• THE AMERICASThe Significance of the Pentagon’s Investment in a Bauxite Mine in Guyana

    By Ben Frankel

    The United States is investing in a bauxite mining operation in Guayana because China has positioned itself at a vulnerable point in a specialized materials supply chain, and the Trump administration has decided that leaving the problem entirely to the market to sort out is no longer acceptable.

  • SURVEILLANCEThe Digital Panopticon: Why Automated Surveillance Threatens a Free Society

    By Mike Fox

    Flock Safety, a manufacturers of cameras used in automatic surveillance, is merely one piece of a vastly expanding surveillance state. The company’s potential downfall should not be blamed on legislation targeting ALPRs specifically but through the firm enforcement of the Fourth Amendment itself. In a free society, companies that thrive on infringing upon constitutional rights should not be economically viable.

  • QUICK TAKES // BY BEN FRANKELA Permanent Veto: Iran and the Strait of Hormuz

    U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright claims that oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is returning “back to normal” or “normalizing.” But there is no going back to normal because the old normal is dead and buried – a victim of the Trump-driven U.S. strategic defeat in the Iran war. That defeat has made Iran’s commercial veto power over the Strait the new normal.

  • OUT OF AMMUNITIONFiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing

    By Jesse Coburn

    In a rushed process exempted from normal rules, the Army hired General Dynamics, which brought on a Turkish subcontractor with little vetting, to make artillery shells. Despite being paid $533 million, General Dynamics did not produce a single usable shell at its new factory — and has not been held publicly accountable. Since the Army halted two production lines at the factory, the General Dynamics unit responsible for the debacle has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion.

  • THUCYDIDES TRAPThe Real Thucydides Trap Is Inside Western Tech

    By Justin Bassi

    Thucydides Trap is a theory which describes how the established power is so anxious about the rising power that it strikes at the rising power and starts a war. Whether or not history provides examples of Thucydides Trap is a subject of lively scholarly debates, but it does exist within Western tech companies. And if we do not change our ways, our desire for intense technological competition within and among Western nations, with economic outcomes prioritized over geostrategic, will again benefit only China.

  • THE AMERICASCriminal Gangs Have Diversified Across Latin America, Making Them More Resilient – but Not Untouchable

    By Robert Muggah

    Latin America’s most powerful criminal groups have expanded beyond the drug trade – and have become more resilient as a result. Criminal networks now draw revenue from illicit and legal sources alike. Many of them police neighborhoods and influence local politics. Brazil is one place where these trends are on display.

  • POWER-GRID RESILIENCETrump Is Blocking Billions of Dollars of Grants That Would Fix the Grid

    By Jeff St. John, Canary Media

    The Department of Energy has canceled or stalled funding for thousands of projects that would improve the country’s stressed grid — and not just in blue states.

  • IMMIGRATIONBipartisan Bill to Let States Sponsor Foreign Workers

    By David J. Bier

    The State-Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act is a rare thing in immigration policy: a genuinely federalist reform that lets Washington’s one-size-fits-all approach give way to 50 different answers to 50 different labor markets. 

  • THE AMERICASGuyana’s Oil Boom and the Old Curse

    As Guyana becomes one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, its sudden oil wealth is testing whether a small democracy in the Americas can escape the resource curse that has plagued so many petrostates.

  • CRITICAL MINERALSHow to Win the Battle for Critical Minerals

    By Robert Monterosso

    In the struggle with China over critical-minerals supply chains, the United States and its partners should focus efforts across three fronts: commercial, technological and allied coordination. Action is needed in each to overcome advantages that China has built over decades.

  • NUCLEAR POWERWorking to Automate Nuclear Plant Operations

    By Poornima Apte

    For nuclear to be considered as a viable clean energy source, it has to be competitively priced and economical to produce. Ph.D. student Lauren Fortier is building on the experience she gained operating a nuclear plant for the Navy to solve a critical hurdle in the wider adoption of the energy source.

  • AI SCAREAn AI Busted Out and Ran Amok. We Should Be Scared

    By David Wroe and Justin Bassi

    Top AI company OpenAI has frightened the heck out of everyone. It announced that its top models, while being tested in a digital cage on their cyber skills, had broken out of the cage, got onto the internet, broken into another AI company’s systems and stolen tools to pass the tests in an ‘unprecedented’ attack.

  • AI SCAREOpenAI’s Models Autonomously Hacked a Tech Startup. It Signals a Seismic Shift in Cybersecurity

    By Hussein Abbass

    It is no longer a question of “if” AI agents go rogue and attack us by themselves. The Hugging Face incident is an early warning that we must accelerate our preparedness. The threat is real and here.

  • IMMIGRATIONIs Debanking the New Immigration Policy?

    By Nicholas Anthony

    the Trump administration as recruited a new type of agents in its war on immigration: Financial regulators. Their weapon of choice appears to be debanking.

  • CHINA WATCHHow Microsoft’s “Little Workaround” Created a Major Pentagon Threat

    By Jessica Lussenhop, with reporting by Renee Dudley and research by Doris Burke

    Reporter Renee Dudley heard Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary. She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it.