The world is in flux. As this issue goes to production, the Trump administration’s tariff policies have profoundly disrupted global economic order, and the US and China may be moving closer to a true Cold War, in which trade frictions could spill over to other domains and bilateral diplomatic communication between Washington and Beijing is mostly deadlocked. The United States’ role in international order is being disrupted, questioned, or potentially withdrawn along almost every dimension of American power—from trade and economic engagement, to the security guarantees that have underwritten regional and global security for decades, to the use of diplomacy and development as tools of American statecraft as well as propellants of global health, human freedom, and prosperity. Countries around the world are watching, drawing their own conclusions, and formulating strategies accordingly.
A similar moment of reckoning is underway in higher education. In its first one hundred days, the new US administration has launched unprecedented efforts to withdraw federal funding from major research universities and placed others under investigation; announced the cancellation of federal grants through institutions like the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative; closed the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon; and shut down ostensibly congressionally chartered research centers, including the United States Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center (the latter a vaunted site of Cold War documentation and scholarship). Meanwhile, America’s ability to tap the world’s best talent and project soft power through global educational and scientific leadership will depend, at least in part, on an immigration policy that has sent shock waves through communities of international students and their families around the world. Many of these actions face court challenges and other pushback, so their exact impact remains to be seen.
One does not have to take any particular position on the administration’s criticisms or the steps it has taken on the basis of those criticisms, to recognize that how higher education meets the current crisis of political—and to some extent public—confidence will shape American innovation, education, and global soft power for generations.
Each of us at the Texas National Security Review holds our own convictions about what is happening in American national security policy, statecraft, and higher education. We recognize that many of our readers do as well, and that those convictions are not monolithic. We believe our community should debate and act, each according to our individual conscience and, where appropriate, our collective convictions—as scholars and professionals who have committed their lives to the defense and wise governance of the country, and the stewardship of international order that has, for decades, gone hand in hand with American leadership. Tough debate and iconoclastic ideas within these communities that work on national and international security and strategy have, for generations, sharpened thinking and made policy better. Now more than ever, intellectual scrutiny that challenges assumptions appears not only prudent, but critical and urgent.
At the journal, we ask: What is the value of scholarship in these moments? I see at least two purposes for our work at the intersection of scholarship, security, and statecraft, which together might help us to uniquely meet the demands—and, for many, the distresses—of the present. The first purpose is to remind us that we have, in some ways, been here before. World order has been broken by economic turbulence, by hegemonic withdrawal and power shifts, and by war and international aggression—and it has been remade from the wreckage of kingdoms and continents, more than once. At moments when old assumptions no longer hold, and the conventional wisdom ceases to apply, it might be wise to look back at these world-breaking and world-making moments to see how scholars and statesmen attempted to take pieces of the old and build the world anew.
To help guide us, however, work that interrogates these patterns and lessons from history must be rigorous, relevant, and accessible. Too much academic knowledge is generated only to sit behind a paywall, invisible to the citizens whose taxes have supported it in one way or another—whether via a research contract awarded through a nationally competitive grant process, or via the support provided in state budgets for public institutions. At the Texas National Security Review, our articles always have been, and will continue to be, available to all those who wish to read them and come to their own conclusions about the value of our work.
Good scholarship has a second purpose when it comes to conventional wisdom, however: It can remind us that it is dangerous to rely on conventional wisdom out of complacency—because sometimes what we think we know about the world, or take for granted as the way to conduct affairs of state, is wrong. Several of the articles in this issue make that argument, in different realms of national and international security. Jonathan Caverley makes a provocative, densely researched case that Beijing gaining military control over Taiwan would not make a major difference to the overall US-China military balance, in part because of important capabilities that the People’s Republic of China has already acquired. Nicholas Anderson and Daryl Press conclude that the North Korean conventional artillery threat to Seoul has likely been overstated—but that North Korean weakness in this regard might, troublingly, increase incentives for first-strike use of chemical or nuclear weapons, as well as for escalation to the nuclear level, in the event of conflict on the Korean Peninsula. In these cases, relying on what we think we know could generate strategic miscalculations with fatal consequences.
At other times, relaxing our reliance on conventional wisdom can open new opportunities to address strategic challenges in previously untapped ways. Erica Lonergan and Jack Snyder document how a small group of “culture entrepreneurs” embedded aspects of hacker culture into broader Army culture to create the subculture of a new “cyber branch,” though tensions and shortcomings remain. Richard Maass makes the case for an innovative theory of “legal deterrence by denial” tailored to address the dilemmas posed by gray zone tactics in modern warfare, an area where many conventional approaches have proved ineffective. And in our Strategist section, Herbert Lin offers new ideas on the use of artificial intelligence in a nuclear weapons context, with attention not only to the catastrophic risks that attend the introduction of rapidly evolving emerging technologies, but also to opportunities to improve safety across the nuclear enterprise.
None of these articles offer a panacea for the profound disruptions to trade, defense, and diplomacy that are currently reverberating through the contemporary international environment, nor should we paper over the potential costs and risks of the current shocks. But this issue of TNSR throws up the counterpoint: that perhaps relying on conventional wisdom is less safe than we sometimes assume, and that—paraphrasing Picasso—much of creation begins in destruction. Sometimes, that is the only place from which to begin.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is editor in chief of the Texas National Security Review. She is associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also directs UT’s Asia Policy Program. She is concurrently a visiting faculty member at the US Army War College and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work focuses on security, strategy, and authoritarian politics in Asia.
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