RealClearWorld Articles

This month, U.S. President Donald Trump rejected an Iranian peace proposal that would have seen the removal of Iran’s highly-enriched uranium and its nuclear program put on hold. Most importantly, the proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and ended a war that so far has cost the United States at least $29 billion and resulted in thousands of deaths. In turning down such a deal, Washington passed up an opportunity to back away from this conflict and make good on its 2026 National Security Strategy commitment to subordinate the Middle East to higher priority regions. But...

President Javier Milei is a man willing to fight. More than ever, he relies on that basic instinct now as he tackles generations of stagnation and corruption in Argentina. Presently, he welcomes battles vs. powerful special interests, particularly monopolistic forces in media and telecom. Those compromised Argentine players unfortunately benefit from unscrupulous assistance from some of the most established platforms in the U.S. legacy media, as well. Perhaps these U.S. media outlets do not grasp the underlying conflict between Milei and his Argentine media opponents? Whatever the...

The end of U.S. military aid to Israel is no longer hypothetical. On December 25, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a 350 billion shekel, roughly $120 billion, investment in Israel's domestic defense industry over the next decade. Two weeks later, in his Mar-a-Lago interview with The Economist, he confirmed he intends to taper U.S. military aid to zero. On April 26, Calcalist reported that Washington and Jerusalem were preparing formal talks on a successor framework that drives Foreign Military Financing to zero by 2038, with teams led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and...

The view of warfare today is grounded in our early 20th-century experience of the logic of mass. Victory in the First and Second World Wars hinged on scale: armies in the millions, fleets in the hundreds, and industrial output that could outproduce, outlast, and grind the enemy into submission. Endurance mattered. The Cold War added to that approach the concept of overmatch. Superior technology, stealth, precision-guided munitions, and networked command and control augmented the need for mass. The specter of nuclear war kept that mix from being fully tested. But the Gulf War appeared to...

Since before Iran’s 1979 revolution, Western policy toward that country has been shaped less by realities on the ground than by what foreign policymakers found convenient to believe about them. The myths have changed over the decades. The cost of believing them has not. In late 1977, Jimmy Carter famously toasted the Shah’s Iran as “an island of stability.”Within fifteen months, the monarchy had collapsed, and the foreign-policy establishment that had built its assumptions around the Shah was left scrambling to comprehend a revolution it had utterly failed to foresee....

When President Trump and President Xi Jinping concluded their May 14-15 summit in Beijing, the headline outcomes were familiar: discussion of a new U.S.-China “Board of Trade,” expectations of major new Chinese purchases of American agricultural products and indications that some tariffs on non-sensitive goods could eventually be reduced. Markets welcomed the renewed dialogue and continuation of the tariff truce. But the summit produced no meaningful commitments on industrial subsidies, state-directed overcapacity or the broader distortions embedded in China’s economic...

South Korea’s maritime security cooperation with Europe should not be dismissed as a diplomatic side project. It reflects a broader shift in allied strategy. The war in Ukraine, instability in the Middle East, gray-zone pressure in the Indo-Pacific, and repeated concerns about undersea infrastructure all point to the same reality: the maritime domain is no longer divided neatly by region. A disruption in one theater can quickly create political, economic, and military consequences in another. The recent Strait of Hormuz crisis offers a useful reminder. For South Korea, a distant...

More than two months after President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, taken in the shadow of his military intervention in Venezuela, the contrast between the two is hard to ignore. One intervention is drifting into uncertainty, while the other is settling into something easily described as a success. As the shaky ceasefire between the United States and Iran makes a lasting peace treaty seem like a distant dream, the idea that Iran might follow Venezuela’s path now feels slightly absurd. For a moment, it was a compelling story of a quick intervention and a brittle...

The phrase “military diplomacy” has long sat uneasily in Western policy circles, conjuring images of coups, shadow governments, and the erosion of civilian authority. While that discomfort has not entirely disappeared, it has been softened by Pakistan’s role in negotiations between the DC and Tehran. When Pakistan’s military brokered a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran in April 2026 and then hosted the first direct high-level talks between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, something shifted. Across think tanks and...

Last summer’s Pacific Island Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting was smaller than usual. Following behind-the-scenes influence by the Chinese Communist Party on the then-host, the Solomon Islands, Taiwan and all non-member partners were excluded from attending, despite regular participation for over 30 years. But now, with Palau hosting the 2026 leaders meeting in just a couple months, Taiwan is rightly back at the table—and the Pacific Islands Forum should keep it that way. In 1993, following a decision by the PIF leaders, Taiwan joined as a development partner. In this role, Taiwan is...

American tech companies built the digital economy, and they are its leading producers—the United States accounts for more than one-third of global output in the IT and information services industry. But America better watch out, because the European Union is making a concerted effort to rewrite the rules of the game through regulatory policy. If the EU succeeds, it will undercut America’s technological leadership at the expense of its economic power and national security writ large. To understand what is happening, consider a meeting that occurred in Kenya in October 2023. The...

For the first time in nearly ten years, U.S. and Chinese leaders will meet in Beijing this week to discuss trade, Taiwan, and the war in Iran, among other issues. The timing is awkward: already postponed once, the summit takes place amid a stalled-out war with Iran while the fragile ceasefire is in danger of collapsing. China feels confident going into the meeting, and with good reason: despite a somewhat weak macroeconomic outlook, the country has made huge progress in tech sectors since President Trump’s last visit in 2017, particularly in AI and electric vehicles. It has successfully...

Western sanctions were designed to isolate Moscow. Instead, trade routes running through Central Asia are quietly helping keep Russia economically connected. Rather than severing Russia from global markets, sanctions have often redirected commerce through intermediary states. The result is not a closed system, but a reshaped one. Goods that once flowed directly from Europe and Asia into Russia now move through a network of intermediaries. At the center of that network sits Central Asia. This shift is not theoretical. Trade data shows sharp increases in exports from countries such as...

Time is working against Iran, whether it wins or loses the current war. Time is working for the U.S, even if it loses this particular war. Machiavelli said, it's possible to lose a war well or badly, just as it's possible to win well or badly. Sometimes a healthy defeat is superior to a mediocre victory. Whether Iran's presently confused and unstable government wins or loses this particular war, its own future is compromised. The Old Regime's fate is sealed. It could win this war, but the issue is really whether it loses well or badly. To lose well is to be replaced in the country by a better...

Western defense secretaries and technology executives should keep a map pinned above their desks. It would show the global distribution of rare earth deposits, the 17 elements that make electric vehicles run, wind turbines spin, fighter-jet guidance systems lock onto their targets, and smartphones come to life. On that map, one color would dominate, the red of China. China controls 85 percent of the world’s rare earth processing capacity. It has used that dominance to impose export restrictions on gallium, germanium, and graphite. Those limits are a stark reminder that any major...

The close cooperation between the UAE, Israel, and India, endorsed by the United States, manifests the resurgence of I2U2 (India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the United States) as a predominant security bloc. The strategic group, which remained practically dormant for many years, now seeks to exert its influence on the global strategic milieu. The U.S.-Israel War on Iran has resulted in bloc realignment in the Middle East. UAE’s decision to quit OPEC indicates that the Gulf allies are no longer on the same page. Differences over retaliation and mediation with Iran have...

This life is not what you expected. You attended a university with a Latin motto and a good ranking. You moved to a global city. You earn a salary that looks impressive on a loan application but leaves you squinting at your bank statement. You bought a charming home in a nice suburb, but you spend 10 hours a week staring at taillights in traffic. You are racing toward a horizon that never moves. Did you choose the wrong career? Did you marry for the wrong reasons? Did you fail to embrace AI early enough? No. It’s not you. It’s London. It began in the 1950s. While America was...

President Trump’s mid-May trip to Beijing is a high-profile reminder that U.S.–China relations will be a major factor in shaping markets, supply chains, and security dynamics this year. The geopolitical environment is markedly different than in 2025. Trade, geopolitics, and national security are now fully intertwined in U.S. economic policy. The widening conflict with Iran adds a new layer of uncertainty, particularly for global energy markets and economic growth. Competition with China remains the organizing principle of President Trump’s statecraft. He is focused on...

Recent reports that the United States and Hamas have entered direct talks for the first time show that the effort to implement President Trump’s Gaza peace plan has entered a critical new phase. Yet, despite the fragile ceasefire that has been in place for over six months, accusations that Israel is responsible for committing genocide in Gaza continue to fuel demands to isolate and boycott America’s closest ally in the Middle East. In November Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) introduced a resolution in Congress calling for the...