A sailor aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln sent a message home that his family passed to Stars and Stripes anonymously, fearing retaliation. "Our mental health and physical health is in danger. We need help." By the time that message surfaced, the Lincoln had been gone from San Diego since late November 2025, redirected from a routine Pacific cruise into a shooting war with Iran and kept at sea for nine months. Her roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines spent 208 consecutive days at sea—more than any carrier in the modern era—with only two brief port calls: Guam in December and Oman in June. One...

Cali, not Bogotá, hosted Colombia's August 7, 2026 presidential inauguration. Abelardo de la Espriella gave his first address as Colombia's president from a military garrison and set the terms of his next four years. "I reaffirm my intention to defeat without truce narcoterrorism—the criminal organizations that threaten Colombia's freedom," he said. He then sent the armed forces after criminal structures and closed his predecessor's negotiations, telling the country that "the option of dialogue is completely exhausted." That vocabulary was not new here. Ecuador's Daniel Noboa proclaimed an...

An unseen battle is being waged across the digital landscape, turning the very devices we rely on into silent observers. Civil liberties organizations have persistently shined light a constellation of Israeli technology enterprises—many birthed by alumni of elite military intelligence units such as Unit 8200, Unit 81, and the Mossad—as pivotal actors in a burgeoning global commercial surveillance market. These firms have supplied powerful tools deployed against journalists, activists, political dissidents, and, in several verified instances, individuals residing within the United States and...

Few ideas have shaped the way Washington talks about Beijing more than the Thucydides Trap. The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison built the phrase on a single line from the ancient historian Thucydides, who wrote that "it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." Allison turned that observation into a general law of world politics. When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, he argues, fear and miscalculation push the two toward a catastrophic collision. He first floated the term in a 2012 Financial Times essay and...

By eliminating the political cost of military casualties, drone warfare has enabled four successive American presidents to expand executive power and wage permanent, undeclared wars around the globe. The United States has carried out tens of thousands of drone and air strikes since launching its first confirmed attack outside a declared war zone in November 2002, killing an estimated 8,871 to 17,274 people across at least five countries according to independent tracking data. Al Jazeera reported in March 2026 that since September 11, 2001, the United States has engaged in three full-scale...

Washington's yearly defense measure has ground to a halt, and one buried clause explains why a widening bloc of lawmakers wants the whole thing pried back open. Members voted down the procedural rule required to open debate on the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act on June 30, splitting 198 to 224 as fourteen Republicans broke away. Their rebellion turned on Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) bid to fasten President Donald Trump's SAVE America Act to the must pass bill, not on the Israel clause. Even so, the collapse handed opponents breathing room and preserved an amendment that...

Israel's latest war on Lebanon is now threatening to unravel the fragile understanding that Washington and Tehran reached to halt their 2026 confrontation. Under the interim agreement that Pakistan mediated, the United States and Iran declared a permanent end to military operations on every front, Lebanon included. Israel, not a party to the pact, refused to comply. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on June 15 that his forces "will stay in the Lebanon security buffer zone for as long as necessary," and nine days later Defense Minister Israel Katz declared the military would not...