By Robbin Laird In the spring of 2020, Murielle Delaporte and I completed our book, The Return of Direct Defense in Europe: Meeting the 21st Century Authoritarian Challenge. The book was built on years of field research across Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and on extensive interviews with German generals,…
By Stephen Kuper Defence Connect 8 May 2026 As the post-World War II rules-based order continues to erode and a more competitive multipolar world emerges, Australia can no longer afford to ask the same questions; we need to start asking radically different ones The end of the Cold War was…
By Robbin Laird A useful analytical distinction has been drawn by Paul Bracken between how alliances are understood in political science and how they function in game theory. In political science, alliances are negotiated documents — formal texts that commit states to one another across a range of contingencies. In…
By Robbin Laird Australia is unlikely to be the public face of Pax Silica, but it may prove to be one of its most consequential enabling powers. The emerging United States-led architecture suggests that the states best positioned to shape the next international order will not be limited to those…
In a recent piece I published on Defense.info, I argued that what changes most profoundly in a genuinely epochal transition is not the answers societies hold, but the questions they consider worth asking. The analyst who clings to the old question-space does not simply get wrong answers. He asks questions…
By Robbin Laird Something has changed in Japanese strategic culture, and the world has been slow to notice. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister, holder of a commanding two-thirds supermajority in the Diet, and a politician who came of age studying American power in Washington, is executing…
By: Alexandra Brooks On May 13, 2025, President Donald Trump stood before Saudi ministers, Gulf investors, and technology executives at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh and delivered what may be remembered as one of the defining foreign policy speeches of the decade. The event was written off…
The Trump administration has moved aggressively to build out America’s strategic and economic partnership with the Philippines. At the center of this effort are two interlocking frameworks: the Luzon Economic Corridor and the Pax Silica initiative. Together, they represent a serious attempt to rewire critical technology supply chains, repositioning the…
