Scholar

States across West Africa have expanded military deployments, acquired new equipment, and deepened security partnerships to confront violent militant groups. Yet these efforts have often produced temporary disruption rather than durable security. This article…

This article challenges the dominant portrayal of George H. W. Bush as the exemplar of a realist president. The image of Bush as a cautious realist was less a reflection of his record than the product of partisan and scholarly mythmaking. In the 1990s,…

Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War has gained new prominence as the United States engages in great-power competition with China, as that emerging geopolitical competition is often explained through parallels with the ancient rivalry between Athens…

This article offers a novel explanation for the variation in China’s policy toward North Korea’s nuclear program. It argues that Beijing’s willingness to constrain Pyongyang is shaped by the perceived level of US assurance regarding Taiwan. Specifically,…

The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s sent shockwaves through the remaining communist world, confronting states like China and North Korea with an existential challenge. While scholars have extensively examined how Beijing interpreted and…

China’s engagement with Africa, Asia, and the Middle East has drawn significant attention from the international community and American policymakers. One understudied dimension of this engagement is China’s expanding space diplomacy in the Middle East.…

Cognitive biases can systematically distort judgments about the use of nuclear weapons, potentially undermining nuclear stability and increasing the risk of nuclear war. In survey experiments with nearly 3,000 US participants, we show how psychological…

Critics of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) argue that these weapons cannot reliably distinguish between legitimate targets and those protected from attack. As a result, the use of AWS seems to violate the principle of distinction under international…

Can conventional military success lead to coercive success in a nuclear crisis? Some scholars argue that achieving limited conventional success can be used to coerce nuclear adversaries. Others argue that conventional capabilities coerce by manipulating…

This article examines the history of war and society during the Cold War in the Middle East and parts of South Asia—two regions linked by geography, history, and culture. Few other regions have been so touched by war, or so fixed the attention of world…

Will the US-led technology control regime against China have a meaningful impact on the emerging great power competition? Supporters praise the effort’s targeted approach and optimistically see the case as a prime example of weaponized interdependence. But…

This article analyzes more than 60,000 assessments of uncertainty made by national security officials from more than forty NATO allies and partners. The findings show that national security officials are overwhelmingly overconfident and that their judgments…