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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Robbin Laird No strategy to structurally constrain Iran’s military options is complete without the maritime dimension. For decades, Tehran has treated the Strait of Hormuz, the northern Gulf, the Bab al-Mandab, and the Red Sea as chronic pressure points, instruments of coercion against adversaries and leverage over the global…
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…
