National Security

In mid-May 2022, eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron approached a grocery store in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Buffalo, NY. He opened fire with a Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing ten people. The attack was one of the deadliest racist massacres...

  Despite the attention in Washington currently paid to developments in Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait, terrorism remains a threat to US national security. The recent counterterrorism strike against Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul highlights that the fight against al-Qaeda,...

For Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s longtime leader, last Saturday probably began like any other. The veteran Egyptian jihadist liked to start the day by reading alone on the balcony of his safehouse in the Sherpur neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan. However,...

Introduction On May 2–3 2022, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Syria/Iraq Office and the Foreign Policy Research Institute convened a panel of foreign policy experts for a dialogue on security challenges present in the Eastern Mediterranean. The first day addressed state fragility...

The United States and its allies in the West have been unable to use the threat of military force to coerce Russia into stopping its war in Ukraine. In part, this is because the West is more concerned about...

We are anxiously awaiting the release of a new National Security Strategy (NSS) from the Biden administration, from which more detailed strategies will be crafted that will lay out the challenges and priorities for the U.S. national security establishment....

Beijing is ahead in the race for establishing a global digital currency standard At the Beijing Olympics—in addition to showcasing a 60-foot snowman and an ambitious (if controversial) environmental initiative—China is debuting its newly minted central bank digital currency,...

With the world still reeling from the global COVID-19 pandemic, nearly two years in the making, few know what to expect terrorism trends to look like heading into 2022. However, certain trends from previous years seem likely to continue...

As the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan came to a close, Americans saw Taliban violence increase as the group took over the country. Was removing the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan the correct policy? Did withdrawing from a vulnerable country...

  Executive Summary As the United States seeks to prepare for a potential conflict with a peer-level adversary, the debate around the utility of the aircraft carrier—and its role in such a contingency—once again has resurfaced. Since the carrier’s...