Our Work

Wess Mitchell analyzes the history of diplomacy, and provides an urgent reminder of why we need to revive its lost art in a dangerous era of great power competition.

America’s allies are heavily reliant on the United States for security. These dependencies belie the potential power of our partners – and America’s growing fiscal constraints.

The United States faces a growing risk of multi-front war against Russia, China and Iran. The optimal response to this danger would be a sequential strategy aimed at inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia in Ukraine on a faster timeline than China is prepared to move against Taiwan. But for that strategy to work, the United States must use the current window wisely to shore up the situation in Eastern Europe, broker a more effective division-of-labor with allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and reform the U.S. defense industrial base.

Washington cannot shrink from great-power competition where U.S. security is threatened, but nor can it form a strategy on the assumption that it possesses unlimited resources to compete, with equal effort, in all the world’s major theaters at the same time. This paper details that dilemma and outline foreign policy approaches that could be framed in response. The goal is not to dictate a specific American strategy, but to develop a framework for focusing debate.

China is making strides in its effort to secure its energy supply, undercutting the threat of an American blockade, potentially increasing Beijing’s willingness for war.

Built on the conviction that political order is engineered through a top-down process, Western foreign policy assumes that the state apparatus creates domestic order, while international institutions and rules build global order. Accordingly, what establishes a more efficient and lasting order is nothing more than the right application of power in its military, economic, or institutional forms.

The reform package best adapted to generate the broadest possible corporate and state-based coalition is by focusing on strengthening what this report designates as the defense industrial “sub-base” (DISB).