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Governance

Coverage of national security laws, sovereignty debates, political systems, and institutional frameworks that shape state behavior.

The Purge Paradox: Xi's Anti-Corruption Campaign Is Crippling the Military It Was Meant to Strengthen

The Purge Paradox: Xi's Anti-Corruption Campaign Is Crippling the Military It Was Meant to Strengthen

China's military purges have removed at least fifteen senior officers and cut the Central Military Commission nearly in half. The campaign reveals not strength through discipline but a loyalty-competence trap that may leave the PLA weaker precisely when Xi needs it strongest.

The Trillion-Dollar Question

The Trillion-Dollar Question

President Trump's call for a 50% defense budget increase promises to fix America's military readiness crisis. But the system that converts dollars into capability is broken. More money through broken channels produces contractor profits, not combat power.

The Trillion-Dollar Bottleneck

The Trillion-Dollar Bottleneck

Trump's proposed 50% defence spending surge promises a 'Dream Military' by 2027. But with the industrial base running at 41% capacity and 700,000 security clearances backlogged, the money cannot buy what the factories cannot build. The bottleneck is physical, not fiscal.

The Protectors Who Couldn't Protect

The Protectors Who Couldn't Protect

Western counterterrorism in the Sahel collapsed not from poor execution but structural impossibility. What fills the vacuum—Russian mercenaries, jihadist governance, military juntas—offers something foreign intervention never could: belonging. The lesson is uncomfortable.

America's Quiet War in Nigeria

America's Quiet War in Nigeria

December's airstrikes in Sokoto marked the first direct US military action inside Nigeria. The intervention architecture that produced them was designed to expand. Whether Washington can control what it has started depends on understanding why the Somalia analogy misleads.

The Franchise That Governs: Why the Sahel's Jihadists Are Building States While Africa's States Collapse

The Franchise That Governs: Why the Sahel's Jihadists Are Building States While Africa's States Collapse

The Sahel has become the world's deadliest region for terrorism, accounting for half of global terror deaths. But the real story is not violence—it is governance. Jihadist groups now tax, adjudicate, and administer territories that nominal states cannot reach. As this parallel order expands...

The Arithmetic of Abandonment

The Arithmetic of Abandonment

America's 60% humanitarian aid cut forces a brutal question: who loses most—fragile states facing immediate mortality, China struggling to fill the vacuum, or American soft power bleeding out across generations? The answer is all three, but the damage operates on different timescales with...

The Dictator's Dilemma: Why Xi's Taiwan Problem Has No Good Solutions

The Dictator's Dilemma: Why Xi's Taiwan Problem Has No Good Solutions

The 2027 'invasion window' misunderstands China's Taiwan calculus. Xi Jinping's political survival does not require taking the island—it requires ensuring no one can challenge him for not taking it. The system he built to guarantee his power may guarantee escalation instead.

The Hierarchy of the Ungrievable: Why Sudan Burns Alone

The Hierarchy of the Ungrievable: Why Sudan Burns Alone

With over 150,000 dead and famine gripping multiple states, Sudan's civil war has become the world's largest humanitarian crisis. The West's near-total absence reveals not hypocrisy but something more structural: a new hierarchy of geopolitical concern that operates according to rules rarely...

Trump's Nigeria Strike: Precision Without Purpose

Trump's Nigeria Strike: Precision Without Purpose

The Christmas Day Tomahawk strikes against ISIS in Nigeria demonstrated American reach but not American strategy. As ISWAP grows stronger and the Sahel slips toward Russia, tactical excellence continues to substitute for strategic coherence in U.S. counterterrorism.

The Defibrillator Problem: Why American Counterterrorism Keeps Failing in the Sahel

The Defibrillator Problem: Why American Counterterrorism Keeps Failing in the Sahel

The United States spent half a billion dollars training Sahelian security forces. Terrorism surged 2,000 percent. The correlation reveals a structural flaw in counterterrorism strategy that no amount of precision targeting can fix.

The Sahel's Sovereignty Ritual: Why the Junta Alliance Fights Wars It Cannot Win

The Sahel's Sovereignty Ritual: Why the Junta Alliance Fights Wars It Cannot Win

Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have launched joint military operations against jihadists with a force one-twentieth the size counterinsurgency requires. The offensive is not a strategy for victory—it is a performance of sovereignty that the three military governments cannot afford to abandon,...