By Robbin Laird Trump’s Riyadh speech is seldom recalled for its strategic architecture. Most commentary at the time focused on the rhetorical framing of Islam. But strip away the atmospherics and the speech laid out a division of labor that has proven remarkably durable: Muslim-majority partners would take the lead…
History rarely offers the same strategic irony twice. In 1805, a small detachment of U.S. Marines marched out of Alexandria across the North African desert to put steel on the “shores of Tripoli,” breaking the grip of Barbary pirates who believed they could hold American commerce and citizens hostage at…
By Robbin Laird China’s presence in Djibouti has usually been read through the familiar grammar of bases and bastions, a forward military foothold that extends PLA Navy reach toward the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Djibouti matters less as a…
By Robbin Laird What is the impact of the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran on Russia? With Washington forced to juggle a major confrontation in the Middle East while continuing to support Ukraine, it can appear as though Moscow has successfully shifted the strategic spotlight away from its own aggression in…
By Robbin Laird The destruction of the IRIS Shahid Bagheri by U.S. Central Command strikes removed from the Iranian order of battle one of the most conceptually significant vessels in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy's inventory. The ship was not a blue-water combatant in the conventional sense. It carried…
By Kenneth Maxwell A crisis at the Strait of Hormuz was always coming. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 10, 2026 that Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline and the UAE's smaller Habshan-Fujairah pipeline are now among the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the world economy, the only overland arteries…
By Robert Czulda For Central and Eastern European states (particularly Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland) as well as Northern Europe (notably Finland), the primary and enduring threat remains. Russia, which, despite strategic setbacks, shows no intention of halting the war in Ukraine. The outbreak of conflict against Iran also affects…
By Robbin Laird For most of its history, U.S. Central Command has been an Army officer's domain. Since its founding in 1983, CENTCOM has been led predominantly by Army and Marine generals whose careers were shaped by the grinding land campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. The combatant command that oversaw…
