Trump’s New ‘Forced Labor’ Tariffs Are a Fig Leaf

Turned off by U.S. policies and border practices, foreign visitors are going elsewhere.

How a headstrong field biologist helped birth the worldwide conservation movement.

Will America join the long line of countries confronting defeat with self-delusion?

In 2016, Ben Friedman wrote, “The Trump Administration Will be Hawkish,” where he argued that despite Trump’s non-interventionist campaign rhetoric, structural forces, hawkish appointees, and an entrenched foreign policy bureaucracy would push him closer toward conventional military interventionism. Ten years later, we asked Ben to revisit his arguments.Image: Max Goldberg via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2016 article, you argued the Trump administration would adopt a hawkish foreign policy, namely towards Russia, China, and Iran. What can we gather about his foreign policy objectives towards those countries from his first term and the first year of his second term? What factors have

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 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