• The U.S. Is Pushing Southeast Asia Toward China. The Iran War Made It Worse.

    There is a growing anxiety among U.S. allies in Southeast Asia about inconsistencies in U.S. policy and the credibility of long-term commitments under Trump’s leadership. A new survey of Southeast Asian opinion leaders shows they prefer China to the United States as a partner, while the region’s biggest geopolitical concern is U.S. global leadership.

  • Study of Tommy Robinson's Social Media Reveals How Online Influencers Mobilize Supporters without Direct Calls to Action

    Analysis shows how influencers shape public behavior and legitimize violence through narratives, not instructions. Far-right extremist Tommy Robinson “used emotional appeals and conspiracy narratives to set up a worldview where violence felt like a natural, even necessary response,” says one researcher.

  • How Iran Can Stop Shipping with Mines – in the Strait, the Whole Gulf, and Even the Red Sea

    Mine warfare doesn’t need to sink ships to succeed. It works by imposing unacceptable risk. Sea mines offer distinct advantages as a maritime weapon. They require little training or specialist support. They are easy to deploy. And they can be laid without direct combat interaction with an adversary, remaining dormant until activated by a passing vessel. These characteristics make mines the most cost-effective weapons available to a weaker and outmatched force.

  • How Sea Mines Threaten Global Trade, and How Navies Detect Them

    Artificial intelligence techniques, such as machine learning, can help navies detect modern sea mines. Here’s what I’ve learned about how the mines work and how they can be neutralized.

  • New York City’s Spike in 3D-Printed Guns Prompts Push for Tougher Laws

    Police in the nation’s biggest city are recovering a growing number of 3D-printed guns. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is advocating legislation that would make 3D-printing guns a crime.

  • Researchers Advance Critical Materials Recycling Technologies

    The U.S. has deposits of nearly all critical materials, but mining capabilities cannot meet the nation’s growing demand. Most extraction and processing are done overseas, much of it in China. This reliance on foreign critical materials risks supply disruptions that could affect U.S. national security, economic growth and everyday life.

  • Iran Will Retaliate in the U.S. We May Not See It in Time.

    Given Iran’s history of malicious operations outside of its soil, the concern about the Iranian threat is unsurprising. Long before this current conflict, Iran has engaged in terrorist attacks, targeted assassinations, cyberattacks, and information operations—and it uses a network of proxies and spies to amplify its reach, including within the United States. Historically, the U.S. has managed to thwart Iranian operations on its soil. Now, this administration may have us unprepared.

  • From Earth Liberation to Accelerationism: A High-Level Review of Fifty Years of Domestic Infrastructure Terrorism

    An examination of 50 years of domestic extremist attacks and plots against U.S. critical infrastructure and infrastructure-adjacent industrial and commercial targets, shows that critical-infrastructure sabotage has appeared across ideologically divergent milieus, with two dominant clusters: environmental and animal-rights extremism (peaking in the late 1990s and early 2000s) and a post-2015 rise in far-right extremist infrastructure plotting, including a subset of cases that explicitly reflect accelerationist intent.

  • Conventional Weapons and the Normalization of Mass Violence

    Conventional weapons are generally presented as controllable, proportionate and morally acceptable, unlike weapons of mass destruction. But new research demonstrates that the massive levels of devastation observed throughout the 20th century, and still today, did not occur in spite of the rationality that defines the use of these weapons, but because of it.

  • Assessment of Blue Barrels Moved into Esfahan Mountain in Days Before June 2025 War

    Le Monde brought to our attention a June 9, 2025, a commercial satellite image taken just four days before the start of the June War. Given the overall appearance of the activity in the image, it appears to us that, of the options considered, the best match is that the blue barrels or casks contain 60 percent enriched uranium enroute to protective storage within the tunnel complex, irrespective of Iranian intent regarding its overhead observation.

  • Trump’s Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration

    In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases.

  • Gulf Leaders Didn’t Want the Iran War. They Need Trump to Win It Anyway.

    Leaders in the region weren’t necessarily interested in a war with the Islamic Republic, but they now need Trump to oust the Iranian regime to ensure it can no longer pose a threat. Stopping short of that would be existential to the Gulf states’ development model.

  • Why Hasn’t the U.S. Military Used Force to Secure the Strait of Hormuz?

    To make the strait safe for shipping, there is a need to secure not just the water, but the land on either side of it. And this would likely require ground forces – or perhaps raiding parties on Iran’s coastline – which would be complicated and risky for the US military. Securing shipping would require a significant number of naval ships.

  • Maritime Dimensions of the West Asia War

    Despite the USs possessing overwhelming superiority over Iran in the naval domain, it has been unable to deter or prevent Iranian disruption of maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s selective restrictions on transit showcase how geopolitical alignments influence commercial navigation and international trade flows.

  • Cameras Have Quietly Appeared in Thousands of U.S. Cities – Now, Their Integration with AI Is Sounding Alarms

    For decades, cars dictated urban planning in the United States. Few could have predicted that they would one day also double as nodes for surveillance. What began as a tool to identify threats to national security is becoming a surveillance infrastructure that can be used to track everyone.