realcleardefense.com / .realcleardefense-com

How a Narrow Waterway Became a Financial Weapon On February 3, 2026, Iranian gunboats and a drone closed in on the Stena Imperative, a U.S.-flagged tanker moving through the Strait of Hormuz. They ...

The 2026 NATO summit in Ankara was supposed to be about burden sharing. It may instead become a reckoning over whether the alliance can still arm itself fast enough to fight. After years of slow ...

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, all major parties got it wrong. Ukraine considered a full-scale invasion unlikely and was preparing for an escalation in the eastern ...

Last month, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) adopted its version of the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Under the leadership of Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), the ...

In 2001, when the anthrax attacks hit cities across America, mayors across the nation watched in horror as we all wondered: would our city be next, and if so, are we prepared? It was already an ...

Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times on the day the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was signed, quotes the treaty's own language to make his case. The United States, he argues,

How Soviet and Chinese Intelligence Subverted Western Education -- and What the Results Look Like Executive Summary Between 1996 and the present, the author -- a former Georgian intelligence ...

When we picture intellectual property theft, we picture a break-in. A hacker slips past the firewall, copies the source code, and disappears. So, when an American AI company tells Congress that China ...

The End of a Long-Standing Hostility or a Pause Before Continued Conflict? For more than two decades, the Islamic Republic and the West (Europe and the United States) have been negotiating over ...

The world watched in disbelief as Iran -- battered, sanctioned, and weakened -- disrupted the global economy and frustrated the powerful United States (U.S.) military for months in the Strait of ...