The Trump administration's toolbox is not empty. What has been deployed so far - Venezuela, Iran, Hormuz, Panama - are the fast tools. The heavy ones are still waiting: Cuba, Kharg Island, Taiwan. Those who understand the selection logic of Trump and Hegseth know the sequence - and why the real driving force is not geopolitics, but a currency that does not yet exist.
What the Trump administration has been executing since January 2025 - in Venezuela, Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Indo-Pacific - looks like the improvisation of an unpredictable president. It is the opposite: the systematic implementation of a recommendation list written by twelve American think tanks between 2014 and 2026 in more than 30 studies. An analysis of how think tank language becomes Pentagon doctrine - and why the window is closing in 2026.
Mali is no longer merely facing an internal security crisis. The coordinated offensive by Tuareg separatists and JNIM, the withdrawal of Russia’s Africa Corps from Kidal, and the growing pressure on Bamako point to a new phase of war in the Sahel. What may look like a French attempt to regain lost influence is, in fact, a far more complex proxy structure: Ukrainian drone expertise, Algerian border depth, French strategic interests, and a Russian security model beginning to fracture in public. This article explains why Mali has become an African secondary front in the wider Russia-West conflict - and why the outcome may reshape the entire western Sahel.
What happens when the world does not collapse through one great war, but through many smaller fires that no one can extinguish?
In the final part of the series “Europe Prepares for War”, Michael Hollister examines a scenario built not on fantasy, but on existing fault lines: Korea, Taiwan, India and Pakistan, Iran and Israel, Turkey and Greece, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar, the South China Sea, and Africa.
Until now, many of these conflicts have been contained by great powers - through pressure, mediation, deterrence, or military presence. But what happens when the United States, China, and Russia are all tied down by their own major conflicts? A global power vacuum emerges. And in power vacuums, states rarely act according to morality. They act according to opportunity.
On April 24, 2026, Washington sanctioned a Chinese Fortune Global 500 company over Iranian oil purchases - triggering an escalation that reaches far beyond Iran. Three US pressure levers, deployed weeks before a planned Trump-Xi summit: a naval blockade, an OFAC designation, and a Strait of Hormuz toll trap. Beijing's response came without press conferences - but on four structural levels simultaneously. An analysis of the invisible escalation between Washington and Beijing, using Iran as a stage while the real decision falls elsewhere.
The United States still holds military superiority - but the window is closing. China is catching up, Russia is seeking allies, Europe is rearming. Is this historical coincidence or the architecture of a grand strategy? An analysis of the structural pressures driving Washington to manage multiple conflict zones simultaneously - and who ends up footing the bill.
Wars do not begin with the first shot. They begin with the removal of every obstacle that has so far prevented it. Treaties are terminated, infrastructure is adapted, industries are converted, language is shifted. Sixteen concrete changes between 2014 and 2026 have transformed Europe from a peace order into a state of war readiness - without any formal decision, without parliamentary approval, without the public grasping the whole. From the end of the INF Treaty through the "Military Schengen", the conversion to a war economy, and the dissolution of command chains, to the dismantling of international crisis communication: each step on its own plausible. All of them together, a pattern. An inventory of what has already happened before the word war is even spoken.
PRISM is not a surveillance program - it is the digital nervous system of Western warfare. Whoever supplies the target coordinates controls the battlefield. PESCO has built the military body. The question is who supplies the eyes - and at what price.
A mechanism invoked only 16 times in 35 years - its previous targets: Belarus, Chechnya, Turkmenistan. Now Georgia has been added to that list. An EU candidate country whose government has jailed opposition leaders, dismantled civil society through legislation, and allegedly sprayed protesters with a chemical agent abandoned after World War I. What the Moscow Mechanism is, why it is so rarely used - and what its activation against Georgia reveals about a country that just three years ago was celebrated as a post-Soviet success story.
Wars don't come out of nowhere. They are prepared - in budget debates, treaty clauses, industry conferences, and legal documents almost no one reads. Michael Hollister has read them. Across nine parts, he reconstructs how Germany and Europe are being systematically converted for war: the war economy, the EU military architecture, the legal automatisms that require no vote. Every part is a piece. Only when you see them all does the mosaic emerge - and what might come next becomes visible.