glance, this might seem far removed from books on Ukraine, maritime autonomous systems, or military transformation, yet it springs from the same diagnosis of our times. In an age of chaos, institutions often default to bureaucratic defensiveness or technocratic language that obscures rather than clarifies what is at stake. Leaders can easily become disconnected from the lived experience of their people and partners.

In this book I argue that the foundational leadership skill is not the ability to dominate the conversation, but the capacity to listen in a way that allows new patterns to be recognized and new coalitions to be formed. Empathy is not sentimentality; it is an operational capability that enables better decisions under uncertainty. The kinds of adaptive organizations I describe in Mastering Chaos cannot function if their leaders treat communication as one‑way messaging rather than as a continuous, probing dialogue.

The link back to strategy is straightforward: states, militaries, and alliances are made up of people whose perceptions, fears, and aspirations shape how they react to systemic change. Whether one is dealing with Pacific allies recalibrating their China policies or Ukrainian commanders improvising under fire, genuine listening is a prerequisite for effective action.​

Another thread running through my 2026 work is a long‑term examination of military transformation. For several decades I have followed how Western militaries, particularly the United States and its close allies, have tried to adapt to new technologies, new operational concepts, and new political constraints. The initial Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) literature of the 1990s promised precision warfare and information dominance, but the wars of the early twenty‑first century exposed both the potential and the limits of those ideas.​

In Lessons in Military Transformation: From the RMA to the Drone Wars, I revisit this trajectory. The book traces how the early focus on network‑centric warfare evolved into today’s struggles to integrate unmanned systems, cyber operations, and space capabilities into coherent force structures and doctrines. I emphasize that transformation is not a linear technical process; it is a contested political and organizational struggle within and among services, governments, and industries.

My book Lessons from the Drone Wars zooms in on one important element of this broader transformation. Unmanned aerial systems have moved from niche tools to central instruments of both state and non‑state actors. Yet I argue that the truly significant change is not the hardware itself but the way drone warfare alters tempo, decision‑making, and the relationship between battlefield and home front. The drone wars also illustrate the diffusion of military power, as capabilities that once belonged only to advanced states become accessible to smaller actors.

While drones are now common in land warfare and in the air, the maritime domain is undergoing its own revolution. For a number of years, I have worked on maritime autonomous systems and what their spread implies for the redesign of naval operations. This is the focus of Lessons from the Drone Wars: Maritime Autonomous Systems and Maritime Operations.

In that book I stress that maritime autonomous systems are not simply “drones at sea.” They operate in a different physical environment, deal with unique sensing and communication challenges, and interact with legal regimes governing territorial waters and exclusive economic zones. As a result, they will reshape concepts of presence, deterrence, and sea control in ways that are distinct from land or air counterparts.​

The integration of these systems requires navies to rethink how they compose task groups, how they manage command and control, and how they balance manned and unmanned platforms. It also requires new approaches to alliances and industrial collaboration, since data sharing and interoperability become central operational questions. This work links back to my broader concern with chaos management: navies must design forces that can absorb and exploit technological change without losing coherence.​

No service better illustrates the challenges and possibilities of transformation in this environment than the United States Marine Corps. Over the past decade I have had the privilege of chronicling the USMC’s efforts to reshape itself for major‑power competition, distributed operations, and contested logistics.​

In Building the Impact Force: Marine Corps Transformation in an Age of Chaos, I describe how the Corps is moving from a crisis‑response posture to one geared toward persistent competition in the so‑called gray zone. Rather than waiting offshore to respond to a discrete emergency, the Marine Corps is experimenting with forward, distributed formations that can shape the battlespace before open conflict breaks out. I use the term “impact force” to capture a conception of the Marines as a catalytic element within a broader kill‑web force structure.

The kill‑web idea stresses cross‑domain integration, linking sensors, shooters, and decision‑makers across services and allies rather than relying on neatly separated service “stovepipes.” In an age of chaos, an impact force must be able to impose uncertainty and friction on adversaries while reinforcing alliance cohesion. The Marine Corps’ experiments with new formations, concepts, and technologies provide a concrete example of how a legacy institution can wrestle with these demands.​

If the Marine Corps illustrates transformation in a combat‑oriented force, the United States Coast Guard shows what adaptation looks like in a multi‑mission maritime security service. In Always Ready, Persistently Underresourced: The Modern United States Coast Guard Story, I examine how the Coast Guard has coped with expanding missions, aging platforms, and chronic funding shortfalls.

The Coast Guard must police fisheries, respond to disasters, interdict narcotics, protect critical infrastructure, and operate alongside the Navy and allied partners in contested waters. Yet it routinely does so with fewer ships, aircraft, and people than its task list would suggest. The phrase “always ready, persistently underresourced” captures the paradox of an organization that is indispensable to national and allied security but often treated as an afterthought in strategic debates.

By looking at the Coast Guard’s experience, we gain insight into the broader problem of how democracies fund and value the institutions that safeguard the maritime commons. It also highlights the human dimension of transformation: sailors and officers working under demanding conditions, improvising solutions, and maintaining professional pride despite structural constraints.​

Several of my books address a theme that has become increasingly urgent as the global system destabilizes: readiness. In Fight Tonight Force: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance, I argue that the traditional metrics and processes by which we assess readiness are inadequate for an age of rapidly shifting threats and technologies.

The phrase “fight tonight” is often associated with forward‑deployed forces in places like the Korean Peninsula, but I use it more broadly as a test of whether our forces can respond effectively under real‑world conditions, not idealized PowerPoint scenarios. Readiness is not only about the number of platforms or units, but about integration, training, logistics resilience, and the ability to adapt under pressure.​

This book ties together insights from Ukraine, Indo‑Pacific exercises, and my work with the Marine Corps and Coast Guard to argue that readiness must be understood as a dynamic property of a force embedded in a complex system. A “fight tonight force” must be able to operate at the speed of relevance, meaning it can sense, decide, and act fast enough to matter in the unfolding situation rather than simply meeting bureaucratic reporting requirements.​

Returning to the international system level, The Australian, Brazilian and Chinese Dynamic explores what it means for middle powers to operate alongside a rising and globalized China. Australia has confronted the strategic consequences of economic dependence on China combined with alliance commitments to the United States. Brazil, in a different hemisphere, faces its own questions about Chinese investment, technology partnerships, and political influence.

By comparing these cases, the book sheds light on the options available to states that cannot dictate the shape of the global system but also refuse to be mere objects of great‑power competition. It also connects back to my leadership and chaos‑management work by underscoring the importance of building adaptive national strategies that combine economic resilience, defense modernization, and diplomatic agility. The choices of middle powers will help determine whether the emerging system tilts toward renewed bloc confrontation, fragmented spheres of influence, or a more pluralistic set of arrangements.

So where does all of this leave us?

Across these books, my conclusion is that we are living through the closing phase of one global system and the contested birth of another.

The end of the post‑war order has produced an age of chaos characterized by multi‑polar authoritarianism, technological disruption, and the erosion of old certainties.

Yet it has also opened space for innovation, in strategy, in organizational design, and in leadership practice.​

The war in Ukraine, the trajectories of Australia and Brazil in relation to China, the transformation of the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard, the spread of drones and maritime autonomous systems, and the struggle to build truly ready forces are not separate stories.

They are different vantage points on the same underlying question: how do democracies and their partners shape a viable way ahead in a system that no longer obeys the rules we grew up with?

In closing, my 2026 books should be read less as definitive answers than as probes into this question.

They invite debate about what kind of global system we are moving toward, how our institutions must change to navigate it, and what forms of leadership, strategic, organizational, and personal, will be needed to master chaos rather than be mastered by it.

My 2026 Books

Global Order and Strategic Transformation

• The Global War in Ukraine: An Essay on the Changing Global Order
• The Global War in Ukraine 2021-2025
• The Australian, Brazilian and Chinese Dynamic: An Inquiry into the Evolving Global Order (co-authored)

Chaos Management and Leadership

• Mastering Chaos: Shaping a Way Ahead for Chaos Management
• Mastering Chaos: The Leadership Insights Trilogy
• Listen to Lead: How Empathy and Better Conversations Transform Your Work and Life

Military Transformation and Operations

• Lessons in Military Transformation: From the RMA to the Drone Wars
• Lessons from the Drone Wars: Maritime Autonomous Systems and Maritime Operations

The Evolution of Australian Defence

• Fight Tonight Force: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance

Marine Corps Transformation

• Building the Impact Force: Marine Corps Transformation in an Age of Chaos

Coast Guard Analysis

• Always Ready, Persistently Underresourced: The Modern United States Coast Guard Story

Competitive Coexistence, the ‘Fight Tonight’ Force and Australia’s Growing Multipolar Predicament

This is the first article in a five part series:

By Robbin Laird

Among the many charges levelled at Donald Trump, that he is impulsive, inconsistent, transactional, hostile to alliances, one rarely examined proposition cuts in a different direction: that across both of his terms in office,

Trump has pursued a strikingly coherent strategic objective.

That objective is the containment and ultimate transformation of Iran, and through Iran, the erosion of Russia’s most consequential partner in its global revisionist project.

When viewed through this lens, the Abraham Accords, the Riyadh speech, the calibrated approach to munitions in Ukraine, and the current campaigns in Iran and Venezuela are not disconnected episodes.

They are chapters in a single long-range strategy.

The Abraham Accords as Anti-Iran Architecture

It has become fashionable to treat the Abraham Accords as a diplomatic vanity project, a set of normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab states that generated headlines without fundamentally altering the region’s security landscape. This reading misses the point entirely. The Accords were, from inception, designed as architecture against Iran.

Washington’s own framing and subsequent analysis make this explicit. The normalization agreements were intended to consolidate a U.S.-aligned regional bloc in which Israel and key Arab partners could cooperate not merely on trade or tourism but on the strategic challenge posed by Tehran’s network of proxies, ballistic missiles, and nuclear ambitions.

The so-called “crown jewel” of this enterprise was always Saudi-Israeli normalization, not because of its bilateral dimensions, but because a deal between Riyadh and Jerusalem would have cemented a coalition spanning the Gulf, the Levant, and North Africa, leaving Iran diplomatically encircled by its own neighbors.

That Hamas, an organization sustained by Iranian money, weapons, and training, understood the stakes is now documented beyond reasonable dispute. A Hamas document recovered in Gaza records Yahya Sinwar arguing that an “extraordinary act” was required to stop Saudi normalization with Israel, precisely because such a deal would open the way for a wider Arab-Israeli realignment that Tehran could not survive strategically. The October 7, 2023 attack was, among its many dimensions, a deliberate strike against the Abraham Accords.

The fact that the architects of that attack were willing to risk a regional war in order to derail a diplomatic process confirms, paradoxically, how seriously Iran’s proxy network took the Accords’ strategic logic.

The Riyadh Speech and the Coalition of the Willing

When Trump returned to office in 2025, his first major foreign policy address was delivered in Riyadh, a choice that was itself a signal. He explicitly identified Iran as the regime that provides terrorists with “safe harbor” and “financial backing,” framing the contest as one between order and disorder, between state-sponsored terrorism and a regional architecture of stability. He called on Muslim-majority states to work together to isolate Tehran.

This was not new rhetoric. It was the articulation of a strategic project.

The Riyadh speech launched or more precisely, relaunched a political effort to mobilize Arab partners not merely against non-state jihadist networks but against the Iranian proxy system itself: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and the Shia militias threading through Iraq and Syria.

By framing the contest in these terms, Trump was constructing the ideological and diplomatic scaffolding for a coalition that would extend the Abraham Accords’ logic from normalization agreements to active strategic alignment.

Crucially, he also cast this regional project in terms that connected directly to the broader Eurasian contest. Iran is not merely a Middle Eastern problem.

It is a key node in what I have described in my work as the “authoritarian axis”, the alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea that defines the strategic environment of the current decade.

Any serious effort to contest Russian revisionism must reckon with Iran’s role in sustaining it: as a sanctions-busting partner, a supplier of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and a spoiler capable of driving energy crises and regional instability to Moscow’s advantage.

Ukraine, Munitions, and the Logic of Strategic Husbandry

Trump’s approach to munitions transfers in Ukraine has generated sustained criticism from those who read it as either indifference to the Ukrainian cause or servility toward Moscow.

Neither reading is persuasive when examined against the broader strategic picture.

The United States faces a genuine munitions constraint. The industrial base has not kept pace with the consumption rates generated by sustained high-intensity warfare in Ukraine, and the stocks of precision-guided munitions, air and missile defense interceptors, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets are finite. A rational approach to this constraint requires choices about where those assets are most critically needed and the answer, in Trump’s strategic calculus, is increasingly the Middle East.

The campaign against Iran demands exactly the categories of capability that Ukraine has consumed in large quantities: long-range precision strike, integrated air and missile defense, and the ISR architecture needed to prosecute a complex, distributed target set. If the United States is to sustain credible military options against Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, as events have demonstrated, to act on them it cannot afford to deplete its precision munitions inventory in a single European theater.

In this sense, the limits placed on certain transfers to Ukraine are not a betrayal of American commitments but a consequence of a strategic reordering of priorities in which the Iranian threat is being treated as the primary near-term military problem.

This logic has been understood, if not always publicly acknowledged, by serious analysts of U.S. force posture.

What it requires is a willingness to view Ukraine and the Middle East not as separate theaters but as components of a single strategic environment in which choices made in one place have direct consequences in the other.

The Current Campaign and the Prospect of Iran 2.0

The military campaign now underway against Iran represents the operational expression of the strategic architecture Trump has been constructing since his first term. It has targeted Iran’s top leadership structures and strategic programs, the nuclear enterprise, the ballistic missile force, and the command networks that direct the proxy system across the region.

The strategic aim, as commentators from multiple analytical traditions have now noted, appears to be something more ambitious than simply setting back Iran’s programs by a few years. The objective seems to be forcing a regime transformation or at minimum, a fundamental reorientation of Iranian foreign policy in which Tehran abandons nuclear weapons ambitions, long-range missile development, and proxy warfare in exchange for sanctions relief and the prospect of reintegration into a regional order shaped by U.S. and partner interests.

This is what some analysts are calling “Islamic Republic 2.0”, a successor regime, or a profoundly reformed version of the current one, that maintains its domestic political character while abandoning the foreign policy instruments that have made it a destabilizing force across the Middle East and a strategic asset for Moscow.

Whether this objective is achievable remains genuinely uncertain. Iran is not a small or brittle state, and the historical record of externally coerced regime transformation is mixed at best. But the ambition itself is coherent, and it connects directly to Trump’s stated goal of completing the “historic transformation of the Middle East” that the Abraham Accords began.

Such an outcome would reorder the regional landscape in ways that directly serve American strategic interests far beyond the Middle East itself.

A post-Khamenei Iran or even a pragmatically constrained Islamic Republic that had abandoned its nuclear program and disengaged from its proxy network would deprive Russia of its most important strategic partner in the region. It would remove the primary engine behind the Houthi threat to Red Sea shipping, the Hezbollah threat to Israel’s northern border, and the militia network that complicates American force posture in Iraq and Syria. It would also, over time, create conditions in which Saudi-Israeli normalization could resume and the Abraham Accords’ logic could reach its intended completion.

Venezuela: The Western Hemisphere Front

The parallel campaign against Venezuela completes the strategic picture by closing what might otherwise remain an exposed flank. Venezuela under Maduro has functioned as a Russian and Iranian outpost in the Western Hemisphere, providing military access, intelligence platforms, sanctions-evasion networks, and the diplomatic footprint of a state nominally beyond Washington’s immediate reach.

Moscow and Tehran have used Venezuela as a node in an integrated ecosystem of arms transfers, energy trading, and illicit finance that sustains both regimes and gives Russia a tool to project pressure toward the United States from below the equator. Striking at this node is not a distraction from the main effort. It is a logical extension of the same strategy that is being pursued in the Middle East.

In the framework I have developed for understanding the Global War in Ukraine, Venezuela represents the Latin American flank of a broader contest in which the United States is rolling back Russian leverage not only in Eastern Europe but across multiple theaters simultaneously.

This is what distinguishes the current strategic moment from the episodic interventionism of earlier decades.

The Trump administration is not simply responding to crises as they arise. It is pursuing a coordinated campaign across connected theaters, aimed at dismantling the authoritarian axis that sustains Russian revisionism, in the Middle East through the Iranian campaign, in the Western Hemisphere through Venezuela, and in Europe through the pressure being applied on Ukraine’s neighbors to accelerate their own defense contributions.

The Global War in Ukraine: A Framework for Understanding

The concept of the Global War in Ukraine which I have developed across my recent analytical work is sometimes misread as an attempt to inflate the significance of a regional conflict. The argument is precisely the opposite.

What has happened in Ukraine since February 2022, and what has been building since at least 2014, is not a regional conflict that the world has chosen to treat as globally significant.

It is a genuinely global contest that has taken one of its most visible forms in Ukraine.

Russia’s war is sustained by Iranian drones and North Korean artillery shells. It is underwritten by Chinese economic support and shielded by Chinese diplomatic cover.

Its strategic logic connects directly to Iranian provocations in the Gulf and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. The authoritarian axis is not a metaphor.

It is an operational reality, and the United States and its allies are contesting it, whether they choose to frame their actions in these terms or not.

Trump’s approach, for all its rhetorical unconventionality, has the virtue of treating this reality with appropriate seriousness. The Abraham Accords were a move against the Iranian pillar of the axis. The Riyadh speech was an attempt to mobilize the regional coalition needed to sustain that move. The calibrated approach to Ukraine munitions reflects a judgment that the Iranian theater is now the most pressing operational priority. And the campaigns in Iran and Venezuela are the operational expression of a strategy that has been in construction, with varying degrees of coherence and consistency, since 2017.

One can dispute the tactics, the sequencing, or the adequacy of the resources being applied. One can argue that the munitions constraint in Ukraine has imposed genuine costs on a democratic partner fighting for its survival. One can question whether the Iranian campaign will achieve its ambitious objectives or whether regime transformation is a realistic goal.

These are legitimate debates, and they deserve serious engagement.

What is harder to sustain is the proposition that there is no strategy here at all, that Trump’s approach to Iran, the Abraham Accords, Ukraine, and now the campaigns in Iran and Venezuela represent nothing more than an assemblage of impulsive decisions driven by personality rather than purpose.

The evidence points in a different direction.

Across eight years and two terms, the strategic through-line has been remarkably consistent: Iran is the central problem in the Middle East, the Abraham Accords are the diplomatic instrument for building a coalition against it, and dismantling the Russian-Iranian axis is the key to resolving not only the Middle Eastern disorder but the broader Eurasian contest that defines the current decade.

That is a strategy. Whether it succeeds is another question entirely but it deserves to be engaged on its own terms.

The Global War in Ukraine: An Essay on the Changing Global Order

The Emergence of the Multi-Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024