On Nov. 5, India announced that its first domestically made nuclear powered submarine, the INS Arihant, had just completed its first “deterrence patrol” by spending a month on station, quietly prowling the ocean while armed with ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Arihant’s assembled crew that their […]

In two of Congo’s anarchic eastern provinces, War and Plague combine to inflict local horrors and seed conditions for a “breakout epidemic” with lethal regional and possibly global health consequences. Unpacking that first sentence illustrates why War and Plague in Congo are a legitimate American national security concern. The War is eastern Congo’s episodic slaughter […]

In retrospect, the June 1989 massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square signaled that China’s rise would not be peaceful. In Tiananmen, the Communist government’s security forces slaughtered more than 2,000 demonstrators. Let’s stipulate that China’s four-decade rise from a hunger-plagued developing country to a great power with global clout ranks as one of history’s more striking […]

The 1994 Rwandan genocide of ethnic Tutsis and Hutu moderates forced hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee to neighboring sub-Saharan African countries. Key point: The burden of providing immediate care for physically threatened refugees always falls on the “host country,” even unwilling hosts. A second key point: A flood of refugees is not a […]

As China’s Communist government sees it, the “neo-NAFTA” U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement is far more than a revised North American trade arrangement. It is an act of strategic warfare aimed at China. Beijing has got this one right. The Trump administration’s USMCA gives Washington a powerful economic and diplomatic tool for achieving the U.S. and its key […]

War and anarchy directly link to mass human hunger. In 2017, the United Nations reported 37 countries confronted food insecurity or scarcity conditions that required external assistance — meaning food supplied by international agencies or donor nations like the U.S. Internal conflicts or regional warfare afflicted at least 30 of these countries. The problematic connection […]

While the Chinese Communist government basks in China’s economic success, several terrible authoritarian decisions made in Beijing put the country’s stability and sustained prosperity at risk. Though a forbidden public topic, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre haunts the government. Chinese citizens bitterly resent the massacre, its cloak of totalitarian silence and Beijing’s continued police state […]

In 2007, now deceased Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez toyed with launching an invasion of Curacao, a Dutch-protected island just off the Venezuelan coast. That wasn’t his first military threat to a neighbor. Circa 2000, he began suggesting Venezuelan forces might intervene in neighboring Colombia, at the time fighting a narco-Communist guerrilla insurgency. Controlling Colombia […]