Security & Defense
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Madiha Afzal at the Brookings Institution, author of *Pakistan Under Siege* (Brookings, 2018), has tracked the strategic consequences for Pakistan of the August 2021 Taliban return to power in Kabul. The relationship Islamabad expected and the relationship it got are sharply different.
Islamabad's old assumption was that the Afghan Taliban would deliver Pakistani Taliban suppression as a thank-you for twenty years of safe haven. The Afghan Taliban has not delivered. The question is why Islamabad ever expected it.
Pakistani military and civilian casualties from cross-border TTP attacks, 2022-2024: an estimated 2,800+, the highest since 2014 (Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies; Afzal 2024 Brookings briefs).
Security & Defense
Kori Schake at the American Enterprise Institute has written the sharpest US-aligned analysis of what an Article 5 invocation actually requires of each member — and what political dynamics would weaken the obligation if tested under a second Trump administration.
Article 5 says each ally will take 'such action as it deems necessary.' The word 'deems' is doing all the work.
NATO members meeting the 2% of GDP defence-spending pledge: 11 of 30 in 2023, 23 of 32 in 2024 (NATO Annual Report).
March 23, 2026
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Security & Defense
Sophia Besch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, previously at the Centre for European Reform in London, has produced the most detailed account of why Olaf Scholz's February 2022 Zeitenwende speech has not translated into the operational defense transformation it promised.
The speech said everything has changed. The procurement system, the Defense Ministry organogram, and the political culture that treated defense industrial policy as embarrassing — none of those have changed enough to deliver the speech's promise.
Germany's €100B special defense fund (Sondervermögen): approved 2022; estimated drawn-down or contracted by end-2024: about 60% (Bundestag budget committee data; Besch 2024).
March 18, 2026
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Vincent Foucher at the CNRS, after a decade at the International Crisis Group, has produced the sharpest analysis of why the French exit from the Sahel was driven as much by Paris's domestic political calculus as by Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey's choices.
The Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey juntas pushed France out. Paris had already decided to leave. The collision was about timing and dignity, not direction.
French troops deployed to the Sahel: 5,100 at Operation Barkhane's 2020 peak; 0 in mainland Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger by end-2023 (French Ministry of Armed Forces).
Security & Defense
Soner Cagaptay at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has tracked the political dimension of Türkiye's drone export program since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. The Bayraktar TB2 has become a foreign-policy instrument as much as a weapons platform.
Türkiye is the only middle power that has industrialized drones as a foreign-policy tool. The TB2 is what Bayraktar sells. Erdoğan sells access to Ankara.
Bayraktar TB2 export customers as of 2024: about 31 countries (Baykar; Cagaptay 2024 WINEP brief). Ukraine purchases since 2019: estimated 50+ units.
February 14, 2026
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Security & Defense
AUKUS Pillar I — Australian acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines — is a structural realignment, not a single procurement. It commits Australia, the US, and the UK to thirty years of integrated industrial-defense planning. Most commentary has focused on the platforms; the durable change is the alliance structure.
Buying submarines from one ally and building them with another is a commitment neither relationship is supposed to outlast.
AUKUS Pillar I program cost: A$268-368B over 30 years (Australian Department of Defence estimate).
February 2, 2026
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Vincent Foucher at the CNRS has tracked the security politics of West Africa for two decades. His reading of the Mali-Burkina-Niger Alliance of Sahel States (AES) departure from ECOWAS treats it as the consolidation of a coherent regional bloc, not a transient post-coup posture.
ECOWAS treated the AES juntas as solvable problems. The juntas treated ECOWAS as the problem. The first reading was wrong; the second was strategic.
AES combined population: ~71 million; combined territory covers approximately 2.78 million km² of the Sahel (World Bank, 2024).
January 25, 2026
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Charles Edel at CSIS has written the most detailed open-source account of AUKUS's two pillars — the nuclear-submarine program and the advanced-capabilities cooperation track. The pact's significance is not the platforms it produces but the industrial-defence integration it locks in.
Pillar II is the part that will actually shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture. Pillar I is what makes Pillar II politically possible.
Estimated AUKUS Pillar I total cost to Australia: AUD 268-368B over 30 years (Australian government 2023 estimate).
January 15, 2026
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