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If the United States were forced to go to war with China over Taiwan tomorrow, it would be seriously hamstrung by a depleted weapons arsenal, a state of affairs made even more dire by the Iran war. In “Out of Ammo: A Two-Year Sprint to Rebuild the American Arsenal and Deter China,” Rush Doshi, Erin D. Dumbacher, William Henagan, Michael C. Horowitz, and Samuel Henry Lazarus explore avenues for the Department of Defense to jumpstart production of cheaper, more sustainable military capabilities to restore the American defense industrial base. Read the report

Energy security is quickly becoming one of the most vital aspects of both national security and climate progress. On a new episode of The Spillover, “Beyond ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’: Why Efficiency Is the Real Path to Energy Security,” host Rebecca Patterson speaks to Vijay Vaitheeswaran about the recently announced deal that gives the United States access to wide swaths of Venezuelan oil fields, how AI data centers can become more energy efficient, and what the future of renewable energy looks like in the developing world. Listen to the podcast

The United States sits in the center of a complicated nexus of violent extremism, radicalized youth populations, and increasingly lethal autonomous weaponry, and its counterterrorism infrastructure isn’t sufficient to prevent a major terrorist attack. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, Bruce Hoffman and Farah Pandith convened a year-long series of discussions with national security experts to discuss where the United States is falling short and what steps it can take to prevent a deadly attack on American soil. Their analysis, “Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, the United States Is Unprepared for Terrorism’s Next Wave,” is sobering. Read more and watch CFR’s special symposium marking the anniversary

In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and throwing the Middle East into disarray. In “The Iran War at Six Months: A Region—and Its Relationship With the U.S.—Transformed,” seven CFR experts mark the six-month anniversary of the start of the war by evaluating where the United States goes from here, especially now that a quick victory has failed to materialize. Read the analysis

Donald Trump owed much of his victory in 2024 to new constituencies who backed him, including Black, Latino, and Jewish voters. A CFR study group, led by Elliott Abrams, examines the makeup of the MAGA coalition—which also includes longstanding conservative stalwarts such as white evangelicals—and discusses whether it will hold in 2026 and 2028 in “The Trump Coalition: What Do the President’s Voters Think About Foreign Policy?” Read the analysis

Markets alone won’t deliver secure supply chains. In “The Shareholder State: Washington’s Improvised Bet on Critical Minerals,” Heidi E. Crebo-Rediker examines how China’s weaponization of supply chain dominance in critical minerals, rare earths, and permanent magnets is a national security issue for the United States, and lays out how using equity strategically can weaken China’s leverage while keeping markets free but not defenseless. Read more

Frontier AI models can now find software vulnerabilities in U.S. infrastructure systems faster than defenders can patch them. In “The Cyber Gap: How to Counter China’s Threat to America’s Critical Network,” Matt Ferren, Adam Segal, and Rush Doshi present a strategy to build cyber deterrence to make the United States a far costlier target for its enemies to attack. Read more

AI is here to stay—the only question is how much it will transform the global order, and whether it is possible to prepare for the upheaval. Jessica Brandt, Adam Segal, Jacob Wentz, and Zoë Moore survey foreign policy experts on how frontier AI capabilities will change governance, civil society, law, and security by 2035 and recommend steps the United States can take to mitigate technological uncertainty in “How Experts Think AI Will Change the Global Balance of Power by 2035.” Explore the responses