The China hawks are an industrious bunch. Full of ideas and financing, they are never short of time and fill it with lengthy publications from their comfy sinecures arguing about what Washington “needs” to do to confront the “China Threat.” One of the most notable of these comes curtesy of life-long government employee, Robert D. Blackwill. A creature of the swamp through and through, having served in every capacity imaginable from diplomat to ambassador, Harvard professor to NSC staffer, lobbyist and CFR member, none are more qualified to articulate an option about what Washington should do...

Today, Taiwan occupies a uniquely important position in the global economy. The island produces the overwhelming majority of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, manufacturing the chips that power everything from smartphones and artificial intelligence systems to automobiles, satellites, and advanced weapons platforms. Taiwan has become so central to the modern technological order that analysts since the 1990s have routinely described its semiconductor industry as a “silicon shield,” a strategic asset so important that no major power can afford to see it disrupted. As the debate...

In recent years, critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at the longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan. They argue that Washington should abandon ambiguity and embrace “strategic clarity,” explicitly pledging to fight China over Taiwan. Others, such as Hoover Institute Fellow Eyck Freymann, have offered more sophisticated sounding alternatives like “structured ambiguity,” attempting to codify precisely what America would and would not do in various contingencies, particularly involving gray zone activities. But abandoning a long-established policy that, whatever...

The increasing arc of instability running across Africa today resembles less a series of isolated crises than a single, widening belt of state collapse, insurgency, proxy war, and foreign intervention stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea. From Mali and Niger to Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the same themes recur with grim consistency: weak post-colonial states, ethnic and religious fragmentation, weapons flows across porous borders, foreign meddling, and Washington repeatedly insisting it can manage extraordinarily complex societies with...

President Donald Trump’s recent two-day summit in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded much as anticipated. In an article written ahead of the trip, I noted that expectations for substantive breakthroughs in the fraught Sino-American relationship were likely to be disappointed. The events of the visit bore this out. While the tone was notably, and welcomely, warmer than in recent years and both sides touted “fantastic trade deals,” the core structural tensions—trade imbalances, technology restrictions, Taiwan, and regional security—remain largely unaddressed. What emerged was...