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.

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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.

They are building working software and carrying out multi-step tasks that previously required sustained human oversight. The upgrades look incremental, but they aren’t. When AI moves from assisting to executing, the ability to get things done shifts from the human to the system.

For most of the digital era, software amplified human effort. Search engines expanded access to information, productivity tools reduced friction, and the first LLM models drafted content that people reviewed and refined. The human operator remained the driver of execution.

What is different about the newest generation of models is their growing capacity to complete tasks independently with limited input, and make subjective judgements. When a system can ingest thousands of lines of code, identify architectural weaknesses, propose and implement revisions, and iterate without constant intervention, the distinction between tool and operator blurs.

That shift matters because software is embedded in the infrastructure of the modern world. Financial transactions clear through code. Hospitals manage records through code. Supply chains coordinate through code. As AI systems begin shaping that code directly, the issue is no longer just productivity or labor markets. It becomes a question of who influences the systems that organize economic and political life.

The speed of change makes the problem sharper. Industrial transitions in the past unfolded over decades, giving institutions time to adapt. Frontier AI models improve on cycles measured in months. Capabilities expand, enterprises integrate them, and by the time lawmakers debate guardrails, the technical baseline has already moved. Governments operate through legislation, regulation, and negotiation. Model development does not slow to match that rhythm. The gap between technology and politics is widening.

Modern power depends on keeping complex systems running. Economies, bureaucracies, and defense networks require constant coordination. That coordination now runs through software. When AI systems begin shaping how information is processed and how options are presented to decision-makers, they influence how authority is exercised, even if they do not formally replace it. The point is not that algorithms govern, but that they decisively shape the environment in which governing occurs.

What makes this moment unusual is where the capability sits. In earlier eras, technologies that reshaped power were embedded within the state or could be brought under direct public control. Nuclear weapons programs were state-run. Intelligence agencies were sovereign institutions. Central banking authority rested with governments. The core capacity was internal.

Frontier AI does not follow that model. The most advanced systems are developed and operated by private firms that rely on cloud infrastructure and advanced semiconductor supply chains. Governments clearly understand the strategic stakes. Export controls on high-end chips and competition over data center construction and critical minerals reflect this. Yet even with those tools, states do not run the leading models. Private companies train them, update them, and determine how they are deployed.

This is what some analysts describe as a “technopolar” moment. The argument is straightforward. Large technology firms are no longer just companies operating within a geopolitical system. Because they control critical digital infrastructure, their decisions now shape that system. They influence who can access advanced models and how those models are deployed. That influence carries strategic consequences.

States are adjusting in different ways. The United States relies heavily on private companies to drive AI development, and the key players in the space are based in the US. China integrates AI more directly into national planning. Europe has focused on writing regulatory frameworks. The approaches differ, but the underlying reality is the same: advanced compute and model capability now carry geopolitical weight.

Control over chips and large-scale training capacity has become a point of leverage. Export restrictions are not only trade policy. They affect who can build the next generation of systems. The competition is therefore not just technical. It concerns who shapes the infrastructure that other institutions depend on.

None of this sidelines governments. States still control law, budgets, and force. But they increasingly rely on systems they do not operate, and AI itself is beginning to takeover decision-making, at least at a low level. As AI becomes more embedded in how modern institutions function, the relationship between public authority and private capability grows more intertwined.

The question is no longer whether AI will disrupt markets. It is whether political systems can govern the infrastructure of intelligence itself. As capability concentrates in a small number of firms and models improve faster than governments can keep up, the debate shifts from innovation to authority.

Nuclear doctrine can get more complex than you might think. There is first strike capability, which is just the brute force capability to launch an attack. There is also what is known as “damage limitation”, or how you withstand damage and retain the ability retaliate after a first strike. And then there is second strike capability, or the ability to retaliate effectively.

The idea of MAD, or mutual assured destruction, fits within the second strike capability. If a first strike comes your way, can you retaliate with enough force that the first strike results in your adversary’s own destruction? If you can make first strikes as costly as possible, beyond any reasonable benefit, than first strikes are no longer an option, and you’ve mostly prevented nuclear war.

What could undermine MAD? Two things: not having enough weapons ready to go, and not being able to withstand a first strike. This is part of the logic of the nuclear triad, or having nuclear weapons delivered through land, sea and air. It increases survivability of nuclear forces and provides more options for the second strike.

Back to the old quote though: at a certain point, adding more weapons becomes absurd IF you already have the capability of destroying your opponent. There is no reason to have enough to destroy the world once, much less three times over. Once you can guarantee the destruction of your adversary, any addition to a nuclear arsenal is pointless. Assured destruction is a threshold concept. Cross it, and the logic changes. The difference between annihilating your opponent once and annihilating them several times does not alter the outcome from a strategic standpoint. It just has the minor drawback of potentially destroying the Earth’s climate.

The New START treaty, which just expired, is about this exact dynamic, one that involves the survival of the human race and is therefore above any other diplomatic or military objective. I would oppose working with Russia on most diplomatic initiatives while it continues to act as a rogue state EXCEPT for this one.

For decades, the superpowers accumulated weapons as if that distinction mattered. Early in the Cold War, some of it did. Missiles were inaccurate and intelligence was uncertain. Leaders feared a disarming first strike and sought to build in redundancy as insurance for an unreliable technology.

But by the late Cold War, survivable second-strike forces were secure. Ballistic missile submarines ensured retaliation even after a massive surprise attack. Hardened silos and dispersed bombers added resilience. Arms control emerged to manage this new reality. It did not eliminate nuclear weapons or remove existential risk, but it imposed limits. It slowed accumulation and introduced transparency. It acknowledged, without saying so directly, that there was such a thing as “enough.”

That structure has now ended.

On February 5, 2026, New START expired. It was the last remaining bilateral treaty placing legally binding limits on the strategic nuclear forces of the United States and Russia. Its single extension had already been exercised in 2021. No successor agreement was concluded. For the first time since the early 1970s, there are no binding caps on the long-range nuclear arsenals of the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

New START was never disarmament. It capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550. It limited deployed delivery systems to 700 and total launchers to 800. Those ceilings were comfortably above any plausible minimum deterrent requirement. Both sides retained secure second-strike capabilities under the treaty. Equally important were the shared definitions of what counted as a deployed warhead. The treaty required on-site inspections data exchanges that reduced uncertainty.

Washington and Moscow have signaled that they may voluntarily observe the previous limits through 2026, but this restraint is informal and reversible. The immediate result is not to resume the arms race. Modernization programs already underway in both countries are expensive and slow-moving. The United States is replacing its aging Minuteman III missiles with the Sentinel system. Russia is fielding the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile. These efforts absorb resources simply to maintain existing capabilities.

The deeper change is structural. Under New START, both sides operated within a shared ceiling. Force planning occurred inside a defined box. Without that box, planning becomes unilateral. The question “how much is enough?” no longer has a mutually accepted answer. It is replaced by “how much might the other side build?.” Relative advantage is psychologically easier to justify than sufficiency. If missile defenses expand, additional offensive systems can be framed as necessary insurance. If a rival’s arsenal grows, symmetrical responses appear prudent. Hedging against worst-case scenarios becomes the organizing principle.

None of this alters the core deterrence equation. Second-strike survivability for both the United States and Russia is already secure. Submarine-based forces ensure retaliation cannot be eliminated by a first strike. Additional warheads do not make that retaliation more credible once assured destruction is guaranteed. The difference between destroying a society once and destroying it several times over does not provide a meaningful strategic gain.

New START did not prevent competition. It contained its most visible expression. It was the last formal acknowledgment that surplus exists. Its expiration removes the shared, legal acceptance of sufficiency. Deterrence remains intact, and neither side doubts the catastrophic consequences of nuclear use. What has changed is the willingness to formally stop counting.

Rolandas is a historian and international relations and security expert with over two decades of experience across government, academia, and the private sector in Europe and the United States. He holds a PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, degrees from Vilnius University and Boston College, and is completing a Master’s in Government at Harvard University. He has served as an advisor at Lithuania’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, consulted for UK government agencies, and worked as a security consultant for multinational firms, including Accenture. His work spans European security, Russia, transatlantic relations, and Japan.

As a native of Lithuania born in the former Soviet Union, he brings a first-person, personal perspective of living in Eastern Europe under the shadow of Russia. In addressing the conflict in Ukraine, he offers a unique perspective as someone who was directly impacted by the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia’s attempts to reclaim its former empire. For him and the citizens of countries on NATO’s eastern flank, security is not an abstraction. It is a lived memory.

From there, we turn to the present.

What is the state of the war in Ukraine? How should we understand Russia’s military posture and Europe’s response? Rather than treating Moscow’s behavior as erratic or irrational, Rolandas situates it in a longer historical arc. Russian statecraft, he argues, follows patterns that are legible if you take history seriously. We discuss the idea of Russia’s “endgame,” whether territorial, political, or civilizational.

We also examine why Eastern Europe sees NATO as a necessary counterweight to Russia. For states like Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, alliance commitments are existential. The Baltic view of security differs sharply from debates in Washington or Western Europe. That divergence helps explain tensions within the alliance, as well as its resilience.

The conversation then widens to U.S.–Russia relations. What does Moscow ultimately seek from Washington? Is confrontation structural, or contingent? How does American policy look from Eastern Europe? We explore the strategic logic on both sides and what it suggests about escalation, deterrence, and long-term competition.

In the final third of the episode, we step back to the broader question of world order. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently described the current moment at Davos as a “rupture” of the post–Cold War system. Is that accurate? Are we witnessing the consolidation of a multipolar world, or simply a more contested version of U.S. primacy? We discuss what this shift means for Europe, Canada, and middle powers that depend on stable rules and predictable alignments.

We also detour briefly to East Asia. Rolandas has studied Japan extensively, and we examine rising tensions between China and Japan. How do maritime disputes and security anxieties in the Pacific echo patterns we see in Eastern Europe? Where do the parallels break down? And what does this tell us about the broader structure of the international system?

Throughout the discussion, one theme recurs: geography and history matter. States carry memory. Alliances reflect fear as much as ideology. And periods of apparent stability often conceal deeper structural stress.

What You’ll Take Away

By the end of the episode, you’ll come away with a clearer understanding of:

• How Eastern Europe interprets Russian behavior

• What Russia may ultimately be trying to achieve

• Why NATO remains central to security on its eastern flank

• How U.S.–Russia tensions fit into a wider global realignment

• What emerging debates about multipolarity mean in practice

If you follow global affairs, European security, or the long-term trajectory of the post–Cold War system, this conversation will sharpen your perspective.

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.

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By Ken Briggs

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The materials include a list of over fifty identified by the Interior Department as “critical”. This includes “rare-earths”, lithium, uranium, and copper, among others. These are the materials of modern technology. But the policy itself is not new.

The core problem is simple. Some supply chain inputs cannot be replaced quickly. Lithium does not move from a mine to battery-grade in weeks. Rare earths require complex refining processes found in only a few countries. When supply is disrupted, the constraint is not just money.

Strip away the language and the acronyms, and the idea is simple. The government wants to buy and store large quantities of certain industrial ingredients before a crisis forces it to. That realization is an old one.

During World War II, the United States discovered that economic dominance did not eliminate vulnerability. It exposed it.

Even before Pearl Harbor, American planners were studying supply risk. By 1939, officials inside the War Department were warning that the country depended heavily on imported manganese, chromium, tin, rubber, and other materials essential to steelmaking, engines, and munitions. These concerns led to the passage of the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act in 1939, which allowed the government to acquire reserves in anticipation of emergency.

In 1941, the United States and its allies restricted oil exports to Japan in response to its expansion into Southeast Asia. Japan had limited domestic oil production and depended heavily on imported fuel. The embargo did not cripple Japan immediately. It started a clock. Japanese leaders understood that existing reserves would sustain operations for a limited period. After that, the military position would deteriorate sharply. Strategy became governed by depletion timelines.

The decision to attack Pearl Harbor was shaped in part by that timing problem. With reserves finite and access cut off, Japanese planners faced a narrowing window of 18 months before it ran out of oil. That led to a decisive attack to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet and seize the oil fields of modern-day Indonesia. The embargo did not simply apply pressure. It compressed time and forced a decision. That episode, explored in greater depth in a previous post, left a deep imprint on American strategic thinking.

Once the United States entered the war, the problem intensified. When Japanese forces seized major rubber-producing regions in 1942, the United States suddenly lost access to 90 percent of its natural rubber supply.

Tires, truck mobility, aircraft components, and countless other systems depended on it. The federal government responded with an enormous synthetic rubber program, directing funding and coordinating private industry to build domestic production capacity from scratch. It worked, but it took time. In the interim, rationing was necessary to stretch existing supplies.

The lesson from this is not ideological, but practical. A modern industrial economy can be constrained by a handful of materials even if its factories remain intact. Money cannot immediately fix that constraint. Mines and refineries can’t be built overnight.

In 1946, Congress established the National Defense Stockpile. The law formalized wartime practice into standing policy. Its purpose was to maintain supplies of critical materials for emergencies. It was insurance against the bottlenecks experienced during the war.

Through the early Cold War, this logic remained intact. Many critical materials were sourced from politically unstable regions. Planners assumed that future conflicts or political upheaval could interrupt access. Over time, especially after the Cold War, confidence in global supply chains grew. “Just-in-time” logistics minimized inventory and stockpiles were drawn down.

Recent developments have reversed this trend.

Rare earth processing capacity is concentrated, monopolized by China. Opening new mines often requires a decade of permitting and construction. As in the 1940s, the constraint is not funding alone. It is the time required to build capacity.

Project Vault aims to secure and hold physical inventories of key minerals. Rather than rely exclusively on tariffs or export controls, which can trigger retaliation and accelerate escalation, policymakers are returning to an older instrument. Stockpiling does not eliminate dependence on international supply. It reduces the risk that sudden disruption will dictate policy.

World War II made clear that the economy is only as secure as its supply of critical materials. The embargo on Japan showed how quickly strategy contracts when reserves begin to run down. In the early Cold War, those lessons were built into permanent institutions. The revival of mineral reserves indicates that the structural risk never went away.

Different inputs, but the same problem: once supply chains tighten, choices narrow.

Drawing on decades of experience as a superintendent, charter school board member, policy advisor, and instructor in public policy, Parker explains why education became the central focus of his work and where today’s K–12 system is falling short. The conversation examines competing proposals for reform, including school choice and charter models, and asks what realistic improvement would actually look like in practice.

The episode also takes on some of the most contested issues in education today. Parker and Briggs discuss the urban–rural divide in school choice debates, recent Supreme Court rulings on religious charter schools, and renewed calls to abolish the federal Department of Education. Throughout, the emphasis is on tradeoffs, incentives, and institutional design rather than slogans.

Don Parker is a nationally published leader in education reform. He served as district superintendent for an urban charter school system in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sat on the same board for 15 years, and advised the Oklahoma State Department of Education under three state superintendents. He currently teaches public policy through Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education. Prior to his work in education, Parker spent over two decades as a senior manager and executive in the technology and banking sectors.

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The change matters because energy systems shape exposure to outside pressure. For decades, Europe’s vulnerability to Russia rested on fuel imports. That vulnerability was exposed most starkly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when gas flows collapsed and energy prices spiked. Europe was slow to cut-off imports, Russia’s main source of revenue.

Europe’s response to that shock revealed how its priorities had already shifted. Rather than attempting to lock in a new dominant supplier, the EU expanded LNG import capacity from the United States, accelerated cross-border power grid interconnections, and invested in infrastructure that allowed energy to move more freely across the bloc. The goal was not control, but flexibility. Security came from having options.

That approach has become central to Europe’s energy policy. Today, energy security in Europe is less about who supplies fuel and more about whether its energy system can absorb disruption. Imports still matter, but dependence is spread across multiple suppliers rather than concentrated in one. Strategic gas storage, reserve capacity, and grid redundancy are treated as insurance rather than inefficiency. Europe is no longer trying to eliminate reliance on external energy altogether. It is trying to make that reliance less vulnerable to coercion.

Rules play a central role in this shift. The EU does not exert influence by owning production or directing markets from the top down. Instead, it shapes outcomes through electricity market rules, grid codes, emissions standards, and access requirements.

These determine how power is traded, where investment flows, and which technologies are adopted. Compliance with these rules, rather than ownership of assets, is what grants access to Europe’s energy market. This gives the EU leverage without constant negotiation or pressure. Once the rules are in place, they operate automatically.

Europe has also accepted that this model carries costs. During the energy shock after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, governments tolerated higher LNG prices to preserve supplier diversity. Renewable overcapacity and grid redundancy were allowed even when they were not economically optimal in the short term.

These were not mistakes or temporary distortions. They were deliberate tradeoffs. Europe chose to pay more upfront to reduce the risk of future pressure. In energy terms, inefficiency was treated as a form of protection rather than a failure.

Trends in energy demand are reinforcing this new baseline regardless of politics. Data centers and AI infrastructure require steady, predictable electricity supply. Utilities plan around future load growth rather than election cycles.

Renewables are increasingly favored because they offer cost stability over time, require shorter lead-times and capital investment to begin production, and are now cheaper. This locks in the system through markets as much as policy. Even where political debate remains heated, investment decisions are already being made on the assumption that renewables will dominate new energy generation.

This creates a widening gap between Europe and the United States. In Europe, policymakers treat a power grid based heavily on renewables as a given. In the U.S., this is still a political debate. Democrats want active government involvement in promoting renewables, Republicans seem to want the same to preserve the existing energy mix. And these policies are volatile and often reversed with a change in presidential administration.

The EU, and China to a lesser extent (especially before Xi Jinping), use deliberation and consensus to drive policymaking. This makes decision-making slow, but the ultimate choice is enduring. In contrast policy in the US is increasingly driven by the presidency, with four-year election cycles leading to major swings in policy.

Markets do not like uncertainty or volatility That difference matters. It affects trade, technology, and expectations within alliances. Coordination becomes harder when partners are working from different assumptions about what is fixed and what remains open to revision.

The foreign policy consequences of this shift are easy to miss because they are quiet. Europe now negotiates with less exposure to energy-related pressure. Energy is no longer its most obvious strategic weak point. External actors have fewer reliable levers to pull. This does not mean Europe is insulated from geopolitical, but it does mean those shocks travel through a system designed to absorb them rather than amplify them.

The most important point is not about ambition or intent. It is about irreversibility. Political arguments about energy will continue across Europe, just as they do elsewhere. But the underlying system has changed. Once infrastructure and investment patterns cross a threshold, policy begins to respond to the system rather than direct it. The European Union is adjusting to this reality, while the United States and other countries are not.

At its core, the 2026 National Defense Strategy is an argument for limits. It rejects the post–Cold War belief that American power can be stretched indefinitely without consequence. Instead, it treats prioritization as unavoidable. The document is clear that sustaining U.S. power over time requires accepting that some demands will go unmet. Strategic sustainability, not global dominance, is the organizing principle. This is not retrenchment. It is an attempt to align commitments with what the United States can realistically support.

That logic carries through to force planning. The strategy assumes one primary theater at a time, with risk managed elsewhere through deterrence rather than direct engagement. U.S. military structure, readiness cycles, and industrial capacity are not designed to support multiple prolonged high-intensity conflicts simultaneously. Rather than maintaining overwhelming presence everywhere, the strategy relies on making aggression difficult and costly, often through allied capabilities. This approach necessarily involves saying no to some missions and tolerating uncertainty outside the priority theater.

Homeland defense and stability in the Western Hemisphere anchor this framework. The strategy elevates defense of the U.S. homeland from an assumed condition to a central mission. Security in the Western Hemisphere is treated as foundational rather than peripheral. Latin America and border-related challenges are integrated into defense planning instead of being managed as adjacent issues. This emphasis implies moving attention away from open-ended expeditionary commitments, like the War in Afghanistan that do not directly support core security.

The document also reshapes expectations of allies. Europe is expected to carry the primary burden of defense against Russia. In the Indo-Pacific, allies such as Japan are expected to invest in capabilities that deter aggression rather than rely on constant U.S. intervention. The United States is cast less as a guarantor and more as a supporter and enabler. This is not framed as a preference but as a requirement imposed by real constraints. For this model to work, allies must believe that U.S. priorities are real and that Washington will not quietly absorb responsibilities it has publicly delegated.

That brings the strategy’s central vulnerability into view. A defense strategy only matters if it rules out actions leaders might otherwise be tempted to take. Prioritization loses meaning if every crisis is a candidate for intervention. Flexibility without exclusion turns strategy into explanation after the fact. American history offers repeated examples of defense strategies that failed not because they were flawed, but because political leaders treated them as advisory.

Recent U.S. behavior already tests whether the constraints outlined in the strategy are being enforced. Escalatory rhetoric toward Iran and sending an armada overseas signals a willingness to expand commitments beyond stated priorities. Military assets continue to be repositioned outside declared focal areas without corresponding reductions elsewhere.

This signals that discretionary engagement remains an option, even as the strategy argues the opposite. At the same time, force-planning assumptions remain unchanged. If existing commitments are not reduced while new ones are added, overextension increases rather than recedes. The administration’s proposed defense budget, approaching $1.5 trillion, reflects a military preparing with even greater responsibility than in the past.

The result is a growing mismatch between strategy at different levels. The military is told to organize for restraint but asked to operate as it has, with homeland and hemispheric defense thrown on top of its existing obligations. Short-term responsiveness masks longer-term degradation. Resources are consumed incrementally, with risk deferred to future contingencies rather than resolved in the present.

This inconsistency shapes how others respond. Allies hear calls for burden sharing but see continued U.S. involvement across regions, weakening incentives to invest in autonomous defense. Adversaries observe that declared limits are conditional and learn that pressure can elicit engagement. Red-line testing becomes more attractive when priorities appear fluid.

The strategy ultimately forces a choice that cannot be postponed. Either secondary theaters remain secondary even when pressures rise, or the strategy must be rewritten to accept overextension openly. Maintaining both positions undermines credibility and erodes the very discipline the document seeks to impose.

The success of the 2026 National Defense Strategy will not be measured by what it enables, but by what it prevents. Restraint, not activity, is the test of seriousness. Discipline matters more than coherence on paper. Limits that are ignored do not remain limits for long.

Greenland’s growing importance, and the lessons of history, become clear when strategic geography intersects with alliance politics and tests American influence. The 1956 Suez Crisis is a key example of how U.S. hegemony operated: not through direct command, but by imposing costs within an alliance. Greenland now presents a similar challenge, raising the same question: what happens when a dominant power cannot easily control a strategic chokepoint against partner resistance? This signals contested hegemony, not a lost empire.

To understand why Suez matters so much, it’s important to grasp what the canal represented before the crisis. Since its opening in 1869, the Suez Canal was more than a commercial waterway. By shortening the journey between Europe and Asia, it underpinned Britain’s imperial logistics and its ability to project force to its colonies east of the Mediterranean. Even after Egypt’s formal independence following World War I, Britain kept military bases along the canal and controlled its operation.

In 1952, Egyptian military officer Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the monarchy, seeking true independence. By 1954, British forces were expelled, but the Suez Canal Company, based in Paris and controlled by British and French shareholders, still exercised quasi-sovereign authority in the canal zone. Both London and Paris saw Suez as vital to their global standing and economic security, especially as Europe’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil grew. Any disruption to Red Sea trade threatened Europe’s fragile postwar economies.

Tensions peaked when Western governments, alarmed by Nasser’s independence, withdrew funding for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam project in 1956. In response, Nasser nationalized the canal, presenting it as an assertion of Egyptian sovereignty and a way to finance national development. For British and French leaders, this was a serious challenge: a legal confrontation, a strategic threat, and a symbolic break from imperial power.

The crisis escalated rapidly. Britain and France saw Nasser’s move as a direct threat to trade and prestige and as a destabilizing force supporting anti-colonial movements, including those fighting French rule in Algeria. Israel, meanwhile, saw Egypt as a security threat and objected to Egyptian control over Red Sea access. These interests converged in a secret plan: in October 1956, Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Britain and France issued an ultimatum demanding withdrawal from the canal zone. When Egypt refused, Anglo-French forces intervened, bombing airfields and landing troops near the canal.

Militarily, the canal zone was quickly seized, but politically, the intervention collapsed almost immediately. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had not been consulted and strongly opposed the action. Washington feared the attack would destabilize the Middle East, alienate newly independent states, disrupt global trade, and invite Soviet intervention during the Cold War. For the U.S., allied use of force was a strategic liability, not a show of strength.

Britain, already under severe financial strain, faced a run on the pound sterling. When London sought emergency support, Washington signaled it would block assistance. France, less exposed but still reliant on U.S. financial backing, could not continue alone. In 1956, both countries were highly vulnerable to American economic pressure. Britain faced chronic dollar shortages and thin reserves, making U.S. support essential to prevent a currency collapse. France’s position was stronger but still depended on access to dollars within the postwar Bretton Woods system. Defying Washington meant immediate economic turmoil.

The U.S. consistently viewed European empires as costly and destabilizing, having played a role in triggering both world wars. Colonial wars drained allied resources and undermined Western influence in regions Washington wanted to pull away from Soviet alignment. American pressure helped push the Netherlands out of Indonesia, France out of Indochina and Algeria, and Britain out of Africa. Alliance membership did not protect imperial autonomy; decolonization advanced because resistance became unsustainable.

Today, the contrast is sharp. Europe remains dependent on global trade, including routes through the Red Sea and Arctic-adjacent waters, but it is no longer a capital-poor, dollar-starved collection of recovering states. Now, Europe is a large, resilient integrated market with its own currency, deep internal capital, and diversified trade partners. American leverage still exists, but it is no longer decisive.

This explains why Europe’s reaction to tensions over Greenland looks nothing like Suez. In 1956, disruption to trade routes and financial vulnerability left Britain and France no room to maneuver. Today, Europe is less economically exposed. Pressure inside the alliance now produces bargaining, delay, and partial resistance, not immediate submission. As European states rebuild military capacity and reduce dependence on U.S. protection, their room to maneuver will only grow.

Suez remains relevant because it shows how control over strategic geography can expose the limits of a “great power”. In 1956, the U.S. could impose its preferred outcome at a vital chokepoint because its allies lacked alternatives. Greenland presents a similar test under different conditions. The U.S. remains the dominant power, but no longer operates from a position of uncontested leverage. The issue is not the collapse of American power, but how far that power still carries when allies can afford to push back.

That assumption now looks wrong.

Over the last week, a sharper break has come into view. There appear to be conversations behind the scenes about building trade and security arrangements that do not depend on the United States. The risk being priced in is not just the current administration. It is the possibility that disruptive populism will persist in the US.

That shift was visible at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In one of the most closely watched speeches, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney laid out a vision of a more multipolar global economy, one less dependent on a single country. His message was not anti-American. It was practical. He argued the world needs systems that can function when major powers become unpredictable, and the US driven order based on international law had ended.

Events prior to Davos have made that point harder to dismiss.

There has not been a major trade deal between the United States and another country because of the new tariffs. What has happened instead is a burst of deal-making elsewhere. The European Union’s agreement with Mercosur, which includes Brazil and Argentina, creates a combined market of more than seven hundred million people, representing 20 percent of global economic output. Talks that had dragged on for years suddenly moved forward this week.

EU negotiations with India are moving in the same direction. A deal there would link two billion people into a shared trade framework without U.S. participation. Canada has gone even further, negotiating tariff reductions with China on measures it originally adopted under U.S. pressure. These are not symbolic gestures. They are structural choices about where risk will sit in the future.

This exposes the central problem with a purely transactional approach to foreign policy. It works best when one country has overwhelming leverage and when alternatives are limited. Thirty years ago, the United States fit that description. At the end of the Cold War, it had unmatched market access, enormous influence over global institutions, and a security role that few countries could replace. At that moment, Washington could have relied heavily on pressure and still gotten results.

Instead, it chose a different path. The system the U.S. helped build was designed to preserve American advantage even as its relative power declined. Trade rules were predictable. Global finance rested on reserves of dollars and U.S. treasury bills. Security relationships reinforced economic integration. Bargaining never disappeared, but it happened within a framework that made cooperation the default option.

What has changed is the environment in which pressure is applied. When other options already exist, economic pressure no longer pushes behavior in a predictable direction. It alters how states plan. Trade disputes no longer stay limited to trade and instead reach into areas that were previously managed separately.

The situation around Greenland illustrates this shift. Denmark hosted a military exercise in Greenland focused on Arctic security. France and other European countries participated. The U.S. response was to raise the possibility of tariffs on European goods, linking participation in the exercise to economic consequences. French president Emmanuel Macron rejected that linkage and said security commitments should not be tied to trade.

For European governments, this episode was not interpreted as a single disagreement. It suggested that economic pressure could be applied without clear boundaries, including in situations involving allies. The response was not confrontation. Governments began discussing how to reduce exposure to U.S. pressure and how to preserve room to maneuver if similar situations arise again.

Similar adjustments are visible in other areas. U.S. export controls on advanced chips may slow China in the near term, but they also encourage countries to reduce reliance on access that can be withdrawn. Japan’s efforts to secure alternative sources of rare earths reflect this approach.

When access becomes uncertain, control over inputs becomes more important. This uncertainty is where diplomacy can come in, to build trust with allies and provide some certainty. It is not the time to turn the screws and act more volatile to extract concessions.

Washington has also relied more heavily on enforcement measures. The seizure of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers and public statements about maintaining control over oil point to a strategy that emphasizes coercion. That approach may produce results in specific cases, but it also increases incentives for others to limit their exposure to U.S. pressure.

This is how transactional policy functions when leverage declines. Pressure still has effects, but it does not produce alignment. It leads governments to adjust their behavior and reduce dependence.

The outcome is not a system that excludes the United States. It is a system that does not assume U.S. centrality. The United States remains influential, but it is treated as one major power among others. Trade arrangements move forward without U.S. participation. Security coordination increasingly takes place alongside U.S. involvement rather than through it. Governments plan for U.S. pressure in the same way they plan for pressure from other major powers.

This change does not happen all at once. It develops as governments revise how they plan and who they rely on. Once those changes take hold, reversing them becomes difficult.

I’ve written about Greenland before and about why it matters to U.S. strategy. At the simplest level, the interests involved are not difficult to explain. Greenland has significant critical mineral deposits that matter directly for AI and semiconductor supply chains. Rare earth elements and related inputs are necessary for chip fabrication, advanced computing hardware, and the energy systems that support large-scale AI deployment. As Washington looks for ways to reduce dependence on China across these supply chains, Greenland naturally draws attention.

There is also a related economic interest tied to security. As Arctic ice recedes, shipping routes that once existed only on maps are becoming more viable. Greenland helps shape access between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic. That matters commercially, but it also matters for military movement. Traffic tends to concentrate along routes that geography does not allow you to bypass.

The deeper reason Greenland has mattered to U.S. planners, however, predates both climate change and the current focus on chips. The shortest route from Washington to Moscow runs directly over Greenland. That is not a figure of speech. It is simply the result of great-circle geometry and the curvature of the Earth, even if some citizens with voting rights remain skeptical.

That geographic fact shaped U.S. defense planning during the Cold War. Greenland became a forward position for early-warning systems designed to detect Soviet missile launches. At its peak, the American military presence on the world’s largest island was substantial. What remains today is smaller, but still central: Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, now operated under the Space Force.

The name change sometimes invites jokes, but the mission has not changed. Missile warning and space-domain awareness are closely linked, and Greenland occupies a position that makes both possible. That role alone explains why Greenland remains strategically important.

This history matters because it clarifies a point that often gets lost in current debate. The United States already has military access to Greenland. That access exists not because Greenland belongs to the United States, but because Greenland is part of Denmark, and Denmark is a treaty ally.

Denmark is not a symbolic partner. It is a capable European military contributor and a country that fought alongside the United States in Afghanistan. For decades, the U.S.–Danish relationship has delivered what American security planners need in Greenland. Danish officials have repeatedly signaled that they would accept an expanded U.S. military presence if circumstances require it. There is no access problem to fix.

The same logic applies on the economic side. Securing mineral inputs for chips and AI hardware does not require sovereignty. It requires contracts, trade negotiations, and long-term investment. Any serious development of Greenland’s mineral resources would take a decade or more regardless of ownership. Acquisition does not accelerate chip supply chains or shorten permitting timelines. It simply changes who bears the cost.

Those costs are not trivial. Denmark currently subsidizes Greenland’s budget by roughly $700 million a year. Acquiring Greenland would shift that obligation to Washington, along with the costs of governance and basic services. Recent proposals to offset those costs through direct payments to Greenlandic citizens resemble a corporate takeover strategy more than a coherent national policy.

Once this is accounted for, the case for outright acquisition becomes thin. The security benefits are already in place. The economic access relevant to AI and chips is negotiable. Ownership adds cost without resolving a real constraint.

The downside, by contrast, appears immediately. Danish leaders have had to issue public statements clarifying that Greenland is not for sale. European officials have openly discussed whether additional forces should be positioned there to signal that territorial integrity within the alliance is not optional. That reaction alone should give pause.

This view has been reflected in the reaction of Republican senators. In a speech on the Senate floor, Mitch Mcconnell said “Unless and until the president can demonstrate otherwise, then the proposition at hand today is very straightforward: incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”

A delegation of senators is traveling to Copenhagen this week, and the position of the legislative branch they will communicate will likely be very similar. One member of that delegation, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), said “The actual execution of anything that would involve a taking of a sovereign territory that is part of a sovereign nation, I think would be met with pretty substantial opposition in Congress.”

For Russia and China, this situation is advantageous. Few outcomes serve their interests better than tension between the United States and NATO. Creating friction within NATO over a territory where U.S. access is already secure is strategically counterproductive.

This reflects a broader truth about power and relationships. In diplomacy, as in business, long-term advantage comes from reliability. States that behave as unpredictable counterparties may extract concessions in the short run, but they weaken every other relationship that depends on trust.

I have argued elsewhere that if Denmark were ever to offer Greenland for sale voluntarily, that would be a different conversation. What matters here is not a hypothetical transaction but the precedent it would set. Pressuring a treaty ally to surrender territory would undermine the strategic logic of NATO and violate postwar norms against acquiring territory by force.

Even if legal and ethical questions are set aside, the policy calculation still fails. The United States would assume new obligations, strain its alliances, and gain little it does not already possess. Greenland does matter. The Arctic does matter. But when it comes to securing AI and semiconductor supply chains, ownership is not the mechanism that advances American interests. It is the one most likely to erode them.