-
FEMA’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year
As 2025 draws to a close, the departure of the beleaguered acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, caps a tumultuous year for FEMA. Internal turmoil and delayed aid – all under the shadow of President Donald Trump’s vow to abolish the agency — expose the agency’s fragility under Trump.
-
-
Homeland Security Wants State Driver’s License Data for Sweeping Citizenship Program
The Trump administration wants access to state driver’s license data on millions of U.S. residents as it builds a powerful citizenship verification program amid its clampdown on voter fraud and illegal immigration. For access, the administration may turn to an obscure data-sharing network used by law enforcement agencies, potentially allowing officials to bypass negotiating with states for the records.
-
-
Trump’s Immigration Forces Deploy “Less Lethal” Weapons in Dangerous Ways, Skirting Rules and Maiming Protesters
Civil rights and weapons experts cite the consequences of federal agents’ use of crowd control weapons: religious leaders shot with pepper balls and noxious chemicals. A nurse nearly blinded by tear gas. Protestors trapped, struggling to breathe.
-
-
What Can Be Done About Hamas Fighters?
Peace is a prerequisite to the ambitious economic development plans that could transform Gaza. Securing that peace, however, requires addressing the future role of Hamas’s fighters.
-
-
Pentagon Investigation of Sen. Mark Kelly Revives Cold War Persecution of Americans with Supposedly Disloyal Views
In an unprecedented step, the Department of Defense announced that it was reviewing statements by U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, who is a retired Navy captain and a decorated combat veteran. By branding critics and opponents as disloyal, traitorous or worse, Trump and his supporters are resurrecting a playbook that hearkens back to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s crusade against people he portrayed as domestic threats to the U.S. McCarthyism wrought devastating social and cultural harm across our nation, and a repetition of a McCarthyite social and political fratricide could be just as harmful today, perhaps even more so.
-
-
Physical Approaches to Civilian Biodefense
Progress in biological sciences and technologies will offer more opportunities to improve human well-being in the coming decades, but this progress may also lower barriers that are blocking bad actors from engineering pathogens to cause destruction. We need to identify potential preparedness measures for challenging biological threats.
-
-
Nick Fuentes Is a Master of Exploiting the Current Social Media Opportunities for Extremism
That the antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his followers have managed to get what their 20th-century predecessors could not — widespread awareness and political influence — reveals how fringe ideologies operate differently today compared to the mid-20th century, when institutional gatekeepers –political parties, law enforcement, the media –could more effectively contain extremist movements.
-
-
Experimental AI Chatbots Significantly Reduce Belief in Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories, New Study Shows
Brief conversations with AI debunking tool reduce antisemitic conspiracy beliefs by 16 percent and improve attitudes toward Jews among initially unfavorable participants by 25 percent.
-
-
Why Was James Garfield Assassinated? A Historian Reveals the Real Story Behind Netflix’s “Death by Lightning”
The real history behind James Garfield’s murder is as much about the corrupt political system he railed against — and how his death ultimately shattered it.
-
-
The Effects of the 1942 Japanese Exclusion on US Agriculture
The U.S. government’s 1942 Japanese relocation program removed the advantage that high-skilled Japanese farmers had given to local agriculture on the West Coast. Whether the forced evacuation contributed to national security is open to question, but it was certainly costly.
-
-
Peace Plan Presented by the U.S. to Ukraine Reflects Inexperienced, Unrealistic Handling of a Delicate Situation
“It’s amateur hour. We’ve seen this before. With this administration, it puts a lot of very amateurish people – Rubio’s not one of them – in place in important offices, like Steve Witkoff, the special envoy for Russia and Ukraine who is also the special envoy for the Middle East. And they’ve gotten rid of all the professionals. They either just fired some or ran some off,” says Donald Heflin.
-
-
U.S. Can’t Overcome Manufacturing Gap with China
The United States should not kid itself. It will not recover its manufacturing position from China in any foreseeable future. Assuming zero growth of China’s manufacturing sector for the next 20 years, closing the manufacturing gap would require U.S. manufacturing to grow at a torrid rate of 6 percent per year. That’s just implausible.
-
-
G20 Johannesburg Endorses Critical Minerals Framework
The Trump administration is trying to diversify critical minerals supply chains and reduce dependence on China, but this goal cannot be achieved without broad and deep cooperation with other countries. The U.S. absence from the 2025 G20 discussions on critical minerals weakens collective efforts to counterbalance China’s influence.
-
-
AI-enabled Intrusions: What Anthropic’s Disclosure Really Means
Last week, AI company Anthropic reported with ‘high confidence’ that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group had weaponized Anthropic’s own AI tools to run a largely automated cyberattack on several technology firms and government agencies. The September operation is the first publicly known case of an AI system conducting target reconnaissance with only minimal human direction.
-
-
Economic Deterrence in a China Contingency
Deterring China from launching an attack on Taiwan is a central focus of U.S. and allied security planning. A new report explores a scenario involving a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, followed by an invasion of the Island, and discusses what economic measures the United States and its allies might employ to deter such aggression.
-
The long view
Hybrid Risks Rise as U.S. Withdraws from International Organizations
The United States’ decision to withdraw from many international organizations risks allowing Beijing and Moscow to further advance their undermining of global stability.
The Legacy of the Arab Spring, to Date
The Arab Spring did not simply unsettle Arab regimes. It disrupted an entire geopolitical equilibrium that had been quietly accepted for decades. What appeared at first as a series of domestic uprisings ultimately rewired regional alignments, altered great-power postures, normalized intervention, and reshaped how instability itself is managed and exploited.
Bookshelf: Why the U.S. Failed to Contain North Korea’s Nuclear Threat
Joel Wit’s new book details the failure of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations to contain and limit North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Wit writes that Trump had an opportunity to roll back the North Korean program, but Trump’s personal characteristics and governing style doomed the effort. Wit credits Trump’s unorthodox approach for setting the stage for the unprecedented Hanoi summit withKim Jong Un, but blames his short attention span – John Bolton said that Trump “has the attention span of a fruit fly” — for its breakdown. “The president couldn’t sit still long enough to close the deal,” Wit writes.
Small Modular Reactors and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are widely heralded as the next major leap in civilian nuclear energy. Beneath this optimism, however, lies a growing unease within the nuclear policy community relating to the nuclear weapons proliferation and safeguards challenges that SMRs pose to the existing global nuclear governance system.
“DeepSeek Is in the Driver’s Seat. That’s a Big Security Problem”
Democratic countries have a smart-car problem. For those that don’t act quickly and decisively, it’s about to become a severe national security headache.
Vaccine Myths That Won't Die and How to Counter Them—Part 1
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has spent decades promoting vaccine skepticism. He has replaced scientists at different HHS such as CDC and NIH with vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine activists. They have polluted the information environment with, and base their policy changes on, myths about the supposed risks of vaccines. Each of these myths has been studied extensively. Each has been refuted. And yet each persists, because misinformation travels faster than correction and because these myths tap into fears that are genuinely human.