From the Desk of George Friedman

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army has begun minor operations to try to quell the unrest in Hong Kong. This is a step that the...

The dispute was decades in the making.

The United States has openly accused Iran of being behind the drone and cruise missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery. Now the...

Socialism is a global political movement that emerged from the French Revolution. Its goal was to speak for the dispossessed, only sometimes as a democratic political party. In all of its guises, it has been a powerful political force in most of the world. In the United States, however, it has been relegated to the […]

The U.S. is still the pre-eminent global power, whether the world likes it or not.

Command of the sea is the foundation of American national security. Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the greatest strategist in American history, identified it as the core American interest (though he wrote before the war on terrorism began and before the development of nuclear weapons). The United States, he argued, can be threatened only by an […]

In order to understand the current confrontation between Iran and the United States, we might begin with the Persian-Babylonian wars. Alternatively, we could begin...

The United States is shifting from military to economic warfare.

Nearly 75 years after it was fought, D-Day remains one of the most vividly recalled battles in history. It was also one of the most decisive. There are those who will argue that the Allies would have won World War II regardless of the outcome of the Battle of Normandy. Indeed, similar arguments are made […]

In “The Next 100 Years,” I described Turkey as an emerging regional power that would over time extend its sphere of influence to resemble...

Nov. 15, 2017 Multilateral groupings are usually impotent, so why are there so many of them?

Iran’s influence has spread across the Middle East, and the U.S. is pushing back.