By Robbin Laird and Ken Maxwell For the past several years, Western policymakers have comforted themselves with a story: that economic interdependence with China would eventually civilize the relationship, that trade would do the work diplomacy could not, and that rising Chinese power would express itself the way past rising…
By Robbin Laird A recent CSIS conversation between the Honorable Michael Obadal, Under Secretary of the Army, and the Honorable Ryan McCarthy, former Secretary of the Army moderated by Jerry McGinn of CSIS’s Center for the Study of the Industrial Base offered a candid look at how senior Army leadership…
By Robbin Laird I have never had a career. I want to say that plainly, at the start, because it is the truest thing I know about my own life, and because it took me the better part of four decades to be able to say it without apology. A…
By Robbin Laird A colleague recently recommended that I listen to and read through a CSIS discussion between two senior Army officials, the Honorable Michael Obadal, Under Secretary of the Army, and the Honorable Ryan McCarthy, former Secretary of the Army, moderated by Jerry McGinn of CSIS’s Center for the…
By Robbin Laird As we mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, it is worth pausing on one of history’s more consequential ironies: the survival of the American republic was purchased in no small part by the treasury, the diplomacy, and the officer corps of an absolute monarchy that…
By Robbin Laird A new special report brings together three strands of analysis on the MV-75 Cheyenne into a single argument about the future of trans-Atlantic defense. Over the past several weeks, I have written a series of pieces tracing how the U.S. Army’s MV-75 Cheyenne tiltrotor can help reshape…
By Robbin Laird When visiting Bahrain some years ago, I made a point of seeing the Portuguese fort. Standing inside those ancient walls, looking at the stonework — Arab foundations overlaid with Portuguese military engineering — I was struck by a simple but powerful thought: the strategic logic that drove…
When I worked on German reunification in the 1980s, one of the core concerns was not simply whether the two German states could be brought together institutionally, but whether the deep historical and cultural gap between East and West Germany could be bridged in any meaningful way. The question was…
