By Robbin Laird The 2025 publications in the Portugal and Brazil Confront the Contemporary World series represent a pivotal consolidation of an ambitious intellectual endeavor, one that repositions Portuguese and Brazilian historical experiences as central rather than peripheral to understanding global modernity. Three substantial volumes appearing this year demonstrate how…
By Robbin Laird If the first strategic challenge is to define the demilitarization objective and the coalition that enforces it, the second is to build the kill web that gives that coalition real deterrent teeth. Deterrence in the post-war Middle East cannot rest on declarations or episodic deployments. It requires…
By Robbin Laird The “Super B‑1B”: Hypersonics, Kill Webs, and the Revival of a Legacy Bomber In earlier work, I argued that hypersonic weapons would only become strategically meaningful when embedded in a wider kill‑web construct what my colleague Ed Timperlake described as the evolution of S‑cubed, where speed, stealth,…
By Robbin Laird Hitchcock’s classic movie, The Birds, offers four core lessons that map almost too neatly onto modern drone swarms. No front lines. In Bodega Bay, danger comes from the sky, not from a defined direction of advance. Likewise, drone swarms turn the battlespace into an enveloping condition rather…
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…
