War On The Rocks

<!-- category --> March 19, 2025 In 2016, Greg Poling wrote “The U.S.-Philippine Alliance Is Stronger Than You Think,” where he argued that despite then-President Duterte’s embrace of China and negative posture toward the United…

Are cyber capabilities escalatory? This is one of the most debated and important questions in cyber operations. If cyber capabilities, and more broadly, their use in operations and campaigns, will not meaningfully increase the nature or…

Are cyber capabilities escalatory? This is one of the most debated and important questions in cyber operations. If cyber capabilities, and more broadly, their use in operations and campaigns, will not meaningfully increase the nature or…

In February, Abdullah Öcalan — the long-imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — called on the group to lay down its arms and “dissolve itself” after more than 40 years of fighting Turkish forces. In an initial step, the…

The 2016–2017 Battle of Mosul would have been unrecognizable to Henri Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Unlike the defined front lines in the Battle of Solferino, where Dunant witnessed the suffering of…

Two years ago, we wrote in these pages about the sorry state of Irish defense and security that, we have on good authority, prompted a question on the matter to the then Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar when he visited the Biden White House on…

In 2021, a Starlink satellite and OneWeb spacecraft came dangerously close to colliding in orbit. While both companies’ automated systems detected a potential collision, the incident sparked intense debate about communication and…

<!-- category --> March 13, 2025 Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the…

From the fanfare-laden reopening of Notre-Dame to the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit held in the cavernous halls of the Grand Palais, to last-minute summits of European leaders hastily convened in the gilded chambers of the Elysee,…

<!-- category --> March 12, 2025 In 2022, Yun Sun wrote “China’s Strategic Assessment of Russia: More Complicated Than You Think,” where she argued that the geopolitical alignment of Russia and China was more nuanced than the…