The Golden Fleet’s Battleship Will Never Sail

Mark F. Cancian

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On December 22, President Trump announced a new class of “battleships” that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion. However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.

Design: The ship’s design will take many years. At the “30,000 to 40,000” tons cited by the president, the ship is much larger than anything the United States has built in the last 80 years, other than aircraft carriers. The truncated DDG-1000 class (only three built) displaced 15,000 tons but still took 11 years from program initiation (2005) to commissioning of the first ship (2016). The battleship will be more than twice as large and more complicated—nuclear-capable with directed-energy weapons. The first ship, USS Defiant (BBG-1), is likely to commission in the early- to mid-2030s, assuming it is built at all.

Ghost Busters: Options for Breaking Russia’s Shadow Fleet

Benjamin Jensen and Jose M. Macias III

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Victory in Ukraine will prove elusive without finding ways to counter Russia’s use of illicit maritime trade to sustain its war economy. That is, Ukraine and its Western backers need to resurrect the idea of commerce raiding and broad-based economic war to bust the ghost fleet and impose costs on Putin’s war machine. In the twenty-first century, states can conduct commerce raiding without ever firing a shot, effectively using open-source intelligence to support diplomacy, lawfare, and sanctions designed to attack a rival state’s economy. By finding ways to aggregate open-source data, the United States can support broader international efforts to restrict Russian illicit maritime trade.

Since sanctions limited oil exports in late 2022, Russia has purchased an illicit fleet estimated to range from 155 tankers and 435 total vessels, when support ships are included, to as high as 591 ships. This shadow fleet—or ghost fleet, as it is colloquially known—transports an estimated 3.7 million barrels per day, representing 65 percent of Russia’s seaborne oil trade, and generates an estimated $87 to $100 billion in revenue per year. To put that in perspective, revenue from this illicit trade network has matched, if not exceeded, the total value of economic and military assistance provided to Ukraine since the start of the war.

The White House Transformed Asia in 2025: Expect Much More in 2026

Joshua Kurlantzick

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In the days following the January 2025 inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, many Asian governments believed Trump’s second term would bring benefits for the region.

The White House promised a tough line against China, which had been menacing other states in regional waters and also pledged to combat Beijing’s supposedly illegal trade actions. Washington had already started discussing tariffs and a more transactional trade approach, but most Asian governments were accustomed to dealing with such transactionalism. In the first Trump administration, Asian leaders like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were among the most effective in dealing with the U.S. president, and many politicians in the region felt ready to handle a second Trump presidency.

What Is the Extent of Sudan’s Humanitarian Crisis?

Mariel Ferragamo and Diana Roy

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Sudan has been engulfed in civil war since fighting erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The violence shattered a short-lived peace that formed on the heels of recent coups and two civil wars, worsening an already precarious humanitarian situation.

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As the war rages on, Sudan is enduring the world’s largest and fastest-growing internal displacement crisis, with several rights groups and the United States describing the violence—particularly in Darfur—as genocide. Most recently, the RSF’s capture of El Fasher, the last major government-held city in Darfur, marked an end to an eighteen-month siege but raised the risk of a de facto partition of the country.

Operation Southern Spear: The U.S. Military Campaign Targeting Venezuela

Diana Roy

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Since early September 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has authorized more than twenty lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea. The strikes are part of an escalating pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, whom U.S. officials accuse of being the leader of a drug cartel that the State Department designated a foreign terrorist organization in November. In recent weeks, Washington significantly increased its air and naval presence in the region as part of Operation Southern Spear, a U.S. military campaign that it says targets drug trafficking in the Caribbean.

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The Trump administration has framed the operation as necessary to curb the flow of drugs from Latin America to the United States, but some experts say the campaign’s scope and intensity go beyond counternarcotics objectives, possibly reflecting a broader effort to force regime change in Venezuela. Meanwhile, heightened U.S. pressure on Venezuela—including a naval blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving the country, which followed expanded sanctions against several Venezuelan oil shipping companies—has raised concerns about escalation toward war and broader regional instability.

What is Operation South

Conflicts to Watch in 2026

Paul B. Stares

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The logic of this exercise is straightforward: U.S. policymakers often find themselves blindsided by conflict-related crises that divert attention and resources away from other priorities and even lead to major military interventions that cost American lives. Those involved frequently lament afterward that officials should have done more to avert or prepare for these crises. Thus, the purpose of the Preventive Priorities Survey (PPS) is not just to alert busy U.S. policymakers to incipient sources of instability over the next twelve months but also to help them decide which are most pressing.

The need for U.S. policymakers to look ahead and actively lessen conflict-related risks grows every year. The world has undeniably become more violent and disorderly. Indeed, the number of armed conflicts is now at its highest since the end of World War II. An increasing proportion of those, moreover, are interstate conflicts, reversing a post–Cold War trend. The United States is uniquely exposed to the growing risk of armed conflict, as no other power has as many allies and security commitments.

Ten Most Significant World Events in 2025

James M. Lindsay

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Anyone hoping that 2025 would provide a break from what was an exhausting 2024 on the world stage came away disappointed. The past twelve months have been a trying time for international cooperation, as the forces of conflict and contention grew stronger and the end of the American led world order more clearly came into view. Unlike 2024, when the pageantry of the Summer Olympics and beauty of the host city Paris reminded everyone of what cooperation and collaboration can accomplish, 2025 provided few instances of inspiration. One can only hope that 2026 will surprise us in a good way. But before we jump to the new year, here are my top ten most significant world events in 2025. You may want to read what follows closely. Many of these stories will continue to make news in 2026. 

Three Shocks that Shook the World in 2025

YANIS VAROUFAKIS

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A new, harder, colder world order was erected on the grave of European ambition in 2025. The year’s enduring lesson is that in an age of existential contests, strategic dependency is the prelude to irrelevance.

ATHENS – This was the year that the remaining pillars of the late-20th-century order were shattered, exposing the hollow core of what passed for a global system. Three blows sufficed.

Gen Z Is Making Politics Hopeful Again

NGAIRE WOODS

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OXFORD – Grim as the final month of 2025 has been – with headlines dominated by mass shootings, crises, and polarization – one positive development offers a glimmer of hope for the coming year. Across the developing world, younger people are demanding jobs, affordable food and fuel, economic opportunity, and action to slow climate change. From South Asia to Latin America, they are presenting political leaders with a stark choice: listen and respond, or step aside and be replaced.

Nepal is a prime example. In September, the government banned 26 major social-media platforms that had been used to expose the lavish lifestyles of politicians’ children, triggering protests over corruption, nepotism, and the lack of opportunities for young people. The 73-year-old prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, then inflamed tensions further by mocking the thousands of teenagers who took to the streets. When security forces fired on crowds, killing at least 19 people and injuring hundreds more, demonstrators set fire to parliament and ransacked Oli’s private residence. He resigned the following day.

Gaza’s New Normal

Daniel Byman

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Gaza has reached a new equilibrium. Unsurprisingly, it is an ugly one. The good news is that the intense fighting is over and humanitarian relief is steadily entering the strip. Since the cease-fire began on October 10, Israel has released almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, and Hamas has returned all living hostages as well as most of the bodies of those killed, in keeping with the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan. Israel has reopened the Kerem Shalom, Kissufim, and Zikim border crossings and promised to allow 600 trucks per day into Gaza, carrying both aid and commercial goods for sale, which it has begun. The Israel Defense Forces has also withdrawn to a “yellow line” that limits its presence to around 53 percent of the strip, although several of the specific boundaries are disputed.

Plans for a more extensive resolution, however, are stalled, and the relations between Hamas and Israel today are characterized by limited but persistent conflict, not progress toward peace. Israel’s policies, Hamas’s refusal to lose more power, and the Trump administration’s poor attention span are likely to foil the peace proposal’s more ambitious plans for Gaza’s rehabilitation. Fundamentally, further progress depends on the creation of an International Stabilization Force to police Gaza, disarm Hamas, and eventually train a new, vetted, non-Hamas Palestinian police force that would assume control over Gaza. The IDF would then withdraw to 40 percent of the strip and eventually to 15 percent, as local security conditions improved. At the same time, a technocratic and apolitical Palestinian government would emerge to govern Gaza, reporting to what U.S. President Donald Trump has called a “Board of Peace,” which would be officially headed by Trump and run on a day-to-day basis by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, is supposed to undertake major reforms while preparing to eventually take on a major role in governing the strip.

The Depopulation Panic

Jennifer D. Sciubba

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In 1980, the economist Julian Simon took to the pages of Social Science Quarterly to place a bet against his intellectual rival, the biologist Paul Ehrlich. The Population Bomb, Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, had argued that the staggering growth of the human species threatened to jeopardize life on Earth. Simon insisted that, contrary to Ehrlich’s predictions, humanity would not self-destruct by overusing the planet’s resources. Instead, Simon believed that humans would innovate their way out of scarcity. Human ingenuity, Simon wrote, was “the ultimate resource.”

Their wager was specifically about the changes in the prices of a suite of commodities over a ten-year period, but it represented much more. The infamous bet was a battle between two larger camps: the catastrophists, who thought that humans were breeding themselves into extinction, and the cornucopians, who believed markets and new technologies would work together to lower prices no matter how big the population became. Ehrlich ultimately lost that bet at a time when global economic conditions favored Simon’s optimistic view of the functioning of markets. Countries also avoided catastrophe as the soaring growth of the world’s population in the twentieth century did not lead to mass famine but to growing prosperity and rising standards of living.

How America and Iran Can Break the Nuclear Deadlock

M. Javad Zarif and Amir Parsa Garmsiri

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The Islamic Republic of Iran serves as a perfect illustration. Over the last two decades, Israel and the United States have tried to persuade the world to stop treating Iran as a normal country and to instead treat it like the international system’s leading danger. The result has been constant denunciations, crushing sanctions, threats of military action, and, most recently, military operations against its territory—carried out during diplomatic negotiations between Tehran and Washington. Iran, in response, has been forced to devote more resources and attention to defense. It also increased uranium enrichment in defiance, to show that it would not be pressured into submission. The external securitization of Iran has fed into a parallel dynamic at home, as the state adopted a stricter approach in dealing with domestic social challenges, responding to these challenges with tighter restrictions.

The result is a securitization cycle: a vicious spiral in which Iran and its adversaries feel compelled to adopt more hostile policies in response to each other’s behavior. This phenomenon is somewhat like the security dilemma, in which one government’s decision to bolster its capabilities prompts others to do the same. But with the security dilemma, each side is reacting to material increases in the other’s capacity. This cycle begins with rhetoric. The target country is portrayed as a threat, and then is treated as a threat. And in response, it turns to activities—such as bolstering its missile capabilities or increasing enrichment—that can be used to corroborate the initial allegation. The cycle, in other words, produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. The securitized country gradually distances itself from independent agency and becomes trapped in a series of reactive behaviors.

Are Japan and South Korea Poised for a Historic Breakthrough?

Ayumi Teraoka

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When the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea last met, in May 2024, observers viewed the meeting with a sense of relief. Japan and South Korea were emerging from one of the darkest periods in their bilateral relationship, when tensions over Japan’s colonial legacy in Korea had become so intense that they derailed traditional areas of cooperation in security and trade. In 2018, leaders in Tokyo reported that a South Korean warship had locked its radar on a Japanese patrol plane, and in 2019 the two countries launched a tit-for-tat escalation, in which Tokyo tightened export controls and Seoul responded.

The Pentagon’s AI Problem Isn’t Algorithms, It’s Evaluation

Benjamin Jensen and Yasir Atalan

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new arms race and the centerpiece of defense modernization efforts across multiple countries, including the United States. Yet, despite the surge in AI investments, both Silicon Valley and the Pentagon struggle to answer one simple question: How can decisionmakers know if AI actually works in the real world?

The standard approach to answer this question is an evaluation practice called benchmarking. Benchmarking is defined as “a particular combination of a dataset or sets of datasets . . . and a metric, conceptualized as representing one or more specific tasks or sets of abilities, picked up by a community of researchers as a shared framework for the comparison of method.” This practice allows the researchers to evaluate and compare AI model performance, for example, how well a large language model (LLM) answers questions about military planning. Yet, proper benchmarking studies are few and far between for national security.

DoD's AI Balancing Act

Sebastian Elbaum and Jonathan Panter

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Exaggerations and unsubstantiated claims pervade debates about the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the government, economy, and society. The hype cuts both ways, with both proponents and opponents of AI adoption making claims that require more evidence and analysis to adjudicate. This battle is particularly salient in the realm of national security, in which the stakes of technological adoption can be life-and-death.

Advances in AI over the last decade—fueled by breakthroughs in deep learning, computing power, and the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI)—promise to transform national security decision-making and the exercise of military power. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recognized this potential early, moving to embrace AI as a critical enabler for future warfare. This early recognition was evident in the Department’s 2014 Third Offset Strategy, and in its launch of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) in 2015.

Corporate AI Is a Threat to Freedom

RICHARD K. SHERWIN

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If AI remains under the control of profit-maximizing firms, liberal democracy could become an illusion. The public urgently needs to understand that freedom depends on defending human agency from incursions by machines designed to shape thinking and feeling in ways that favor corporate, rather than human, flourishing.

NEW YORK – Eight years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that whoever masters AI “will be the ruler of the world.” Since then, investments in the technology have skyrocketed, with US tech giants (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) spending more than $320 billion in 2025 alone.

Why is Türkiye Interested in South Asia?

Akhilesh Pillalamarri

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A painting of the First Battle of Panipat, which was fought between the invading forces of Babur against Ibrahim Khan Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, in Panipat, north India, on April 21, 1526, shows the use of cannons by Babur’s forces.Credit: Wikipedia/Baburnama

The modern nation-state of Türkiye — and its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire — have long been interested in exerting influence on South Asia. Such interest has become evident again after a few decades of occultation. Türkiye has long seen itself as the patron of Muslim interests in the region, and Muslim states in South Asia have sought closer relations with them throughout the ages.

In the past year alone, there have been several suggestions of an enhanced Turkish role in the affairs of the Indian subcontinent. Indian investigators have suggested that a Turkish handler played a role in coordinating Delhi’s November 10, 2025 Red Fort blast. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Türkiye have grown closer, along with Azerbaijan — these countries comprise an informal defense grouping known as the “three brothers.” Moreover, Türkiye supplied military equipment and intelligence to Pakistan during the May 2025 India-Pakistan clashes.

'The Bangladesh Hindu Genocide': Radical Islam in Bangladesh

Uzay Bulut

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It is high time for the Trump Administration officially to designate Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh a Foreign Terrorist Organization and hold Bangladesh's "interim" leader Muhammad Yunus to account.

Under Yunus's interim administration, Bangladesh has suffered a surge in Islamic radicalization and an alarming rise in attacks on minorities, particularly Hindus.

"The recent events in Bangladesh have resulted in radical Islamic fundamentalists launching an all-out attack on minority communities, particularly the Hindus," reported Insight UK. Other outlets have called the attacks "the Bangladesh Hindu Genocide."

The coalition [of Bangladeshis, Americans, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians] also suggested linking Bangladesh's participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions to the cessation of internal ethnic and religious persecution. The memorandum also proposed a comprehensive Minority Protection Act, officially to recognize minorities and indigenous groups.

Why China, a One-Party State, Is Backing Elections in This Country

Sui-Lee Wee

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Sign up for the Tilt newsletter. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, makes sense of the latest political data.

Five years ago, the United States played a pivotal role in Myanmar’s general election. Washington assisted with voter education programs, supporting civil society in the name of strengthening global democracy and countering China’s influence in the region.

It was one of the few truly contested elections in Myanmar, which has largely been ruled by its military since independence from Britain in 1948. Voters delivered a decisive win for the civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but within months the generals again seized power, and Washington downgraded diplomatic ties with the nation.

Now election season has returned in Myanmar, as voters start casting ballots on Sunday. The polls, which will not include many politicians opposed to the junta and will only be held in areas controlled by the military, have been called a sham by the United Nations. But they have a surprising backer — China, a one party state.

For Beijing, Myanmar is a crucial link to the Indian Ocean. China has committed funds worth billions of dollars for infrastructure projects in its smaller neighbor, including highways and a deep seaport. But the coup in 2021 and an ensuing civil war that has wracked Myanmar have threatened those plans.

In a remarkable statement last year, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, called on Myanmar to achieve domestic peace with an end to the fighting and “national governance based on the will of the people

China is building the world’s most powerful hydropower system deep in the Himalayas. It remains shrouded in secrecy

Simone McCarthy, Yong Xiong

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Hundreds of miles from China’s populous coastline, a sharp bend in a remote Himalayan river is set to become the centerpiece of one of the country’s most ambitious – and controversial – infrastructure projects to date.

There, a $168 billion hydropower system is expected to generate more electricity than any other in the world – a vast boon for China as it hurtles toward a future where electric vehicles dominate its highways and power-hungry AI models race to out-compute international rivals.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for the project to be “advanced forcefully, systematically, and effectively” during a rare visit earlier this year to Tibet, a region where Beijing continues to tighten its grip in the name of economic growth and stability.

China: New Quality Combat Forces Underpin Military Modernization

Arran Hope

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New Quality Combat Forces Underpin Military Modernization

Executive Summary:“New quality combat forces,” which refers to the integration of emerging technologies with military capabilities, are increasingly important to Chinese military modernization, according to authoritative policy documents and commentaries in Party media.

The concept is important to the Party’s attempts to design a national system that fuses economic progress and military strength into an overarching “national strategic system and capabilities.”

Technological progress is undermined by ongoing issues within the People’s Liberation Army, such as corruption, political unreliability, and governance issues.

The last few months of 2025 have seen a proliferation of authoritative policy documents and commentaries discussing “new quality combat forces” (新质战斗力), a term that refers to the integration of emerging technologies with military capabilities. These include the Central Committee’s “Recommendations” (建议) for the 15th Five-Year Plan, a commentary on the plan by Central Military Commission (CMC) Vice-Chair Zhang Youxia (张又侠), and other articles in authoritative media penned by military theorists and scholars. These pronouncements provide more detailed insight into what the term means, how it relates to other concepts such as “advanced combat forces” (先进战斗力), and its increasing importance to the Party’s notion of systems confrontation. [1] They also warn against over-indexing on technological development as a marker of military modernization, warning that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still must improve in a number of other areas, such as cultivating personnel who are both technically competent and politically reliable.

Why China Rejects Trump’s ‘G2’

Bryan Burack

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In the coming year, President Donald Trump may meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping up to a half dozen times, an intense period of high-level diplomacy amid unprecedented mutual trade and supply chain warfare with China.

The stage was set by the leaders’ Oct. 2025 summit in Korea, which Trump described as a convening of the “G2,” recalling a discarded diplomatic idea that the U.S. and China stand as peers above other countries and groupings like the G7 and G20, and should partner together to govern the world.

However, China has conspicuously declined to join Trump’s revival of the G2 label, even though Xi has sought to establish such global power-sharing arrangements with the United States in the past.

The Tech Review 2025: China sees breakthroughs in AI and robotics

Guo Meiping

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The year 2025 has been defined by a wave of transformative advances in China's artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics sectors, marking a decisive shift from laboratory research toward deep industrial integration and real-world application.

The year opened with a major shake-up in the foundational AI model landscape. DeepSeek, a company specializing in large language models, released a next-generation model that emphasized stronger reasoning and coding abilities rather than sheer parameter scale, while sharply reducing its application programming interface (API) costs. Widely described as a "game-changer," the move sparked global developer interest in usability and affordability, accelerating the rise of AI-native applications.

Momentum continued with growing public fascination around embodied AI, where intelligence is embedded in physical form. On January 16, humanoid robots developed by Unitree Robotics performed a highly synchronized dance at the China Media Group Spring Festival Gala. Showcasing dynamic balance, precise control, and swarm coordination, the performance reached hundreds of millions of viewers and became a cultural moment that brought advanced robotics into the public imagination.

Trump's second term marks a significant departure from his first term, analysts say

Franco Ordoñez

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From the first days of his second term, it was clear President Trump had an aggressive approach to how he would wield American power abroad. He's used tariffs as a weapon against allies, secured the release of hostages from Gaza, cozied up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and launched a pressure campaign against the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro. NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez has more on Trump's busy year and how he's reshaped U.S. foreign policy.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, the president-elect of the United States, the Honorable Donald John Trump.

FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: On his first days in office, President Trump threatened to take back control of the Panama Canal, seize Greenland and turn Canada into the 51st state - reflections of his fascination with expansionism and foreshadowing his determination to carve up the world between the three major powers.

The Quiet Omani Port Reshaping India’s Regional Strategy

Fatemeh Aman

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Oman’s Duqm port cannot replace India’s dependence on Iran’s Chabahar. But it can help challenge Pakistan in the Indian Ocean.

India’s expanding presence along Oman’s coastline has unfolded without announcements, declarations, or diplomatic spectacle. Indian naval vessels have been making increasingly regular port calls to Oman, framed as routine deployments and professional exchanges rather than strategic statements.

One such long-range training deployment, acknowledged by India’s Ministry of Defence, described Indian Navy ships arriving in Muscat for engagements with the Royal Navy of Oman. The language was deliberately procedural. What matters is not the individual visit, but the accumulation. Naval deployments that once appeared episodic are now predictable, forming a pattern that places Oman firmly within India’s western Indian Ocean operating environment.

This rhythm rests on foundations laid earlier. In 2023, India and Oman signed defense cooperation agreements that expanded military engagement and enabled Indian naval vessels to access Omani ports for logistics and maintenance. At the time, these arrangements were treated as enabling frameworks rather than strategic shifts. What has changed since is not access itself, but normalization. What once required explanation now passes without comment.

How Cash Flights to Kabul Help Iran and the Taliban

Natiq Malikzada

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The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan as the United States withdrew its forces under the Doha Agreement, which was initially billed as a framework for a responsible transition of power in Afghanistan. Under the terms of that deal, the Taliban promised to cut ties with global jihadists like Al-Qaeda, allow space for political pluralism, and participate in a state-building process. Four years on, none of these goals have been met. Apparently vindicated by their victory in Afghanistan’s civil war, the group no longer feels bound by the constraints of the Doha Agreement, and has ruled for the past four years through fear, ethnic division, and brutality against disfavored groups—all while steadfastly keeping ties with the terrorist organizations that prompted America’s intervention in the first place.

Yet all is not well for the insurgents-turned-rulers. Deep rifts inside the Taliban’s leadership, centred on Kandahar, have paralysed the basic decision making system, and the group is more divided than it has ever been. Afghanistan’s governing authorities today do not resemble a government so much as a closed armed faction with a flag, creating a hotspot for chaos that feeds every regional crisis around it—including the one now playing out with Pakistan—and creating an opportunity for countries like Iran to bypass international sanctions.

Latin America’s Revolution of the Right

Brian Winter

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From virtually the moment he and his band of bearded rebels rode into Havana in 1959 until his death from natural causes in 2016, the most iconic leader in Latin America was Fidel Castro. With his trademark military fatigues, slender Cohiba cigars, and marathon speeches vilifying Uncle Sam, Castro captured the imaginations of aspiring revolutionaries and millions of others around the world. Never content to merely govern Cuba, Castro worked tirelessly to export his ideas. His global network of allies and admirers grew over the decades to include leaders as diverse as Salvador Allende in Chile, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

El comandante would roll over in his grave if he learned that, today, the two Latin American figures who come closest to matching his global profile both hail from the ideological right. Javier Milei, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” president of Argentina who has wielded a chainsaw to symbolize his zeal for slashing the size of government, and Nayib Bukele, the bearded millennial leader of El Salvador, have built fervent followings at home and abroad. Instead of the ubiquitous Cuban revolutionary cry, ¡Hasta la victoria, siempre! (“Ever onward to victory!”), Milei’s libertarian catchphrase, ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, damn it!”), is now showing up on T-shirts on some college campuses in the United States and being quoted by politicians as far away as Israel.

The Illiberal International

Nic Cheeseman, Matías Bianchi, and Jennifer Cyr

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During the interwar years, support for revolutionary, anticapitalist parties by the Soviet-led Communist International laid the groundwork for the expansion of communism after World War II. Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S.-led international order promoted liberalism and democracy, albeit unevenly, enabling waves of democratic transitions worldwide. Today, political cooperation across borders is advancing autocracy. The momentum lies with a mix of authoritarian and illiberal governments, antisystem parties—typically but not only on the far right—and sympathetic private actors that are coordinating their messaging and lending each other material support.

What links these actors is not where they sit on the political spectrum, but how they relate to democratic institutions and liberal values, including constraints on executive power, safeguards for civil liberties, and the rule of law. From illiberal leaders within historically democratic states, such as U.S. President Donald Trump, to fully established autocrats, such as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko—often referred to as “Europe’s last dictator”—they share a readiness to personalize power, weaken checks and balances, and deploy disinformation to erode accountability. By hollowing out pluralism and delegitimizing their opponents, these leaders, to varying degrees, roll back political rights and civil liberties. And by pooling resources, amplifying disinformation, and shielding one another diplomatically, they participate in cross-border illiberal networks whose growing capabilities and influence are tilting the global balance in favor of autocracy.

The G20 Agenda Is Shifting from the Global South to America First

Gustavo Romero and Stewart Patrick

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Carnegie’s Global Order and Institutions Program identifies promising new multilateral initiatives and frameworks to realize a more peaceful, prosperous, just, and sustainable world. That mission has never been more important, or more challenging. Geopolitical competition, populist nationalism, economic inequality, technological innovation, and a planetary ecological emergency are testing the rules-based international order and complicating collective responses to shared threats. Our mission is to design global solutions to global problems.Learn More

On December 1, the United States assumed the rotating presidency of the Group of 20 (G20). This transition follows an unprecedented sequence of four consecutive Global South–led chairs (Indonesia, India, Brazil, and South Africa), during which the forum’s agenda, as well as membership, evolved and expanded. It also completed the forum’s first full hosting cycle: Since the G20 was elevated from a modest yearly gathering of finance ministers to leader-level summits in response to the global financial crisis in 2007–2008, every member has chaired it at least once. Now, for the first time since 2009, the G20 presidency returns to the United States.

This transition will not be merely procedural. It represents a substantive and normative shift from a more expansive, inclusive, development-centered G20 toward a narrower, more nationalized vision. President Donald Trump’s administration has already signaled its desire to pursue a back-to-basics agenda, which will sharply curtail much of what has been accomplished over the past four years. Such a shift raises fundamental questions about the G20’s purpose, legitimacy, and effectiveness at a moment when multilateralism itself is increasingly under strain.

How the Russia-Ukraine War Shifted in 2025

Stefan Theil

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Almost four years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting have gained momentum. U.S. President Donald Trump, who once promised to end the war within 24 hours, has been putting intense pressure on Kyiv and its European backers to cut a deal with Moscow—even if it comes at Ukraine’s expense. After halting military aid to Kyiv earlier this year, Washington began advocating for Moscow’s territorial goals last month amid reports of White House plans for lucrative business deals with the Kremlin.

On the battlefield, a gruesome stalemate has set in. The 750-mile front is now so saturated with drones that movement is deadly, and Russia’s snail-paced gains have come at an immense human cost. Meanwhile, Russia has ramped up its nightly attacks on civilian targets while Ukraine is increasingly striking energy and military infrastructure deep inside Russia.

Trump Hands 21st Century to China, Reverses Biden's Ban on Selling Advanced Chips

Gordon G. Chang

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"Rather than grow dependent, China will take Nvidia chips while they are available, use them to train models to compete with American frontier variants and continue to invest heavily in domestic alternatives like Huawei's Ascend chips. When those are good enough, the firms will drop Nvidia—and quickly." — Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, letter to the Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2025.

Alperovitch believes that America's only advantage in the AI race is its advanced chips. Trump, however, is giving the Chinese better chips than they now have.

"During the height of the Cold War, it was unthinkable for the U.S. to sell supercomputers to the Soviet Union, the equivalent of the GPUs today. We've never won technological competitions by arming our competitors—we've prevailed by preserving a clear and enduring advantage." — Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, referring to Graphics Processing Units, the specialized chips at the core of AI infrastructure, letter to the Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2025.

The C.I.A. lost a nuclear

Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles 

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The mission demanded the utmost secrecy.

A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas.

Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down.

Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration.

The art of war is undergoing a technological revolution in Ukraine

Oleg Dunda

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Ukraine is currently at the epicenter of radical changes taking place in the way modern wars are fought. However, much of the world is still busy preparing for the wars of yesterday. European armies are only combat-ready on paper, while the invincibility of the United States military is based largely on past victories.

The current state of affairs is far from unprecedented. In early 1940, Polish officers tried to warn their French counterparts about Nazi Germany’s new blitzkrieg tactics but were ignored. France surrendered soon after. There is still time to adapt to the transformations that are now underway, but the clock is ticking.

One of the key lessons from the war in Ukraine is the evolving role of soldiers. People are now the most expensive, vulnerable, and difficult resource to replace on the battlefield. Meanwhile, many of the core weapons systems that dominated military doctrines in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are becoming less relevant. Tanks, artillery, and other traditional systems are simply too expensive and are unsuited to the challenges created by newer technologies.

Dien Bien Phu: Lessons in Strategic Empathy

Darryl Scarborough

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The 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu demonstrates how failures in strategic empathy and cultural understanding can undermine technological superiority, with lessons that remain vital for modern military and policy leaders. This article analyzes the French defeat and its enduring relevance while offering practical recommendations for adapting strategy to asymmetric threats.

The suicide of French artillery commander Colonel Charles Piroth marked the first casualty of a catastrophic failure in strategic empathy, a blindness to enemy capability that would later doom American operations from the Ia Drang Valley to the mountains of Afghanistan. This article argues that the French defeat was rooted in a refusal to conceive of an adversary capable of mobilizing a bicycle-based logistics engine and employing Chinese operational art to strangle a modern air-land fortress. Dien Bien Phu was the dramatic culmination of a decade of political maneuvering and nationalist aspiration, as Việtnam’s anti-colonial struggle was transformed by Cold War tensions.

Why the EU’s Google Antitrust Case Is Misplaced in the AI Era

Joseph V. Coniglio

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The EU’s latest antitrust investigation against Google misreads competitive AI markets, risks politicized enforcement, and could heighten transatlantic tensions amid intensifying US–China technological rivalry.

There are few real certainties in life. Two of the most famous are death and taxes. Another, less obvious verity is that every five years, the European Union (EU) opens a major antitrust investigation into Google.

In 2010, the European Commission began scrutinizing Google Search for allegedly favoring its own shopping services, an inquiry that produced a €2.42 billion penalty, as well as ultimately an investigation into Google’s search advertising business, which led to the Commission issuing a second €1.49 billion fine. Then, in 2015, the Commission launched yet another antitrust probe, this time targeting Google’s Android agreements. That case yielded a staggering over €4 billion judgment, the largest antitrust fine the Commission has ever imposed. And in 2021—after a brief delay while the Commission was busy separately reviewing Google’s acquisition of Fitbit—the EU commenced an investigation into Google’s ad tech suite, resulting in a €2.95 billion fine issued this past September

What Pax Silica Reveals About India’s Vulnerability in Global Tech Supply Chains

Venni V Krishna

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The launch of a new U.S. alliance called Pax Silica to secure semiconductor manufacturing supply chains for the coming artificial intelligence (AI) era has drawn attention, among other reasons, for its exclusion of India. The initiative came not long after Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, met in Busan, South Korea, to ease tensions between their countries over tariffs and technology controls.

A new phase of techno-geopolitics is unfolding. Trade policies, the resurgence of techno-nationalism and the tightening of export controls — particularly in strategic materials like rare-earth magnets — represent the three defining pillars of the emerging global technology order.

As global trade and technology flows become increasingly securitized and restricted, India faces the urgent task of reducing its technological dependence.

In essence, the Busan truce between Trump and Xi signalled a tactical pause in the U.S.-China contest, during which, as Pax Silica shows, efforts will be made to consolidate supply chains and strengthen technological defenses.

For countries like India, the lessons from this trade war and temporary truce are profound. Strengthening local technological capabilities is no longer optional — it is a prerequisite for maintaining strategic autonomy.

Ukraine’s best hope may lie elsewhere as Russia inches forward on the battlefield

Dan Sabbagh

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Adepleted – but far from defeated Ukraine – looks to 2026 with few good military options, even though a critical €90bn (£79bn) loan from the EU has been agreed. The financing will help Kyiv to continue defending at its current intensity until late 2027, but it will not lead to a transformation of its battlefield prospects.

On land, the pattern of the last two years should, in the first instance, continue. Russia has held the initiative since 2024, but only gaining territory incrementally, largely because it constantly throws people into the “meat grinder” of the frontline. During 2025, Russian advances amounted to 176 sq miles a month to the end of November, but at an estimated cost of 382,000 killed and wounded.

The White House has argued, in the latest run of peace negotiations, that Ukraine is fated to lose the remaining 22% of Donetsk province, including the fortress cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. At the current rate of Russian advance that would take at least a year (and arguably more given the predominately urban environment) and another 400,000 or more Russians killed, disabled, or hurt – a cost Kyiv is willing to try to inflict.

Ukraine deploys low-cost drones to counter Russia’s aerial attacks

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Ukraine is rapidly deploying inexpensive interceptor drones to counter Russia’s sophisticated aerial attacks on its urban centres and energy infrastructure. These homegrown systems intercept high-altitude suicide drones at a fraction of conventional missile costs, revolutionising modern air defence strategies.

Field technicians swiftly assemble equipment, attaching antennas and sensors to light stands and unpacking monitors and controls from protective cases as they prepare these game-changing weapons for immediate deployment.

The Sting with its thermos-like appearance exemplifies Ukraine’s innovative interceptor fleet. According to a unit commander, these systems neutralise Russia’s evolving suicide drones, which now operate faster and at higher altitudes.

“Every destroyed target is something that did not hit our homes, our families, our power plants,” said the officer, known only by the call sign “Loi” in line with Ukrainian military protocol. “The enemy does not sleep, and neither do we.”

Thailand Shows the West Has Already Lost Southeast Asia

Michael Hollister

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It doesn’t begin with tanks. It begins with a fiber-optic cable. With a battery production facility. With a data center in Thailand’s heartland, owned by Chinese interests. While the West talks about “values,” China invests—systematically, irreversibly.

Thailand, long a neutral buffer between competing great powers, is tilting. Not loudly. Not on command. But through infrastructure, through economic logic, through cultural proximity. The country that once served as a bulwark against communism is becoming China’s gateway for trade, logistics, infrastructure, and IT security.

And the West? It’s present—but always a few years too late. Too moralizing. Too slow. Too distant. The United States may still fly joint exercises with Thailand, but China’s influence already runs through the ground, the power grid, the smartphone, the corporate office.

Thailand represents the microcosm of a global shift: a tectonic revolution in Southeast Asia’s center. Anyone seeking to understand why the West has lost influence in the region need only look here.

A Stronger Military Requires a Stronger Economy

Liana Fix

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Before Friedrich Merz won Germany’s parliamentary elections in February of this year, the country faced a money dilemma: Germany’s economic stagnation required significant reform and investment to revitalize industry, and the United States demanded more spending on collective defense. The budgetary dispute over how to simultaneously address these conflicting priorities had led to the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. To avoid the same fate, lawmakers in Merz’s grand coalition, comprising the center-right Christian Democratic Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party, as well as the Greens, agreed to leverage debt to finance its dual obligations. Suddenly, Germany was flush with money.

Seven months in, however, Merz’s government has still been unable to chart a course for economic reform and persuade voters that better days lie ahead. Merz’s bold moves on defense spending have confirmed Germany’s leadership role in Europe but at a cost to his domestic popularity. Merz’s expenditure of significant political capital at international summits to manage U.S. President Donald Trump and defend Ukraine has left him vulnerable to accusations that he is focusing too much on foreign policy and not enough on domestic issues. The right-wing, Russia-friendly Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is channeling economic anxiety to profit in the polls, criticizing Merz’s government for squandering German wealth to build a “war economy.” And although Merz’s efforts on defense have won him praise from the White House, the Trump administration is steadily undermining him by normalizing the AfD and—in the words of the newly released National Security Strategy—other “patriotic European parties.”