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Calder Walton says both seek to topple the United States from atop world stage, with China's blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing the greater threat.

Calder Walton recounts how Russia and China are using their intelligence agencies to reverse the outcome of the Cold War

Why does the U.S. Army rely on persuasion to influence military partners to improve their forces despite repeated failures that undermine U.S. foreign policy goals? The army prioritizes its role as a fighting force, not an advisory group. U.S. leaders have developed an ideology—the cult of the persuasive—to advance army bureaucratic interests.

International Security Program Fellow Megan M. Turnbull, an international affairs professor at the University of Georgia, discussed the conditions leading to election violence in Nigeria during a virtual seminar hosted by the International Security Program on November 10, 2022.

Der Tagesspiegel  profiles asymmetric conflict and cybersecurity expert Ivan Arreguín-Toft. 

The United States nor its allies alone cannot counter adversarial and criminal cyber activity in the digital domain-–the reach, scale, stealth, and danger are simply too great for any one country to bear. As such, calls for international operational collaboration in cybersecurity and emerging technologies are increasing. Former U.S. State Department Cyber Diplomat Chris Painter noted in a December 2020 Foreign Policy article that there must be more leadership and partnership on global cyber cooperation. What follows represents a thinking-through of what this ought to entail.

After the mistaken U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, China turned to information-age weapons to create a risk of escalation to nuclear war with the United States. This shift helps compensate for its conventional military inferiority.

A state’s declining international status activates two sets of social psychological dynamics that contribute to domestic conflict, alienating some groups and intensifying others’ nationalism. These dynamics can contribute to center-periphery conflict in multinational states after acute status loss.

Rather than rapid robotic wars and decisive shifts in military power, AI-enabled conflict will likely involve significant uncertainty, organizational friction, and chronic controversy. Greater military reliance on AI will therefore make the human element in war even more important, not less.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.