Taiwan

Like Churchill as he mulled Cromwell, we must prepare for threats beyond, while still contending with today.

Xi Jinping is watching the Ukrainian invasion closely and is strategizing his long-term interactions with the democratic world based on the West’s response.

Moscow and Beijing’s argument of “Western encroachment” has an aura of authenticity in other capitals around the world, where there is a sense that the West’s business enterprises, Hollywood culture, and radical sexual ideologies are bludgeoning their cultures.

What we can gain from the origins of the Great War is that strategic ambiguity played a role in bringing on that cataclysm.

George Marshall’s attempt to create peace between the Chinese nationalists and communists failed. Christian realists in 1947 considered why.

Xi understands well that if Putin’s regime falls, China will lose an important bulwark.

The New Right cannot be bothered with foreign threats because they are rationing political capital for an ideological fight at home. That’s bad enough. Even worse, they seem less interested in transcending tyranny and more interested in learning from it.

Just war thinking is moral analysis of military action, not a framework for foreign policy. Acknowledging these limitations helps us to become better just war casuists, and it highlights the need for values-driven strategic thinking in the foreign policy sphere.

Here is the bad news for Beijing, and the good news for the West. Despite genuine concerns over how an increasingly multipolar world will erode the human rights consensus, the agenda still remains a major obstacle to ideological competitors—both at home and abroad.