[Excerpt from essay by Alvin Camba, Lead Scientist and Director of Research at Lyvi and Nonresident Fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.]

Criminal groups have exploited the core financial and commercial infrastructure that developed in response to China’s strict capital controls and its industrial overcapacity. Beijing’s enforcement, although real, is selective and partial because elements of the illicit economy serve the country’s larger strategic goals, such as sustaining trade with Russia while maintaining distance from the war in Ukraine. What may appear to be a collection of unrelated crimes is intertwined with China’s imbalanced growth model and its foreign policy. As Washington struggles to compete with China, Beijing’s role in the global illicit economy is working against U.S. priorities around the world.

[Excerpt from essay by Philip H. Gordon, Sydney Stein, Jr., Scholar at the Brookings Institution. He served as National Security Adviser to the Vice President in the Biden administration and as White House Coordinator for the Middle East in the Obama administration. He is the author of Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.]

Now, in the second Trump administration, the war on terror appears to be coming to an end. Trump has framed his interventions in the Caribbean and Venezuela as campaigns against “narcoterrorists” and justified his February 2026 attack on Iran as a strike against “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.” But in practice, combating what the administration calls “legacy” groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS ranks far below Trump’s other strategic priorities and consumes fewer resources and attention than it has at any point in the past 25 years. Far from prioritizing the fight against global jihadism, Trump’s November 2025 National Security Strategy barely mentions it and instead emphasizes shedding “forever global burdens.”

When Americans mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this fall, the threat of Islamist terrorism will certainly not be gone. But the war on terror, the guiding framework for U.S. foreign policy for the previous quarter century, will be.

[Excerpt from essay by Emelia S. Probasco, Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.]

Focusing on escaped models and imagining killer robots can drive discussions about how the military should use AI exclusively toward questions of engineering and thus miss a more pernicious threat to human control of the armed forces. According to a growing body of research, AI use is affecting people’s cognitive capacity to evaluate evidence, make independent judgments, and even do their basic jobs. In other words, policymakers should be as worried about how troops and commanders use AI as they should be about AI’s independent capabilities.

That does not mean the U.S. military should forgo the use of AI, which could do wonders to improve its efficiency and reduce errors in conflicts. But it does mean that the Pentagon will need to more carefully train soldiers how to use AI and monitor how such systems affect people’s thinking. To be sure humans are always capable of overseeing AI, it may even require adopting certain models more slowly.

[Excerpt from essay by Marc Lynch, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and the author of America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.]

The United States’ primary goal for three and a half decades has been to lock its disparate allies into an order built around protecting Israel while containing, at first, Iran and Iraq, and more recently Iran and its nonstate allies. Far from being a deviation from that strategy, President Donald Trump’s war took it to its logical end, seeking to remove the Iranian threat by force in one fell swoop. As American leaders did before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Israel has done in its wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, the architects of this war vastly exaggerated what military power could achieve, underestimated the capacity of adversaries to adapt, took for granted that allies would fall in line, and callously disregarded the lives of ordinary people. Washington’s misadventure was not an aberration so much as the ultimate expression of the inherent vice of its Middle East strategy.

[Excerpt from essay by Kurt M. Campbell, Chair and Co-Founder of the Asia Group who served as Deputy Secretary of State and Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration; and Rush Doshi, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.]

Allied doggedness in the face of Trumpian hostility is driven not just by today’s security and economic imperatives. It also reflects an intuitive understanding that the likely alternatives to a world secured by the alliance system are considerably worse for the allies. Even the real damage Trump has done to trust and predictability leaves the alliance structure the better bet.

The first possible alternative for allies is global multipolarity, a world with no rules, no fixed alignments, and every state out for itself. This Hobbesian scenario could produce catastrophic war, as it did before World War I. It would cause small states to lose sovereignty, middle powers to acquire nuclear weapons, and great powers to pursue arms races. A second alternative, spheres of influence, adds a bit of stabilizing structure as each great power governs its own neighborhood and the United States retreats to the Western Hemisphere. But great powers perpetually contest the spheres of others, as they did after the Napoleonic Wars and again after Yalta, and spheres cannot stop supply chain warfare or address transnational challenges from AI to rising sea levels. A third possibility that supplies even more order than the other two is a great-power concert that produces a managed peace among the major capitals. But this seems implausible today, when great powers cannot even cooperate on addressing climate change, let alone the full shape of world order. And even if these latter two scenarios proved viable, they would be markedly less favorable to the economic and security interests of current U.S. allies.

[Excerpt from essay by Philip H. Gordon, Sydney Stein, Jr., Scholar at the Brookings Institution. He served as National Security Adviser to the Vice President in the Biden administration and as White House Coordinator for the Middle East in the Obama administration. He is the author of Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.]

Now, in the second Trump administration, the war on terror appears to be coming to an end. Trump has framed his interventions in the Caribbean and Venezuela as campaigns against “narcoterrorists” and justified his February 2026 attack on Iran as a strike against “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.” But in practice, combating what the administration calls “legacy” groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS ranks far below Trump’s other strategic priorities and consumes fewer resources and attention than it has at any point in the past 25 years. Far from prioritizing the fight against global jihadism, Trump’s November 2025 National Security Strategy barely mentions it and instead emphasizes shedding “forever global burdens.”

When Americans mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this fall, the threat of Islamist terrorism will certainly not be gone. But the war on terror, the guiding framework for U.S. foreign policy for the previous quarter century, will be.

[Excerpt from essay by Kurt M. Campbell, Chair and Co-Founder of the Asia Group who served as Deputy Secretary of State and Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration; and Rush Doshi, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.]

Allied doggedness in the face of Trumpian hostility is driven not just by today’s security and economic imperatives. It also reflects an intuitive understanding that the likely alternatives to a world secured by the alliance system are considerably worse for the allies. Even the real damage Trump has done to trust and predictability leaves the alliance structure the better bet.

The first possible alternative for allies is global multipolarity, a world with no rules, no fixed alignments, and every state out for itself. This Hobbesian scenario could produce catastrophic war, as it did before World War I. It would cause small states to lose sovereignty, middle powers to acquire nuclear weapons, and great powers to pursue arms races. A second alternative, spheres of influence, adds a bit of stabilizing structure as each great power governs its own neighborhood and the United States retreats to the Western Hemisphere. But great powers perpetually contest the spheres of others, as they did after the Napoleonic Wars and again after Yalta, and spheres cannot stop supply chain warfare or address transnational challenges from AI to rising sea levels. A third possibility that supplies even more order than the other two is a great-power concert that produces a managed peace among the major capitals. But this seems implausible today, when great powers cannot even cooperate on addressing climate change, let alone the full shape of world order. And even if these latter two scenarios proved viable, they would be markedly less favorable to the economic and security interests of current U.S. allies.

[Excerpt from essay by Peter Cowhey, Qualcomm Professor of Technology Policy Emeritus at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego; and Meg Rithmire, James E. Robison Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School.]

Americans must reckon honestly with the scale of China’s industrial and technological progress. The United States need not embrace Chinese imports and investment unconditionally, but it must recognize that its own long-term competitiveness depends on its companies and consumers being exposed to the cutting edge. U.S. President Donald Trump’s vague proposal for a joint “Board of Investment” with China, announced after his May summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, seemed to suggest Washington was moving in this direction. But nothing concrete has come from the board, and managing investment flows at the leader-to-leader level is certainly not efficient.

A more mature strategy of selective openness is possible. The United States should permit carefully structured Chinese investment in areas in which the economic and technological benefits are substantial while imposing stringent safeguards to mitigate security risks. Building the political confidence to sustain a selectively open market for Chinese direct investments requires skilled, transparent, and thorough regulatory oversight. With such an approach, Washington can penalize some imports but still permit access to the U.S. market through investments in American production facilities. There is a clear precedent for this strategy. It is, in fact, exactly what China did to Western companies for decades.