Analyzing Trump’s Foreign Policy and Its International Implications

When is the risk of war the highest? And what should the United States be doing about it? One of the most important but underappreciated questions in international politics is how states think about the future balance of power. Countries that believe their position is improving often choose patience. Those who fear their position is deteriorating may feel pressure to act before their advantages disappear. In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dean Cheng, Mira Rapp-Hooper, and Amanda Hsiao to explore how Chinese leaders may be thinking about time, power, and Taiwan. This episode is sponsored by Kibu, which ensures you always know

Modern peer combat has blown apart the myth of protected combat medical units. On the battlefields of Ukraine, scores of medical personnel, shielded in theory by both international law and historic norms, now lie dead. To survive in this environment while rescuing others, medics ranging from junior enlisted caregivers to senior physicians need tactical experience under fire. Skipping this training leaves them vulnerable and turns them into a security risk — a losing formula in modern combat.Throughout the past four years, Russia has targeted Ukrainian aid stations, evacuation routes, and trauma teams. These attacks offer a grim triple advantage: killing

The drones hitting Gulf Arab states daily since the United States and Israel launched large-scale military operations against Iran in February are not merely Iranian. They are originally Iranian, yes. But these designs and production processes were improved and refined by Russia through years of battlefield testing against Ukrainian defenses. So, they were returned to Tehran from Moscow. Confronted with a threat that Ukraine has spent four years learning to counter, the United States found itself in unfamiliar territory. It was one of 11 countries requesting Ukrainian counter-drone assistance to defend against Iran’s attacks, despite the American president’s assertion that

The U.S. military is firing million-dollar missiles at Iranian drones that cost a tiny fraction as much — a striking example of the kind of overmatch modern warfare punishes.The Department of Defense’s approach to electromagnetic spectrum policy follows a similar logic, occupying prime mid-band frequencies for vital but relatively low-throughput national security uses — including radars, satellite communications, navigation, and electronic warfare — even as those same bands could generate much larger commercial, allied, and strategic returns.The Pentagon understandably views spectrum through a national security lens, but the current allocation reflects less strategic optimization than a legacy of policy choices

Elites in both China and the U.S. are too easily tempted to buy into their own myths.

The term “affordable mass” entered public defense discourse in 2021 as a munitions concept, which the Air Force adopted in 2023 to describe its effort to field large numbers of lower-cost, semi-autonomous aircraft to complement crewed fighters. The term has since spread in defense reporting, think-tank commentary, service initiatives, and even on War on the Rocks.The Air Force, Army, and Navy are all pursuing low-cost, high-volume buying efforts to augment the force of the “few and exquisite” with the “affordable and plentiful,” and the Pentagon is requesting $54 billion to dramatically expand autonomous drone warfare efforts. The Air Force calls