Not the Russian Empire: Putin Brings Back Soviet Scientific and Technological Decline

09/15/2025
By Robbin Laird My friend and colleague Erik Hoffmann and I worked extensively on analyzing the efforts to change the Soviet system under the pressures of the technological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. This was when Brzezinski published his book on the technotronic age and described the challenges a…

Admiral Nicolas Vaujour Provides a French Navy Perspective on Global Dynamics

09/08/2025
By Pierre Tran Paris - The Chinese navy was large, growing fast, and led by a complex command structure which showed an aggressive approach in operations at sea, the navy chief of staff, Admiral Nicolas Vaujour, told the Association des Journalistes de Défense (AJD) Sept. 3. Meanwhile, the Russian navy…

Putin’s War: How Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Triggered a Scientific Exodus

09/05/2025
When Vladimir Putin launched his "special military operation" against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he envisioned a swift victory that would restore Russia's great power status. Instead, the invasion has triggered one of the most devastating scientific brain drains in modern history, systematically dismantling the mathematics and physics capabilities that…

From Cinematic Battles to Real War: Ukraine’s Journey from Waterloo to Today

08/29/2025
In 1970, the rolling hills and vast plains of Ukraine served as the backdrop for one of cinema's most ambitious war epics. Sergei Bondarchuk's "Waterloo" transformed the Soviet republic into 19th-century Belgium, with thousands of Red Army soldiers marching across Ukrainian soil to recreate Napoleon's final defeat. More than five…

Britain and the IMF Bailout Debate: Economic Crisis or Political Theatre?

08/26/2025
Nearly five decades after Britain's humiliating dash to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout, warnings of history repeating itself are echoing through Westminster and the City of London. A growing chorus of economists, politicians, and financial commentators are drawing stark parallels between today's economic challenges and the crisis that…

The Anarchy of the Moment: Or the Challenge of Chaos Management

08/17/2025
By Robbin Laird World leaders find themselves lurching from crisis to crisis with little time to catch their breath. This reactive scramble has become the defining characteristic of our era or what might be called the "anarchy of the moment." Unlike the grand ideological struggles or systematic breakdowns that marked…

How Australia’s Port Development Threatens Its Nuclear Submarine Future

08/13/2025
Australia's ambitious leap into nuclear submarine warfare through the AUKUS partnership represents one of the most significant strategic pivots in the nation's defense history. But a seemingly unrelated infrastructure project in Western Australia may be inadvertently creating a massive security vulnerability at the very heart of this cornerstone defense initiative.…

The Parallel Resurrections: Trump and Lula’s Unlikely Mirror

08/10/2025
In the turbulent landscape of contemporary global politics, few phenomena are as rare or as psychologically compelling as the successful comeback after political disgrace. Yet our current historical moment has produced one of the most extraordinary coincidences in modern democratic history: two septuagenarian leaders, Donald Trump and Luiz Inácio Lula…