The previous piece in this series argued that America is losing the most important military race of our time because its procurement system cannot keep pace with the speed of unmanned warfare. Procurement was the symptom. The implications are broader: a UAS revolution that has quietly demolished three foundational assumptions of the Post-War international order.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine has become a laboratory for the future of conflict. Russia launched 54,538 Shahed-type drones at Ukrainian targets in 2025 and is on pace to exceed 67,000 in 2026. Ukraine responded with an unprecedented defense industrial mobilization . Starting with seven drone manufacturers, Ukraine now has more than 500, producing roughly four million drones a year, more than the rest of NATO combined.

Drones have broken the eighty-year-old assumption that offense was expensive and defense, at scale, was cheaper. Ukraine built 100,000 interceptor drones in 2025 alone, at $1,000 to $3,500 per unit. Last winter those drones accounted for more than 70% of Shahed interceptions over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles, which cost over $3 million each, for the ballistic missile threats they were actually designed to stop.

$400 drones routinely destroy Russian T-90 tanks valued at $4.5 million; in March, one took down a $16 million Ka-52 attack helicopter near Pokrovsk. Three of Ukraine’s lost F-16s, donated aircraft worth roughly $30 million each, were brought down during Shahed intercept missions that cost Russia a few thousand dollars each,

Non-state actors now produce impacts on the battlefield that were previously reserved for well-funded militaries. Houthi drones costing $20,000 each disrupted a Red Sea corridor carrying roughly $1 trillion in annual trade. Container traffic through the Suez Canal fell 90% between December 2023 and March 2024.

In Sudan, a drone war continues between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The Laws of Armed Conflict assume uniformed combatants and identifiable command authority. They have nothing useful to say about a Houthi militant launching an Iranian-designed drone from a Toyota pickup truck.

Drones have also broken the perception of safety inside a nation’s borders. In June 2025, Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb used 117 drones smuggled into Russia in shipping containers to strike five strategic airfields over a thousand miles away, destroying or damaging roughly a third of Russia’s long-range bomber fleet with weapons that cost about $2,000 each.

On September 9–10, 2025, at least 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace, prompting Poland to invoke Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the first NATO ally to fire shots at Russian military hardware over its own territory since 1945. Romania, another NATO member, has logged seven incursions in the first four months of 2026 alone, and similar violations have spread to the NATO member countries of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

NATO’s Article 5, the alliance’s foundational red line, now must grapple with a question its drafters never imagined: how many $20,000 drones falling on a member state’s territory constitute an armed attack? Poland and Romania, which are both pushing for a “drone wall” along NATO’s eastern flank, are demanding the alliance answer in advance.

Export-control frameworks such as ITAR, the Missile Technology Control Regime, and the Wassenaar Arrangement were built to keep sensitive components inside a narrow group of trusted suppliers. In a world where most of a Shahed’s chips come from civilian Western electronics and its airframe is consumer-grade carbon fiber, traditional arms control architecture is obsolete.

All of these broken assumptions are now reshaping three theaters at once. In the Pacific, Taiwan has launched a drone-centric defense overhaul explicitly citing Ukraine, while Chinese planners study Ukrainian operations to prepare for drone-based defenses across the Taiwan Strait.

In Africa the Russian Africa Corps deployments and Turkish Bayraktar drone exports have filled the vacuum left by French withdrawal from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, embedding Russian drone doctrine in a region where a Western military counterweight is thinnest. Finally, in the Middle East, Iran’s March 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history. This was accomplished mostly with just the threat of drone and anti-ship missile strikes.

The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program, a $1 billion effort to deliver 340,000 small attack drones to U.S. units over two years, is an overdue start. But as the previous piece argued, this procurement reform may be coming too late as events on the battlefield outpace it.

Non-state actors now project state-scale force, and borders and distance no longer act as a buffer for even the largest states. Despite an ocean separating the United States from its adversaries abroad, drones could soon cross that moat. Their ubiquity in delivery, photography, and now warfare exposes us, and in a globalized economy, that may be exactly what our adversaries want.

Guest contributor Armin Aryafar writes on defense procurement, emerging technology, and geopolitics. He is an FAA-certified UAS operator working in autonomous drone delivery at Zipline. This piece is a follow-up to “Too Slow to Win,” published April 13, 2026.

Lincoln’s Lyceum Speech and the Threat from Within

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln was 28 years old and unknown outside Illinois. He delivered a speech in Springfield to a local civic organization about American politics. His central point was the U.S. would fail as a republic because of internal division, not invasion.

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined . . . could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” - Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, January 27, 1838.

He had two things in mind for what these internal problems could be. The first was erosion of respect for the law and a slow hollowing out of institutions. The second was that an ambitious person, talented and restless, would build when the opportunity was there and tear down when it was not.

If that person rose up in a successful, democratic society, they would distinguish themselves by tearing it apart. Lincoln was pointing to a vulnerability built into democratic government. Holding it in check required a shared civic idea that everyone, including the ambitious, was measured against. The question was what that idea was.

Lincoln’s Constitutional Philosophy: The Declaration as the Key

The Constitution was widely read in Lincoln’s time as a contractual arrangement between sovereign states. They had ceded certain powers to a federal government while maintaining sovereignty elsewhere. A state could in theory reclaim those powers, which is what Southern states argued when they seceded. Lincoln rejected the premise.

His argument, developed most fully during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, was that the Constitution could not be properly read apart from the Declaration of Independence. The claim that all people are created equal, and that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, was the founding idea the Constitution existed to protect. Everything else followed from it. It was not just a “contract”.

This was the basis of his opposition to expanding slavery to newly admitted states, the position the Republican Party was formed around. The objection was that spreading it into new territories violated the document the country was founded on. The Constitution did not prohibit slavery, but the imperative to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which the Declaration said was the goal of government, could not coexist with treating human beings like property.

This is the civic religion Lincoln was defending: not Christianity, not shared ancestry, not a particular culture, but a claim about human equality and what government is for. It functions as a national idea because it does not exclude anyone in advance. It derives from a universal idea about human beings, not a particular claim about any group of them.

What Replaces It: Alternatives That Cannot Hold

When that framework is set aside, something moves in to replace it. One of the most prominent candidates today is a politics rooted in religious identity. Christian Nationalism holds that the United States is and should be understood as a Christian nation, that its laws should reflect Christian values exclusively, and that its legitimacy derives from that religious foundation.

A civic idea that functions as a national foundation must be available to every person. One grounded in a specific religious identity cannot be. A Jewish American, a Muslim American, an atheist American: each holds full citizenship according to the Declaration and none holds full citizenship under a framework that ties legitimacy to Christian identity.

Without a shared foundation, what remains is a contest over power. Each faction claims legitimacy for itself and denies it to the other. There is no common ground to appeal to and no shared principle to resolve disputes. Force fills the space that principle vacated.

The Visible Fragmentation

The evidence of this breakdown is already present. California sets its own environmental standards, its own immigration enforcement, and now is setting its own trade relationships. Texas does the same from the opposite side of the aisle. Redistricting has become a national partisan battle between democrats in blue states and republicans in red states.

The country is functioning less like a union and more like a loose collection of competing regional governments. The political rhetoric tracks this reality. A president in the American tradition governs all citizens. The current posture dispenses with that premise. Political opponents are not adversaries to be defeated at the ballot box. They are enemies, internal threats, and targets for punishment.

That rhetoric carries consequences beyond the ballot box. When a president and his movement cast the opposition as enemies of the country, use the powers of the office to pursue political opponents, and govern by division rather than by any pretense of representing everyone, they create an environment in which people on both sides feel genuinely threatened.

People who feel threatened respond, often in ways that are morally indefensible. The rise in political violence and the assassination attempts of recent years did not emerge from nothing. The shock expressed when this happens is not credible from a movement that stokes fear and anger, or at least looks the other way when their leaders do so.

“For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” – Hosea 8:7.

The Strains That Are Outside the Tradition

The ethno-nationalist and Christian nationalist currents now present in American politics are different expressions of the same underlying position: that political legitimacy derives from identity or ancestral culture rather than shared principles. Both place themselves outside the Lincoln tradition. If legitimacy flows from who you are rather than from a universal claim about human beings, it cannot simultaneously flow from the Declaration of Independence.

Ethno-nationalism has few native roots in the American political tradition. Its genealogy has more in common with European nationalist and monarchist movements. The aesthetic of the current moment reflects this. Gold-plated offices, the president’s name and likeness on consumer goods, passports, and portraits accumulating across federal buildings. This has a different point of origin than the republic whose first president refused a crown.

These movements are not advancing an argument for something better. They are pulling down because pulling down is the end itself. Lincoln identified the type in 1838, and Francis Fukuyama described the same impulse in The End of History. The check Lincoln identified was a country unified around the shared idea. The question is whether enough of that unity remains.

“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause . . . then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. . . . for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.” - The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

The Other Temptation: Exclusion

The civic tradition cuts both ways, and the opposition to these ideologies has its own failure to account for. Lincoln concluded a war that killed hundreds of thousands and then chose reconciliation over punishment. His second inaugural address spoke of shared guilt for slavery and war, and national peace and unity.

Many of the people who found the nationalist argument persuasive are not true believers. Some felt their concerns were dismissed as ignorant or malicious, watched a political coalition treat their exclusion as a feature and then found themselves drawn to anyone who acknowledged their anger. Some also voted for the traditional policy positions they agree with.

Treating those people as permanent enemies rather than as fellow Americans to be brought back to a common foundation does not protect the civic tradition. It concedes the nationalist argument that the other side is simply another tribe pursuing its own interests.

The Civil War killed over half a million Americans. The country reconciled anyway, imperfectly but enough to function as a union again. If that was possible after four years of industrialized killing between Americans, the current division is small in comparison. But, it won’t happen by treating everyone who voted differently as an enemy.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to . . . achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” - Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865

What Is at Stake

Lincoln’s civic religion is either the country’s operating principle, or it is not. Either the government’s authority derives from the idea that all people are created equal, with everything that requires in practice, or it derives from something else: identity, force, or the preferences of whoever controls the government at a given moment.

If the framework is discarded, what remains is competing power claims with no common reference point, which is the condition Lincoln identified in 1838 as the precondition for the republic’s end. The 250th anniversary is a reasonable occasion to ask whether our inheritance can still hold.

The structural weakness was not new. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were the only Gulf exporters with pipeline capacity to bypass the closure. Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, and Bahrain had no alternative route. When the passage closed, their exports stopped with it. Iran demonstrated exactly how to weaponize a trade chokepoint, and now every country is searching for them, be they financial, technological, or geographical.

IEA Executive Director stated that one expected response to the crisis would be an acceleration of renewables, citing their value as domestic energy sources insulated from this kind of supply shock. That framing has become mainstream. The case for transitioning away from fossil fuels is now made as often in the language of security and economics as in the language of climate. Global fossil fuel power generation fell after the closure partially due to growth in solar and wind.

The transition was already underway. Renewables accounted for 85.6% of all new global energy capacity installed in 2025 and now make up 49.4% (nearly half) of global energy capacity. Global clean energy investment reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, double fossil fuel investment. Solar alone met three-fourths of last year’s demand growth and is now growing 18 times faster than natural gas.

Spain offers the clearest near-term evidence of what the shift produces. Wholesale electricity prices ran 32% below the EU average in the first half of 2025, a gap analysts attributed directly to solar and wind displacing gas generation. After the war began, Spain registered among the lowest gas prices in the EU. The economic case and the security case now point in the same direction.

But, supply chains for these energy sources have their own chokepoints. Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are manufactured from specific minerals, and those minerals and the industrial capacity to process them are not distributed evenly. China is the dominant refiner for 19 of 20 minerals in the IEA’s 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook, at an average market share of roughly 70%. There is currently no heavy rare-earth separation capacity in the United States at meaningful scale.

The distinction between mining and refining is where the constraint sits. Australia leads global lithium extraction. Congo produces most of the world’s cobalt. The United States leads in quartz, the ore from which silicon is derived. But raw ore cannot become a battery or a magnet without processing. China built that refining capacity at scale over decades.

China has also demonstrated willingness to use this position as leverage, with export controls escalating from gallium and germanium in 2023, key for semiconductors, to rare earths critical to magnets and defense applications last year. The IEA draws a useful contrast between oil security and mineral security. An oil supply disruption hits every gasoline driver immediately. A mineral supply disruption affects only the manufacture of new solar installations or EVs. Existing deployed infrastructure keeps running.

But oil is consumed entirely. Every barrel burned requires a new one. Minerals are components of physical infrastructure that are recyclable. The intensity of mineral demand for the transition is also front-loaded. It peaks during deployment. Once a solar panel or wind turbine is installed, it produces energy for decades without consuming additional minerals. Recycling is not yet mature enough to close the supply gap on its own, but the trajectory is established.

The World Resources Institute projects recycling could reduce new mine development needs by 40% for copper and cobalt by 2050. Both dependencies share recognizable features: concentration in a small number of points, long lead times to build alternatives, and a demonstrated willingness by controlling parties to restrict access under geopolitical pressure. The war made fossil fuel vulnerability impossible to ignore.

Mineral vulnerability remains somewhat abstract, for now. Oil dependency is permanent and recurring. Mineral dependency is front-loaded and diminishes as recycling scales; it is a problem with a ceiling. The transition does not eliminate strategic exposure. It relocates it upstream, into supply chains that are no less concentrated than the ones being left behind but with constraints that are more manageable. That does not make it one policymakers can afford to ignore.

The broker was Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief and, in practical terms, its most powerful official. In Pakistan’s civil-military structure, the army chief has historically exercised more real foreign policy authority than the prime minister. Munir’s personal travel to showed serious commitment and that his country has positioned itself to be a substantive power broker. Pakistan built this position deliberately over decades, and the Saudi defense arrangement is the foundation.

The Pakistan-Saudi relationship dates to the 1960s, when Pakistani troops first deployed to protect Saudi frontiers during regional conflicts. A 1982 military agreement formalized the stationing of Pakistani troops and trainers in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia helped fund Pakistan’s nuclear program from the early 1970s, and by the late 1990s a covert nuclear assurance arrangement was in place. The formal Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement, signed last September, codified an alliance that already existed.

During the Iran war, the exchange became concrete. Pakistan deployed fighter jets to the Kingdom and secured a $3 billion payment from Riyadh, the most recent installment in a 60-year relationship built on a straightforward exchange: Pakistani security capacity for Saudi financial support. What that history bought Pakistan was credibility in the Gulf. Both the U.S. and Iran know Paksitan had real skin in the outcome, not just a reputational interest in being seen as helpful.

The conventional image of a mediator is a neutral party with no stake in the outcome. That model has limits. A party with no stakes has no leverage, and no particular reason to be trusted by either side. The more effective model is the interested broker: a party with real relationships on both sides, enough to be trusted and enough to be useful. Qatar has operated this way for decades, maintaining ties with Hamas, the Taliban, and Western governments simultaneously. The relationships that made its mediation possible were the same ones that would have disqualified a classic neutral broker.

Pakistan in 2026 fits this model. It has a functional relationship with Iran rooted in shared regional interests (sharing a long border), a deep security relationship with the Gulf states, and enough proximity to Washington to carry messages credibly. None of those relationships is neutral, but they are all useful. Munir’s April 15 trip to Tehran came after the first round of Islamabad talks ended without a deal on April 12.

He carried a new message from Washington and worked to secure a second round before the April 22 ceasefire expiration. The effort was coordinated across Pakistan’s government: Munir in Tehran, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi also in the Iranian capital, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif conducting a four-day Gulf tour simultaneously. Trump credited Munir by name, calling him a key reason negotiations were likely to continue in Pakistan.

The ceasefire framework Pakistan helped produce calls for an immediate halt to hostilities, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and a 15-20 day negotiating window. It remains fragile. The U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports continued after the ceasefire took effect, and Iran threatened to close the Red Sea in response. Now, in a game of musical chair for leverage, the U.S. has imposed its own blockade on the strait, and Iran has reversed its opening of the strait on April 18^th in response to the US Navy firing on an Iranian vessel last Sunday.

Despite all of this, the sides continue to talk. A framework exists for this to occur, and it exists because Pakistan had the relationships to make it possible. And now other parties are stepping to further de-risk the situation. A European coalitionis seeking to reopen Hormuz itself without the United States as part of an international mission. Given the impact of the global economy, internationalizing this aspect of the conflict is a good idea that will make a final settlement between Iran and the U.S. easier to reach.

Pakistan’s role fits a pattern that researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center have begun examining systematically. Their Middle Powers Project identifies countries that have positioned themselves between Washington and Beijing without formally committing to either, built relationships across multiple sides, and developed the capacity to act when the great powers are deadlocked or distracted. They are not staying out of great power competition. They are inserting themselves into it on their own terms.

For Pakistan, sixty years of security guarantees and financial exchanges with Saudi Arabia produced something that couldn’t be manufactured on short notice: credibility with both sides of a conflict the great powers couldn’t resolve alone. It was the return on a long investment in regional standing, collected at exactly the right moment. Pakistan is not the only country that has made that kind of investment.

Turkey brokered the 2022 grain corridor agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Qatar facilitated the 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban. India has positioned itself as a voice for the developing world without taking sides in U.S.-China competition. Each built specific relationships over years and deployed them when the moment arrived. The Saudi arrangement is not charity, and Pakistan’s mediation is not altruism. Both are investments in relevance, and Pakistan just collected on them.

On April 19, 1775, 700 British regulars marched from Boston to the towns of Lexington and Concord to seize a colonial arms cache. It was a police action, and the Crown did not believe the colonists would fight. The Intolerable Acts of 1774 had effectively suspended Massachusetts self-government. In February of 1775, Parliament declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion, and tasked a military governor with disarming growing colonial militias.

A nascent colonial intelligence network uncovered this and moved their supplies from the weapons caches at Lexington and Concord, and the militia organized to harass the British army on their return trip. On the 18-mile retreat from Concord to Boston, thousands of militiamen fired from concealed positions.

The British suffered seventy-three killed, one hundred and seventy-three wounded, and twenty-six missing. The colonists lost fifty killed and thirty-nine wounded. The most powerful army in the world had been bled by farmers with muskets. And they set the stage for a grueling guerilla campaign that defined the 8 years of the American Revolution.

It was not just the colonist’s bravery that led to this result. Four conditions were in place that British military professionalism could not overcome. The first was terrain. The militia knew every road, farm, and tree line between Concord and Boston. The British marched in formation through countryside that functioned as a shooting gallery. The second was distributed command. The self-organized militia had no single commander to capture, and no central arms depot to destroy.

The third was cost asymmetry. For the colonists, this was an existential fight on home soil for their rights as Englishmen. For the British, it was a colonial enforcement problem across an ocean. The two sides were not absorbing comparable costs toward comparable stakes. The fourth was political illegitimacy. The British were not defending their own territory, and every escalation produced more colonial recruits. Within weeks of April 19, 20,000 militiamen had placed Boston under siege.

Those same conditions defined the next eight years. The Continental Army was established in June 1775, with George Washington taking command of a force based in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, that was underfunded, underequipped, but fighting on home terrain. In March 1776, Henry Knox dragged sixty tons of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to the heights overlooking Boston, a feat meant to break a nearly year-long seige. The British position became untenable, and they evacuated without a fight.

Britain won most of the set-piece battles that followed, but it did not matter. Every campaign required moving a professional army through hostile territory thousands of miles from its supply base. The war ended the same way it started. At Yorktown in 1781, Washington’s Continental Army fixed Cornwallis from the north across the narrow peninsula connecting it to the rest of Virginia, while s French fleet cut off the sea. A distributed eight-year insurgency had exhausted British will and treasure to the point where a single tactical encirclement was enough to end it.

Two modern conflicts come to mind in trying to apply the lessons from the Revolution to the present day. The Ukraine war is the best example, while the Iran war has some similarities. Russia’s February 2022 assault assumed a quick collapse of Ukrainian command, and Ukraine did not blunt this initial advance by outgunning Russia. Prepared defenses and strategic destruction of infrastructure slowed the Russians, while a distributed territorial defense force consisted mostly of small units armed with portable anti-tank missiles attacked the stalled Russian columns from concealed positions.

The defense of Kyiv and the Kharkiv counteroffensive followed the same logic as the British retreat from Concord: a superior force operating in unfamiliar terrain against a motivated defender with distributed command bled out. But, Ukraine has since demonstrated something the American colonists could not. It has achieved actual battlefield success against a peer adversary in open engagements in some cases, leading to a stalemate on a line of control that has been mostly fixed for several years. Meanwhile, drone warfare and long-range missile strikes continue to degrade Russian logistics.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. Iran’s’ command-and-control infrastructure was destroyed and most of its senior leadership was killed, including the Supreme Leader. The Iranian navy was eliminated and missile capacity severely degraded. Trump declared on March 9 that the war was “very complete.” But when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the entire strategic equation changed. Peace talks in Pakistan collapsed on April 12 after the Trump administration agreed to a ceasefire. The U.S. imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports on April 13, but so far Iran has shown no indication of coming to terms.

The war is now six weeks old and unresolved. The reason follows directly from the four conditions at Lexington. The IRGC has independent command, finance, and logistics. Decapitating the formal government did not stop it. The Iranian regime is fighting at home for survival, while the U.S. is managing a regional policy problem on a political clock. The cost each side is willing to absorb is not comparable. The fact that the U.S. backed off after Trump threatened a ground invasion shows the limits of the cost they will absorb.

The lesson of April 19, 1775 is not that small forces can always beat large ones. It is that military superiority becomes less decisive when the conditions for asymmetric resistance are in place and the political objective requires more than destruction. Violence and political compliance are not the same currency.

The question for any large power thinking about using force against a weaker adversary on their home terrain is not whether it can win militarily. It is whether military victory produces the political result it needs, and at what cost over what timeline. From the Ancient Greeks repelling the advances of the Persian Empire to the Vietcong pushing the U.S. out of Southeast Asia, to every successful anticolonial revolution, history has not been kind to the side that did not think seriously about this question.

Lidia has spent her career at the intersection of language, culture, and education. She has taught Spanish as a foreign language at some of the world’s leading universities, collaborated with UNESCO on its Global Education Monitoring Report, and served as a cultural expert for EU institutions. She is currently completing a master’s in international relations at Harvard, where her research examines how AI interactions may be changing the way humans communicate with one another.

We cover how AI is upending traditional assessment in higher education. Take-home essays and written assignments are becoming unreliable as measures of student learning, and educators are responding by shifting toward oral exams, in-class presentations, and collaborative tasks that reveal how students actually think. Lidia sees this as a largely positive development: a long-overdue move away from evaluating finished products and toward understanding the learning process itself.

We also talk about what it means to teach in a screen-saturated world, where sustained attention is harder to maintain and the classroom has to compete with an endless stream of digital stimuli. And we examine the global dimension: AI systems trained predominantly on English-language and Western sources risk widening existing gaps between technologically advanced and developing countries, and disadvantaging the world’s multilingual education systems.

The conversation closes on what AI cannot replace. Lidia makes a compelling case that the authenticity, nonverbal presence, and genuine human recognition that great teachers provide are foundational to learning.

What You’ll Take Away

• How AI is pushing some universities to rethink assessment, and whether that’s a change for the better

• The shift from evaluating finished products to observing the learning process

• How screen saturation is affecting student attention in the classroom, and what educators can do about it

• Why AI’s reliance on English-language and Western sources may create disadvantages for multilingual education systems

• What research suggests about authenticity, nonverbal communication, and human connection in the learning environment

• How Dr. Lozano sees the future of the classroom, and where she thinks AI should and shouldn’t play a role

About the Guest

Dr. Lozano is an expert in language acquisition and cross-cultural understanding. She holds a PhD in Philology from the University of Barcelona. She has teaching experience at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Barnard College, and research experience at the Harvard University and the University of Barcelona. She has co-authored articles, learning materials, and a multimedia course on language acquisition. Dr. Lozano has also worked in project management and administration at the United Nations in New York and volunteered for UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report. Additionally, she has served as cultural expert for the European Commission and has been selected for inclusion on the European Parliament’s list of research experts.

For Further Reading

1. UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report

2. Statistics on teacher pay can be found here: UNESCO Global Report on Teachers (2023)

3. Nomophobia: Is the Fear of Being without a Smartphone Associated with Problematic Use? — Kaviani et al., International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020

4. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Review) - David Fowkes, International Journal of Constitutional Law

5. The Importance of Non-Verbal Communication in Classroom Management — Özad & Uygarer, Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2009

6. Data on language distribution on the internet: W3Techs: Usage Statistics of Content Languages for Websites

I created Current History to explore how history shapes present choices in geopolitics, technology, and public policy. If you found this conversation useful, consider subscribing below.

Subscribers receive every podcast and essay directly in their inbox. Its free for now, with paid options if you would like to support this work directly. The Founding Member plan guarantees lifetime access without a paywall.

You can also subscribe on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@current-history.

The United States military remains the most powerful in the world. Yet the inflexibility of its industrial base to adapt to the current pace of armed conflict is concerning. The American public is not prepared for the consequences if procurement does not fully adopt the lessons learned in Ukraine. A $20,000 drone is reshaping 21st-century warfare. The U.S. still doesn’t have a good answer to it.

In 2025 alone, Russia launched 54,538 Shahed-type drones against Ukraine. These are not sophisticated weapons. They cost between $20,000 and $70,000, cheap enough to use as disposable missiles and simple enough to mass produce. They are made partly from Western microchips and Canadian satellite antennas, smuggled through shell companies in the UAE and Central Asia despite international sanctions.

Early in 2025, only 2–3% of them hit their targets. But by December that hit rate had climbed to as high as 28%. Ukraine’s air defenses, meanwhile, were being ground down by the sheer volume of these cheap one-way suicide drones. Through all this, Ukraine adapted, while the United States watched.

The Paradox at the Heart of American Defense

The United States leads the world in aerospace technology. It invented the drone. It operates the Reaper, the Global Hawk, and is developing collaborative combat aircraft that can fly alongside manned jets and make autonomous decisions. In terms of high-end unmanned systems, no country comes close. The Patriot missile defense system, though now over 40 years old, is still one of the best systems used across the globe for missile defense. But the U.S. still uses a procurement system mired in bureaucracy.

Every major U.S. weapons program starts with JCIDS: the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System. The military must define exactly what it needs in exhaustive detail, a process that takes one to two years on its own. Then come three formal milestone gates requiring approval from senior Pentagon leadership and notification to Congress, followed by years of testing and evaluation before production begins.

For a fighter jet or an aircraft carrier, this makes sense. These are systems that cost billions and will be in service for fifty years. You want to get them right to stave off early retirement and reduce maintenance and upkeep costs. For a drone that costs $40,000 and will be used once, the same cumbersome process currently applies.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation System, the rulebook that governs all government purchasing, is so complex that it effectively favors large, established defense contractors who have entire legal departments dedicated to navigating it, over the small startups that are building innovative drone technology today.

Five Countries, Five Approaches

Drones are dual platform technology, and countries which can produce the largest quantity of them have an advantage.

Russia chose state-directed industrial mobilization. Its main factory now produces roughly 5,500 Geran-2 drones per month, heavily based on the Iranian Shahed design. The unit cost has fallen from around $200,000 when Russia imported them from Iran in 2022 to roughly $70,000 for domestically produced versions in 2025. This is a war economy running full steam ahead and virtually no oversight exists.

Iran has shown that you don’t need a sophisticated industrial base to win the strategic calculation. The Shahed drone was designed around a simple idea: a $20,000–$50,000 drone that forces the defender to shoot a $5 million interceptor missile is extracting value regardless of what it hits. Under heavy Western sanctions, Iran still managed to supply Russia with drone technology by sourcing components through the UAE, China, and Central Asia. In the current conflict with the U.S. and Israel, the lesson from Iran is you don’t need to build the best drone, you need to build one cheap enough to use as a weapon of attrition.

China operates at a different scale entirely. Its Military-Civil Fusion policy breaks down the barrier between commercial technology and military procurement. DJI, the company that makes the small, commercially available drones, holds over 90% of the global civilian drone market. That is directly convertible military capacity in the event of a war required a major scale-up in military drone production.

Turkey built and fielded the Bayraktar TB2, a combat-proven armed drone that has performed in Syria, Libya, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, in roughly five to seven years from first prototype to fielded system. The unit cost is around $5–5.5 million, compared to roughly $30 million for the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper.

And then there is Ukraine,where survival eliminated bureaucratic friction entirely. When Russia invaded in 2022, Ukraine had seven drone manufacturers. By 2025 it had over 500, producing four million drones annually,more than any NATO country). Ukraine built interceptor drones costing $1,000 to $3,500 per unit designed to destroy Shaheds. Ukraine produced 100,000 of them in 2025. One startup went from founding to battlefield deployment in seven months. Private companies-built prototypes, soldiers tested them, feedback arrived in days, and production scaled accordingly, in a cycle taking only weeks.

The Reforms Are Real But Are They Enough?

The Biden and Trump administrations have not ignored this problem. Recent reforms represent the most significant structural changes to U.S. drone procurement in decades.

In June 2025, an executive order directed federal agencies to promote domestic drone production and removed some restrictive legacy policies. In July 2025, the DOD issued a memo giving colonel-level commanders the authority to procure and test small drones, a meaningful cultural shift away from the Pentagon’s centralized approval structure.

The Drone Dominance program commits $1 billion toward 340,000 drones delivered over four competitive phases. Phase I launched at Fort Benning in February 2026, with 25 vendors competing to hit a target unit cost of around $5,000. The Army’s Pathway for Innovation, launched in November 2025, is explicitly designed to allow servicemembers to define defense acquisition requirements.

These are real steps, just not enough of them. Even at the Drone Dominance’s programs most ambitious scale, 340,000 drones over two years, that is 170,000 per year. Russia launched 54,538 in a single year against one country. China’s estimated production capacity is 500,000 per month.

A Brave New Warfare

One way attack drones represent a meaningful shift in American procurement. At roughly $22,000 per unit, they mirror the cost logic of the Iranian Shaheds they are designed to counter. But drone warfare demands a networked approach: attack, intercept, surveil, and jam operating as a system rather than isolated platforms. The F-35 was built around network centric warfare. American drone doctrine needs the same integrated thinking applied to these low-cost systems.

A new industrial base needs to be built, and the procurement system needs to change. Congress needs to decide what level of oversight is appropriate for systems that cost less than a new car. Slower doesn’t just cost our country dollars, it will cost our soldiers’ lives and our military’s effectiveness in a world where quantity has won out against expensive weapons systems.

Guest contributer writes on defense procurement, emerging technology, and geopolitics. He is an FAA-certified UAS operator working in autonomous drone delivery, and this piece draws on his current research on UAS and transportation planning.

A New Kind of Military Power

Ukraine has emerged from four years of industrial-scale war as a specialized military power in a domain that did not exist as a distinct field of warfare a decade ago. It is the first country in to establish a dedicated military branch for unmanned systems. This is official recognition that drone warfare has become its own discipline, an official recognition that drone warfare has become its own discipline rather than an extension of existing ones

The innovation cycle Ukraine has built is measured in weeks, not years. Feedback from the front line produces updated systems quickly, by necessity. That pace has no precedent in conventional defense procurement, and no large conventional military operates that way. Ukraine is not a large or wealthy country, but it has developed a military capability that the world’s largest armies are now trying to learn from and acquire.

Ukraine has used its drone capability to go on the strategic offense. The strike on the St. Petersburg oil terminal, Russia’s largest, demonstrated that Ukraine’s reach now extends deep into Russian territory, far beyond anything a conventionally outmatched military would have been expected to achieve. Its campaign against Russian energy infrastructure has delivered measurable results, reducing Russian oil processing capacity by roughly 20 percent through more than 225 combined strikes.

Russian casualties have reached historic levels, with drone strikes credited as the primary driver. An estimated 33,000 Russian soldiers were killed last month, the first in which Russian losses exceeded new recruits. What Ukraine has built is not a supplement to conventional military power. It is a replicable model for how a smaller nation can offset conventional disadvantages through asymmetric technological dominance.

Drone Alliances Take Shape

Iran supplied Shahed drones to Russia throughout the war, giving Ukraine years of direct combat experience against the same weapons now being used against U.S. forces in the Middle East. Ukraine built a defensive doctrine around defeating this threat. They developed low-cost, $3000 interceptor drones specifically designed to destroy $50,000 Shahed-type drones.

Russia is now sending upgraded versions of those drones back to Iran, closing a loop that runs directly from the Ukrainian front to the current conflict in the Middle East. The tactical problem the U.S. military is confronting in the Iran war is one Ukraine already solved. The doctrine, hardware, and battlefield-tested expertise exists. It is held by a country the United States has chosen, at the level of stated policy at the top, to keep at arm’s length.

The rest of the world has drawn its own conclusions from Ukraine’s battlefield performance. Gulf states facing Iranian Shahed attacks have signed multi-year agreements to purchase Ukrainian drone defense systems, maritime drones, and electronic warfare packages. President Zelenskyy toured Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan to formalize these arrangements. He brought with him the naval doctrine Ukraine developed in the Black Sea, where Ukrainian maritime drones sank or disabled Russian warships.

Europe is pursuing joint production ventures with Ukraine. Poland and Ukraine have announced joint military training and production programs. NATO’s European members increased defense spending by 20 percent in 2025, and Ukrainian expertise is central to what they are now building into their own defense architectures.

Taiwan’s defense planners are drawing directly on Ukraine’s battlefield experience as they develop their own asymmetric posture against a much larger adversary. A de facto drone alliance is forming, with Ukraine at its center. Its foundation is battlefield credibility of a kind no other country can offer, earned against one of the world’s most powerful militaries over four years of continuous combat.

The U.S. Exception

Against this backdrop, stated U.S. policy at the highest level stands apart. President Trump said publicly that Zelenskyy was the last person he would ever ask for help. U.S. military aid to Ukraine over the first year of his second presidency. When U.S. forces came under sustained Shahed attack in the Iran war, it was Gulf states, not the United States, that had already secured Ukrainian guidance on defeating those weapons.

But necessity requires putting aside political posturing. The U.S. military is now working with Ukrainian advisers in the field. That cooperation is a practical acknowledgment that the policy posture and the battlefield reality are not the same thing. This has not been announced through official channels, and this type of tactical coordination would not rise to the level of the political leadership that set broad policy. The drone alliance is forming without the United States. Ukraine’s strategic relevance is not diminished by American policy. It is simply being expressed elsewhere.

The countries that recognized that relevance early are better positioned for the conflicts ahead. The ones that did not will learn the hard way what Ukraine already has.

Iran has been fortifying the island and moving additional air defenses into position. The shooting down of a US F-15 fighter jet shows they have retained some offensive capability. An entrenched and capable but weaker defender will try to hold the line against a superior invading force, conducting one of the most difficult offensive operations in war: a contested amphibious landing.

An amphibious landing is the most unforgiving military operation that exists. The troops crossing open water are exposed and unable to maneuver. The defender knows the terrain, has prepared positions, and can concentrate fire on what is a narrow front by necessity. There is no safe fallback position once the ramp drops. Success requires overwhelming preparation: precise intelligence, naval and air fire support, reliable logistics, and enough men to absorb the initial defense.

Military doctrine has long held a rule-of-thumb that an attacker needs a three-to-one numerical advantage against an entrenched defensive position. During an amphibious landing, that ratio needs to be higher. Bad planning does not reveal itself gradually in an amphibious operation. It reveals itself immediately and at significant cost. Four landings from the 20th century illustrate what happens when that preparation is present and what happens when it is not.

Gallipoli, 1915

In World War I, Winston Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty, basically the political head of the Royal Navy. In the military strategy against the Ottoman Empire, Churchill focused in on the narrow Dardanelles strait separating Asia and Europe, the gateway to Istanbul and the Black Sea. Taking the Gallipoli peninsula, on the European side, would open a supply route to Russia and provide some relief to the western front against Germany. The idea was sound, but the execution was not.

A naval attack in March 1915 failed and gave the Ottomans weeks of warning before any land assault. When the landing came on April 25, troops arrived on the wrong beach, beneath cliffs, with no room to maneuver. The Ottomans had fortified the cliffs. Churchill had pushed the operation forward before adequate forces and planning were in place, and military planners had serious reservations that were overridden. Once the troops were pinned on the beaches eight months of stalemate followed, with 250,000 Allied casualties.

Guadalcanal, 1942

The United States launched its first major Pacific offensive before it was ready. The Marines who landed on Guadalcanal in August 1942 had weeks of rations and limited ammunition. Two days after the landing, the Navy pulled its aircraft carriers from the area because it had not neutralized Japanese air and naval power and did not want to risk losing them. This left the Marines without air cover or reliable resupply due to Japanese naval superiority. For months, they used whatever was on hand to repel Japanese counterattacks.

The campaign lasted six months with 15,000 U.S. casualties. Guadalcanal was eventually won, and the strategic value of that victory was significant. But the victory obscured a planning failure. The Navy was not ready and the logistics were not in place. The means were not matched to the ends at the outset, and the men on the ground absorbed the cost of that gap through extraordinary sacrifice that should not have been necessary. And that sacrifice is much greater than what the U.S. public will accept today, especially in a war the U.S. itself initiated.

D-Day, 1944

The Normandy landings were the largest amphibious operation in history. They succeeded because of two years of preparation that overcame significant portions of the operation going wrong. In The Germans knew an invasion attempt was coming and began fortifying the French coast of the English Channel in earnest by November of 1943. An Allied bombing campaign and a glance at a map made that obvious. The challenge was not concealing the fact of an invasion but concealing its location.

Operation Fortitude deceived the Germans into concentrating their strongest forces at Pas-de-Calais at the narrowest crossing from Great Britain, rather than Normandy. Allied air power spent months destroying German logistics and infrastructure before a single soldier hit the beach. The plan built in redundancy across five landing beaches with multiple contingencies, backed by overwhelming naval and air support.

The American landing at Omaha Beach was still nearly a disaster. Landing craft blew 1,000 feet off course, unloaded too far from shore, and much of the supporting artillery sank before reaching the beach. But the operation had enough depth that one catastrophic landing did not collapse the campaign. Eisenhower had spent two years building that depth. He had the authority and the resources to do the job properly.

Inchon, 1950

By September 1950, North Korean forces had pushed troops U.S. troops into a small perimeter on Korea’s southern coast. To salvage the war, Douglas MacArthur proposed an amphibious landing at Inchon, deep behind North Korean lines. The harbor had extreme tides and a fortified island blocking the approach, but MacArthur insisted. The landing worked completely, aided by surprise and overwhelming force. Within two weeks Seoul was liberated and North Korean forces were in full retreat.

Then MacArthur overreached. He drove north toward the Chinese border despite explicit warnings that China would intervene, which it did with 300,000 troops driving UN forces back in the largest American military retreat in history. Tactical and strategic success are not the same thing. MacArthur could execute a landing brilliantly. He could not define what winning meant once he was ashore. That confusion cost tens of thousands of lives.

Gallipoli was rushed by a leader who wanted the outcome without the preparation. Guadalcanal was launched before the supporting forces were ready and won by the men despite the planning rather than because of it. D-Day succeeded because Eisenhower matched the means to the ends with two years of deliberate planning. The landing at Inchon was executed brilliantly and followed by a failure to define what success beyond the beach actually required.

The men who fought on these beaches were not let down by their courage. They were let down when their leaders wanted the outcome without being honest about the cost of achieving it. Beyond the matching of means to ends, as General James Mattis recently observed on the Iran war, there has also been a persistent confusion of “targetry” with strategy. A brilliant and decisive military operation can still fail to deliver if its objectives are not clearly defined and planned for. That failure is not obvious until the ramp drops, but by then it is too late.

Global data center electricity consumption is projected to hit 1,100 terawatt-hours in 2026, the equivalent of Japan’s entire national energy consumption. AI requires continuous, reliable power. The answer converging across governments and technology companies is nuclear power from small modular reactors (SMRs). SMRs can be factory-built, shipped to site, and scaled incrementally. They do not require the decades of planning and billions in upfront capital of conventional nuclear plants. They can be sited near existing infrastructure and tailored to the power requirements of a data center campus or a regional grid.

A reactor export is not a purely commercial transaction. It is a 100-year relationship. Whoever builds a country’s reactor also sets its technical standards, supplies its fuel, and maintains its systems through the life of the plant. That relationship creates a structural dependency that no trade agreement can replicate. It also carries a complication that no other technology export does. Enriching uranium to fuel a nuclear reactor and to build a nuclear weapon use the same basic process. Every country that acquires civilian nuclear capability acquires proximity to weapons capability. That is why who builds your reactor, and under what terms, carries consequences far beyond the energy sector.

Russia and China understood all this before the United States did. Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, has nineteen reactors under active construction in seven countries and projects worth over $200 billion spread across forty. Its model is straightforward: state financing, turnkey construction, long-term fuel contracts, and repayment on favorable terms. The client does not just buy a reactor. It buys a dependency.

China is building a third of all reactors under construction globally and is targeting thirty reactor exports by 2030 through the Belt and Road Initiative. Pakistan, Egypt, Argentina, and Kazakhstan are among the partner countries. Russia built Kazakhstan’s first nuclear plant, and as Rosatom’s capacity weakens under Western sanctions, China is stepping in to build the second and third. Neither country attaches nonproliferation conditions to its reactor exports. Countries that accept their technology accept their terms, or the absence of them.

The United States is now competing, and the AI boom has given that competition a commercial urgency that climate policy never provided. The American approach differs from the Russian and Chinese models in one important respect. The U.S. conditions nuclear technology transfers on nonproliferation commitments. Allies get access to American reactor technology, and in exchange they agree not to pursue weapons capability. That is the direct answer to the core tension in nuclear exports, and it is a condition Russia and China do not impose.

The partnerships being built reflect energy and foreign policy imperatives. The U.S. and Japan recently announced a $40 billion SMR partnership, with reactors being built in Tennessee and Alabama using technology developed by GE and Hitachi. Japan has almost no domestic energy resources, so locking in American nuclear technology means locking in the strategic relationship on terms that benefit both sides. South Korean engineering firms with deep nuclear construction experience are now embedded in multiple U.S. SMR projects.

Poland, offered cheaper financing from China, chose American and South Korean reactor technology instead. That choice reflects foreign policy priorities more than economic calculation. France is committing nuclear power to anchor a major AI hub and is co-developing reactor technology with India and the UAE. The U.S. is also investing in domestic uranium enrichment capacity to reduce allied dependence on Russian fuel supply. Supplying the fuel is just as important as building the reactor

The stakes are significant. A nation running American-designed reactors on American-enriched fuel is aligned with Washington in ways that no diplomatic agreement can match because the dependency is physical rather than political. The inverse is already visible. Turkey is running a Rosatom plant that will eventually supply 10 percent of its electricity, and that will shape Turkish foreign policy for decades regardless of what Ankara’s leadership prefers.

The AI angle sharpens everything further. Nations that lock in reliable power for their AI infrastructure now will have an advantage in the future. The reactor that powers the data center also powers the alliance. The emerging Western free trade bloc taking shape among the EU, Australia, Canada, and South America, formed partly in response to energy supply chain vulnerability, represents a natural market for U.S. reactor technology, and nuclear diplomacy and trade diplomacy are beginning to converge. Future U.S. presidents would be smart to exploit this.

The proliferation risk does not disappear under American partnerships. It is managed through binding commitments that Russian and Chinese exports do not require. The United States is not simply selling reactors. It is exporting a framework for how civilian nuclear power gets developed, governed, and constrained. Whether enough countries choose that framework over cheaper alternatives will do as much to shape the next century as any military alliance or trade agreement.

Taiwan has never built the defense it needs to stop a Chinese amphibious invasion. The island’s geography favors the defender with limited landing areas, mountainous interiors, and dense urban areas. But geography only matters if you have the weapons to exploit it. Analysts at the Center for the New American Security (CNAS) have laid out what a proper defense looks like: hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones organized across four zones spanning the strait, to impose attrition on an invasion fleet before it ever reaches the beaches. But Taiwan produces only 10,000 drones a year. It continues to spend billions on advanced systems like fighter aircraft that Chinese missiles would destroy quickly.

The U.S. commitment to intervene has filled the gap. While this policy is ambiguous by design and not binding, it has been credible enough to work. That credibility is now being eroded. Significant U.S. military assets have moved to the Middle East. A $14 billion arms package to Taiwan, containing the “asymmetric” systems the island needs most, was withheld ahead of Trump’s planned Beijing summit. The 2026 National Defense Strategy does not mention Taiwan by name. None of this was designed to signal weakness. It is the byproduct of an administration consumed by one theater while another watches. But unintended signals are still signals, and what Beijing is hearing is that it might be able to move on Taiwan and get away with it.

Trump’s approach to China is transactional, focused on trade negotiations and using an arms deal with Taiwan as a bargaining chip. When Trump said he was “talking to Xi” about the Taiwan arms package, he was describing a negotiation. Beijing received it as confirmation that it has leverage over U.S. decisions about Taiwan’s defense, which has significant implications for its military strategy. When Xi told Trump directly that Taiwan is “the most important issue” in the bilateral relationship, Trump responded by discussing trade deals. The two sides are not having the same conversation.

The pattern extends beyond individual exchanges. While Trump was occupied with Iran, Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang leader accepted Xi’s invitation to visit Beijing in April. Taiwan’s internal politics are drifting toward accommodation as American commitment appears to wane. The NDS language reflects a genuine strategic shift: the stated goal is no longer to counter China but to avoid being dominated by it. Underlying all of it is a cruder logic that Trump has occasionally made explicit: spheres of influence were the U.S. focuses on the Western Hemisphere, and China is left to manage its own neighborhood.

China does not need to invade Taiwan immediately to achieve its strategic objectives. A blockade or sustained “gray zone” campaign short of invasion achieves the same end without triggering a direct military response. The playbook is visible in the current military activity. On March 15, 26 Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, with sixteen crossing into the northern, central, and southwestern sectors simultaneously.

Seven naval vessels were active around the island at the same time, and the outline of a potential blockade is still in place. This followed a two-week lull that coincided precisely with the lead-up to Trump’s originally planned summit in late March, since rescheduled to mid-May. China paused its air provocations as a diplomatic gesture before a summit it was preparing to host. When Trump postponed, the flights resumed.

The longer-term Chinese approach is more patient than a sudden assault. A slow-walked blockade, gradually isolating Taiwan economically and logistically without triggering an acute military response, closes the noose over time until Taipei negotiates rather than fights. Taiwan produces the chips that run American AI infrastructure and defense systems. Disrupting that supply chain without firing a shot is a prize worth considerable patience. And it also facilitates the long-term Chinese goal of reunifying with the island.

Taiwan’s own defense planners have already begun adjusting to U.S. unreliability. The CNAS report states this plainly: the asymmetric drone defense it recommends “offers a meaningful hedge given growing concern that the United States might not intervene in a cross-strait conflict.” Taiwan’s military community is no longer treating U.S. intervention as a baseline assumption. That shift in planning reflects a rational reading of the signals Washington is sending, intentional or not.

Another problem is that Taiwan is not building the defense that hedge requires. It is investing in legacy platforms at the direction of a U.S. defense industry that profits from selling expensive hardware, while the drone production gap grows wider. The withheld arms package made it worse: the asymmetric systems Taiwan needs most were held back to avoid antagonizing Beijing ahead of a summit that was then postponed anyway.

The CNAS authors frame the deterrence question correctly: the issue is not whether Taiwan can defeat China in a conventional war. It cannot. The question is whether Beijing can stomach the operational chaos, staggering casualties, and strategic uncertainty of a contested amphibious crossing. That deterrent only holds if Taiwan is building it and Washington is visibly committed to supporting it. Right now, neither condition fully applies.

Deterrence does not collapse all at once. It erodes through an accumulation of signals that individually seem manageable but collectively tell a different story. Trump has said “Taiwan is Taiwan” when pressed by a reporter, but against a pattern of delayed arms sales, a changing defense strategy, a postponed summit. Beijing reads patterns, not throwaway statements in press conferences or social media. China’s military posture is active now. Taiwan’s defense gap is real now. The window is open now for China to make a move while the US is distracted once again in the Middle East.

Santiago has spent 25+ years in rooms where the world’s energy and environmental future is negotiated. He chaired the International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation (IPEEC), co-led the G20 Energy Transition Working Group, and advised the World Bank, International Development Bank (IDB), and the International Energy Agency (IEA). He’s also a professor and researcher at Harvard, where he teaches public policy alongside some of the field’s leading scholars. His current research is looking back at Mexico’s democratic transition a quarter century on to ask: what’s changed, what’s reversed, and what does it mean?

We cover a lot of ground. We talk about Mexico’s energy sector, the genuine potential, the political headwinds, and what the realistic path forward looks like. Then we turn to energy efficiency: the IEA’s so-called “first fuel”. Santiago chaired IPEEC and worked with the IEA on this directly, and he has a practitioner’s view of why the most cost-effective energy tool available to most countries still gets underused. We close by looking ahead: what does effective international energy governance look like in a world that’s more fragmented than the one these institutions were built for?

We examine whether multilateral frameworks like the G20 actually effective, or whether they’re empty exercises in optics. We look at the state of democracy across Latin America and the relationship between institutional health and the capacity to pursue serious energy policy. We also go inside the implementation question: why does good policy so often fail to produce results on the ground? And what does it look like when it actually works?

Santiago is someone who has seen this from every angle in government and academia. The conversation is grounded, candid, and full of lessons for anyone who thinks seriously about policy, energy, and how political change actually happens in the real world.

What You’ll Take Away

• What Mexico’s energy transition looks like from the inside

• Whether G20-level energy governance actually moves the needle

• How democracy and institutional capacity shape a country’s ability to deliver on energy policy

• Why policy implementation fails, and what the evidence says about making it work

• Why energy efficiency is the most underused lever in most countries’ arsenals — and what changes that

• What durable international energy governance looks like in a more fragmented world

If you follow energy policy, Latin American politics, or the mechanics of how international agreements translate (or don’t) into real-world change, this conversation will be worth your time.

About the Guest

Santiago Creuheras is a public policy scholar and sustainable development expert with over 25 years of experience across government, international institutions, and academia. He served as Deputy Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Energy of Mexico and chaired the International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation, elected by unanimous endorsement of all member countries.

He co-led the G20 Energy Efficiency and Energy Transitions Finance Working Group and has held senior advisory roles at the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. At Harvard, where he holds three master’s degrees, he is a Kennedy School JFK Fellow, a Weatherhead Visiting Scholar, and teaches alongside Professors Matt Andrews and Ricardo Hausmann. His research examines Mexico’s democratization process and the broader trajectory of Latin American democracy and sustainable development.

For Further Reading

1. G20 Energy Transition Working Group: Doubling Energy Efficiency

2. Harvard Growth Lab: Atlas of Economic Complexity

3. Energy Efficiency in Public Facilities Project - World Bank Group

4. Creating Public Value - Harvard Kennedy School

5. The View from New York: The Poblano Subdiaspora

I created Current History to explore how history shapes present choices in geopolitics, technology, and public policy. If you found this conversation useful, consider subscribing below.

Subscribers receive every podcast and essay directly in their inbox. Its free for now, with paid options if you would like to support this work directly. The Founding Member plan guarantees lifetime access without a paywall.

You can also subscribe on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@current-history.

In this episode, I spoke with Marcus Wong, a public relations professional, former public official, and policy analyst whose Harvard graduate research focused on Canadian Arctic sovereignty and security. Marcus is also the author of a six-part series for the NATO Association of Canada titled Power Play in the Arctic, and our conversation draws directly from that work.

We open with the environmental and strategic context. The retreat of Arctic sea ice is already well underway. Marcus walks through the scale of what has changed, why the opening of the Northwest Passage represents both an economic opportunity and a security challenge, and what the vast untapped resource wealth of the region means for the states now competing for it.

From there, we turn to the actors. Russia has spent the better part of two decades systematically restoring Soviet-era military infrastructure across its Arctic frontier, expanding its Northern Fleet, and developing military capabilities designed to complicate any response. China, despite having no territorial claim in the region, has declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and is building what it calls the Polar Silk Road by positioning itself for commercial and strategic influence along emerging shipping routes. The United States, meanwhile, has historically disputed Canada’s jurisdiction over the Northwest Passage, treating it as an international strait rather than Canadian internal waters. That bilateral tension is unresolved and consequential.

We then examine where Canada currently stands. The picture is sobering. Canada faces genuine gaps in military capacity in the North, limited Arctic infrastructure, and a legal position under international maritime law that is more vulnerable than most Canadians realize. Marcus walks through the ambiguities created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and what is at stake if Canada loses the argument over the Northwest Passage on the international stage. We also discuss the role of Arctic Indigenous communities in Canada’s sovereignty claims: a relationship that is underutilized and, in important ways, an asset Canada has not fully engaged.

The second half of the conversation turns to what a serious Canadian response would look like. Marcus draws on the later installments of his series to outline a new partnership model for sovereignty in the High North, the case for an Arctic Charter incorporating perspectives from all stakeholders, and the practical steps a credible Arctic strategy would require. The discussion is concrete and policy-focused: less about what Canada should aspire to and more about what it would actually take to get there.

We close with a forward-looking conversation drawing on the analysis of Dr. George Soroka, the expert featured in the final piece of Marcus’s series. What are the most plausible scenarios for the Arctic over the next decade? Is there a version of this story in which Canada becomes a genuine leader in the region rather than a reactive follower?

What You’ll Take Away

By the end of the episode, you’ll have a clearer understanding of:

• Why the Arctic has become a contested strategic arena, and how quickly the situation is evolving

• What Russia, China, and the United States each want from the region — and where those interests conflict with Canada’s

• The legal vulnerabilities in Canada’s position over the Northwest Passage under international maritime law

• Why partnership with indigenous communities is central to a durable Arctic sovereignty strategy, not peripheral to it

• What a credible Canadian Arctic policy would actually require, and what the next decade may look like

If you follow Canadian foreign policy, international security, or the geopolitics of the High North, this conversation is worth your time.

About the Guest

Marcus Wong is a public relations professional, former public official, and policy analyst completing a Master of Liberal Arts at Harvard, where his graduate research focuses on Canadian Arctic sovereignty and security. He served as an elected member of West Vancouver City Council, has been appointed to the West Vancouver Police Board and the Board of Trustees at Queen’s University, and worked for the Canadian Olympic Committee and the Embassy of Canada in Washington. He is a board member of the NATO Association of Canada and the author of the Power Play in the Arctic series discussed in this episode.

For Further Reading

Power Play in the Arctic — NATO Association of Canada

• Part 1: From Isolation to Insecurity

• Part 2: Dissecting the Arctic’s Power Struggles by State

• Part 3: A Policy Prescription for Canada’s Arctic Defence

• Part 4: A New Partnership Model for Sovereignty in the High North

• Part 5: Blueprint for Canadian Arctic Leadership

• Part 6: Cold Fronts, Hot Choices — Dr. George Soroka Looks Ahead

I created Current History to explore how history shapes present choices in geopolitics, technology, and public policy. If you found this conversation useful, consider subscribing below.

Subscribers receive every podcast and essay directly in their inbox. Its free for now, with paid options if you would like to support this work directly. The Founding Member plan guarantees lifetime access without a paywall.

You can also subscribe on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@current-history.

In 1901, the Iranian government granted a British businessmen a concession to explore for oil across most of the country. It was the first oil concession granted by any Middle Eastern nation to a foreign power, and it set the terms for everything that followed. When oil was struck in 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed. The British government became its majority shareholder. The company that would eventually become British Petroleum was, from the beginning, an instrument of British foreign policy as much as a commercial enterprise.

Iran is an ancient country, but at this point in time it increasingly resembled a modern state. A constitutional revolution beginning in 1906 had established a parliament and a prime minister serving alongside the Shah, Iran’s monarch, by 1911. The country had the architecture of self-governance. What it did not have was control of its most valuable resource. By the late 1940s, Britain was earning more from Iranian oil than Iran itself.

In 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize the oil industry, and the Iranian assets of the renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The prime minister who led the effort, Mohammad Mosaddegh, argued that Iran’s oil belonged to Iran and that its revenues should not be diverted elsewhere. It was the position of a democratically elected nationalist government with broad popular support. Britain responded with sanctions, a naval blockade, and broader isolation from the West. Iran’s economy collapsed.

Lobbying from the British government and American concern about political instability providing an opening for communist influence led the CIA to assist a coup plot. In August 1953, Operation Ajax overthrew Mosaddegh’s elected government and consolidated power under the Shah, who again became an absolute monarch. Around 300 people died in the fighting in Tehran. Mosaddegh was imprisoned and spent the rest of his life under house arrest, while the rest of his government was executed. The oil returned to a Western consortium.

The question of who owned Iran’s resources had been answered in the most direct terms possible. The coup did not just remove a government. It imposed dictatorship and demonstrated that Western powers would destroy Iranian self-determination to protect their access to oil. The lesson Iran drew was permanent: agreements with the West are contingent, sovereignty is conditional, and the oil is never fully yours.

The Shah ruled for 25 years with American backing. His secret police, SAVAK, established with U.S. and Israeli assistance, became a symbol of repression that reached into every corner of Iranian society. Oil revenues soared after 1973, but wealth accumulated at the top. Inequality deepened, inflation rose, and ordinary Iranians saw little of the boom. The Shah had oil wealth and American protection. He had little legitimacy.

A Shia Muslim cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini had been arrested in 1963 for condemning the Shah and the revolution that brought him to power and was sent into exile in 1964. He spent 15 years building a revolutionary theology that fused Shia Islam with anti-imperialism and a specific grievance against American interference. When the revolution came in 1979, he did not need to construct a narrative from scratch.

The 1953 coup had written it for him. A savvy political operator, Khomeini fused popular discontent with the government with a coherent ideology appealing to the Shia majority of Iran into a movement that overthrew the Shah and established a theocratic government. The revolution replaced a pro-Western secular monarchy with an anti-Western Islamic republic. The hostage crisis that followed was a direct statement of defiance against the United States, and Khomeini used it to consolidate power at home by delegitimizing moderate opposition leaders who opposed taking the hostages.

The Islamic Republic built its foreign policy around the lesson of the 1953 revolution: never be vulnerable again. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, in which the United States backed Saddam Hussein, killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians and deepened the siege mentality that has defined the regime ever since.

Iran began funding proxies in the early 1980s, and built a regional network of proxy forces in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iraq (PMF), Yemen (Houthis), Palestine (Hamas), and Syria. The proxy network was a strategic hedge that gave Iran the ability to impose costs on adversaries without direct confrontation. It worked. For decades, Iran projected power across the region without ever facing a direct military conflict after the Iran-Iraq War.

That logic has been dismantled over the last few years. Hamas and Hezbollah have been destroyed as military forces. Assad is gone. Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who built and ran the proxy network, was assassinated by the United States in 2020. The hedges Iran spent forty years constructing have been stripped away one by one.

Oil remained the economy’s vulnerability throughout. Every time the West wanted to punish Tehran it reached for oil sanctions. The United States imposed its first sanctions on Iran in 1979. They have never fully been lifted, strengthened under Obama as leverage for the eventual 2015 nuclear deal, and reimposed by Trump when concerns about Iran’s nuclear program resurfaced.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions are inseparable from this history. The nuclear program began under the Shah with American assistance under Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative. After the revolution it was restarted. The central logic was straightforward: nuclear states are not attacked. The JCPOA of 2015 offered sanctions relief in exchange for enrichment limits.

President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018 and Iran resumed enrichment. This reinforced that Western commitments are reversible. Earlier this year, Iran offered significant limitations to its nuclear program in negotiations. Shortly after, it was attacked. The conclusion Iran draws from that sequence is that it needs to develop its nuclear and military capabilities faster, not slower.

Iran is now absorbing thousands of airstrikes with its supreme leader dead and its navy destroyed, and it is still holding the Strait of Hormuz closed. This is not irrational behavior. It is the behavior of a country acting from a very long memory, and of a state in a battle for survival using every tool at its disposal. The strait is the one lever Iran has learned, over seventy years, concentrates Western minds: disruption of the oil supply. It is local to Iran, easy to contest, and extraordinarily costly for the U.S. to attempt to reopen.

The country fighting back is not a random adversary. It is a nation shaped by a specific history of having its sovereignty stripped and its resources taken. As one of the world’s oldest civilizations, with a national identity stretching back through a succession of dynasties to the ancient Persian empire, that history ties into a level of national pride that makes resistance particularly salient. Iranians do not need to support the Islamic Republic to resist foreign intervention. The two things are not the same, and they never have been.

That history does not disappear when the bombs stop falling. It will shape whatever government emerges from this war, and whatever relationship Iran has with the West afterward. The question that started all of this, who owns the oil, has still not been answered to Iran’s satisfaction. It is unlikely to be settled by airstrikes.

The political contradiction is already visible. The administration promised cheaper energy and a quick, clean operation against Iran. Trump ran on energy dominance, the idea that American production would insulate Americans from the volatility of foreign conflicts. That argument is being tested in real time, and the test is not going well.

The damage is not contained to the United States. Europe is facing an inflation revival at a moment when its gas storage was already dangerously low. Global stock markets are down roughly 5.5 percent since February 28. The cost of shipping and insuring cargo of all kinds is rising. Freight and shipping insurance has been canceled or repriced across the board.

The cause is a twenty-one-mile channel between Iran and Oman.

The Strait of Hormuz is the only exit from the Persian Gulf. Two lanes of traffic carry 30 percent of the world’s seaborne oil. But oil is only the most visible thing moving through it. Gas, fertilizer inputs, and industrial chemicals all transit the same channel. Closing the strait applies pressure to the entire supply chain of the modern economy.

Iran didn’t close the strait by defeating the U.S. Navy. It closed it by hitting enough tankers that insurers stopped covering ships and captains stopped sailing. A few drones occasionally striking a vessel does the trick. The economics are straightforward: an incoming drone costs Iran a few thousand dollars; the interceptor missile that destroys it costs a defending country a million or more. Iran doesn’t need to win that exchange every time. It needs to make the risk calculation go the wrong way for everyone trying to move cargo.

Bypass routes exist on paper. Iran has hit those too. Oman’s alternate deep-water ports have been struck by drones. The UAE’s Fujairah terminal, the main alternate export route that bypasses Hormuz, has been hit three times. There is no pipeline across Arabia that comes close to replacing the volume normally transiting the strait. Without active naval escorts, ground-based anti-drone defense, and a sustained willingness to absorb casualties, there is no way to fully reopen it without Iranian cooperation.

Oil prices surged from $72 a barrel before the war to $110, with some analysts projecting $150 if the conflict drags on. The U.S. produces a lot of its own oil, but oil is priced on a global market. American pump prices rise when Brent crude rises, regardless of how much the U.S. drills. Higher energy costs are inflationary across the entire economy. The Fed was expected to cut rates this year, but that is now off the table. Higher prices will incentivize more U.S. production, but that takes time, and producers will hedge their bets.

Gas markets are getting hit from three directions at once. LNG tankers cannot move through the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian pipeline gas to Turkey and Iraq is under threat. And strikes have disrupted major Gulf gas fields. Together, one-fifth of the world’s LNG supply has been knocked off the market. There is no spare capacity sitting somewhere waiting to fill the gap. Like oil, because gas trades on a global market, no country fully escapes the economic impact.

More than 80 percent of the oil and gas moving through the strait goes to Asia, not the West. Japan gets 90 percent of its crude from this source, and its government has activated emergency response measures. South Korea gets 70 percent of its crude through the same channel and has already deployed a $68 billion stabilization fund to cushion the blow. China has large strategic reserves and can absorb a short disruption, but a prolonged one threatens its growth and the competitiveness of its manufacturers. India has thinner reserves and is already feeling the pressure.

As a major LNG exporter, the United States is in the unusual position of benefiting from higher prices even as it caused the disruption. American producers are locking in elevated prices for years ahead. The countries bearing the most economic pain from this war are precisely the ones being asked to send warships to help resolve it. Their reluctance is not hard to explain. They did not choose this war, but they are paying for it anyway.

The fertilizer shock few are talking about, and it may prove the most lasting. The Gulf ships enormous quantities of ammonia, urea, and sulfur, the building blocks of the nitrogen fertilizer that grows most of the world’s food. Because fertilizer is manufactured using natural gas, the gas disruption is simultaneously hitting fertilizer production in other parts of the world. The price of ammonia is up roughly 30 percent. Unlike oil prices, the economic impact will not be felt immediately, but in food prices months from now.

Financial markets have mostly assumed this war ends the way last June’s twelve-day conflict did, quickly and with limited damage. That assumption is what’s keeping oil prices from being even higher than they already are. If the war drags on, or if Iran continues striking major oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf, what is currently a painful disruption becomes an ongoing crisis with no quick fix.

Every major oil shock in modern history eventually forced a lasting response, countries diversified supply, and reduced dependence on single chokepoints. This crisis may push Asia and Europe to do the same. But structural adjustment takes years. The damage being done now is real, and its being felt by countries that did not choose to fight this war.

That gap is the story.

Iran’s strategy was never to defeat the American military head-to-head. No Iranian general believed that was possible, and their strategy has always been based on asymmetry. The strategy is to make the war expensive for everyone by targeting energy, shipping, and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf. The logic is straightforward: raise the price of escalation until pressure for de-escalation builds. Three weeks in, and this strategy is still in play.

The Strait of Hormuz is the instrument. The narrow strait between Arabia and Iran handles roughly 20 percent of the global seaborne oil trade, primarily from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Qatar, and Kuwait. When Iran’s Revolutionary Guard declared the passage closed to American and allied vessels, it didn’t need to sink the U.S. Navy. It needed to make insurers nervous and shipping companies unwilling to accept the risk, and hit a few tankers with drones to get the point across.

It has succeeded. Daily oil exports from the Gulf dropped by at least 60 percent in the week ending March 15, the world’s largest ever supply disruption. Oil has surged well above $100 per barrel. The economic pain is real and it is global, and it’s the result of a war the United States initiated.

Iran has also systematically targeted alternative routes. Drones struck Oman’s deep-water ports at Duqm and Salalah, which offered tankers an alternate path outside the strait. Fujairah, the UAE terminal that bypasses Hormuz, has been struck three times this month.

Beyond the energy crisis, Iran has escalated a general political crisis for the Gulf States. Besides oil, the UAE and its crown jewel Dubai are dependent on international business and tourism. Iranian drone and missile attacks have destroyed the image of safety required to sustain those industries. And Iranian strikes have had a substantive impact on degrading US military capabilities. Multiple THAAD radars, used for US missile defense, have been destroyed, along with some logistics on U.S. bases in the Middle East.

The alliance picture is the deeper wound. President Trump has demanded that NATO members, Japan, South Korea, and China send warships to reopen the strait. Germany, France, and the UK have ruled out military involvement. The message from these countries is consistent: we need the strait open, but we didn’t start this war and we won’t take the risk to help.

President Trump expressed surprise at the reluctance. He shouldn’t be. Most U.S. allies outside the Gulf opposed the operation from the start, and countries that opposed the war feel no obligation to pay its tab. And its no secret that many of our European allies are not fans of President Trump and would like to damage his political prospects in the US.

These are consequences of preventive war without a coalition. My previous piece asked whether the United States had defined its ends in Iran clearly enough and sized its means to match them. Iran, for its part, is calibrating the closure deliberately.

On March 5, the IRGC announced the strait would remain closed only to ships from the U.S., Israel, and their Western allies. India got two gas carriers through. China is in active negotiation. Iran is using access to the strait as a diplomatic instrument rewarding non-alignment and punishing alliance with Washington. That is not the behavior of a country on the verge of surrender.

The war is widening. Israel has opened ground operations in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. Iran continues firing missiles and drones at U.S. bases and allied infrastructure from Bahrain to Jordan. Every node in Iran’s regional network has been activated. The United States is managing simultaneous pressure points across a theater that stretches from the Red Sea to the Levant, and is now pulling resources from East Asia as China surrounds Taiwan.

The administration’s position is that Iran’s military has been significantly degraded and that the disruption ends when the war does. That may be true. But the timeline is open, the end state remains undefined, and the economic cost compounds daily.

What began as a battlefield shock has hardened into a geoeconomic one. Every additional week of disruption makes recovery harder and more expensive. Iran, for its part, is a major manufacturer of drones, and even if its missile launch sites are mostly destroyed, it can still maintain the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and continue to periodically hit US bases.

The United States has not been tactically defeated in Iran. It has won every engagement it has chosen to fight. But Iran doesn’t need to win battles to achieve its strategic objectives. It needs to hold the strait, keep its proxy network active, and wait for the economic pressure to do what its military cannot: force a negotiation on terms it can live with.

As researchers have noted at the outset of the conflict, the strategic objective of the operation remains obscure. Thatobservation has only grown sharper with time. Iran is losing the military campaign, but it holds the strait. Military dominance and strategic control are not the same thing and right now, the bill is falling on everyone except the country that started this. There are ways to secure the strait of Hormuz, but all involve greater escalation, and potentially ground troops.

The goals are unclear, the means are escalating. None of this looks promising in the long-term.

Sources

• Wikipedia: 2026 Strait of Hormuz Crisis — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Strait_of_Hormuz_crisis

• Al Jazeera: Which ships has Iran allowed safe passage — https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/3/16/strait-of-hormuz-which-countriess-ships-has-iran-allowed-safe-passage-to

• NPR: Trump demands NATO and China police the Strait — https://www.npr.org/2026/03/16/nx-s1-5749109/trump-threatens-nato-strait-hormuz-iran-war

• NBC News Day 17 live blog — https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/live-blog/live-updates-iran-war-trump-reopen-strait-of-hormuz-israel-lebanon-rcna263448

• CNN: EU ministers decline to expand Hormuz operations — https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/iran-war-us-israel-trump-03-16-26

• World Economic Forum: The Global Price Tag of War in the Middle East — https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/the-global-price-tag-of-war-in-the-middle-east/

• Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy: US-Israeli Attacks on Iran and Global Energy Impacts — https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/us-israeli-attacks-on-iran-and-global-energy-impacts/

The record is uneven.

After World War II, the United States occupied Germany and Japan completely with nearly one million troops. Douglas MacArthur ran Japan like a military dictator from 1945 until 1951. Germany was divided, administered, and rebuilt under sustained Allied rule until 1949. The U.S. rewrote constitutions, purged institutions, rebuilt economies from rubble, and stayed for years until the new order held. Both countries still host American forces.

New governments were not just installed. They were constructed from the ground up, monitored, and supported until they could stand on their own. It worked because it had to. Total war had created total mandate. Four years of sacrifice and two atomic bombs meant the American public would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender and complete transformation. The ends were clear and the means were matched, and so the results endured.

George H.W. Bush understood this logic better than any president since. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 to annex it and seize its oil fields, Bush didn’t act on instinct or ideology. He built a 35-nation coalition, secured UN authorization, brought Arab states to the table, and defined the objective with precision: expel Iraq from a sovereign country it had illegally invaded.

It was a principled act of collective security, not transactionalism. And when Kuwait was liberated, he stopped. Going to Baghdad would have shattered the coalition, violated the mandate, and required an occupation nobody had signed up for. It was strategic discipline, not timidity. The ends defined the means, and the means stopped where the ends did.

His son’s administration lacked that discipline. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was sold as liberation, not occupation. The public was promised they would be greeted as liberators. Inside the administration, Colin Powell, the secretary of state and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the elder Bush, reportedly argued for a 500,000 troop occupying force. This was on par with the occupations of Germany and Japan and enough to stabilize a country of 25 million after toppling its government.

Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, overruled him in favor of sending roughly a third of that. The idea was a smaller, more nimble force could win rapidly and then work with Iraqi security forces to stabilize the country. They had enough force to win the war, but conflicting goals meant they did not have enough to win the peace. In a program to purge members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party, Iraq administrator Paul Bremer dissolved the security forces in 2003. The end was regime change, but the means were sized for a raid. The result was a quagmire that defined a generation.

Barack Obama’s failure in Libya came from a different direction. The impulse was humanitarian. Muammar Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who was threatening to crush a 2011 uprising in Libya. To stop a massacre in Benghazi and protect civilians, US forces provided air cover to rebel forces in a limited air campaign. Eventually, Gaddafi was removed.

But Gaddafi had held Libya together by force for four decades. Remove him without a plan for the morning after and you inherit the chaos he had been suppressing. Libya today is a failed state with two governments, open instability, and a transit point for every destabilizing force in North Africa. The intentions were right. The ends were never honestly defined beyond the immediate crisis, while the means were deliberately limited to avoid political cost. The gap between them became a failed state.

Which brings us to Iran. The full picture is still forming. If statements from Secretary of State Rubio are accurate, the United States joined Israel’s campaign in part because Israel was going regardless, and Washington calculated it was better to shape the operation than watch from the sidelines. That is crisis management, not strategy. Initially, regime change was the stated goal.

Right now, the morning-after question is immediate and unanswered. Iran has 90 million people, the land area of Alaska, a sophisticated political culture, and is a regional military power. Nobody has made the case to the American public for what comes next, questions such as what the new Iran looks like, who runs it, how long American forces stay engaged, and what it costs. Initially, Iranians, stem happy with the overthrow of the regime, but continuous bombardment of some of the largest cities in the Middle East (Tehran is home to 9 million people) may cause their enthusiasm to wane.

Iran itself is also very different than Iraq and Libya. No such countries ever existed prior to European empires drawing lines on a map over a century ago. Removing dictators destabilized those countries, but posed little threat to American forces. Iran has a national identity stretching back to the ancient world with well-defined national interests that will persist across regimes. The U.S. has not fought a full-scale war against such a country since World War II. If the goal is regime change, the lack of troops on the ground will make that difficult.

But, its size and geography make Iran a very difficult target for a ground invasion, and Iranians will defend their land. The U.S. is arming Kurdish groups, but a small rebellion in Iran’s northeast will not topple the government. If the regime survives, it now has a much stronger incentive to pursue a nuclear weapon. Reporting shows Iran offer significant limitations to its nuclear enrichment program. In response, it was attacked. This does not happen to nuclear weapons states, Russia being the key example.

Previously, military actions by President Trump have been very targeted and limited, with narrow aims that were tactical and transactional in nature. In his first term, we worked with a coalition to defeat ISIS and targeted a rogue Iranian general. In his second, the US removed Nicolo Maduro from power to create more negotiating leverage with the Venezuelan regime, which was otherwise untouched. The current conflict with Iran is different.

Every administration in this history thought it had a strategy. The ones that succeeded defined their ends clearly, built legitimate means to achieve them, and were honest about the cost. The ones that failed wanted the outcome without the commitment. It was transformation on the cheap, regime change without occupation, liberation without reconstruction.

The graveyards of American foreign policy are full of leaders who wanted to remake nations but budgeted for a raid. We will find out which category this one belongs to. But history says the question to ask is not whether we won the opening campaign. It is whether we defined what winning actually means, and whether we were honest enough to pay for it.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iran’s top military leadership was killed in the opening hours. The operation is ongoing. Iran is fighting back across the entire Middle East, targeting U.S. bases and allies from Bahrain to Jordan. Six American service members are dead. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil flows, is closed. This is not a limited strike, but a war.

Iran’s response has been relentless and deliberately broad. Since the strikes began, Iran has launched coordinated drone and missile attacks across the Middle East, hitting civilian infrastructure, airports, ports, military facilities, and urban areas in the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The scale is unlike anything the region has seen.

The UAE alone absorbed 165 ballistic missiles and 541 drones in a single day. Most were intercepted. But interception is not free. Every drone swatted out of the sky costs a defending country an interceptor missile that can run to a million dollars or more, while the incoming drone may have cost Iran a few thousand. The U.S., which has seen a consulate, embassy, and multiple military bases hit, faces the same financial calculation.

This asymmetry, cheap drones exhausting and evading expensive defenses, is one of the defining military lessons of the Ukraine-Russia war. It does not require sophisticated technology. It requires volume, and Iran has volume as the world’s largest exporter of drones for military use and Russia’s primary supplier. The question of how you defend against it, at sustainable cost, does not yet have a good answer.

The AI Battle That Ran Alongside It

Now for the extraordinary irony embedded in this week’s news. Hours before the strikes on Iran began, Trump announced that the military would no longer use Anthropic’s AI tools, and then U.S. forces used that same AI to assist the very operation launched that day.

The dispute had been building for weeks. Anthropic, maker of a widely used AI called Claude, had signed a contract with the Pentagon to integrate its technology into classified systems. The company held two firm limits beyond current US law: it did not want its AI used for fully autonomous weapons, and it did not want it used for mass surveillance of American citizens.

The Pentagon called those limits unacceptable. Anthropic said the government’s final offer included language “framed as compromise paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.” When Anthropic refused to back down, the administration banned the company from all government work and moved to blacklist it, a designation normally reserved for foreign adversaries.

Hours later, a rival company, OpenAI, announced a deal with the Pentagon. Its CEO said the government had displayed “deep respect for safety”, invoking the same principles Anthropic had been punished for asserting. But the terms of its agreement permitted all legal uses of ChatGPT, with no additional stipulations. Sen. Mark Warner warned publicly that the episode raised serious concerns about whether national security decisions were being driven by careful analysis or political considerations, and might be a pretext to steer contracts toward a preferred vendor.

Strip away the corporate drama and the underlying question is serious. AI is now embedded in American military operations, used to assess intelligence, identify targets, and model battle scenarios. Who decides how it can be used, and what it cannot be asked to do? A private company drawing its own ethical lines is one answer, imperfect but at least visible. The administration’s response to blacklist the company and find a more compliant vendor forecloses that conversation entirely.

The Larger Contest

Pull back further and both stories, the war and the AI dispute, are expressions of the same underlying competition. Modern warfare runs on technology. Technology runs on chips. Chips run on minerals that China refines in overwhelming quantities and has already shown willingness to restrict as a geopolitical weapon.

Earlier this month, the U.S. convened ministers from 54 countries in Washington to begin building a rival supply network, an alliance committed to producing and trading the critical minerals that advanced electronics require, outside of Chinese control. The same week, India formally joined an American initiative to secure technology supply chains running from raw materials all the way through to AI systems.

The argument behind both efforts is simple: if the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it. For example, Brazil, sits on some of the world’s largest rare earth deposits and is now the subject of open competition between the U.S., Europe, and China. Panama seized Chinese-operated port concessions at the canal. Every move is incremental. Together they describe a concerted effort to peel away Chinese supply chain control, one node at a time.

The Iran war made vivid what is usually abstract. A supreme leader was tracked and killed using AI tools built by a California company, delivered by aircraft that depend on components sourced from across a global supply chain that the United States is now racing to secure.

The U.S. is struggling to combat another technological advance: cheap, precision-guided drones that are making advanced missile defense systems obsolete. Its the new, high-tech 21st century version of assymetric warfare, developed and battle tested in Ukraine and now deployed in another conflict against the world’s most powerful military.

The compute wars are not coming. They are already here, and this week showed what they look like when they arrive.

Since the major lines stabilized after Ukraine’s counteroffensive phase in Fall 2023, Russia has captured roughly an additional 1% of Ukrainian territory at the cost of over one million casualties. The battlefield has not produced decisive movement in Moscow’s favor. Instead, it has settled into a costly grind.

Ukraine has continued some offensive activity. It has struck Russian logistics hubs, energy infrastructure, and military production facilities over 1000 miles behind the front. In the Black Sea, sustained Ukrainian pressure forced Russian naval assets to pull back from positions once thought secure, allowing commercial shipping routes to reopen. Small territorial gains have occurred in localized sectors, though the broader frontline remains largely static.

Diplomacy continues in parallel. Contacts and negotiations between Ukraine, the United States, and Russia have not produced a settlement, but they show that all sides are positioning for a longer contest. Russia has shown its not interested in a deal right now, with missiles still raining down on Ukrainian civilians and the infrastructure they depend on.

Kyiv wants security guarantees and to give up no additional territory. European states are increasingly central to those discussions. Washington remains influential, but it no longer defines the conversation alone.Russia’s position has changed as well. Moscow entered the war expecting rapid gains and sustained economic leverage over Europe. Instead, it has made limited territorial progress at high cost.

Oil revenue still flows, but often at discounted prices, and even that is declining with U.S. pressure on buyers such as India. The longer the war drags on without major gains, the harder it becomes for Moscow to claim momentum. A war that produces little new territory and steady financial strain does not strengthen a negotiating hand.

Against that backdrop, the political structure supporting Ukraine is shifting. For two years, American aid functioned as the backbone of the Western response. Advanced air defense systems, long-range weapons, intelligence coordination, and financial packages moved through Washington first. European states supplemented that support. The pace of assistance often tracked a sympathetic Biden administration.

The shift is no longer about delay. It is about structure. Direct U.S. aid has been suspended. Washington is not moving large congressional funding packages. Instead, it is permitting weapons sales from American defense manufacturers, financed by European governments and Ukraine itself. That arrangement changes the center of gravity. The United States still controls export approvals and retains industrial capacity, but it is no longer carrying the financial burden.

That shift forces a different kind of planning. Europe cannot assume American underwriting. It must organize its own defense. There has been an assumption that Europe was not capable of this. But that logic is based on the strategic picture that existed before the Ukraine war. European states have national interests that were suppressed by an alliance system designed to do exactly that in the wake of two destructive world wars largely caused by European states.

NATO was designed to, as it was famously put by the first NATO secretary general Hastings Ismay, “To keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The U.S. took charge of security and facilitated decolonization of the remaining European empires.

Europe never developed a significant arms industry or pulled its weight in NATO, because it never had to. With US support in question, the interests of Europeans are reasserting themselves in the face of a Russian threat, and combined they have more than enough resources to protect those interests themselves.

Germany’s rearmament commitments are moving from announcement to implementation, and its working with France and the UK on a potential nuclear umbrella. The European Union has expanded joint procurement and financing tools to support defense production. Nordic and Eastern European states are increasing military spending. Poland is building one of the largest conventional forces in Europe. There is now open recognition that Europe will have to take charge of its security.

Inside alliances, leverage flows from necessity. Influence comes from being essential to action. For much of this war, the United States occupied that position. Control over advanced systems and funding translated into influence over timing and escalation. Washington could shape how quickly capabilities arrived and under what conditions.

If Europe can now fund and arm Ukraine with less dependence on U.S. appropriations, that dynamic changes. European governments are asserting their interests more openly and building the capacity to act even if American politics slows support. Influence inside the alliance becomes more negotiated and less assumed.

The United States retains significant military weight and political influence. But it cannot define the terms alone. When supply becomes shared, influence becomes shared. NATO remains intact. American forces remain deployed across Europe. Collective defense commitments are unchanged. Yet dependence is decreasing.

The war continues. Russia has failed to translate attrition into decisive territorial gains, and its room to maneuver is shrinking. Ukraine has adapted to impose steady costs rather than chase dramatic breakthroughs. Europe is expanding its defense base while diplomatic channels remain open. The front may appear static. The balance of leverage is not. In an alliance built on capability, the question is no longer who is strongest. It is who is indispensable.

The controversy was not just about one song. It was about the entire halftime show. Bad Bunny’s set was largely in Spanish and centered Latin American culture at a moment of visible tension in U.S.–Latin American relations. Washington has returned to a more assertive posture in the hemisphere, from pressure campaigns against Nicolás Maduro to an aggressive deportation policy at home. Whether framed as security or democracy promotion, that posture revives older memories of intervention.

When Ricky Martin joined the stage to perform “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” the meaning was direct. The title translates to “What Happened to Hawaii.” The song draws a parallel between Hawaii’s path from independent kingdom to U.S. annexation and eventual statehood, and Puerto Rico’s current territorial status. Its warning is not about formal statehood alone, but about gradual loss of control over land, political autonomy, and long-term direction under American sovereignty.

That comparison only makes sense if you go back to 1898.

In the aftermath of the Spanish–American War, the United States acquired both Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Hawaii’s monarchy had been overthrown in 1893 by American and European business interests backed by U.S. Marines. Annexation followed five years later. A joint resolution by the U.S. Congress apologizing for this action was passed in 1993.

Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain under the Treaty of Paris ending the war, in addition to Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. This was part of a broader turn toward overseas expansion marking a break from the earlier continental model of territorial growth. Both island nations entered the twentieth century under American control, strategically valuable and politically unsettled.

Hawaii’s location made it central to Pacific naval power. Puerto Rico became a key foothold in the Caribbean. In both cases, Congress had to decide whether these new possessions were destined for full incorporation into the Union or something else. The Supreme Court addressed that question in the Insular Cases, establishing the doctrine of “unincorporated territories.” The Constitution, the Court held, did not automatically apply in full to newly acquired territories. That doctrine still governs Puerto Rico today.

From there, their paths diverged.

Hawaii moved gradually toward incorporation. It became an organized U.S. territory in 1900 and, after decades of political lobbying and demographic change, achieved statehood in 1959. Statehood brought representation in Congress and participation in presidential elections.

It also locked Hawaii firmly into the federal system. Indigenous land claims were marginalized, large portions of land shifted into corporate and mainland ownership, and the economy became closely tied to tourism and the U.S. military. Political equality within the Union came with permanent integration into American sovereignty.

Puerto Rico followed a different model. It became an unincorporated territory in 1900 and later the Jones Act of 1917 granted U.S. citizenship to residents but not full political rights. In 1952, it adopted a constitution and became a commonwealth, a status designed to provide internal self-government while preserving U.S. authority.

Its residents are U.S. citizens and their children are natural-born citizens, yet they cannot vote in presidential elections and lack voting representation in Congress. The island governs itself locally, but federal law overrides local decisions, and Congress retains ultimate control. It is neither a state nor an independent nation.

The United States has long described itself as anti-imperial, especially in contrast to European colonial empires. Yet Hawaii and Puerto Rico were products of an openly expansionist period. The debate at the time was explicit. Figures such as Mark Twain and perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan opposed annexation, arguing that ruling distant populations without full consent contradicted republican principles. Others maintained that strategic expansion was necessary for economic growth and security. The system that emerged was a compromise that avoided formal colonial language while preserving federal authority over distant territories.

Puerto Rico’s status has never been fully settled. Several referenda have asked voters to choose among statehood, independence, or continuation of the current arrangement, and the results have been divided. Congress has not taken definitive action. In the meantime, economic crises, the imposition of a federally appointed fiscal oversight board, migration to the mainland, and changes in property ownership have reshaped the island’s future without resolving the constitutional question.

“What happened to Hawaii” refers to a specific trajectory: annexation, incorporation, demographic transformation, and permanent integration into the federal system. For some Puerto Ricans, the concern is not simply whether the island becomes a state. From a political standpoint, it is whether decisions about land, the economy, and politics shift steadily toward Washington without a clear and binding settlement of status. From a cultural standpoint, it’s a question of the loss of identity.

The halftime performance did not create that debate. It placed it in front of a national audience. If Hawaii represents full incorporation into the Union and Puerto Rico represents prolonged territorial ambiguity, the comparison forces a basic question about how the United States understands territories acquired during its period of overseas expansion. And it should inform the sensitivity with which the U.S. should approach its new found concern for Latin America and the Western Hemisphere.