Foreign Affairs

Dmitry Adamsky, an expert on Russian security and Russian nuclear deterrence strategy at Harvard and Reichman Universities, examines a large-scale shift in Russia’s strategic thinking over the past year, centered around the view that Europe, rather than the United States, is now Russia’s primary geopolitical rival and adversary, and looking at the consequences of this shift for US efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

Niall Ferguson, the leading historian of empire, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and AI scholar Lisa Klassen offer a novel reframing of the US-China AI race in the history of world empires. The authors argue that AI is inherently imperial in it ambitions and structure, and that, like previous technological empires, China and US have amassed extraordinary global but that it's happening at a much faster pace. Rise and fall cycle will be faster. It will either lead to catastrophe or slow decline.

William McRaven, a retired four-star admiral and a major figure in American military affairs, uses history and his personal experiences to make an authoritative case that American leaders frequently overestimate the potential of military force to achieve political ends—and that new technologies like AI will exacerbate this problem.

Mara Karlin, a defense policy expert who served as senior national-security official in multiple American administrations, makes an authoritative case that war planners tend to be overconfident about their ability to predict how new tools will shape the battlefield—blinding them to the unchanging realities of war. Using examples from Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran, Karlin shows how this "technology trap" leads to false assumptions about the future of war.

In this essay, Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s foremost experts on imperial history, teams up the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, and the researcher Lisa Klaassen to make the provocative argument that AI is an inherently “imperial technology”—and to reveal what the fate of past empires might say about the future of U.S.-Chinese competition in a world shaped by AI.

Alex Imas, Mohamed El-Erian, and James Manyika, leading voices at the intersection of business and technology, argue that realizing AI’s potential requires giving workers, communities, AI labs, infrastructure developers, and big companies a share of the gains. Using insights from game theory, they argue that increased cooperation can make AI work for all.

In 1971, as the international monetary system was on the brink of collapse, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally told a group of worried European finance ministers that the dollar was “our currency, but your problem.” The dollar had become that system’s official reserve currency in 1944, under the Bretton Woods agreement, making signatories subject to the whims of U.S. monetary policy. Even after Bretton Woods collapsed and many currencies floated freely, the dollar continued to dominate. In the last half century, U.S. currency power has only expanded, as more countries have integrated into the global economy and therefore grown to depend on the dollar. China, reliant on export-driven growth, is foremost among them.

The advent of a new technology invariably comes with strategic implications, raising the question of who will benefit and whether risks can be managed. In 1957, following the Soviet Sputnik launch, U.S. policymakers and analysts recognized that the satellite, as the American physicist and engineer Lloyd Berkner observed in these pages, would bring transformative effects. The United States could not risk losing out, Berkner argued, but nor should governments allow geopolitical tensions to prevent the technology’s broad benefits from emerging.

Ngaire Woods, Dean of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, Claas Mertens, also at Oxford, have written a piece arguing that Europe, despite its attempts at self-sufficiency, remains dependent on an unpredictable United States. The continent needs to address this vulnerability so that it can convince other countries, many of which find themselves similarly vulnerable to great-power coercion, that it is a worthy partner.

Charles Kupchan, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, argues that many aspects of Trump's foreign policy are worth keeping and align with changes in the international system. He explains how the next president can marry the good impulses of "America first" with the best of liberal internationalism. 

Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine, former members of the National Security Council, argue that the members of what they call the “axis of upheaval”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—are deepening their cooperation. Meanwhile, Washington is creating friction with many of its own partnerships. If these developments continue unabated, the United States will squander the strength of its network just as its adversaries learn to make the most of theirs.

Former U.S. NATO ambassador Ivo Daalder argues that the scramble to shore up Europe's conventional defense risks overlooking the continent's greatest security weakness: nuclear deterrence. Europe knows it can't fully trust Washington's guarantee anymore. But he lays out a middle path between dependence and nuclearization that would extend France's and the United Kingdom's nuclear umbrella—a course, he argues, that could even repair the transatlantic alliance.

The battle on the streets over the foundations of the state.

What people in the region actually believe.

How a true “energy cease-Fire” can curb Putin.

Technology experts Kathleen Curlee and Sam Bresnick argue that China is catching up to the United States in space, commercially and militarily. This poses a threat to U.S. military operations, which rely on space-based capabilities. Washington must invest in space defense and also reduce its reliance on the domain.

When airpower wins, and when it doesn’t.

What will survive when the boom ends.

Why disengagement is not the answer.

Scott Singer and Pavlo Zvenyhorodsky, researchers at Carnegie’s China AI Initiative, argue that China is betting that AI dominance will come from combining hardware and software, or AI-powered robots. By focusing only on software such as AI models, they argue, Washington and Silicon Valley risk falling behind.