The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle to Define Legitimate Power in the Trump Presidency

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Luke Ford

Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times:

Trump’s Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights

Moynihan agreed that “there are significant strategic motivations for the U.S. military action” against Iran. But for Trump, “the key point seems to be the impulsiveness, the arrogance, the lack of public and interparty consultation.”

There are other parallels, Moynihan argued:

What was DOGE at the start of the second administration? Smash and terminate. Break things and move fast, but without a plan for what follows.

It seems pretty clear that they are making it up as they go — in Venezuela, in Iran, in dealing with Europe over Greenland, in tariff levels. This is all smash and grab, see what works.

If ICE goes too far, then fire the homeland security secretary and move on to the next opportunity to punish and dominate. If you can’t indict Comey, move on to Schiff, or Senator Kelly. Keep up the pressure and punishment. See what works. Keep them constantly under pressure and off guard. Show you are powerful and can do anything at any time.

I leave it to Moynihan to conclude on a note that will have to pass for optimism right now:

I think we are going to pay a large price globally and domestically for this rashness, arrogance and destructive incompetence. But in one sense we are fortunate.

Imagine how much more threatened our democracy would be if we had a president with the same authoritarian intent and ambition, but much greater patience, strategic savvy, planning, intellect and skill. It is not only his overreach and greed that will be his undoing, but his incompetence.

No one says they want to define legitimate power because it gives them power. They say they defend the rule of law, protect institutions, uphold democracy, or exercise decisive leadership. This is the central insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Interpretive authority is a status claim wrapped in constitutional and moral language. It functions as coalition technology: it recruits trust, excludes rivals, and justifies control over court rulings, media narratives, expert consensus, donor loyalty, and the deference that flows to whoever successfully occupies the role of the person who knows what counts as legitimate governance in March 2026. Thomas B. Edsall’s essay in the New York Times, titled “The Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches Its Apex,” is not primarily an analysis of the Trump presidency. It is a status-defense document for the institutional coalition whose governing model the presidency is systematically dismantling, and reading it through Alliance Theory reveals the jurisdictional war that every paragraph is fighting.

Stephen Turner’s deflationary method cuts to the mechanism beneath every vocabulary deployed in this contest. Turner would note that none of the frameworks competing for authority over the meaning of the Trump presidency has a stable epistemic base independent of the institutional interests it serves. Lawlessness does not derive from a neutral philosophy of constitutional order that settles which first-mover actions count as illegitimate disruption and which count as the decisive leadership that democratic mandates authorize. Institutional damage does not derive from a neutral theory of checks and balances that settles which university settlements and law firm capitulations count as coercion and which count as rational risk management by institutions that calculated their litigation odds and chose efficiency over principle. Decisiveness does not derive from a neutral framework of executive authority that settles which civilian costs, the elementary school killing at least 175 people, the USAID mortality estimates reaching into the hundreds of thousands, count as collateral consequences of necessary action and which count as wanton destruction by an administration that did not perform the procedural analysis that would have illuminated those costs in advance. Each vocabulary is a coordination mechanism that recruits allies, defines legitimate power in terms that expand the defining coalition’s jurisdiction, and presents that expansion as the natural acknowledgment of what serious governance actually requires.

The institutional-procedural coalition is the first master formation in this war, concentrated in legacy media columnists including Edsall himself, liberal academics, career civil servants, legal elites, and the technocratic policy professionals whose entire professional identity depends on the model of governance that the procedural framework embodies. It uses the language of lawlessness, impulsiveness, institutional damage, and the moral weight of civilian harm to frame the Trump presidency as operating outside the boundaries of legitimate governance entirely. Its claim is that power flows legitimately through agencies, legal reviews, expert consultation, and institutional continuity, and that a president who treats those processes as obstacles rather than as sources of authority has forfeited the legitimacy that democratic election alone cannot confer. Edsall’s sourcing pattern performs this claim’s coalition logic perfectly: Bob Bauer, Gary Jacobson, Larry Diamond, Brendan Nyhan, and Don Moynihan are not random academics. They are credentialed members of the institutional ecosystem whose sequential endorsement of the smash-and-grab thesis creates the appearance of converging independent expert judgment while actually demonstrating the coalition’s internal coherence. The journalist frames the argument. The academics supply authority. The readers see multiple experts agreeing. The result feels like neutral analysis even though every quoted voice belongs to roughly the same alliance network.

The executive-first-mover coalition, whose organizational base includes Trump-aligned strategists, the populist networks that provide the administration’s electoral foundation, and the anti-institutional actors who treat the procedural coalition’s rules as the corruption they were elected to overcome, counters with the language of strength, winning, leverage, and the decisive action that an era of national decline requires. Its claim is that power belongs to those willing to act before resistance organizes, and that the law firm settlements totaling nearly a billion dollars in pro bono commitments, the university capitulations from Columbia through Cornell to Brown, and the Iran war’s strategic achievements represent the exercise of genuine presidential authority rather than the coercion that the procedural coalition’s vocabulary describes. Bob Bauer’s first-mover analysis, which Edsall treats as a critique, functions equally as a description of successful strategy: if an executive acts with sufficient speed and indifference to subsequent rulings, the facts on the ground that result cannot easily be undone by the courts and congressional procedures whose reactive design the administration has learned to exploit.

Turner’s deflationary method applied to both coalitions produces the same finding. The procedural coalition asserts that legitimacy has a process essence, a determinate content of consultation, legal review, and expert validation that the institutional model transmits and that present governance must embody if it is to count as something more than the exercise of raw power in constitutional clothing. The executive coalition asserts that legitimacy has a mandate essence, a determinate content of electoral authorization and decisive action that the people’s will transmits and that present governance must embody if it is to count as something more than the expert class’s defense of its own institutional prerogatives. Neither definition has a stable epistemic base independent of the institutional interests it serves. Both are constructions that define legitimate power in terms that expand the defining coalition’s authority while placing the burden of justification on whoever the definition designates as the party that must explain itself.

The most technically significant element of Edsall’s column is Bauer’s first-mover analysis, because it identifies the structural mechanism through which the procedural coalition is losing the jurisdictional war rather than just the political one. In a system built on checks and balances, the checks are almost always reactive. They take months or years to move through courts whose willingness to hold the government in contempt Nyhan describes as limited, whose ability to monitor compliance Nyhan describes as dependent on the administration’s own good faith, and whose intervention the administration’s pattern of compliance theater is designed to satisfy formally while violating substantively. The Iran war represents the first-mover advantage at maximum scale: by the time any legal or institutional challenge to the war’s constitutional basis works through the courts, the geopolitical reality has shifted in ways that no ruling can undo. The Senate’s failure to pass the War Powers Resolution by a 47-53 vote on March 4 represents Congress’s own contribution to this dynamic, as Speaker Johnson’s double-negative legislative strategy, voting against disapproving the war rather than affirmatively authorizing it, provides the executive with functional ratification while allowing individual members to maintain interpretive flexibility about what their votes meant.

The civil service transformation is where Turner’s analysis of tacit knowledge becomes most revealing. A bureaucracy is not merely a set of rules. It is a community of practice whose power resides in the unwritten, embodied know-how of career professionals who understand how to navigate the interplay of law, technical data, political reality, and the informal networks through which agencies coordinate with each other and with the private sector entities they regulate. The finalization of the Schedule Policy/Career rule in March 2026, reclassifying up to fifty thousand career officials as at-will employees removable for subverting directives, is not simply an organizational reform. It is the systematic dismantling of the tacit architecture through which the institutional coalition’s governing model actually operates.

Turner would identify the mechanism: tacit knowledge thrives in stable environments where practitioners feel safe enough to exercise their feel for a problem, to push back on directives that technical expertise identifies as counterproductive, and to maintain the informal coordination networks through which agencies collectively manage the gap between formal rules and operational reality. When an EPA scientist or a Treasury analyst knows that exercising that tacit judgment can produce termination, the institutional knowledge does not disappear quietly. It is replaced by compliance theater, the performance of following directives that generates the formal appearance of governance while hollowing out the substantive expertise that made the agency valuable. The chain of apprenticeship through which tacit knowledge is transmitted across generations of practitioners is broken not primarily by firing individuals but by changing the psychological environment in which their successors are trained, ensuring that the professional formation that produced the old institutional culture cannot be reproduced in its absence.

The more than three hundred thousand career civil servants who have left or been dismissed since early 2025 represent not just an organizational disruption but an epistemic loss whose full consequences will not be visible until the next crisis that requires the kind of sophisticated technical judgment that years of institutional formation produces and that no screening for loyalty can substitute for. Moynihan’s point about DOGE’s smash-and-terminate approach applies with full force here: breaking things and moving fast without a plan for what follows is a strategy that produces immediate disruption but defers the cost to the moment when the system’s brittleness encounters the demand that reveals it. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the National Weather Service still perform their routine functions, but they have lost the tacit depth to manage the novel crises that fall outside routine, and the loss will not be apparent until those crises arrive.

The psychological-delegitimation coalition, which occupies a distinct position in the war over the Trump presidency’s meaning, uses the language of narcissism, childish impulsiveness, and authoritarian instinct to push Trump out of the category of legitimate governing actors entirely. Gary Jacobson’s analysis of Trump as a self-proclaimed genius whose gut instincts override evidence-based analysis, Larry Diamond’s description of Trump as an opportunistic aggressor looking for unlocked doors, and Moynihan’s conclusion that the country is fortunate Trump lacks strategic savvy all perform the same coalition function: by treating the president’s behavior as pathological rather than strategic, this coalition avoids having to engage with his methods as serious governing alternatives that the institutional model must answer with something better than the assertion that it is inherently superior. The status delegitimation move is structurally necessary for the institutional coalition because taking Trump’s methods seriously as strategic alternatives would require acknowledging that the procedural model’s reactive design has genuine limitations that the first-mover advantage exploits rather than violates.

Moynihan’s closing observation is the most revealing sentence in Edsall’s entire column precisely because it exposes the institutional coalition’s deepest anxiety. The real danger, he says, would be a leader with Trump’s intentions but greater patience, strategic savvy, planning, intellect, and skill. That sentence tells you more about the coalition than any of the moral language surrounding it. The fear is not that Trump is uniquely dangerous. The fear is that his method of governing might prove effective and replicable. If a future leader combined the willingness to break institutional constraints with careful planning and sustained strategic execution, the procedural model’s reactive design would provide no defense, because the first-mover advantage does not depend on impulsiveness to work. It depends only on the asymmetry between the speed of executive action and the speed of institutional response. That asymmetry exists regardless of the executive’s temperament, and the institutional coalition’s relief that Trump is impulsive rather than disciplined is simultaneously an acknowledgment that its model cannot defend itself against a disciplined version of the challenge he represents.

The financial asymmetry and settlement logic that Edsall documents in the law firm and university cases reveals the mechanism through which the procedural coalition’s institutional strongholds are being converted from sanctuaries of rights into toll roads of compliance. Elite institutions like Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and the major law firms operate on a logic of risk management whose rational calculus, even when the legal merits favor resistance, produces settlement when the cost of litigation, the threat to federal funding, and the reputational exposure of sustained conflict exceed the cost of accommodation. Trump’s administration exploits this by creating the scenario where the interplay of legal rights is subordinated to immediate financial survival, converting what the procedural coalition treats as principled institutional resistance into a series of individually rational capitulations whose cumulative effect is the normalization of a governing model that the coalition’s own vocabulary describes as illegitimate. Columbia’s $200 million settlement, Cornell’s $60 million, Northwestern’s $75 million, and Brown’s $50 million are not just financial transactions. They are trophies that the administration hangs on the wall, demonstrating to the next institution in line that resistance is more expensive than accommodation and that the coalition solidarity that might make collective resistance viable does not materialize when individual survival calculations dominate.

The moral-harm-amplification coalition’s deployment of civilian death statistics, the elementary school strike killing at least 175 people, the USAID mortality estimates potentially reaching 781,000 deaths over one year, and the EPA and OSHA rollbacks expected to increase American fatalities, performs the coalition function of converting policy disputes into moral emergencies whose stakes preclude the kind of neutral analysis that would require taking the administration’s strategic rationale seriously. By scaling harm to the level where no responsible actor could endorse the policies producing it, this coalition claims jurisdiction over ethical judgment in ways that position the institutional model’s procedural requirements as the obvious precondition for preventing atrocity rather than as one approach to governance among several. The Iran school strike provides the most visceral version of this move: the 175 dead children, many if not most of them girls, represent the moral cost of the administration’s refusal to perform the legal review, the intelligence coordination, and the strike planning that the procedural model’s requirements would have produced, and Edsall uses that cost to make the procedural model’s absence visibly catastrophic in ways that the abstract argument for institutional process cannot achieve on its own.

The elite-solidarity-and-warning coalition performs the specific function of calling the institutional coalition’s members to close ranks before the settlement logic produces the kind of individual defection that makes collective resistance impossible. The naming of specific institutions, Harvard’s challenge, the eighteen universities filing statements of support, the law firms that refused to settle versus the nine that did, creates a public record of who maintained coalition solidarity and who chose individual survival, with the implicit understanding that the record will matter when the political environment changes and the institutions that held are distinguished from the institutions that capitulated. Edsall’s column is partly addressed to that audience: it is a reminder that the chilling effect on the broader legal community, the firms that declined to join the defense of those under attack, represents exactly the kind of individual defection from coalition solidarity that the first-mover strategy is designed to produce, and that the procedural coalition’s survival depends on preventing that logic from completing its work.

The big pattern across all six coalitions is the same pattern Pinsof identifies everywhere. Every coalition claims: we should define what this presidency means because we uniquely understand what legitimate power requires. The institutional-procedural coalition claims the process framework without which governance produces the wanton destruction that the Iran war and USAID cuts represent. The executive-first-mover coalition claims the mandate framework without which governance produces the paralysis of procedural vetoes that an era of national decline cannot afford. The institutional-fragility coalition claims the reform analysis without which governance collapses under challenges that the existing system’s reactive design was never built to address. The moral-harm coalition claims the civilian-cost accounting without which governance ignores the suffering that procedural bypasses produce. The elite-solidarity coalition claims the institutional-defense coordination without which governance atomizes institutions into the individual capitulations that permanently shift the power balance. The psychological-delegitimation coalition claims the interpretive superiority without which governance appears normal that is actually pathological. None of these coalitions acknowledges that institutional interests shape their claims. All present them as democratic necessities visible to anyone with genuine commitment to the republic.

What makes the war over the Trump presidency’s meaning distinctive within this series is the degree to which its central contest, over who defines legitimate executive power in a democratic republic, is simultaneously a contest over the most fundamental question a self-governing people faces: how should citizens relate to the specialized procedural knowledge that modern governance requires but that most people cannot directly evaluate, and on what terms can they withdraw the deference that the institutional coalition’s authority depends on when the institutions claiming that authority are losing the jurisdictional war to a president who has learned to treat their reactive design as a vulnerability rather than as a constraint? The totalizing feel of every dispute over the Trump presidency in March 2026, the sense that every argument over a university settlement or a war authorization is also an argument about whether procedural sovereignty or first-mover dominance will define the republic’s governing model for the next generation, is not the product of unusual polarization or culture-war inflation of normal political disagreement. It is what jurisdictional competition looks like when the stakes include not just narrative control and institutional funding but the foundational question of which kind of authority democratic citizens owe deference to when the institutions that claim it are being systematically dismantled faster than the courts and the procedural model’s defenders can respond.

Turner’s deflationary method does not deny that procedures constrain abuse, that first-mover speed produces facts on the ground, that institutional fragility demands structural reform, that civilian harm requires moral accounting, that solidarity preserves collective resistance capacity, or that psychological analysis illuminates governing style. It asks what work these languages do in present contests, whose authority specific definitions of legitimacy advance, and what gets excluded from the picture when each coalition presents its preferred version of what the Trump presidency essentially is as the authentic one. The procedural essence the institutional coalition defends is selected from the history of American governance in ways that serve the coalition’s interest in the expert consultation model while minimizing the evidence that the procedural model’s reactive design has always been vulnerable to the first-mover exploitation that Trump has made visible rather than invented. The dominance essence the executive coalition invokes draws on genuine democratic mandate while serving institutional interests in a model of executive authority whose scope, if permanently normalized, would eliminate the constraints that future democratic majorities would need to reverse its consequences. The incompetence essence the psychological-delegitimation coalition asserts reflects genuine governing failures while serving the institutional coalition’s interest in a dismissal of Trump’s methods that avoids the more threatening acknowledgment that a more disciplined version of those methods would expose the procedural model’s deepest structural vulnerabilities rather than merely overwhelming its reactive capacity.

The battle to define legitimate power in the Trump presidency is governed not by a single trusted governing class but by competing coalitions of considerable institutional reach and genuine normative commitment, each using different moral and constitutional language to justify authority over the framings, rulings, settlements, warnings, and narratives through which the meaning of legitimate presidential power is contested and the republic is shaped. The equilibrium this produces feels like democratic crisis because the questions at its center, what counts as legitimate and who deserves deference for naming it, are genuinely unresolved and because the first-mover dynamic that the administration has mastered is producing facts on the ground faster than the procedural model’s defenders can convert their institutional authority into effective resistance. The stability is real, produced by the procedural coalition’s retention of sufficient judicial, media, and academic infrastructure to maintain its claim to interpretive authority even as that authority’s practical consequences are being outpaced. The conflict is equally real, produced by the fact that the most fundamental question about the Trump presidency, whether its governing model represents a temporary disruption of norms that institutional resilience will eventually correct or a permanent realignment of the power balance between executive action and institutional constraint, has not been settled and cannot be settled by any coalition’s column, ruling, or settlement alone. That unsettledness is not a failure of American democratic life. It is its most honest expression.

ChatGPT says: This column is a good example of how the elite alliance ecosystem reacts to a figure who refuses to follow its operating rules. Through Alliance Theory, the piece tells you less about Trump’s psychology than about the coalition Edsall belongs to and the signals he is sending to it.

First, identify the alliance.

Edsall writes inside the institutional liberal coalition. Its core members include:

elite universities
legacy media
career civil servants
legal elites
international institutions
technocratic policy professionals

This coalition’s central value is procedural governance. It believes legitimacy comes from consultation, law, expertise, and institutional continuity.

Trump threatens that alliance because he treats those institutions as obstacles rather than sources of authority.

So the column’s core frame is predictable. It describes Trump not as wrong but as illegitimate.

Second, the “smash-and-grab” language is alliance boundary policing.

Calling the presidency “smash-and-grab” is not just criticism. It signals that Trump is operating outside the accepted norms of elite governance.

Within the institutional coalition, legitimate power looks like:

policy planning
expert consultation
legal review
international coordination
institutional continuity

Trump’s method violates all of these. Edsall therefore casts his behavior as reckless and immoral rather than strategic.

This language helps reinforce the coalition’s identity. It reassures readers that their own style of governance remains the only respectable one.

Third, notice the expert sourcing pattern.

Edsall quotes:

Bob Bauer
Gary Jacobson
Larry Diamond
Brendan Nyhan
Don Moynihan

These are not random academics. They are credentialed members of the institutional ecosystem.

Their role in the article is to create a consensus signal.

The structure works like this.

Journalist frames the argument.
Academics supply authority.
Readers see multiple experts agreeing.

The result feels like neutral analysis even though all the experts belong to roughly the same alliance network.

Fourth, the moral framing is coalition glue.

The column repeatedly emphasizes:

dead children
democratic erosion
lawlessness
victims of fraud
attacks on institutions

This is not accidental. Moral framing strengthens alliance cohesion.

When a coalition feels threatened, it tends to shift from policy arguments to moral ones. Moral language mobilizes allies more effectively than technical debate.

Edsall is reminding readers that opposition to Trump is not merely strategic but ethical.

Fifth, the psychological narrative.

A large portion of the article focuses on Trump’s personality:

narcissism
impulsiveness
authoritarian instinct
lack of planning

This is a common elite response when dealing with disruptive outsiders.

If the opponent’s behavior is described as pathological, then his policies do not need to be treated as serious strategic alternatives.

In Alliance Theory terms, this is status delegitimation.

It pushes Trump out of the category of legitimate governing actors.

Sixth, the implicit fear.

The most revealing sentence is actually near the end.

The real danger, Moynihan says, would be a leader with Trump’s intentions but greater strategic discipline.

That line exposes the deeper anxiety of the institutional coalition.

Their fear is not simply Trump himself.

Their fear is that Trump’s method of governing might prove effective.

If a future leader combined Trump’s willingness to break institutional constraints with careful planning, the existing elite system could be permanently displaced.

Seventh, the narrative function of the Iran war in the column.

The war serves as the perfect example for Edsall’s thesis.

It allows him to illustrate three points simultaneously.

Trump ignores institutional process.
Trump acts impulsively.
Trump creates destructive consequences.

Whether those claims are fully accurate is less important than the narrative role they serve.

The war becomes symbolic proof that Trump’s governing style is inherently reckless.

This column performs three alliance functions.

It reassures the institutional liberal coalition that their governing norms remain morally superior.

It delegitimizes Trump’s disruptive style by framing it as pathological and reckless.

It warns elites that institutional guardrails are weakening and must be defended.

In other words, the piece is less a neutral analysis of the Iran war than a status-defense document for the professional governing class that sees Trump as its primary internal challenger.

Posted in America, Elites, Expertise, Stephen Turner | Comments Off on The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle to Define Legitimate Power in the Trump Presidency

The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Status at the Hoover Institution

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Luke Ford

No one at the Hoover Institution says they want status because it gives them power. They say they advance ideas about freedom, markets, and national strength, that they ground policy in serious historical analysis, or that they translate the lessons of the twentieth century’s catastrophes into the strategic clarity that the current moment demands. This is the central insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Intellectual authority is a status claim wrapped in realist and historical language. It functions as coalition technology: it recruits trust, excludes rivals, and justifies control over congressional testimony, policy memos, academic citations, donor commitments, media slots, and the deference that flows to whoever successfully occupies the role of the person who knows what serious conservative thought requires in a dangerous world. In the competition for high-status authority at Hoover, the dominant vocabularies are realism, archival legitimacy, deterrence, national strength, strategic clarity, and the productive counterweight that conservative scholarship provides against the progressive mainstream’s institutional dominance. These words do not merely describe intellectual commitments. They tie authority claims to the deepest contested questions about what the institution essentially is and what occupying it legitimately essentially requires: a practitioner-scholar sanctuary whose authority derives from the combination of real-world governance experience and rigorous historical research that no purely academic think tank can replicate, a proprietary archive whose physical possession of the primary sources through which the twentieth century’s catastrophes must be understood gives its fellows an epistemic standing that white-paper shops operating on secondary literature cannot match, a geopolitical hardliner that enforces ideological discipline on a conservative coalition perpetually tempted to subordinate long-term strategic competition to short-term corporate revenue, or a trans-Pacific elite network whose Palo Alto location and Asian strategic partnerships position it as the intellectual architecture of the Indo-Pacific order that Washington’s Atlantic-facing establishment cannot fully see. Different answers expand different coalitions and different institutional rewards, which is why every dispute over AI export controls, Iran war framing, or Stanford faculty senate relations carries a charge that exceeds its ostensible subject. What looks like a quarrel over whether to call the current campaign regime alteration or regime change is always also a quarrel about who holds legitimate authority to define what serious conservative foreign policy analysis requires.

Stephen Turner’s deflationary method cuts to the mechanism beneath every vocabulary deployed in this contest. Turner would note that none of the frameworks competing for authority at Hoover has a stable epistemic base independent of the institutional interests it serves. Policy relevance does not derive from a neutral theory of strategic influence that settles which analyses count as shaping real decisions and which count as producing the sophisticated irrelevance that institutional prestige launders as serious thought. Archival legitimacy does not derive from a neutral philosophy of historiography that settles which primary source holdings count as proprietary epistemic authority and which count as selective curation of the evidence that supports predetermined conclusions. Geopolitical realism does not derive from a neutral framework of international relations theory that settles which threats deserve the deterrence-or-elimination logic that Hoover’s hawks apply and which can be managed through the engagement frameworks the institution has spent decades arguing against. Each vocabulary is a coordination mechanism that recruits allies, defines legitimate authority in terms that expand the defining coalition’s jurisdiction, and presents that expansion as the natural acknowledgment of what serious thought about power actually requires.

Six coalitions concentrate this struggle more than any others. The policy-relevance arena coalition, the academic-legitimacy-and-archive coalition, the media-and-narrative arena coalition, the donor-and-network-alignment coalition, the internal-ideological-spectrum coalition, and the anti-elite-and-Stanford-tension coalition are the master formations of Hoover prestige. Whoever controls them controls which voices gain deference, which analyses shape testimony and policy, which historical narratives endure, and whose framing shapes the decisions that administrations, Stanford faculty, donors, and media actually make.

The policy-relevance arena coalition is the first master formation, concentrated in the practitioner-scholars whose combination of real governance experience and post-service intellectual production represents the institution’s most distinctive contribution to the think-tank ecosystem. Condoleezza Rice, who served as both National Security Adviser and Secretary of State before returning to Stanford, and figures like H.R. McMaster, whose career moved between battlefield command, National Security Council leadership, and Hoover fellowship, embody this coalition’s claim that the institution produces theory tempered by the friction of real-world governance that purely academic institutions cannot match. Its claim is that prestige flows to those whose work can plausibly shape Washington decisions, and that the alternative, the pure theoretical analysis that lacks the authority of demonstrated executive judgment, produces the sophisticated irrelevance that well-credentialed commentary produces in abundance. By positioning practitioner-scholars as the institution’s most authoritative voices, this coalition claims jurisdiction over the advisory roles, congressional testimony slots, and executive consultations through which think-tank influence actually operates.

Turner’s deflationary sociology identifies the essentialist claim at the center of this move. The policy-relevance coalition asserts that serious strategic analysis has a practitioner essence, a determinate content of executive judgment and real-world friction that distinguishes genuine policy wisdom from the theoretical sophistication that academic training produces without the accountability of actual decision-making. There is no neutral theory of strategic insight that settles whether the experience of having exercised power produces the calibrated judgment the coalition claims it does or whether it produces the institutionalized assumptions and bureaucratic habits that prevent exactly the kind of outside-the-box analysis that outsiders can sometimes provide more clearly. Critics who argue that the practitioner-scholar model primarily provides political legitimacy for predetermined policy conclusions rather than genuine intellectual correction are not simply being unfair to serious former officials. They are contesting the terms on which policy-relevant authority is evaluated and who holds standing to make that judgment. That is a jurisdictional dispute presented as a quality-of-analysis question.

The academic-legitimacy-and-archive coalition is the second master formation, concentrated in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives whose holdings include the records of the Russian Revolution, the Nazi regime, and the Chinese Communist Party, and in the Senior Fellows whose scholarly production draws on those holdings to ground contemporary policy arguments in the documented patterns of the twentieth century’s great conflicts. Its claim is that prestige flows from controlling the primary sources through which history must be interpreted, and that the physical possession of these records gives Hoover scholars an epistemic standing when discussing authoritarian regimes, revolutionary movements, and strategic competition that no secondary-source analysis can replicate. When a Hoover scholar discusses the CCP’s organizational logic or the Iranian regime’s ideological foundations, the claim is that the analysis is grounded in documentary evidence that the scholar’s institution physically holds rather than in the secondary literature that less-resourced institutions must rely on.

Pinsof’s framework decodes this move precisely. By framing archival possession as proprietary epistemic authority rather than as a specific institutional program that shapes which historical questions get asked and which get answered in ways that serve the conservative coalition’s current policy preferences, this coalition converts what is genuinely an extraordinary research resource into a claim of comprehensive historical authority that the resource itself does not automatically confer. The genuine depth and breadth of Hoover’s archival holdings provide real grounds for treating its scholars’ historically grounded analyses as deserving special epistemic weight. They also provide grounds for a scholarly apparatus whose authority depends on the archives’ centrality to the production of historical knowledge, which creates structural incentives to frame contemporary policy questions in ways that the archived materials illuminate while minimizing the questions whose answers the archives do not resolve or whose resolutions the archived materials would complicate.

The media-and-narrative arena coalition, concentrated in Hoover Digest contributors, podcast hosts, video-series producers, and the dissemination infrastructure that Hoover has built to bypass traditional gatekeepers and reach donors, policymakers, and broader conservative audiences directly, uses the language of clarity, truth-telling, and the translation of complex strategic thought into accessible narratives that travel without the mediation of publications that might be unsympathetic to the institution’s perspectives. Its claim is that prestige flows to those who can reach audiences that matter directly, and that the alternative, dependence on the New York Times or the Washington Post to amplify conservative strategic analysis, produces the systematic underrepresentation of serious right-of-center thought in the institutions through which elite opinion is formed. By building its own dissemination channels including high-production video series, digital platforms, and direct donor communications, this coalition claims jurisdiction over the narrative framing of strategic issues that reaches the audiences whose support sustains the institution and whose policy preferences it seeks to shape.

The donor-and-network-alignment coalition, whose organizational base includes Hoover’s massive endowment and the patron network that has treated the institution as a vehicle for converting wealth into durable intellectual influence rather than short-term policy wins, uses the language of intellectual independence, long-term investment, and the financial autonomy that allows serious scholarship to ignore the grant-chasing that shapes the research agendas of less-endowed institutions. Its claim is that prestige flows from the capacity to fund decade-long scholarly projects, to support fellows working on historical biographies or comprehensive data initiatives that no foundation grant cycle would sustain, and to wait out the unfavorable political cycles that force hand-to-mouth shops to chase whatever funding is currently available. The generational influence channel that donor funding creates, moving from the endowed chair through the books and fellows and students that the chair produces and into the government and media positions that those former students eventually occupy, represents this coalition’s model of how wealth converts into the kind of lasting cultural leverage that lobbying cannot produce.

Turner’s essentialist diagnosis applies with equal force to the donor-and-network-alignment coalition. Its claim that serious intellectual work has a financial independence essence, a determinate content of endowment-funded autonomy that allows genuine scholarly freedom that grant-dependent institutions cannot achieve, is also a construction. The financial independence that Hoover’s endowment provides does not eliminate the influence of donor preferences on institutional priorities. It changes the form that influence takes, from the explicit grant conditions that constrain hand-to-mouth shops to the implicit alignment between the institution’s intellectual priorities and the worldview of the donor community whose generational support has shaped which chairs exist, which fellows are recruited, and which research programs receive sustained investment. What the donor-alignment coalition presents as the obvious precondition of intellectual seriousness serves the institutional interests of a funding model whose independence claims are more credible than direct corporate lobbying but whose outputs are no less shaped by the preferences of those who provide the resources.

The internal-ideological-spectrum coalition, spanning the traditional Reaganite conservatives, libertarian economists, national security hawks, anti-Trump institutionalists, and Trump-tolerant nationalists whose coexistence within Hoover reflects the same fragmentation that has characterized the broader conservative coalition since 2016, uses the language of serious conservatism, intellectual rigor, and the distinction between principled conservatism and its various populist or opportunistic counterfeits. Its claim is that prestige flows to those who define the institution’s center of gravity in ways that preserve its authority across the full range of the center-right coalition rather than capturing it for any single faction. The Iran war has sharpened this coalition’s internal tensions: the hawks whose regime-alteration framework treats the current campaign as the necessary conclusion to a forty-seven-year conflict since 1979 coexist with the realists whose deterrence logic asks whether the post-regime power vacuum will produce outcomes that American strategic interests can manage.

The anti-elite-and-Stanford-tension coalition uses the language of intellectual courage, institutional independence, and the counterweight function that Hoover performs within the meritocratic ecosystem by maintaining a distinct conservative pole within the heart of progressive elite academia. Its claim is that prestige flows from the productive friction with Stanford’s faculty senate that proves Hoover’s independence, and that the institution gains legitimacy in two markets simultaneously: appearing as a rebellious outpost inside liberal academia to conservative donors, and appearing as a respectable research center tied to one of the world’s best universities to the policymakers and media whose deference requires the Stanford aura. The tension itself is the signal, and its maintenance requires the careful calibration that neither full integration into Stanford’s academic culture nor complete separation from it would permit.

The Iran war and the AI export control debate function as the 2026 stress test for every coalition simultaneously. Hoover’s framing of Operation Epic Fury as the conclusion of a forty-seven-year conflict rather than as a new escalation represents the policy-relevance coalition’s most significant recent narrative assertion, converting what critics characterize as an unprecedented military campaign into the historically grounded strategic logic that the academic-legitimacy coalition’s archive holdings and the practitioner-scholars’ governance experience combine to authorize. H.R. McMaster’s argument that the current strikes represent the necessary elimination of Iran’s asymmetric warfare toolkit, Condoleezza Rice’s characterization of Iran’s regional strikes as a strategic blunder that unified the opposing coalition, and Niall Ferguson’s 1919-moment framing of the post-conflict stabilization challenge all perform the same jurisdictional move: they position Hoover’s analysis as the historically informed, practically grounded alternative to both the naive multilateralism that liberal internationalists advocate and the Iraq-era nation-building errors that the regime-alteration language is explicitly designed to distance the current campaign from.

On AI export controls, Matt Pottinger’s congressional testimony rejecting the Biden-era AI diffusion framework that allowed middle-tier chip exports to nearly 150 countries exemplifies the institution’s enforcer function within the national security wing of the conservative coalition. By characterizing the market-share argument for broader chip exports as a transactional myth that sacrifices long-term strategic competition for short-term corporate revenue, and by reframing AI governance from safety, meaning bias and domestic misuse, to weaponization, meaning the compute power that adversarial regimes could use to execute cyber warfare or accelerate nuclear programs, Hoover scholars perform the ideological discipline function that the institution has historically exercised over a conservative coalition perpetually tempted to subordinate strategic logic to commercial interest. The Silicon Valley tension this creates, between Hoover’s genuine financial ties to tech donors and its willingness to criticize Nvidia’s lobbying for Chinese market access, represents the institution’s most direct claim to the intellectual independence that its donor-alignment coalition’s rhetoric requires it to demonstrate.

The naming-and-shaming mechanism enforces status boundaries within Hoover’s ecosystem with the same structural logic it operates in every arena Alliance Theory illuminates. Transactional myth, market-share myth, and captured by corporate revenue are not merely analytical characterizations of opposing arguments. They are tools for excluding rivals from the hawkish policy coalition’s prestige hierarchy by attacking their independence, their strategic seriousness, and their willingness to subordinate short-term commercial interests to the long-term competitive imperatives that Hoover’s national security framework treats as paramount. The Iraq-2003 comparison that every participant in the Iran war debate is working to avoid represents the most powerful delegitimizing label available: being associated with the analytical failures and governance disasters of that precedent strips policy-relevant authority from any strategic framework that cannot credibly distinguish itself from what the 2003 consensus produced.

The status competition has changed in the past year primarily through the Iran war’s forcing function on the internal-ideological-spectrum coalition’s fault lines. The hawk-realist tension that existed before February 28 as a manageable disagreement about deterrence strategy has become an acute public division between those whose regime-alteration framework treats the current campaign as necessary and overdue and those whose caution about post-regime power vacuums and regional instability reflects the realist tradition’s skepticism about the controllability of the outcomes that decisive military action produces. Both sides use the language of deterrence and credibility, but they apply it to different timescales and different threat scenarios, and the prestige stakes of being associated with the wrong prediction about how the post-Khamenei power vacuum develops are high enough that the positioning choices being made now will shape the institution’s intellectual reputation for years.

Over the past five years the institution has changed along the same three structural axes that have transformed the broader conservative intellectual ecosystem. Trump’s presidency acted as a sorting mechanism that forced every Hoover fellow into a positional choice about how to relate to a populist administration whose relationship to the Reaganite and national security traditions Hoover has historically anchored was complicated enough to require explicit public navigation. Media presence became not merely an amplification strategy but a primary status signal, as the fellows who built direct audiences through podcast appearances, Substack essays, and video series developed influence channels whose independence from traditional academic gatekeeping paralleled the platform coalition’s broader challenge to institutional prestige hierarchies. Geopolitical realism hardened across the full coalition in ways that produced a degree of consensus on China, Russia, and Iran that the institution’s earlier ideological diversity had not always supported, making Hoover’s hawkish frame more unified and more publicly visible than it had been in the immediate post-Cold War decades when the strategic competition that justified that frame was less obvious to the broader public.

The big pattern across all six coalitions is the same pattern Pinsof identifies everywhere. Every coalition claims: we should have authority because we uniquely combine the seriousness, realism, and institutional depth that the current moment requires. The policy-relevance coalition claims the practitioner judgment without which analysis produces the sophisticated irrelevance of people who study power without ever having exercised it. The academic-archive coalition claims the historical grounding without which analysis produces the ahistorical fantasy that mistakes the present moment for something unprecedented rather than recognizing the patterns that the twentieth century’s documented catastrophes illuminate. The media coalition claims the narrative clarity without which analysis fails to reach the audiences whose understanding of strategic competition determines whether the public will support the policies that serious analysis recommends. The donor coalition claims the financial independence without which analysis starves or bends to the grant conditions that prevent institutions from reaching conclusions their funders would prefer not to hear. The ideological-spectrum coalition claims the center-of-gravity definition without which the conservative coalition fragments into factions whose mutual delegitimization produces the kind of intellectual chaos that adversaries can exploit. The anti-elite-Stanford-tension coalition claims the counterweight authenticity without which Hoover loses the institutional edge that distinguishes genuine intellectual independence from the comfortable conformity of institutions whose prestige depends on never seriously challenging the assumptions of the academic culture that houses them. None of these coalitions acknowledges that institutional interests shape their claims. All present them as intellectual necessities visible to anyone with genuine commitment to freedom, markets, and American power.

What makes the Hoover Institution’s jurisdictional war distinctive within this series is the degree to which its central contest, over who counts as the authoritative conservative voice inside elite academia, is simultaneously a contest over how the American right relates to the full range of institutions, the university, the military, the financial elite, the tech sector, and the foreign policy establishment, that it must simultaneously court and discipline to maintain its position as the intellectual bridge between wealth, scholarship, political power, and historical narrative across generations. The totalizing feel of Hoover’s internal and external contests, the sense that every argument over AI diffusion policy or Iran war framing is also an argument about whether institutionalist or populist conservatism will define the right’s intellectual future, is not paranoia. It is what jurisdictional competition looks like when the stakes include not just fellowships and citations but the foundational question of which kind of authority the conservative coalition, its donors, and the broader American public owe deference to when the world becomes genuinely dangerous.

Turner’s deflationary method does not deny that practitioner experience genuinely tempers theory, that archives genuinely ground contemporary analysis in documented historical patterns, that media clarity genuinely spreads ideas to audiences that matter, that financial independence genuinely enables the long-term scholarship that grant cycles cannot sustain, that ideological diversity genuinely sharpens arguments, or that the Stanford friction genuinely signals a kind of intellectual independence that full integration would eliminate. It asks what work these languages do in present institutional contests, whose authority specific definitions of serious conservative thought advance, and what gets excluded from the picture when each coalition presents its preferred version of intellectual seriousness as the authentic one. The practitioner essence the policy-relevance coalition defends is selected from the history of governance in ways that serve the coalition’s interest in the prestige that executive experience confers while minimizing the arguments that the specific experiences Hoover’s senior fellows had produced the institutional assumptions that contributed to the policy failures those fellows are now positioned to help reinterpret. The archival essence the academic coalition invokes draws on genuine documentary wealth while serving the institutional interests of a research program whose historical framings of the twentieth century’s great conflicts happen to support the strategic conclusions that Hoover’s hawkish policy consensus reached on grounds that the archives ratify rather than generate. The realism essence the geopolitical coalition asserts reflects genuine threats while serving the interests of an institutional culture whose authority depends on the continuous identification of adversarial challenges that its specific analytical frameworks are uniquely qualified to address.

The Hoover Institution is governed not by a single unified conservative intellectual class but by competing coalitions of considerable reach and genuine commitment, each using different realist and historical language to justify authority over the analyses, testimony, narratives, networks, factions, and signals through which prestige is allocated and policy is shaped. The equilibrium this produces feels like coherence because the institution’s shared commitment to freedom, markets, and American power provides enough common ground to manage the internal tensions that its ideological diversity generates. The conflict is equally real, produced by the fact that the most fundamental questions about Hoover, what serious conservative thought essentially requires in 2026 and which institutional arrangements best produce it, have not been settled by any coalition’s dominance within the institution and cannot be settled by any single fellow’s testimony, book, or policy memo alone. That unsettledness is not a failure of the Hoover Institution. It is its most honest expression.

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Decoding The Trump Doctrine

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Luke Ford

Michael Hirsh writes in Foreign Policy magazine:

Now, it seems, Trump is also intent on leaving behind a very Trumpian global legacy. And his confidence in this grandiose ambition has only grown in proportion to the seeming ease with which he’s able to achieve his transformation—at least thus far.

Previous presidents have been forced to discard or scale down big global ambitions in the face of often bloody military failure—whether Lyndon Johnson’s humiliation in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter’s failure to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, or George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq occupation. Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton suffered the Black Hawk Down debacle in Mogadishu. And so on.

Trump has not met such a comeuppance yet, and there’s no certainty that he will.

The easiest way to understand the Trump doctrine is to stop treating it as a strategic document and start seeing it as an alliance style that Trump has used his entire life.
Trump does not think like a policy planner. He thinks like a coalition builder and a dominance negotiator. His worldview runs consistent across Manhattan real estate, reality television, domestic politics, and foreign policy. The core logic is simple: reward allies who show strength and loyalty, punish enemies hard, humiliate freeloaders, and win visibly. Everything else is improvisation.
Trump grew up in the Queens and Manhattan real estate world where alliances were fluid, personal, and often adversarial. Deals were not governed by institutions. They were governed by reputation and leverage. You built alliances with bankers, politicians, contractors, and media figures, but you also tested those alliances constantly. Anyone who embarrassed you or tried to dominate you got crushed publicly. His foreign policy follows the same pattern.
Trump is comfortable in open rivalry. The foreign policy establishment prefers bureaucratic coordination. That is why elites read Trump as chaotic while his supporters read him as decisive.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory helps translate what Trump signals to allies and rivals. Loyalty matters more than ideology. Trump has never organized alliances around shared values. He organizes them around loyalty signals. That is why he can praise Saudi Arabia, pressure NATO, flatter Putin, and support Israel all within the same framework. The question is always the same: are you helping me win?
Status dominance must be visible. Trump believes the leader must dominate the coalition. This is why he demands tribute from allies. NATO must pay more. Japan must contribute more. Europe must stop free riding. From his view, this is not rudeness. It is how coalitions function. Previous presidents, in his mind, weakened American alliances by hiding hierarchy under polite language.
Violence, in this framework, is a signaling tool rather than an ideological crusade. The message is simple: challenge me and you get hit harder than expected. The Soleimani strike fits that logic. So do the current strikes in the Iran conflict. The goal is not occupation or democratization. The goal is deterrent reputation. It resembles mafia logic more than Wilsonian foreign policy.
The foreign policy establishment operates through what might be called institutional alliance maintenance. Policy must appear consistent. Language must be precise. Strategy must be explained. Trump rejects this. He runs something closer to narrative pluralism, saying different things to different audiences because he manages multiple alliances at once. To hawks he signals maximum pressure. To voters he signals quick victory. To adversaries he signals unpredictability. Elites see contradiction. Trump sees coalition management.
This explains why Trump has not yet suffered the traditional presidential humiliation. Vietnam destroyed Johnson. The hostage crisis destroyed Carter. Iraq destroyed Bush. Black Hawk Down damaged Clinton. Those failures shared one feature: they were long and visible. Trump’s instinct runs in the opposite direction. Short, violent demonstrations of power. Limited objectives. Fast narrative victory. He hates occupations because occupations invert alliance status. The stronger power ends up bleeding for weaker societies. Trump reads that as a betrayal of the deal.
If you look at Trump through this lens, the foreign policy framework he is building resembles the 19th-century great power system more than the post-1945 order. America as dominant patron. Regional powers as semi-autonomous clients. Enemies punished quickly and not rebuilt. The avoidance of open-ended commitment rests on a deliberate strategy of strategic abandonment. By destroying high-value targets and declaring victory, the administration avoids the broken windows problem of traditional nation-building. It breaks the window and leaves the repair bill to the neighbors.
Three reinforcing feedback loops support Trump’s confidence. American voters increasingly hate endless wars. Precision strikes now allow shows of force without occupation. And the foreign policy establishment lost prestige after Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving a vacuum Trump believes he can fill.
From an Alliance Theory perspective, none of this is new. It is the globalization of the deal-making strategy Trump has used for fifty years.

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Decoding Trump’s Rhetoric About The Iran War

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Luke Ford

Donald Trump has not really been speaking with one voice. He has been speaking to five audiences at once. What looks like incoherence is mostly coalition management per David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory.

In February 2025, Trump restored “maximum pressure” on Iran, explicitly tying together three goals: no nuclear weapon, neutralizing Iran’s terror network, and countering its missile and asymmetric capabilities. In his May 13, 2025 Riyadh speech, he again paired an offer of a “deal” with the threat of maximum pressure and “all action required” if Iran refused.

Since the war launched on February 28, 2026, Trump’s rhetoric has moved through four phases.

First, launch language. He framed the war as reluctant but necessary. The official White House line on March 1 called Operation Epic Fury an effort to “crush” the regime and end the nuclear threat, while emphasizing diplomacy had been tried and failed. This is classic Trump “peace through strength” language. He wants the action to look like enforcement, not adventurism.

Second, maximalist escalation language. By March 6, he said there would be no deal except “unconditional surrender,” and linked that to selecting a “great & acceptable” new leader. Reuters also reported he told them he wanted to be involved in choosing Iran’s next leader. On March 7, he escalated further, saying Iran would be “hit very hard” and suggesting wider areas and groups could be targeted.

Third, mixed endgame language. On March 9, Reuters reported Trump threatening to escalate further while also signaling the war could end soon. That same day he was publicly saying the U.S. could declare success, but also that it would “go further.” This is not a settled end-state. It is pressure rhetoric combined with off-ramp rhetoric.

Fourth, victory-and-closure language. By March 9 and 10, Trump was saying the war was “very complete,” “far ahead of schedule,” and that Iran’s navy, air force, communications, and other capabilities had been decimated. He also said he had “no message” to Mojtaba Khamenei, while hinting that Iran’s new leadership would not be able to “live in peace” on the old terms.

Now the Alliance Theory decode.

Trump is holding together a coalition with genuinely different desires.

One faction wants no forever wars. Another wants regime collapse. Another wants a quick punitive campaign. Another wants a reordered Middle East. Another wants stable oil prices and no quagmire. So he rotates messages.

To the MAGA anti-forever-war wing, he says this is not Iraq. It is short, decisive, ahead of schedule, and narrowly tied to stopping Iran’s nuclear and missile threat. That is why you get “very complete” and “far ahead of schedule.”

To the hawkish pro-Israel and Gulf-security coalition, he says unconditional surrender, no deal except capitulation, maybe a new leader, and possibly broader targeting. That language reassures the pressure camp that he is not going soft midstream.

To markets and the broader establishment, he says the war could end soon and implies there is a definable success condition. That is meant to calm fears of an endless regional war and economic blowback.

To Iranian elites, he is trying to create panic and defections. “Unconditional surrender” and talk of acceptable leaders is not conventional diplomacy. It is psychological warfare aimed at convincing insiders that regime survival now depends on abandoning maximal resistance.

To the Iranian public and exile networks, he distinguishes between the regime and the people, and leaves open the idea that this could produce a different Iran after the war. The White House’s own launch framing explicitly cast the operation as crushing the regime and ending the threat, not warring against Iran as a civilization.

So what is the underlying through-line?

It is narrower than the rhetoric. Trump’s constant message has been:

Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Iran cannot keep using proxies and missiles to veto the regional order.
If Iran yields, there can be a “deal.”
If Iran resists, force escalates.

That means the apparent contradictions are mostly differences in register, not differences in core aim.

The best way to phrase it is this:

Trump’s “deal” language is for audiences that need a path to closure.
His “unconditional surrender” language is for audiences that need dominance.
His “ahead of schedule” language is for audiences that fear quagmire.

Same war. Different alliance maintenance.

So does he “mean” negotiated settlement, regime change, punitive war, or regional restructuring?

The answer is that he is strategically ambiguous because his coalition contains all four desires. But the most stable interpretation is that he wants forced submission dressed, when useful, as a deal. That is the key to making sense of what he has been saying.

The Advisor Influence Logic

The shifting language reflects the varying influence of the nationalist wing, which prioritizes avoiding a quagmire, and the traditional hawks, who seek a fundamental reordering of the Middle East. When the president speaks of being ahead of schedule, he likely validates the nationalist desire to limit the scope of the conflict. When he demands unconditional surrender, he adopts the posture favored by those who believe only a total collapse of the current Iranian power structure ensures long-term security. That he moves between these positions suggests he refuses to let any single faction fully capture his foreign policy. He keeps his subordinates in a state of perpetual competition.

Tactical Unpredictability

One might also consider the role of personal unpredictability as a deliberate tool. In the book The Art of the Deal, the author emphasizes the importance of leverage and the willingness to walk away. By signaling both an immediate end to the war and a massive escalation on the same day, he denies the Iranian leadership a stable baseline for their own strategy. This is not just coalition management for a domestic audience. It is a psychological application of the Madman Theory. If the adversary cannot predict the next move, they cannot effectively counter it.

The Economic Symmetry

The focus on decimated infrastructure and a very complete war serves a specific domestic economic purpose. A spike in global oil prices or a prolonged disruption in the Strait of Hormuz poses a threat to the domestic economy. By projecting a sense of rapid conclusion and overwhelming success, the administration attempts to settle the energy markets. This rhetoric functions as a verbal subsidy for market stability. It tells investors that the peak of risk has passed, even if the underlying military reality is more complex.

The Successor Dialogue

The specific refusal to send a message to Mojtaba Khamenei while mentioning an acceptable leader indicates a sophisticated use of silence. By ignoring the presumptive successor, the administration signals that it does not recognize the legitimacy of a hereditary transition within the current system. This creates a vacuum that different exile groups or internal defectors can project their own hopes into. It is a way to encourage a coup without explicitly committing American ground forces to regime change.

The Audience Segmentation Logic

Trump’s rhetoric is not only balancing advisers inside the administration. It is balancing external allies whose cooperation is necessary for the war to function. Different lines speak to different coalition partners.

When he talks about unconditional surrender or regime collapse, that language resonates with the Israeli security establishment and the Gulf hawks who believe Iran’s regional network must be dismantled permanently.

When he says the war is ahead of schedule or nearly complete, that language reassures European governments and Asian energy consumers who fear a long disruption in oil markets.

When he emphasizes that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons but avoids promising occupation or democracy promotion, he reassures his domestic nationalist coalition that this is not Iraq.

The rhetoric therefore performs alliance maintenance at three levels simultaneously: domestic, regional, and global.

The Escalation Ladder Logic

Another layer is the preservation of escalation dominance. Trump’s language consistently leaves the next rung of escalation undefined.

If Iran backs down, he can claim the war succeeded quickly.

If Iran retaliates through proxies or shipping disruption, he has already framed escalation as justified.

This ambiguity keeps the initiative on the American side. Iran never receives a clear signal about where the red lines actually sit.

In deterrence terms, he is trying to make every Iranian decision look riskier than inaction.

The Negotiation Trap

The demand for unconditional surrender also serves a negotiation function. It sets an intentionally impossible opening position.

In negotiation theory, extreme opening positions anchor expectations. If the other side eventually accepts a partial dismantling of missiles, proxy networks, or nuclear infrastructure, that outcome can be framed as a compromise rather than a concession.

The maximalist rhetoric therefore expands the range of outcomes that can later be presented as victory.

The Coalition Discipline Mechanism

The unpredictability also disciplines the American policy apparatus. Officials inside the system never know which line will become the dominant one the next morning.

That forces bureaucracies to remain flexible. The State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and allied governments must constantly prepare for both negotiation and escalation.

This prevents any single bureaucratic faction from locking the policy into a rigid path.

The Information Warfare Layer

There is also a signaling dimension directed at Iranian elites. When Trump praises the military progress but refuses to recognize the successor leadership, he communicates two separate messages.

First, that the regime is militarily vulnerable.

Second, that regime continuity itself is not guaranteed.

This combination attempts to widen the psychological gap between the ruling core and second-tier elites such as IRGC commanders, technocrats, and regional governors. The message is that survival may require distancing themselves from the current leadership.

The Strategic Narrative

If one steps back, the underlying narrative Trump is trying to maintain is consistent even though the language shifts.

The United States did not seek war but will end the Iranian nuclear and proxy threat.

The campaign is rapid and controlled rather than open-ended.

Iran can either accept the new regional order or risk further destruction.

This narrative allows him to speak simultaneously to three fears within his coalition: fear of Iranian power, fear of endless war, and fear of economic disruption.

In Alliance Theory terms, the rhetoric is not a set of contradictions. It is a rotating set of signals designed to keep a very broad coalition aligned while denying the adversary a clear point of leverage.

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Decoding The International Institute for Strategic Studies

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Luke Ford

The International Institute for Strategic Studies represents the gold standard for institutionalized strategic logic. It operates less as a traditional think tank and more as a high-level clearinghouse for the global security establishment.

Institutional Identity and Flagship Products

The London-based institute maintains a reputation for technical rigor that dates back to its 1958 founding. Its identity centers on providing a nonpartisan baseline for understanding military power. The most prominent example of this is The Military Balance. This annual report serves as a definitive catalog of global weapons systems and defense budgets. Military planners and academic researchers use this data because it prioritizes descriptive accuracy over ideological flair.

Convening Power and the Global Network

The institute is a primary node in the network of defense elites. It functions as a neutral ground where generals, intelligence officials, and defense ministers can exchange views outside the constraints of formal diplomacy. The Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore stands out as its most influential gathering, serving as the premier venue for security discussions in Asia. This convening power ensures that the institute remains at the intersection of European, American, and Asian strategic interests.

Analytic Posture and Influence

The IISS avoids the overt policy advocacy common in many think tanks. Instead, it focuses on force structures, defense economics, and strategic balances. This style appeals to governments seeking credible assessments of capabilities rather than moral narratives. Its influence stems from this perceived neutrality; when the professional strategic community needs to quantify a missile threat or evaluate regional escalation risks, it relies on the institute’s data.

Role in Regional Conflict

In the context of major crises, such as a war involving Iran, the institute focuses on the distribution of power rather than legal or moral arguments. It analyzes how force deployments and military capabilities shift the regional symmetry. It acts as a global strategic accounting office, providing the analytic infrastructure that allows the international security establishment to understand the shifting landscape of military power.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies acts as a cold-eyed auditor of the current conflict involving Iran. While the general public fixates on the shock of the February 28, 2026, air strikes, the institute maintains its focus on the underlying symmetry of military power. Its recent analysis avoids the emotive language of “justice” or “aggression,” choosing instead to quantify the erosion of Iranian command and control.

The Military Balance in the Current Crisis

In its 2026 report, the institute highlights a fundamental shift in the regional logic. Iran traditionally relied on its status as the holder of the largest active military force in the Middle East, with about 610,000 personnel. However, the institute observes that the US-Israeli campaign specifically targets the qualitative advantages Iran used to offset its aging conventional equipment. By focusing on ballistic missile launchers and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, the coalition aims to deplete Iranian offensive capacity before interceptor stockpiles run low.

Strategic Power Structure and Escalation

The institute views the current war as a test of the “Axis of Resistance” network. Its analysts track how the assassination of senior Iranian leadership on February 28 affects the internal cohesion of the security apparatus, including the Basij and the Artesh. Rather than speculating on political outcomes, the IISS monitors the technical reality: can Iran reconstitute an integrated air defense? The institute suggests this is unlikely in the short term, given the concentration of Israeli air power on decision-making centers in Tehran.

The Role of Gulf Partners

A key IISS focus remains the strategic posture of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The institute notes that Saudi Arabia, while possessing a smaller manpower pool of 225,000, maintains a massive $72 billion defense budget used to procure high-end Western platforms like THAAD and F-15SA. The current conflict validates the institute’s long-standing analysis of “interplay” between local defense and surged US assets, such as the Patriot batteries that recently defended Qatar and the UAE from retaliatory strikes.

Influence through Credibility

The institute’s influence in this crisis is quiet. When defense ministries or journalists need to know how many Iranian launchers remain after the first phase of the war, they turn to the IISS. By providing a technical baseline—such as the estimate that the coalition destroyed roughly 300 launchers in the first week—the institute defines the parameters of the strategic debate. It remains the infrastructure through which the professional security community processes the collapse of regional containment.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies views the current strikes on Iran as a high-stakes recalibration of the nuclear breakout timeline. While the institute previously analyzed the “12-Day War” of June 2025 as a severe setback for Iranian enrichment, its 2026 assessments focus on the interplay between subterranean resilience and the erosion of state capacity.

Status of Nuclear Enrichment and Facilities

Following the February 28, 2026, strikes, IISS experts note that major nuclear sites like Natanz and Fordow appeared not to have been the primary targets in the opening hours of the campaign. This marks a shift from the 2025 “Operation Midnight Hammer,” which used B-2A Spirit bombers to target buried enrichment halls. Current IISS analysis suggests that while surface infrastructure at the Esfahan complex remains heavily damaged from previous rounds, the most sensitive components of Iran’s nuclear program likely reside in “inaccessible” nodes like the Pickaxe site or deep mountain tunnels. The institute quantifies the risk not through immediate destruction, but through the degradation of the Iranian state’s ability to maintain secure custody of nuclear materials.

Breakout Logic and Strategic Deterrence

The institute monitors the “breakout time”—the period required to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon—which remained at a few weeks leading into the 2026 conflict. IISS analysts argue that the decapitation of the Iranian leadership on February 28 creates a strategic vacuum that might either stall the nuclear program due to a lack of command-and-control or, conversely, trigger a desperate, uncoordinated move toward weaponization by remaining IRGC factions. The institute uses its technical baseline to track Iran’s 60% enriched uranium stockpile, which it estimates could be converted into fuel for roughly ten crude nuclear weapons if the regime decides to cross the threshold.

The Role of Subterranean Resilience

A core focus of recent IISS reporting is the “Oghab 44” (Eagle 44) underground airbase and the Tehran bunker network. These sites represent a logic of survival that challenges Western kinetic packages. The institute observes that while surface entrances to missile and nuclear-related “farms” were targeted in early March, the internal infrastructure often remains functional. This subterranean resilience forces a tactical shift in the coalition campaign, moving from establishng air superiority to a prolonged war of attrition against hardened targets.

Influence through Technical Monitoring

The credibility of the IISS in this crisis comes from its ability to provide an objective assessment of battle damage. When US or Israeli officials claim to have “obliterated” the nuclear program, the institute cross-references these claims with satellite imagery and historical data on site hardening. It acts as a necessary check on political rhetoric, consistently pointing out that while state capacity is degraded, the technical knowledge and partially enriched stockpiles remain a “latent” nuclear capability that no amount of air power can entirely erase.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies views the “Axis of Resistance” as a decentralized security network that is currently experiencing a profound test of its operational logic. In its March 2026 assessments, the institute moves away from the narrative of a monolithic Iranian command, focusing instead on the “differential responses” of its regional partners.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese Front

The IISS highlights that Hezbollah maintained a posture of strategic restraint until the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei on February 28, which the group had defined as an absolute red line. Since then, the institute has tracked a transition from symbolic rocket fire to direct engagements with Israeli ground forces in Southern Lebanon. IISS analysts observe that while the Israel-Hezbollah conflict of 2024 severely degraded the group’s air defense, its subterranean rocket inventory remains “materials-resilient.” The institute estimates that despite the intensity of current strikes, Hezbollah retains approximately 92% of its pre-war short-range rocket stockpile, representing a persistent second-strike threat that can bypass the “decapitated” command structure in Tehran.

The Houthi Deterrence Doctrine

In Yemen, the institute characterizes the Houthi response as a “deterrence without escalation” strategy. While declaring solidarity with Iran, the Houthis have focused their kinetic operations on the global economy rather than a full-scale regional invasion. The IISS monitors the continued disruption of the Red Sea trade routes, noting that Houthi-led attacks have forced the closure of major energy export terminals in Saudi Arabia. The institute suggests that the Houthis function as a strategic insurance policy for Iran; by imposing a cost on global shipping and regional oil production, they attempt to force a diplomatic “off-ramp” for the US-Israeli campaign.

Iraqi Militias and State Constraints

The IISS notes that Iran-aligned armed groups in Iraq face a more acute set of constraints. Unlike the Houthis or Hezbollah, these groups operate within a state structure that is deeply vulnerable to US retaliation. The institute observes that while these militias have launched drone strikes against US bases, they must balance their ideological commitment to Tehran with the risk of drawing the Iraqi state directly into a catastrophic confrontation. IISS analysts highlight a “decentralization of power,” where local commanders in Iraq and Syria are likely making autonomous tactical decisions due to the collapse of the central IRGC coordination hubs in Tehran.

The Axis as a “Survival Delta”

A central theme in recent IISS webinars is the concept of a “survival delta”—the gap between the destruction of Iran’s central military apparatus and the remaining capacity of its regional proxies. The institute argues that even if the coalition achieves its objective of “razing” Iran’s ballistic missile industrial base, the decentralized nature of the Axis ensures that a latent threat remains. This makes a decisive victory difficult to achieve through air power alone, as the institute consistently points out that the proxy network is designed to function even when the “head of the snake” is neutralized.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies monitors the prospects of a popular uprising through the lens of state capacity and the logic of domestic repression. While public anger remains high following the historic January 2026 protests, the institute suggests that a successful revolution depends on the interplay between the degradation of security forces and the organization of the opposition.

Degradation of the Internal Security Apparatus

In its March 2026 briefings, the IISS notes that recent coalition strikes specifically target the infrastructure of domestic control. On March 1 and March 6, strikes hit the Fifth Tehran Municipality Quds Basij Resistance Regional Base and other Law Enforcement Command (LEC) headquarters across Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan provinces. These facilities are the primary nodes through which the regime suppresses unrest. The institute argues that by destroying these regional command centers and decapitating the Ministry of Intelligence, the coalition creates a “coordination dilemma” for the remaining security forces. Local units might struggle to prioritize reserves between restive ethnic-minority provinces and the major urban centers of Tehran and Mashhad.

The Institutional Resilience of Repression

Despite the strikes, the institute remains cautious about the probability of an immediate regime collapse. It observes that the Islamic Republic is a deeply institutionalized system where hardline IRGC elements tend to dominate decision-making in times of crisis. While the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei on February 28 removed the ultimate arbiter of the state, the IISS indicates that the security apparatus retains significant “residual capacity” for violence. The public remains largely unarmed and unorganized, facing a system that has spent decades perfecting the mechanics of urban pacification.

Peripheral Destabilization and Kurdish Dynamics

A notable shift in the strategic landscape is the focus on Iran’s western provinces. The IISS tracks how strikes on border guard and LEC positions in Kurdish-majority areas might open a new front. Reports suggest that the CIA might be coordinating with Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq to provide military support. The institute analyzes this as a “peripheral destabilization” strategy intended to pin down Iranian security forces away from the capital. This creates a logic of exhaustion; if the regime must fight a multi-front war against both external air power and internal armed insurgencies, its ability to maintain order in the Persian heartland might eventually fracture.

The Problem of the Power Vacuum

The institute consistently highlights the uncertainty of what follows a potential collapse. It warns that without a unified opposition or a clear alternative governance structure, the erosion of regime control might lead to a prolonged power vacuum rather than a stable democracy. The IISS focuses on the technical risk of such a scenario: the security of nuclear materials and advanced weaponry in a country experiencing civil strife. For the professional strategic community, the primary concern remains whether the degradation of the security apparatus leads to a “managed transition” or a chaotic regional spillover that includes large-scale refugee flows and the loss of command over the “Axis of Resistance.”

The leadership and analytic core of the International Institute for Strategic Studies represent the specific institutional symmetry that allows it to maintain its global authority. The organization is steered by a mix of long-term strategic architects and technical specialists who manage its most data-heavy products.

Executive Leadership

The institute underwent a significant leadership transition recently. Bastian Giegerich is the Director-General and Chief Executive. He assumed this role in late 2023 after serving as the Director of Defence and Military Analysis. His background is deeply academic and technical, holding a PhD from the London School of Economics and having served in the German Federal Ministry of Defence. He succeeded Sir John Chipman, who led the institute for three decades. Sir John now serves as the Executive Chairman, focusing on global fundraising and maintaining the high-level diplomatic relationships that underpin the institute’s major summits.

The Analytic Core

The institute’s authority rests on its senior fellows and program directors who manage specific strategic domains. Fenella McGerty and Karl Dewey lead the analysis on global defense spending and economics, which is a primary pillar of The Military Balance.

Henry Boyd serves as the Senior Fellow for Military Capability and Data Assessment, overseeing the technical inventories that the security establishment relies upon.

Douglas Barrie focuses on military aerospace, providing the technical logic for evaluating air power in theaters like the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Nick Childs is the Senior Fellow for Naval Forces and Maritime Security, focusing on the shifting logic of carrier groups and regional naval escalations.

Emile Hokayem is the Director of Regional Security and a Senior Fellow for Middle East Security. He is a prominent voice in analyzing the strategic shifts involving Iran and its regional network.

Regional and Programmatic Directors

The institute maintains a global footprint through regional offices, each led by figures who bridge the gap between technical analysis and defense diplomacy. Ben Schreer serves as the Executive Director for IISS-Europe in Berlin, focusing on the fortification of NATO and European defense autonomy.

Lucie Béraud-Sudreau is a Senior Fellow for Indo-Pacific Defence Policy and a key organizer for the Shangri-La Dialogue. Nigel Gould-Davies is the Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia, providing the analytic infrastructure for understanding the attrition logic in the Ukraine war.

Paul Fraioli is a Senior Fellow for Technology, Geopolitics, and Strategy, and serves as the editor for Strategic Comments.

These players ensure that the institute functions as more than just a research center. They are the individuals who convene the world’s defense ministers and generals, providing the data that defines how those elites understand the distribution of global power.

The incentives for the International Institute for Strategic Studies center on its survival as the primary clearinghouse for the global security establishment. Because it has no general endowment, it operates through a logic of constant fundraising from the very actors it analyzes. This creates a specific interplay between its need for credibility and its reliance on institutional and corporate patronage.

Primary Incentives

Host-Nation and Government Support: The institute relies heavily on “Host-Nation” funding to run its flagship summits. For example, the Shangri-La Dialogue and the Manama Dialogue depend on the financial and logistical support of the Singaporean and Bahraini governments, respectively. This gives these states an outsized influence on the “pulse” of the discussions.

Defense Industry Integration: A significant portion of its revenue comes from the “big six” defense contractors and other major players like Airbus, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. These companies pay for corporate memberships and sponsorship of events where they can network directly with the defense ministers and military chiefs who make procurement decisions.

Bespoke Services: The IISS sells tailored geopolitical advice and data products to private-sector clients. This incentivizes the institute to maintain “analytic dominance” in specific niches, such as the Military Balance+ database, to ensure that no serious defense ministry or contractor can afford to be without its subscription.Credibility as Capital: Its most valuable asset is the “IISS brand.” If the institute loses its reputation for technical neutrality, it loses its ability to convene rival powers (like the US and China) at the same table. This creates a powerful incentive to avoid overt partisan bias in its data, even if its broader strategic outlook aligns with the Western-led order.

What the IISS Cannot Say

Explicit Condemnation of Host Governments: You might notice a conspicuous lack of sharp criticism regarding the internal human rights records or domestic policies of countries that host its major summits. For instance, investigative reports have highlighted how the institute’s reliance on Bahraini funding might limit its public willingness to address political crackdowns in the Gulf.

Anti-Establishment or Radical Critiques: The IISS is an institution of the establishment, by the establishment, and for the establishment. It cannot advocate for the dismantlement of the current global security architecture or push for radical pacifism. Its logic is based on managing the “balance of power,” not questioning the existence of that power.

Selective Disclosure on Intelligence: While the institute uses open-source intelligence (OSINT), its analysts often have deep ties to national intelligence communities. It cannot publish information that would jeopardize these relationships or cross the line from “rigorous analysis” into “leaking classified data.” It stays within the bounds of “official” strategic conversation.

Picking “Winners” in Procurement: While it analyzes military capabilities, it avoids explicitly telling a government to buy a specific weapon system over another. To do so would alienate its corporate sponsors. Instead, it highlights “capability gaps” and “force structure requirements,” leaving the industry sponsors to fill in the blanks with their products.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies operates with a specific logic that prioritizes the quantifiable and the institutional. This focus, while providing a rigorous baseline for global security, creates inherent blind spots where the messy reality of modern conflict escapes its accounting.

The Conventional Bias and the “Counting” Trap

The institute’s greatest strength is also its primary blind spot: an overwhelming focus on conventional military hardware. By centering its analysis on The Military Balance, the IISS tends to view power through the lens of tank counts, missile ranges, and aircraft generations. This creates a symmetry where state actors look like the only relevant players. In theaters like the 2026 Iran conflict, this logic might underestimate the efficacy of decentralized, low-tech resistance. While the IISS can tell you exactly how many launchers a nation has, it struggles to quantify the “logic of the street” or the symbolic power of a martyr, which often matters more in an insurgency than the number of active-duty personnel.

The Problem of Corporate and State Patronage

The financial structure of the institute creates a “convening bias.” Because the IISS depends on host-nation funding for its dialogues in Singapore and Bahrain, it rarely publishes scathing critiques of those governments. You will find exhaustive data on the defense budgets of the Gulf states, but far less analysis on their internal political fragility or the human rights implications of their military operations. This reliance on the defense industry also means the institute is incentivized to focus on the types of high-end capabilities that its corporate sponsors—like BAE Systems or Lockheed Martin—produce, potentially at the expense of analyzing cheaper, asymmetric threats like commercial drone swarms.

Lagging Behind Unconventional Warfare

Historically, the IISS has struggled to adapt its models to irregular warfare. Its analytic infrastructure is built for a world of clear borders and uniformed armies. In the current era of “war amongst the people,” the lines between civilian and combatant are blurred. While the institute has expanded its Armed Conflict Survey to include non-state actors, it often treats these groups as “quasi-states” rather than understanding the fluid, ideological nature of modern networks. This makes the institute less effective at predicting the outcome of conflicts where the “will to fight” outlasts the “capacity to fight.”

The “Establishment” Echo Chamber

The primary audience of the IISS is the professional strategic community. This creates a feedback loop where analysts write for the very officials who fund their summits. The institute is unlikely to challenge the foundational assumptions of the Western-led security order. It operates as an auditor of the status quo, which means it might fail to anticipate “Black Swan” events that fall outside the parameters of traditional statecraft. It analyzes how the structure of power shifts, but it rarely asks if that entire structure is built on a fault line.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies is the high-level infrastructure that allows the foreign policy establishment to maintain its logic. If the blob is the collective of bureaucrats, analysts, and academics who manage the global order, the IISS is the clearinghouse that provides the data and the physical space for that class to talk to itself.

Providing the Analytic Infrastructure

The institute serves as the primary data provider for the establishment. By publishing The Military Balance, it creates the shared reality that defense ministries and think tank analysts use to justify their existence. This data acts as the technical foundation for the status-preserving narratives of the professional class. When an analyst argues for increased defense spending or warns of a shift in the regional symmetry, they rely on IISS figures to grant their claims an air of nonpartisan authority. This relationship ensures that the establishment remains anchored in a specific, quantifiable view of the world that prioritizes hardware and budgets over messy human or political realities.

The Convening Power and Status Production

The summits hosted by the IISS, such as the Shangri-La Dialogue, are essential venues for the production of professional status. These gatherings are not just about policy; they are about reinforcing the hierarchy of the global security elite. The presence of defense ministers and intelligence chiefs creates a prestige loop where the institute gains credibility by hosting the elites, and the elites gain legitimacy by participating in the institute’s serious, technical forums. This interplay allows the establishment to maintain its “smug, patronizing attitude” by framing its discussions as the only serious way to handle international security.

Maintaining the Establishments Blind Spots

The incentives of the IISS ensure it rarely challenges the core assumptions of the blob. Because its funding comes from host nations and the defense industry, the institute avoids critiques that might disrupt these relationships. This creates a logic where the “interplay” between government policy and corporate interest is never questioned. The institute focuses on the distribution of power within the existing system rather than asking if the system itself is failing. This makes the IISS a chronicler of the status quo, documenting the shifts in military power while ignoring the possibility that the professional class’s focus on “strategic balances” might be disconnected from the actual outcomes of the wars they manage.

The War of Choice Narrative

In conflicts like the one involving Iran, the IISS helps the establishment manage the narrative by focusing on technical consequences rather than moral or legal failures. By analyzing the “balance of capabilities” and “regional escalation risks,” the institute provides the establishment with a neutral-sounding language to describe its actions. This allows the blob to frame its interventions as calculated strategic necessities rather than the products of a self-interested alliance. The institute’s style makes it an attractive partner for a foreign policy class that wants to present its ideological arguments as credible strategic assessments.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies operates as a high-end status-production machine for the foreign policy establishment, often referred to as “the Blob.” Its institutional survival depends on the persistence of a high-threat environment. For the IISS, a “New Cold War” with China is not just a strategic possibility; it is a comprehensive business model.

The Financial Logic of Competition

The institute has no general endowment, meaning it must eat what it kills every fiscal year. As of 2026, its funding reveals a direct incentive to frame China as a “pacing threat.”

Defense Industry Patronage: Major corporate partners like Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman provide hundreds of thousands of pounds in membership and sponsorship fees. These firms profit directly from the “modernization efforts” the IISS advocates for in response to Chinese military growth.

Government Endowments: The IISS recently secured multi-million-dollar endowments from governments like Japan to fund specific roles, such as the Japan Chair and Senior Fellows for Nuclear Arms Control. These positions are explicitly designed to analyze and counter Chinese regional influence.

Summit Economics: The Shangri-La Dialogue depends on the Singaporean government’s “host-nation” support. Maintaining the relevance of this summit requires a continuous sense of crisis; without the “China threat,” the premier defense summit in Asia loses its urgency and its ability to draw high-paying corporate sponsors.

Status Production and Professional Hype

For IISS analysts, the “New Cold War” is a vehicle for personal and institutional power.

Expertise as Capital: In a world of stable peace, technical experts on missile ranges and force structures are peripheral. In a cold war, they are essential. By producing “nuanced” reports on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), IISS players ensure they remain the primary translators for the defense elite.

The Credibility Loop: The institute uses its “analytic neutrality” to mask what critics, such as the Quincy Institute, describe as “threat inflation.” By focusing on technical data—like the 2.5% real-terms growth in global defense spending in 2025—the IISS makes the case for a new arms race look like a cold, objective necessity rather than a policy choice.

Convening the Elite: The prestige of the IISS comes from its ability to put the US Secretary of Defense and the Chinese Minister of National Defense in the same room. This creates a “status delta” where only those within the IISS orbit are seen as serious strategic actors.

What the IISS Cannot Say about China

The institute’s incentives create specific boundaries for its analysis.

Avoidance of “De-escalation” Narratives: You will rarely see IISS reports advocating for significant defense cuts or radical diplomatic concessions. Its logic is “strategic balance,” which usually implies matching or exceeding an adversary’s capabilities.

The Costs of Competition: While the IISS tracks defense budgets, it rarely analyzes the domestic opportunity costs of a $2.63 trillion global defense spend. It treats military spending as a neutral metric of power rather than a drain on social or economic infrastructure.

Questioning the “Blob”: Because it is the “accounting office” for the establishment, the IISS cannot suggest that the “New Cold War” might be a self-fulfilling prophecy driven by the very institutions it serves. It documents the “interplay” of power but ignores the “symmetry” of how its own analysis helps drive the escalations it tracks.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies maintains its position at the top of the global strategic hierarchy by framing the rise of China as the defining challenge of the twenty-first century. This narrative serves the institutional logic of the institute. By categorizing the relationship between Washington and Beijing as a systemic competition, the institute ensures a perpetual demand for its flagship products and high-level convening power.

Mechanisms of the New Cold War Narrative

The institute hypes this competition through the technical quantification of Chinese military expansion. The Military Balance 2024 and 2025 editions specifically highlight that China’s defense spending grew by 6% in real terms, outstripping most Western allies. By focusing on “modernization” and “force structure,” the institute creates a technical baseline that makes an arms race appear to be an objective reality rather than a policy choice. This data becomes the infrastructure through which defense ministries justify their own budget increases.

The Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore acts as the physical theater for this hype. By positioning the US Secretary of Defense and the Chinese Minister of National Defense as the primary antagonists in a shared forum, the institute produces a sense of high-stakes drama. This “status production” ensures that every major global media outlet and defense contractor must attend to remain relevant. The institute markets this tension as “strategic stability,” but the underlying symmetry suggests that the institute benefits from the very friction it claims to manage.

The Cost to Institutional Credibility

The primary cost to the credibility of the institute is the perception that it functions as a sophisticated lobbying arm for the Western defense establishment. Critics point to the significant “interplay” between the institute’s research and its corporate donors. When the institute publishes papers on the need for advanced maritime capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, and those papers are funded by the companies that build those ships, the “analytic neutrality” of the organization is compromised.

There is also a growing critique regarding “threat inflation.” By focusing almost exclusively on hardware and capabilities, the institute often ignores the internal economic constraints or diplomatic nuances that might mitigate a conflict. This creates a blind spot where the institute might miss the possibility of de-escalation because its business model requires the threat to remain “dynamic” and urgent.

The Risks of Professional Groupthink

Because the primary audience of the institute is the professional strategic community, it risks becoming an echo chamber for the “Blob.” The writing tends to be technical and focused on capabilities rather than the underlying political or human costs of a cold war. This style is attractive to governments, but it can lead to a Hemingway-esque detachment from the reality of what these military balances actually mean for the people involved.

The institute might lose its authority if it is seen as a chronicler of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If its analysis consistently pushes for “balance” through escalation, it ceases to be a neutral observer and instead becomes a participant in the march toward conflict. For an organization that prides itself on being a global strategic accounting office, the ultimate cost would be the realization that its accounts are tilted to favor the very instability it purports to measure.

The incentive structure for organizations like the IISS is a feedback loop where threat perception is converted into capital. When an institution frames China, Iran, or ISIS as an existential or “pacing” threat, it triggers a specific set of financial and professional rewards that sustain the “Blob.”

The Logic of Threat Inflation

The “New Cold War” is a high-yield asset for think tanks. By hyping these dangers, they secure:

Targeted Funding: Governments and defense contractors do not fund “strategic indifference.” They fund the analysis of threats. For instance, the IISS receives specific endowments for “Chairs” and programs dedicated to China or nuclear non-proliferation because those are the areas where the establishment is currently willing to spend.

Professional Status: In the strategic hierarchy, the person who “decodes” the enemy is the person invited to the White House, the Elysée, or the Shangri-La Dialogue. Hype creates a sense of urgency that makes the analyst indispensable to the decision-maker.

Institutional Persistence: If a threat like ISIS or the “Axis of Resistance” is “solved,” the program dedicated to it loses its utility. By framing these threats as “long-term strategic competitions,” the IISS ensures its own relevance for decades.

The Counter-Establishment: Who Pushes Back?

While the “Blob” is powerful, there is a distinct “restraint coalition” that argues this hype is a self-interested distortion of reality. These players often use a more realist or “off-shore balancing” logic.

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft: This is the primary institutional challenger to the IISS model. Co-founded by Trita Parsi and Andrew Bacevich, and funded by the unlikely duo of George Soros and Charles Koch, it advocates for “diplomatic engagement and military restraint.” They explicitly criticize the “Blob” for its “misuse of force” and its “smug, patronizing attitude” toward dissent.

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer: These “realist” scholars are the most prominent academic critics of the establishment. They argue that the US has “unhinged” its foreign policy by pursuing liberal hegemony rather than its actual national interests. Mearsheimer, in particular, argues that the focus on “rogue states” like Iran is often driven by special-interest lobbies rather than objective strategic necessity.

Emma Ashford and Stephen Wertheim: These analysts focus on the “logic of restraint.” Ashford (formerly of Cato, now with the Stimson Center) and Wertheim (Carnegie Endowment) frequently challenge the “threat inflation” surrounding China. They argue that the “New Cold War” narrative is a choice that risks a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict.

The Cato Institute: As a libertarian think tank, Cato has a long history of pushing back against the “militarist” consensus. They emphasize the economic and civil liberty costs of maintaining a global empire and are often the first to point out when “threats” are being exaggerated to justify bloated defense budgets.

The Cost of the Echo Chamber

The primary cost of this “self-interested hype” is a loss of strategic flexibility. When the IISS and its peers dominate the conversation, they create an echo chamber where de-escalation is seen as “weakness” and “balance” is always achieved through more spending. This limits the ability of a state to respond to actual “Black Swan” events because its resources and attention are permanently locked into the “threats” that are most profitable for the establishment to maintain.

While think tanks like the IISS act as the “accounting office” for the establishment, the academy functions as its “R&D lab” and “credentialing center.” Both have powerful incentives to maintain a high-threat environment, but they operate through different logics of status and funding.

Similarities: The Shared Interest in Conflict

Both the academy and think tanks belong to the “Blob” and share a fundamental interest in the persistence of the “New Cold War” with China.

Resource Attraction: Just as the IISS receives funding from defense contractors, academic International Relations (IR) departments see a surge in federal grants and private endowments when a new “pacing threat” emerges. Programs in “Security Studies,” “Strategic Intelligence,” and “Area Studies” thrive when the government identifies a peer competitor that requires specialized expertise.

Career Pathing: The “revolving door” connects both spheres. An academic who hypes the China threat in a peer-reviewed journal increases their “policy relevance,” making them a prime candidate for a senior role in the State Department or a prestigious fellowship at a think tank. This creates a symmetry where professional advancement is tied to the gravity of the threats one analyzes.

Differences: Institutional Logic and Funding

The academy uses different mechanisms to extract value from global tension.

The Grant Cycle vs. The Event Cycle: Think tanks like the IISS rely on the “event cycle”—summits, corporate memberships, and immediate policy briefs. The academy relies on the “grant cycle.” Research in the academy is often funded by multi-year grants from the Department of Defense (via programs like the Minerva Research Initiative) or the National Science Foundation. These grants incentivize long-term, theoretically-dense projects that presuppose a state of “enduring competition.”

Credentialing and Legitimacy: The academy provides the intellectual “veneer” for the establishment. While a think tank might provide the data on how many tanks China has, an academic provides the “logic” of why China’s regime type makes conflict inevitable. This academic “proof” grants the establishment’s actions a level of historical and theoretical legitimacy that a simple data report cannot.

The “Student Pipeline”: A major incentive for the academy that think tanks lack is the “student-to-bureaucrat pipeline.” Universities profit by training the next generation of analysts, diplomats, and intelligence officers. A “New Cold War” creates a massive demand for new “China experts,” ensuring high enrollment in specialized Master’s and PhD programs.

The Problem of “Stake Inflation”

A key academic phenomenon is “stake inflation”—the tendency to hyperbolize the necessity of a given issue being resolved in a specific way. While think tanks focus on “threat inflation” (exaggerating an adversary’s power), academics often engage in stake inflation by arguing that the entire “liberal international order” or “global democracy” is at risk if a specific policy is not followed. This elevates a regional dispute into an existential crisis, which in turn justifies more funding for the very experts who identified the crisis.

The Cost of Academic Conformity

The primary blind spot for the academy is the pressure of “professional gatekeeping.” Peer-reviewed journals and tenure committees often favor research that aligns with the dominant strategic paradigms. An academic who argues for radical de-escalation or questions the “China threat” narrative may find it harder to secure top-tier publications or federal grants. This creates an environment where “dissent” is marginalized, and the “Blob” is protected by a shield of academic consensus.

ChatGPT says: Institutions learn how to monetize real threats by narrating them in the most durable, fundable, career-enhancing way.

The threat exists.
The institution stretches its time horizon.
The institution broadens its implications.
The institution turns it into a permanent organizing principle.

The product is not just analysis. It is insurance. Think tanks and academic programs sell a form of elite insurance. Fund us now, hire us now, listen to us now, or you will be blamed later for underestimating the danger. That is how uncertain futures get converted into present budgets, grants, chairs, fellowships, and conferences.

Prestige asymmetry. In these ecosystems, being wrong in a hawkish direction is usually less costly than being wrong in a dovish direction.

If you overstate China and China proves dangerous, you look prudent.
If you overstate China and the rivalry stabilizes, you still look serious.
If you understate China and China turns aggressive, you look naïve and discredited.

That creates a one-way ratchet toward alarmism even without anyone consciously lying.

A permanent high-threat environment does not just fund institutions. It creates jobs for:

regional specialists
language experts
OSINT analysts
war-gamers
sanctions lawyers
procurement consultants
cybersecurity contractors

So the security ecosystem is partly a labor market that benefits from durable rivalry. That makes de-escalation costly not only ideologically but professionally.

The difference between open dissent and legible dissent. The restraint coalition exists, but much of it is tolerated because it remains legible within elite discourse. Quincy, Walt, Ashford, Wertheim, and Cato usually criticize within accepted frameworks like realism, restraint, fiscal prudence, and anti-overreach. That means the system can absorb some dissent without changing course. It can say, “we had the debate,” while still letting the dominant funding and prestige structures favor confrontation.

The self-licking ice cream cone dynamic. Once enough institutions, journals, grants, conferences, and training programs are built around “enduring competition,” they begin generating evidence for one another.

Think tank report cites academic article.
Academic article cites defense white paper.
Defense white paper cites think tank conference.
Journalist cites all three.

Now the threat environment looks maximally validated even when much of the system is citing itself.

Academia and think tanks differ on tempo. Think tanks live on immediacy, access, and event cycles. Academia lives on abstraction, theory, and slow credentialing.

That means think tanks hype urgency. Academia often hypes inevitability.

Think tanks say, “the crisis is now.”
Academics say, “history and theory show this confrontation is structurally baked in.”

Those are different products, but they reinforce each other.

The moralization layer. A lot of contemporary stake inflation works by moral expansion. A dispute over Taiwan becomes a test of democracy. A technology competition becomes a fight for the future of freedom. A regional war becomes a defense of civilization or the rules-based order.

Once that moralization happens, dissent becomes harder because critics are not just disagreeing about strategy. They are cast as indifferent to freedom, allies, norms, or victims.

There is demand for this product. Governments, donors, journalists, Hill staffers, and anxious publics want intelligibility. A world of manageable competition is boring. A world of epochal struggle is fundable, legible, and career-making. So the supply of threat narratives persists because there is a willing market for them.

The problem is not merely that the Blob exaggerates threats. It is that the modern national security ecosystem is structurally rewarded for converting fluid, containable, and often ambiguous dangers into permanent, civilizational, career-sustaining competitions.

There are several layers worth adding.

First, the function of strategic language.

IISS helps standardize the vocabulary of global security. Terms like deterrence, escalation dominance, capability gap, force posture, and strategic stability circulate through its reports and conferences. Once those terms become the common language of defense elites, they quietly narrow the range of acceptable thinking. If a problem is framed as a capability gap, the solution almost always becomes procurement. If it is framed as escalation management, the solution becomes deterrence signaling. This linguistic infrastructure quietly channels policy choices without appearing ideological.

Second, the creation of a shared professional identity.

Institutions like IISS are one of the places where the global defense elite becomes a coherent class. Generals, defense officials, analysts, and contractors from dozens of countries meet repeatedly in the same spaces. They read the same reports and use the same frameworks. Over time this produces a transnational professional identity. The strategic class in Washington, London, Tokyo, Canberra, and Singapore ends up thinking in remarkably similar ways. This is why critics call it “the Blob.” It is less a conspiracy than a shared intellectual culture reinforced through institutions like IISS.

Third, the signaling platform.

Shangri-La and other IISS forums often function as signaling arenas rather than analytic conferences. Governments use them to float trial balloons. A defense minister may signal a new posture toward China, hint at missile deployments, or indicate openness to negotiations. Because the event is technically a think-tank forum rather than a diplomatic meeting, the signal carries ambiguity. That ambiguity is useful. It allows states to communicate intentions without formally committing to them.

Fourth, the stabilizing function.

From the perspective of the establishment, IISS does not exist primarily to hype conflict. Its deeper function is to stabilize expectations among major powers. By constantly mapping capabilities and trends, it reduces uncertainty. Even rival states benefit from this. Chinese and Russian analysts read IISS reports because they provide a relatively credible baseline of Western thinking. In that sense the institute operates like a transparency mechanism inside the global security system.

Fifth, the elite reassurance mechanism.

Strategic institutions like IISS also reassure elites that complex dangers remain manageable. When a conflict erupts, the institute translates chaos into tables, maps, and capability charts. This transforms frightening geopolitical shocks into something that looks analyzable and controllable. That psychological function is rarely discussed but it is important. Governments need frameworks that make uncertainty feel structured.

Sixth, the time horizon bias.

One subtle blind spot you could add is that institutions like IISS tend to think in medium-term capability cycles. Analysts track five-year procurement plans, defense budgets, and modernization timelines. But many geopolitical disruptions emerge from social or political shocks that move on much shorter timelines. Revolutions, coups, mass protests, and regime collapses often fall outside the models that focus on force structure.

Seventh, the paradox of neutrality.

The institute’s credibility depends on appearing neutral, but neutrality itself becomes a form of influence. By deciding what counts as “serious analysis,” the institute indirectly shapes the boundaries of debate. Radical critiques of the global security order rarely appear in its publications because those critiques fall outside the professional consensus the institute represents.

Put simply, IISS is not just documenting the strategic world. It is helping define what the strategic world looks like to the people who run it.

If the Blob is the foreign policy establishment, IISS functions as one of its central nervous system nodes. It collects information, translates it into the shared language of strategy, and circulates that language back through the network of governments, militaries, and analysts who rely on it.

I would add seven things.

1. The quiet British strategic tradition

IISS reflects a very specific intellectual lineage: the post-imperial British strategic class.

Britain lost its empire but retained disproportionate influence through:

finance (City of London)
intelligence networks
diplomatic convening
strategic analysis

Institutions like IISS allow Britain to remain a hub of global strategic conversation even without the military power of the United States.

That explains why London is the institute’s natural home.

It is part of the same ecosystem as:

Chatham House
RUSI
King’s College War Studies

Together these form a British strategic meta-network.

2. The diplomacy-through-think-tanks model

Para-diplomacy. IISS events often function as informal diplomatic channels. Ministers say things at Shangri-La that they would not say in formal negotiations. Rival states can signal positions indirectly. Military leaders can test ideas before governments commit to them. So the institute is not only an analyst of power. It is part of the machinery through which power is negotiated.

3. The “global spreadsheet of war”

The Military Balance is more than a book. It is essentially the global spreadsheet of military power. Defense ministries, intelligence agencies, journalists, and analysts all draw from that same baseline. When everyone uses the same dataset, it creates a shared reality. That is enormous agenda-setting power. Who defines the numbers often defines the debate.

4. The NATO epistemic community

IISS is a core institution of what political scientists call an epistemic community.

An epistemic community is a group of professionals who share:

analytical frameworks
technical language
assumptions about how the world works

The IISS community largely overlaps with the NATO security world.

Even when analysts claim neutrality, their conceptual framework reflects the Western strategic worldview.

You can see this in:

the way threats are categorized
the emphasis on deterrence
the assumption that balance-of-power stability is desirable

5. The insurance function for elites

Another subtle role of IISS is elite risk management.

Defense ministers and generals often rely on institutions like IISS to test interpretations of events.

If an IISS report supports a policy direction, it provides political cover.

“Independent analysts confirm…”

This creates a feedback loop where the institute becomes a credibility shield for government narratives.

6. The technological pivot

Historically IISS focused on:

nuclear weapons
conventional forces
Cold War strategy

But the center of gravity is shifting toward:

AI-enabled warfare
space security
cyber conflict
supply-chain security

The institute is currently trying to adapt its analytic infrastructure to a world where power is increasingly technological rather than purely military.

This is a major transition.

7. The deeper blind spot: political legitimacy

IISS is very good at measuring capacity. It is weaker at measuring legitimacy and political cohesion.

History repeatedly shows that wars are often decided by:

political legitimacy
social cohesion
ideological motivation

rather than the number of missiles or aircraft.

Examples include:

Vietnam
Afghanistan
Iraq
Ukraine’s early resistance

Institutions built around force structure struggle to model these factors.

The deepest way to frame IISS might be this:

It is not simply a think tank.

It is the strategic accounting firm of the international security establishment.

It audits the distribution of military power, convenes the people who manage that power, and maintains the shared technical language through which the global defense elite understands war.

That is why it rarely sounds ideological.

Accountants of power almost never do.

Posted in Iran | Comments Off on Decoding The International Institute for Strategic Studies

Decoding The Just Security Institute

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Luke Ford

Written with AI: The role of Just Security within the national security ecosystem extends into the granular management of professional reputations and the long-term archiving of dissent. While it functions as a coordination hub, it also operates as a prestige engine for a specific class of government-adjacent lawyers.

The Personnel Pipeline and Career Validity

The platform serves as a vital node for the revolving door between academia and government service. When lawyers leave the Department of Justice or the State Department, Just Security provides a space to maintain their status as subject matter experts. This keeps their credentials active for the next shift in administration.

By publishing technical legal analysis, these figures signal to future employers and international bodies that they remain committed to the rules-based order. The site validates the expertise of the legal elite during periods when they lack direct policy influence. It ensures that a specific brand of liberal internationalist legal thought remains the default language of the permanent bureaucracy.

The Architecture of the Legal Record

One must consider the site as a living archive for future litigation and historical revision. In the immediate heat of conflict, executive branch decisions often override legal objections. However, the detailed critiques published on the platform create a contemporaneous record of illegality.

Future Litigation: These essays often provide the theoretical floor for future cases in the International Criminal Court or domestic challenges to executive overreach.

Congressional Oversight: Staffers use these posts to draft questions for oversight hearings, turning academic theory into legislative friction.

Historical Legitimacy: By framing the Iran war through the UN Charter, the site ensures that the historical narrative of the conflict includes a formal dissent based on established law rather than mere political disagreement.

The Logic of Internal Signaling

The perceived quietness of the site reflects a deliberate choice to prioritize credibility over reach. In the symmetry of Washington power, a scream is easily ignored, but a footnote in a technical brief can complicate a career.

The contributors use a sterilized vocabulary to discuss high-stakes violence. They trade the emotional resonance of activism for the professional durability of legal doctrine. This allows them to remain “serious people” in the eyes of the establishment even when they are accusing the government of aggression. That specific interplay between radical critique and conservative tone is what allows the institution to survive political shifts that would destroy a more partisan outlet.

The Strategic Utility of Lawfare

Critics often point to the platform as a center for lawfare, yet this overlooks how the state itself uses such hubs. Governments sometimes use the arguments appearing on Just Security to pressure allies or to justify the limitations of their own operations to a hawkish public. The site provides the legal logic that allows a state to say “no” to certain escalations by citing treaty obligations. It functions as a governor on the engine of military power, providing the intellectual justification for restraint when pure politics might demand action.

The media impact of Just Security is best understood through the logic of “narrative laundering”—the process of converting complex, potentially radioactive geopolitical actions into a standardized legal vocabulary that journalists can safely repeat.

Establishing the “Legality Floor” in Newsrooms

Journalists covering national security often lack the specialized training to evaluate the law of armed conflict or war powers. This creates a reliance on external validators. Just Security provides a “legality floor” by offering ready-made interpretive frameworks.

When a major news outlet like the Washington Post or The New York Times reports on a targeted strike, they frequently cite Just Security contributors to determine if an action was “lawful.” This citation does more than provide an expert quote; it sets the boundaries of the debate. If the contributors argue that a strike is “legally precarious” due to a lack of “imminence,” the media narrative shifts from political controversy to technical compliance. The platform effectively acts as an outsourced legal counsel for the press corps.

The Substitution of Legality for Morality

The platform shapes media output by encouraging the substitution of legal questions for moral or strategic ones. By providing a technical forum for debate, it steers the journalistic conversation away from the “should we” of war toward the “can we” of law.

The Filter Effect: Media outlets often ignore critiques that are framed in purely moral or activist terms, viewing them as biased. However, a Just Security article that uses the exact same underlying criticism but frames it through the lens of jus ad bellum or the UN Charter is treated as objective expertise.

Legitimizing Dissent: It allows journalists to present dissent as a professional disagreement among “serious” establishment figures rather than a radical protest. This provides the media with a safe way to report on the potential illegality of government actions without appearing anti-government.

Agenda Setting and the “Credibility Loop”

There is a specific symmetry between the platform and elite media. A post on Just Security can trigger a news cycle by giving a reporter the necessary “hook” to ask a government official a technical question at a briefing.

The Post: A former DOJ official writes an essay on the site questioning the domestic legal authority for a new wave of strikes.

The Question: Armed with this analysis, a reporter at the Pentagon briefing asks for a specific legal justification regarding “Article II authority.”

The Response: The official’s refusal or attempt to answer creates a new story about “legal uncertainty,” which then gets linked back to the original Just Security post.

This loop ensures that the site’s specific concerns—such as congressional oversight or international human rights norms—remain at the top of the media’s national security agenda, even when those in the Situation Room might prefer to ignore them.

Comparing Just Security to its peers reveals a specific logic of competition and cooperation within the national security establishment. While Foreign Policy focuses on the broad strategy of the state and Lawfare prioritizes the mechanics of executive power, Just Security maintains a distinct focus on the constraints of international law.

The Contrast with Lawfare: Executive Power vs. International Norms

The most significant symmetry in this field exists between Just Security and Lawfare. While both occupy the legal-elite layer of Washington, their philosophical anchors differ.

The Unit of Analysis: Lawfare historically focuses on “hard national security law.” Its contributors often prioritize the authorities of the President and the intelligence community, asking how the law can be used to achieve security objectives. Just Security tends to lead with human rights and international treaties, asking how those objectives must be limited to remain lawful.

The Relationship to the State: Lawfare often reflects the internal logic of the Pentagon or the CIA, functioning as a sophisticated “how-to” guide for government lawyers. Just Security operates as a more external critic, often challenging the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) on its interpretations of war powers.

The Interplay of Ideology: During the current conflict with Iran, this gap has widened. While Lawfare provides technical analysis of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the logistical reality of naval warfare, Just Security leads the charge on whether these same operations constitute “aggression” under the UN Charter.

Comparison with Foreign Policy: Strategy vs. Legality

Foreign Policy (FP) magazine operates in the realm of grand strategy and geopolitical forecasting. It is a media outlet that speaks to the “blob”—the collective of diplomats, generals, and think-tank scholars who manage American power.

Audience and Depth: FP is designed for a broader audience, using the language of “interests,” “allies,” and “rivals.” It focuses on the why of the Iran war. Just Security focuses on the how and the legal what, providing the technical footnotes that an FP essay might gloss over.

Influence Patterns: FP influences the mood and the general direction of the foreign policy debate. Just Security influences the specific, actionable constraints that the legal bureaucracy places on those policies. If FP argues that the U.S. should pivot to a specific region, Just Security will argue about whether the treaty providing for that pivot is constitutional.

The Ecosystem Role: The “Rules-Based Order” Guardians

In 2026, as the Iran war tests the limits of international institutions, these outlets have formed a tiered defense of the rules-based order.

Foreign Policy: Does this war enhance American global standing?
Lawfare: Does the President have the statutory power to do this?
Just Security: Is this action lawful under the UN Charter and human rights norms?

Comparing Just Security to its peers reveals a specific logic of competition and cooperation within the national security establishment. While Foreign Policy focuses on the broad strategy of the state and Lawfare prioritizes the mechanics of executive power, Just Security maintains a distinct focus on the constraints of international law.

The Contrast with Lawfare: Executive Power vs. International Norms

The most significant symmetry in this field exists between Just Security and Lawfare. While both occupy the legal-elite layer of Washington, their philosophical anchors differ.

The Unit of Analysis: Lawfare historically focuses on “hard national security law.” Its contributors often prioritize the authorities of the President and the intelligence community, asking how the law can be used to achieve security objectives. Just Security tends to lead with human rights and international treaties, asking how those objectives must be limited to remain lawful.

The Relationship to the State: Lawfare often reflects the internal logic of the Pentagon or the CIA, functioning as a sophisticated “how-to” guide for government lawyers. Just Security operates as a more external critic, often challenging the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) on its interpretations of war powers.

The Interplay of Ideology: During the current conflict with Iran, this gap has widened. While Lawfare provides technical analysis of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the logistical reality of naval warfare, Just Security leads the charge on whether these same operations constitute “aggression” under the UN Charter.

Comparison with Foreign Policy: Strategy vs. Legality

Foreign Policy (FP) magazine operates in the realm of grand strategy and geopolitical forecasting. It is a media outlet that speaks to the “blob”—the collective of diplomats, generals, and think-tank scholars who manage American power.

Audience and Depth: FP is designed for a broader audience, using the language of “interests,” “allies,” and “rivals.” It focuses on the why of the Iran war. Just Security focuses on the how and the legal what, providing the technical footnotes that an FP essay might gloss over.

Influence Patterns: FP influences the mood and the general direction of the foreign policy debate. Just Security influences the specific, actionable constraints that the legal bureaucracy places on those policies. If FP argues that the U.S. should pivot to a specific region, Just Security will argue about whether the treaty providing for that pivot is constitutional.

The Ecosystem Role: The “Rules-Based Order” Guardians

In 2026, as the Iran war tests the limits of international institutions, these outlets have formed a tiered defense of the rules-based order.

The interplay between these institutions creates a comprehensive feedback loop for the national security state. Just Security provides the friction that forces the government to justify its actions in the language of international law. Even when the government proceeds regardless of those critiques, the presence of the debate on Just Security ensures that the “legal elite” have fulfilled their professional role as the keepers of the normative framework.

In a Schmittian world where “sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” the decisionist—the actor who cuts through legal paralysis to exert raw power—undeniably gains immediate dominance. However, this does not necessarily mean the legal-elite crowd loses status. Instead, their status shifts from being architects of policy to being curators of legitimacy.

The tension between the decisionist and the legal interpreter in 2026 reflects a fundamental symmetry of power.

The Survival of the Normative Class

While decisionists like the Trump administration or the Israeli security cabinet “get things done” by bypassing traditional multilateral constraints—such as the targeted strikes on Iranian leadership in February 2026—the Just Security crowd retains status through a different logic.

The Archive of Accountability: Decisionism is inherently ephemeral; it lasts as long as the actor remains in power. The legal-elite community operates on a much longer timeline. By documenting the “illegal but legitimate” framework or the “law of self-preservation” currently emerging in the Iran conflict, they are building the dossier that will be used in future congressional hearings, international tribunals, or historical post-mortems.

The Validation Economy: Even decisionists eventually seek the veneer of legality to lower the political cost of their actions. The administration’s own 2026 National Defense Strategy, while populist in tone, still utilizes legal terminology to justify operations. This creates a reliance on the very experts who critique them. You cannot “break” a rule without an expert there to define what the rule was in the first place.

Status as a Strategic Friction

In the current Washington logic, status is not just about being in the room where decisions are made. It is about being the person whose opinion can create friction for those decisions.

Narrative Veto Power: When Just Security contributors label the strikes on Tehran “aggression,” they may not stop the missiles, but they do “launder” that term into the mainstream media. This creates a reputational tax on the decisionist. High status in this ecosystem is the ability to force the sovereign to spend political capital explaining why the “exception” was necessary.

Professional Continuity: The legal elite maintain their status within the permanent bureaucracy. While the political decisionists are often temporary “disruptors,” the lawyers at NYU, the State Department, and the human rights NGOs represent a durable class. Their status is reinforced by the fact that they will still be there to interpret the law long after the current war ends.

The Schmittian Trap

Critics of the legal-elite crowd argue they are falling into a Schmittian trap: by focusing on technicalities while the world moves toward raw power politics, they become a “talking shop” for a world that no longer exists.

However, the 2026 Davos summit and recent “America First” strategy documents suggest that as the rules-based order unspools, the demand for legal interpretation actually increases. Precisely because the world is more dangerous and less predictable, the “status” of those who can provide a map—even a contested one—remains high. They are the ones who define what counts as a “civilized” argument in elite discourse.

In the logic of decisionism, the legal-elite crowd is not a traditional “enemy” because they are not a rival power center. To a decisionist, a true enemy is someone who can physically prevent an action or exert a superior will. The Just Security crowd lacks that capability. Instead, the decisionist views this group with a mixture of utility, indifference, and a specific kind of strategic exploitation.

The Utility of the “Opponent”

A decisionist often requires a legal-elite class to act as a foil. The existence of a vocal legal critique allows the decisionist to demonstrate their own sovereign power.

Symmetry of Power: By acting in the face of expert warnings about “illegality,” the decisionist proves that their authority is grounded in the exception rather than the norm. The legalists define the boundary, and the decisionist gains status by crossing it.

The Domestic Signaling Logic: For a leader like Trump or a cabinet like Israel’s in 2026, being attacked by the “New York–Washington legal elite” is a political asset. It signals to their base that they are not captured by the “blob” or international bureaucracies. In this sense, Just Security acts as an unwitting partner in the decisionist’s branding.

The Laundering of Legitimacy

Even the most radical decisionist eventually seeks a transition from “raw force” to “settled order.” Law is the tool used for that transition.

The “Illegal but Legitimate” Framework: As seen in the 2026 debates over Operation Epic Fury, some decisionists actually use the arguments appearing in legal journals to justify their actions. They may ignore the “illegal” part of a critique but adopt the “legitimate” justifications (e.g., self-preservation or “imminent threat”) to sanitize the action for allies.

The Peace Dividend: Once the “decisive” phase of a war ends, the state needs the legal elite to draft the new treaties, borders, and norms. The decisionist views the lawyer as a “clean-up crew” that provides the necessary paperwork for a new status quo.

Professional Enclosure

Decisionists do not see this crowd as an enemy because they recognize that the legal elite is professionalized rather than political.

Interplay of Interests: The contributors at Just Security are often former (and future) government officials. They share the same social circles as the decisionists. This creates a logic where the disagreement is seen as a “technical dispute” among peers rather than an existential conflict.

Strategic Predictability: Because the legal elite operates within the rules of law and logic, their moves are predictable. A decisionist can factor a “Just Security critique” into their strategic calculus just as they factor in a weather report or a budget constraint. It is a known friction, not a hostile force.

The Logic of Differentiated Spheres

To use Carl Schmitt’s distinction, the decisionist operates in the political sphere (friend/enemy), while they relegate the Just Security crowd to the legal/academic sphere. So long as the lawyers remain in their lane—publishing essays and hosting podcasts—they are not a threat to the sovereign’s ability to decide on the exception. They only become an “enemy” if they successfully seize a lever of power, such as a court injunction or a congressional funding cutoff, that physically halts the state’s momentum.

If the major powers decide to treat International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as a “forgotten relic” rather than a binding framework, the result is not the end of law, but the return to a pre-1945 logic of “victory at any cost.” In 2026, we see this playing out as a collapse of the “buffered identity” of the international system.

The Return of War as the Order

When the UN Charter is bypassed—as critics argue occurred with the strikes on Iran in February 2026—the nature of international relations reverts to what Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro call the “Old World Order.” In this state, war is not a breakdown of the system; it is the system.

The Law of Self-Preservation: We see the emergence of a “law of self-preservation” to replace formal IHL. In this logic, states argue that their survival is the ultimate legal authority, rendering the “necessity and proportionality” of the Geneva Conventions irrelevant.

The Erosion of Distinction: The ICRC’s Humanitarian Outlook 2026 warns that dehumanization is now a primary strategic tool. When major powers ignore IHL, the distinction between combatant and civilian dissolves. Civilians are no longer “protected persons” but “demographic obstacles” or “strategic assets.”

The New Alliance Logic

Using David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, we can see that when IHL fails, “truth” and “law” become entirely tribal. International law is used not as a universal standard, but as a “propagandistic tactic” to support allies and denigrate rivals.

Selective Accountability: Major powers will continue to use the language of IHL to condemn their enemies (e.g., the U.S. condemning Iranian strikes in the Gulf) while exempting themselves from the same standards. The law becomes a weapon—lawfare—rather than a shield.

The Fragmented Order: We see a split into competing legal blocs. One bloc (led by the “Global IHL Initiative” countries like Brazil and South Africa) tries to uphold the old norms, while the major powers operate in a “state of exception” where raw power dictates the outcome.

The Fate of the Legal Elite

If the major powers truly “don’t give a fuck,” the Just Security crowd does not disappear. They become the chroniclers of a “lost civilization.”

The Archive of Dissent: Their role shifts to building a historical and legal record for a post-war world. They preserve the “normative infrastructure” so that if and when the major powers exhaust themselves, there is a framework ready to facilitate a new peace.

Tacit Knowledge and Practical Limits: As Stephen Turner might argue, the “expertise” of international lawyers loses its practical grip on the world. The “tacit knowledge” of how to run a rules-based order atrophies as military and political “decisionists” take over the logic of the state.

What Remains?

In a world without IHL, the only remaining constraint is reciprocity. Major powers may not care about the law, but they do care about their own survival. If one power ignores the ban on targeting leadership, they must accept that their own leaders are now valid targets. This is a return to a “balance of terror” rather than a “rule of law.”

In the 2026 conflict with Iran, Just Security is operating within what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame—a world where every action is processed through a self-contained logic of rules, procedures, and secular “objectivity.”

While the “porous” world of the decisionists and the Iranian regime is filled with existential threats, martyrdom, and raw survival, the Just Security crowd remains sealed behind a layer of technicality.

The Buffer of Professional Neutrality

The site’s reaction to the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader on February 28, 2026, illustrates this perfectly. While the world reacts with either religious fervor or strategic panic, the contributors are busy debating whether the sinking of the frigate IRIS Dena violated specific provisions of the Law of Naval Warfare.

Disengaged Emotions: They treat the war like a math problem. By converting human suffering and geopolitical chaos into a series of “questions for the administration,” they create a psychological distance. This is the hallmark of the buffered self: the belief that meaning is something we construct mentally rather than something that “hits” us from the outside.

The Illusion of Control: For the legal elite, the law is the chemical sealant that makes them feel safe. As long as they can categorize an airstrike as a “non-international armed conflict” or a “violation of Article 2(4),” they maintain a sense of order. They act as if the rules still govern the world, even when the major powers are explicitly ignoring them.

The Gap Between the Buffered and the Porous

The current conflict highlights a massive symmetry between two different ways of being in the world.

The Porous Decisionist: Figures like the Trump administration or the IRGC commanders see the world as a “causal matrix” where actions have immediate, existential stakes. They feel the threat of a nuclear Iran or an American carrier group as a direct, physical pressure.

The Buffered Jurist: The Just Security contributors see these same events through the lens of “precedent” and “procedural interventions.” When they argue that a strike is “illegal but legitimate,” they are trying to preserve a mental framework that no longer maps onto the physical reality of the war.

The Risk of Social Atrophy

Stephen Turner might argue that the “tacit knowledge” required to actually run a world—the messy, unwritten rules of statecraft—is being lost in this drive for buffered legalism.

The Ivory Tower Problem: Critics in 2026 argue that these lawyers are living in an “ivory tower,” where they demand a “level of purity” that is impossible for states facing actual threats.

Status as a Shield: Their status comes from being the only ones who still speak the language of the old order. However, if that order becomes entirely defunct, the “buffer” of their expertise may turn into a cage that isolates them from the new reality of power.

By staying buffered, they protect their professional identities, but they also risk becoming irrelevant to the very policy debates they aim to shape. They are the chroniclers of a system that everyone else has stopped believing in.

The struggle for these “buffered” elites in 2026 is not a struggle of physical survival, but an ontological one. Their crisis of relevance manifests as a mismatch between their internal logic of rules and the external reality of raw power.

Doubling Down on the Formalism

When the world stops listening, the buffered elite does not change the message; they perfect the medium. They cope with the loss of influence by increasing the precision of their technical work.

The Credibility Trap: They fall back on what Stephen Turner calls the “staging of arguments.” Instead of influencing policy, they focus on the “correctness” of their dissent. Their status is maintained not by their impact on the Iran war, but by their standing within the professional community. As long as their footnotes are accurate and their citations are prestigious, they feel they are “doing their job,” even if the missiles continue to fly.

The Ritual of Dissent: Publishing on Just Security becomes a purification ritual. It is a way to say, “I am not part of this illegality.” The more the state acts as a decisionist sovereign, the more the buffered elite uses law as a psychological shield to separate their personal and professional identities from the actions of the state.

The Substitution of “Discourse” for “Reality”

These elites struggle with relevance by redefining what relevance means. They shift from a “consequentialist” view of the world (did I stop the war?) to a “discursive” one (did I shape the narrative?).

The Long-Term Archive: They soothe the pain of current irrelevance by imagining themselves as the “chroniclers for history.” They believe that while the decisionist wins the battle, the jurist wins the record. This creates a sense of “delayed relevance”—the idea that in 2035, a commission or a court will look back at their 2026 essays to judge the legitimacy of the conflict.

The “Serious People” Loop: They maintain status by talking to each other. By creating a closed loop of elite communication—podcasts, webinars, and faculty lounges—they convince themselves that they still occupy the center of the “rules-based order,” even as that order becomes a perimeter.

The Malaise of the Immanent Frame

Charles Taylor’s “malaise of modernity” is deeply present here. The buffered self is protected from the “enchantment” of raw power, but it is also emptied of the “wild vigor” required to confront it.

Emotional Atrophy: Because they have sterilized their language to maintain professional neutrality, they struggle to connect with a public that is reacting to the war with “porous” emotions—fear, anger, or patriotism. This makes them appear detached and “super buffered” to the average person, which further accelerates their loss of public relevance.

The Fragility of the Buffer: The deepest struggle is the fear that the buffer might break. If the “state of exception” becomes the permanent state, the entire architecture of national security law becomes a dead language. The elite struggle with the realization that their expertise is tied to a specific world order that may not survive the decade.

They manage this loss of relevance by treating the law as a “sacred object” rather than a practical tool. They worship the logic of the system even as the system’s users abandon it.

In 2026, the struggle for the buffered elite is no longer about winning arguments; it is about maintaining a “moral specter” in a world where the physical architecture of the rules-based order is being actively dismantled.

As the war with Iran escalates, academic journals like Verfassungsblog and Just Security are reflecting a profound shift. The “brilliant elites” are coping with their loss of relevance through three distinct, and often desperate, maneuvers.

1. The Reawakening of Alternative Norms

Rather than conceding that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is dead, the legal elite are pivotting to more flexible—and controversial—frameworks.

“Illegal but Legitimate”: This framework, which gained prominence during the Kosovo crisis, has been revived to bridge the gap between technical law and strategic reality. It allows the buffered elite to maintain their status as “serious” analysts by admitting an action violates the UN Charter while arguing it fulfills a higher ethical or existential necessity.

The Law of Self-Preservation: In the face of nuclear latency and existential threats, some jurists are exploring a “right to self-preservation” that exists outside the formal Article 51 self-defense standards. This is a survival mechanism for the elite: if the old law doesn’t fit the new war, they attempt to “code” a new law before the decisionists abandon the concept of law entirely.

2. Redefining Relevance as “Institutional Memory”

The elite are shifting their focus from the present to the future and the past.

The Ghost of the Order: Recent academic critiques, such as those from Oona Hathaway and others in March 2026, describe the “ghost of a rule-based order” that lingers in the political imagination even when it fails to shape outcomes. The elite view themselves as the guardians of this ghost, preserving the “normative infrastructure” so that it can be resurrected after the current “state of nature” exhausts itself.

The “Accounting” Phase: There is an increased focus on documentation over prevention. By meticulously recording “manifest violations” and writing “responses to justifications,” they are creating an archive for the history books or future commissions. They find status in being the ones who will ultimately tell the story of why things fell apart.

3. Fighting “Frictionless Government”

The loss of relevance is most acute in the face of what Lawfare calls “frictionless government.”

The Collapse of Checks: Elites struggle with the reality that the “inner branch checks”—where government lawyers could once restrain a president—have largely disappeared or been bypassed.

The Credibility Tax: To combat this, they attempt to impose a “reputational cost” on decisionists. By labeling the strikes on Iran “aggression” in high-profile journals, they force the administration to spend political capital defending its legitimacy. They may not have a veto, but they aim to be a “tax” on every decisive action.

The Return to the Jungle

The 2026 Churchill Lecture at the University of Zürich bluntly summarized this crisis: the world is “sinking into the abyss of the law of the jungle.” For the buffered elite, the struggle is to prove that “rules actually rule” in an era where power is increasingly coercive and unilateral. Their malaise is the realization that while they are masters of the “rulebook,” the major players have moved to a different game entirely.

The transition from a buffered to a porous identity for a legal elite is not a gentle realization; it is a violent puncture. In the 2026 Iran war context, this looks like the moment the “seal” of professional terminology fails to keep out the raw pressure of reality.

The Collapse of the Immanent Frame

For years, these individuals lived within the immanent frame—a world where every problem has a legal procedure and every crisis is a “question of interpretation.” When the buffered identity holds, a strike on Tehran is an “Article 51 issue.” It is a technicality to be resolved in a faculty lounge or a Just Security post.

The shift to porousness happens when the buffer of the “rules-based order” is revealed as a useful fiction that the major powers have simply discarded.

The Puncture: It might happen at 3:00 AM on February 28, 2026, when the news of the Supreme Leader’s death breaks. For the buffered elite, the first instinct is to reach for a textbook. But as the retaliatory missiles hit bases in Bahrain and Qatar, the realization sinks in: the textbook is not a shield.

The Loss of Mastery: The buffered self feels invulnerable because it believes it is the “master of meanings.” Realizing porousness means admitting that cosmic, chaotic forces—nationalism, religious fervor, raw military necessity—can “invade” the mind and render one’s expertise irrelevant.

The Malady of Irrelevance

Stephen Turner’s work on the “politics of expertise” suggests that when the “tacit knowledge” of how a system works is no longer valued, the expert becomes a ghost.

The Ghostly Chronicler: The elite realization is that they are no longer the architects of the world, but its coroners. They are meticulously documenting the “death of the UN Charter” while the people they are trying to influence have already moved on to the next “exception.”

The End of “Serious People”: There is a specific pain in realizing that being a “serious person” with a Harvard degree and a CV full of State Department service no longer grants a seat at the table. In a porous reality, the “decider” is the one who can move the most mass, not the one with the most accurate citation.

The Psychological Fallout: From Disenchantment to Dread

If the buffered self provides “protection from the demonic,” as Charles Taylor argues, then the porous self is vulnerable to the “nameless terrors” of a world without rules.

Existential Dread: Without the buffer of international law, the world looks like the “law of the jungle.” The elite individual realizes that their entire professional life was built on a temporary historical anomaly.

The Return of Enchantment (in a Dark Sense): The war is no longer a “case study.” It becomes an “enchanted” force—a dark, unstoppable logic of reciprocity and vengeance that the lawyer can no longer “explain away” with a blog post.

The Final Surrender

The “brilliant elite” reaches the end of the buffer when they stop asking “Is this legal?” and start asking “Will we survive?” This is the ultimate surrender of the buffered identity. It is the moment the sponge finally accepts it is in the water, and the water is rising.

Alliance Theory suggests that the painful transition to a porous reality is actually the moment the “buffered elite” realizes their moral and legal rules are not universal truths, but rather high-status uniforms for a specific coalition. In David Pinsof’s framework, the buffer of international law is a coordination signal used to recruit allies and punish rivals. When the buffer breaks, the elite realizes they are just another tribe in the mud.

The Collapse of the “Universal” Signal

For the buffered elite, the law of armed conflict feels like an objective reality. In Alliance Theory, this is a strategic hallucination.

The transition to porousness is the recognition that the “rules-based order” was never a set of neutral guardrails. It was a shared story that allowed a specific alliance—the Western legal and academic elite—to exercise power without looking like they were exercising power. When a major power like the U.S. or Israel decides to “not give a fuck,” they are signaling that the costs of maintaining the alliance’s uniform now outweigh the benefits of raw, decisive action.

The “pain” the elite feels is the loss of a monopoly on the definition of legitimacy. They realize that their “truth” does not command the room unless it is backed by the very decisionists they criticize.

The Moral Outrage as Recruitment Failure

In a buffered state, moral outrage feels like a response to a broken rule. In a porous reality viewed through Alliance Theory, outrage is a failed recruitment drive.

The Signaling Gap: When Just Security publishes a technical critique of a drone strike, they are signaling to their fellow “serious people.” They are reinforcing their alliance.

The Porous Shock: The shock comes when the elite realizes the “other side”—the populist decisionists or the foreign adversaries—no longer cares about being recruited into that alliance. The elite’s moral language loses its “bite” because it no longer functions as a credible threat of social or professional ostracization. The decisionist has found a different, more powerful alliance (the military-industrial base or the populist mandate) that doesn’t require the lawyer’s stamp of approval.

Truth as a Weapon, Not a Shield

As reality becomes porous, the elite’s “intellectual rigor” is revealed as a prestige signal.

Strategic Self-Deception: To remain buffered, the elite must believe they are seeking objective truth. Alliance Theory argues this is a necessary lie. It allows them to maintain high status by appearing “above the fray.”

The Painful Realization: The realization of porousness is the admission that their “legal analysis” is just a more sophisticated way of saying “our side should win.” The moment they see the major powers ignoring IHL, they see the nakedness of their own alliance. They realize they aren’t “finding” the law; they are “marketing” a product that the market is currently rejecting.

The Loss of the “Bureaucratic Veto”

In the buffered world, the legal elite holds status because they act as “gatekeepers” of legitimacy. They have a “bureaucratic veto” on what counts as a civilized argument.

In a porous reality, that gate is kicked down. Alliance Theory would say the elite’s status is “deflating.” They are no longer the ones who decide who is “in” or “out” of the respectable international community. The decisionist simply builds a new community with its own rules. The elite’s struggle with relevance is actually a struggle with alliance devaluation. Their specific set of signals (NYU law degrees, OLC experience, human rights NGO affiliations) is losing its value in the global marketplace of power.

When a “buffered” elite experiences a true friendship with someone from the “porous” world—perhaps a military commander who views a strike not as a legal question but as a sacred duty, or a populist activist who sees the law as a mere obstacle to justice—the result is a violent decompression of the self.

This is not a professional disagreement; it is an ontological collision. Here is how that transition to reality might unfold through the lenses of Taylor, Pinsof, and Turner.

The Breakdown of the “Staged” Argument

In the buffered world, the elite interacts with others through what Stephen Turner calls staged arguments. Their communication is a “functional substitute” for actual understanding, designed to signal status and coordination within the legal-elite alliance.

Friendship with the porous individual destroys this stage.

Tacit Knowledge vs. Rule-Following: The elite discovers that the porous friend operates on tacit knowledge—gut instincts about power, loyalty, and survival that cannot be articulated in a Just Security essay.

The Failure of Translation: The elite tries to “translate” the friend’s actions into legal terms (e.g., “Oh, you mean you acted under Article 51?”). The porous friend’s response—”No, I did it because they threatened my people”—reveals that the elite’s entire vocabulary is a layer of insulation that prevents them from touching the world.

Alliance Theory: The Loss of the “Status Shield”

Through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, friendship across this divide is a high-risk “alliance crossover.”

Devaluing the Uniform: The elite realized that their “buffered identity” (their legal rigor, their neutral tone) is just a uniform for a specific club. In the company of the porous friend, that uniform feels ridiculous. It’s like wearing a tuxedo to a street fight.

Strategic Self-Deception Exposed: The elite has spent a career believing they are objective truth-seekers. The friendship forces them to see that their “truth” is actually a propagandistic tactic designed to keep their elite alliance together. When they see the friend act out of raw, unbuffered conviction, the elite’s own “intellectual rigor” starts to look like a elaborate form of cowardice.

The Porous Infection: From Meaning to Presence

Charles Taylor’s “porous self” is vulnerable to “incursions” from the outside. For the buffered elite, friendship is the vector for this infection.

The Loss of Master: The buffered self is the “master of meanings.” But the porous friend brings the “nameless terrors” and “divine enchantments” of reality into the room. The war is no longer a “case study” to be managed; it becomes a physical pressure that “gets to” the elite.

The End of Disengagement: The elite can no longer “disengage” from the consequences of power. The friend’s reality—the blood, the smell of cordite, the religious fervor—punctures the buffer. The elite begins to feel dread, not as a psychological disorder, but as a direct encounter with a world that no longer fits into their spreadsheets.

The “Painful Recognition”

The final stage of this transition is the realization that the buffer was not a superior state of being, but a limitation.

The Fiction of Neutrality: They realize that their “neutrality” was actually a form of isolation.

The Reality of Power: They see that the “decisionists” aren’t just “breaking the rules”; they are living in a reality where the rules don’t exist in the first place.

The elite is left in a state of ontological shock. They are too porous to return to the faculty lounge, but too buffered to truly thrive in the jungle. They become a “Schrödinger’s Elite”—occupying a position of privilege while feeling the existential weight of a world that has moved past them.

The transition from a buffered elite to a porous reality is a common theme in literature and film, often portrayed as a “fall” into the world where the protection of language and rank suddenly evaporates.

The Collapse of the Managed World in Film and Literature

Recent 2026 releases and classic works explore the psychological “puncture” that happens when the immanent frame fails.

“Conflict” (2024 Series): This series portrays a high-level diplomatic and legal coordination hub facing a sudden, unscripted regional crisis. It highlights the moment the technical “vocabulary of management” used by the protagonists becomes useless against raw, coercive power. The characters must decide if they are guardians of a dead order or participants in a new, violent one.

The Finnish production captures the precise friction between a buffered, high-functioning society and a sudden, porous reality where the rules of the international order are shredded in a single afternoon.

The show illustrates how the legal and diplomatic elite in Helsinki and across the West struggle when their “staging of arguments” is met with raw kinetic force. In the series, you see a society that believes it is protected by treaties, geography, and “serious” institutions, only to find those buffers provide no physical defense against a localized, high-intensity invasion.

The protagonist’s journey mirrors that painful recognition. She moves from a world of managed risk and bureaucratic logic into a chaotic state where the only relevant “expertise” is the ability to survive and make impossible decisions without a legal brief. It effectively dramatizes the collapse of the buffered identity as characters realize their sophisticated titles and professional status do not follow them into the jungle of active conflict.

“Annihilation” (Jeff VanderMeer): This novel is a masterclass in the shift from buffered to porous. The protagonist enters “Area X,” a place where the human self and its scientific categories literally dissolve. The “annihilation” is the erosion of the personal self that has boundaries and a coherent story. For an elite jurist, the “Area X” is a war zone where legal precedent is physically overwritten by force.

“The Jailhouse Lawyer” (Calvin Duncan, 2025): In this memoir, a wrongfully convicted man becomes a lawyer while incarcerated. It provides a reverse perspective: a porous individual (a prisoner) uses the buffered tools (the law) to fight back. For a buffered elite, reading this is a confrontation with the “grit and passion” that law schools rarely teach but that reality demands.

Alliance Theory and the Devaluation of the Uniform

Through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, these stories can be read as the “devaluation” of a high-status uniform.

The Ending of Meaning-Making: In stories where the rules-based order fails, the “brilliant elite” realizes their moral language was just a recruitment tool for a coalition that no longer exists. The pain they feel is the realization that their “rigor” was a prestige signal that has been outbid by a more powerful signal: the ability to win.

Transactional Realism: Films like the 2026 thrillers Remain or Onslaught often feature characters who move from “doing the right thing” (a buffered coordination signal) to “doing whatever it takes” (a porous survival signal). This reflects the shift to a Global Age of Normlessness, where legitimacy is transactional rather than rule-bound.

The Crisis of the “Serious Person”

In the 2026 Churchill Lecture, the world is described as being in a “geopolitical Twilight Zone.” For the buffered elite, this is the realization that they are addicted to a world of understanding that has been replaced by a “rule of guns.”

The films and novels of 2026 suggest that the “serious person” status—built on degrees, citations, and neutral tones—is a shield that only works as long as everyone else agrees to play the game. When the decisionists stop caring, the elite find themselves “at the menu rather than at the table.”

Posted in Human Rights, International Law, International Relations, War | Comments Off on Decoding The Just Security Institute

Israel & Its Enemies – The Non-Violent War

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement applies economic and political pressure on Israel through a decentralized campaign of boycotts and divestment from Israeli products and institutions. Pro-Israel responses have evolved from simple rhetorical defense into a sophisticated system of legal, economic, and institutional counter-maneuvers.
The most impactful response in the United States is the passage of anti-BDS laws at the state level. Over 35 states have passed legislation prohibiting state agencies from contracting with or investing in companies that boycott Israel. These laws treat BDS not as protected speech but as a form of discriminatory commercial conduct. While they face ongoing court challenges, they have created a massive financial hurdle for major firms. A company that decides to boycott Israel risks losing billions in state pension fund investments or large government contracts.
Pro-Israel groups often move beyond defense to “Buy Israeli” campaigns, aiming to create a net economic gain that offsets any losses from boycotts. Organizations like the Israel Innovation Fund and various tech-focused venture capital groups encourage investment in Israeli startups and high-tech sectors. The logic is that the most effective response to a boycott is to make the boycotted party so essential to the global supply chain, particularly in cybersecurity, medical technology, and water management, that a boycott becomes a self-inflicted wound for whoever participates.
On university campuses and in corporate boardrooms, pro-Israel responses increasingly use the logic of civil rights and inclusion. Instead of debating the history of the conflict, these responses frame BDS as a movement that creates a hostile environment for Jewish students and employees. This strategy often leverages the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. By adopting this definition, institutions agree that certain criticisms of Israel can cross into antisemitism, which allows pro-Israel advocates to use institutional HR and DEI frameworks to challenge BDS activity directly.
Following the Abraham Accords, a newer strategic response emphasizes normalization. This strategy highlights growing cooperation between Israel and Arab nations like the UAE, Morocco, and Bahrain, and frames BDS as an exclusionary movement standing in the way of regional peace and economic integration. By pointing to Arab-Israeli collaboration in trade and security, advocates frame BDS as a relic of an older, more confrontational era being outpaced by actual diplomatic progress.
Pro-Israel responses also focus on exposing links between BDS leadership and organizations that Western governments designate as terrorist groups. Groups like NGO Monitor and the ADL produce research purporting to show overlapping personnel or funding streams between boycott activists and groups like Hamas or the PFLP. This targets the legitimacy of the movement in the eyes of mainstream liberal institutions and aims to make association with BDS a reputational risk for corporate and political leaders.
These strategies reflect a shift toward using institutional tools rather than relying solely on military or diplomatic force. Pro-Israel advocates use law, finance, and institutional policy to create a high-cost environment for those who support the boycott. They have transitioned from traditional debate to a form of digital competitive control, using doxxing not as random malice but as a strategic tool to raise the cost of entry for BDS activism.
The most sophisticated versions of this are sites like Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism. Canary Mission focuses on students and professors, with the explicit goal of ensuring that today’s radicals do not become tomorrow’s employees. By aggregating social media posts, protest footage, and organizational affiliations into searchable profiles, the site ensures that the first thing a recruiter finds when searching a candidate’s name is an accusation of antisemitism or support for terrorism. StopAntisemitism uses a name-and-shame model, often tagging the employers of individuals who make controversial statements online. By late 2025, the group’s executive director claimed they had profiled 1,000 people, with over 400 resulting in job losses.
The primary objective of this approach is not to fire every activist but to create a high-cost landscape. A 2025 survey of people on these lists found that over 40% toned down their activism due to fear. By conflating anti-Zionist activism with antisemitism, these groups force the BDS movement to spend its energy defending its own legitimacy rather than attacking Israel. A notable evolution in 2024 and 2025 was the use of doxxing trucks, mobile billboards circling campuses like Harvard and Yale displaying the names and faces of students who signed anti-Israel letters. This brings digital exposure into physical space, making the threat visible to a student’s peers and neighbors.
While these groups are officially independent, they work in concert with state power. Israeli intelligence services have reportedly used Canary Mission profiles to screen and deny entry to activists at Ben Gurion Airport. In early 2025, U.S. federal agents reportedly used these private databases as leads to investigate international students for potential deportation based on protest activity. The activist fighting one of these sites is not fighting a website. They are fighting an ecosystem that connects a college protest to a future job, travel plans, and legal residency.
Several things deserve emphasis beyond the mechanics. The legal battle is part of the war itself. Civil liberties groups argue that many anti-BDS laws violate the First Amendment because political boycotts have historically been treated as protected speech, and several federal courts have struck down or narrowed state laws on that basis. Both sides try to shape constitutional doctrine, not just public opinion.
The arena is also transnational. The EU has taken a different approach from the United States, with European courts ruling that calls for boycotts can be protected political expression. Some European governments require labeling of products from Israeli settlements. The institutional environment differs dramatically across jurisdictions, which creates opportunities and constraints for both sides.
What ties all of this together is a contest over reputational status inside institutions. The central questions become who is legitimate, who is extremist, who discriminates, and who is a victim. BDS activists frame their work as human rights accountability. Pro-Israel advocates frame BDS as antisemitic discrimination. Both sides try to place the other into the institutional category that triggers sanctions.
The deeper issue beneath all of this is a legitimacy contest over Israel’s place in the international system. BDS aims to treat Israel as a pariah state similar to apartheid-era South Africa. The counter-strategy aims to integrate Israel into global economic and technological networks so deeply that isolation becomes impossible. If Israel becomes indispensable in cybersecurity, semiconductor design, agricultural technology, and missile defense, the cost of isolating it rises dramatically. What we are watching is not just lawfare or narrative warfare. It is a long-term legitimacy war fought inside Western institutions, where the key terrain is universities, corporations, and professional networks rather than battlefields.

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Our Enemies Exploit Western Legalism

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Luke Ford

Defeating the exploitation of Western legalism requires a transition from seeing law as a constraint to seeing it as a maneuver space. The thinkers who address this usually fall under the banner of lawfare—the use of law as a weapon of war. While David Kilcullen identifies the problem, the following thinkers provide the framework for a counter-strategy.

Charles Dunlap Jr.: The Architect of Lawfare

Major General Charles Dunlap is the most prominent voice on this topic. He argues that law is not just a set of rules but a functional weapon system. For Dunlap, the deepest way to defeat legalistic exploitation is to embrace it. He suggests that democratic militaries must use law affirmatively to achieve strategic goals. That means integrating legal advisors into the earliest stages of operational planning so that every move is designed to maximize legal legitimacy while putting the adversary in a “legal checkmate.” He views our respect for the law as a center of gravity that enemies attack; therefore, we must defend it by being better at the “legal game” than they are.

Orde Kittrie: Law as a Strategic Tool

Orde Kittrie argues that the United States is currently “unarmed” in the legal battlespace. In his work, he details how China and Iran have made lawfare a core part of their military doctrine. To defeat this, Kittrie recommends Legal Statecraft. This involves using domestic and international courts to strip adversaries of their resources and legitimacy before a single shot is fired. He cites examples like using private litigation to hold state sponsors of terrorism financially liable, which creates a form of “economic deterrence” that functions alongside military power.

Bobby Chesney and the “Defend Forward” Logic

Robert “Bobby” Chesney focuses on how law evolves in the gray zone, particularly in cyber and intelligence operations. He argues that we often lose because our legal frameworks are built for a clear “peace/war” binary that no longer exists. His work with the Lawfare Institute explores how to build a domestic legal architecture that allows the military to “defend forward.” This means engaging adversaries in the gray zone—where they think they are safe—by creating new legal authorities that allow for persistent engagement below the threshold of traditional war.

Key Strategies for Countering Legal Exploitation

Legal Resilience: Building systems that are not easily paralyzed by “frivolous” international legal claims or propaganda.

Aggressive Litigation: Using the Western court system to target the financial and logistical networks of non-state actors like the Houthis or Hezbollah.

Information Integrity: Ensuring that the “legal narrative” of a conflict is won in real-time. This prevents adversaries from using civilian casualties as a way to “de-legitimize” a military operation.

That shift toward a proactive legal strategy is what allows a state to escape the trap of being “handcuffed” by its own values. It moves the conflict from a defensive posture—where we constantly apologize for our actions—to an offensive one where we use the law to delegitimize the enemy.

The 2026 war between the U.S.-Israeli coalition and Iran—which accelerated rapidly following the joint strikes in late February—is forcing a massive strategic pivot. The conflict is moving beyond Kilcullen’s “liminal” phase into what some are calling the “Post-Legal” era of warfare.

The joint operation on February 28, 2026, which reportedly resulted in the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, represents a violent rupture of the legal norms that usually govern Western military action. This war is currently generating three new paths for defeating legalistic exploitation.

1. The “Illegal but Legitimate” Precedent

Legal thinkers at institutes like Just Security are observing a widening gap between international law and state behavior. While UN experts have condemned the 2026 strikes as violations of the UN Charter, many Western and regional states have offered “mild or even supportive” reactions. This suggests a shift toward the “law of self-preservation.”

The New Path: Instead of seeking prior legal authorization, states are acting first and seeking “normative legitimacy” afterward. This treats the law not as a permission slip, but as a secondary arena for narrative management.

2. Deep-Penetration Cyber Lawfare

The recent “Four-Hour Cyber War” on Tehran showcased a new integration of law and technology. Israel used real-time intelligence from deeply penetrated mobile networks and traffic cameras to execute high-value targeting.

The Defeat of Exploitation: In the past, adversaries used civilian infrastructure as a “legal shield.” The 2026 conflict shows the West using that same connectivity to create a “digital glass house.” By mastering the urban littoral’s digital layer, the coalition neutralized the protection traditionally afforded by hiding in dense civilian environments.

3. Financial Lawfare 2.0 (DeFi Compression)

As the Houthi maritime blockade intensified in 2025, the U.S. began using “lawfare coalitions” to target the decentralized finance (DeFi) channels used by Iranian proxies.

The Strategy: Thinkers like Orde Kittrie have long advocated for this, but the 2026 war has pushed it into high gear. By leveraging U.S. terror designations against PMF and Houthi financiers, the coalition is compressing the “Hawala” and crypto-transfer systems that previously allowed these groups to operate outside the reach of traditional sanctions.

4. The “Byzantine” Shift in Proxy Management

A significant development in 2026 is the attempt to “reclaim sovereignty” for states like Iraq and Lebanon.

The Counter-Strategy: Instead of Western troops fighting proxies, the focus has shifted to forcing local governments to issue arrest warrants for Hezbollah and militia members. This uses the local state’s own legal machinery against the “snakes.” It is a direct application of Kilcullen’s Byzantine mindset: use the local political architecture to neutralize the hybrid threat from within.

The 2026 war is essentially proving that the best way to defeat the exploitation of Western legalism is to stop treating the law as a set of static rules and start treating it as a contested geography.

As of early March 2026, the strategy against Houthi “DeFi” (Decentralized Finance) networks has evolved from simple sanctions into a more aggressive form of DeFi Compression.

The Mechanics of DeFi Compression

This new path forward involves moving beyond the “legal shield” that crypto and decentralized networks once provided.

On-Chain Identification: In January 2026, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated UK-registered exchanges like Zedcex and Zedxion. These platforms had reportedly processed tens of billions of dollars for IRGC-linked networks. By including specific Tron addresses in the sanctions, the U.S. effectively “blacklisted” the liquidity itself rather than just the people behind it.

Network-Level Neutralization: The current strategy uses “Legal Statecraft” to force stablecoin issuers and larger exchanges to freeze assets in real-time. Chainalysis reports that since the February 28 strikes on Tehran, crypto markets have seen visible, near-real-time asset movements as these “compression” tactics squeeze the Houthi’s ability to cash out into local currencies or buy dual-use drone components.

The “Byzantine” Aspect: Instead of just attacking the wallets, the coalition is pressuring the regional nodes in the UAE and Oman. By using local legal machinery to target “front companies” and “Hawala” exchange houses in Sana’a, they are trying to break the link between the global digital economy and the local physical one.

The “Illegal but Legitimate” Shift

The assassination of Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, during a joint U.S.-Israeli operation, has created a “Post-Legal” precedent.

The Strategy: The coalition used high-level intelligence to execute a “decapitation strike” that bypassed traditional international legal norms regarding state sovereignty.

The Result: While many international bodies condemned the strike, the lack of a unified global pushback suggests that “legitimacy”—based on the perceived threat of a nuclear Iran—is replacing “legality” as the primary driver of Western action. This is the ultimate “counter-envelopment” of the legal trap Kilcullen warns about.

Liminality to Visibility

By targeting the very “liminal” tools Iran used—such as the IRIS Dena, which was sunk on March 4, 2026—the U.S. and its allies are signaling that the “gray zone” no longer offers protection. The “snakes” are being forced into the open, where their asymmetric advantages disappear.

The 2026 conflict has turned the Houthi “DeFi” network from a hidden asset into a strategic liability. As of March 2026, the blockade in the Bab al-Mandab is undergoing a slow collapse, not because of naval gunfire alone, but because of the aggressive “DeFi Compression” that is starving their procurement system.

The Collapse of the Houthi Procurement Cycle

Kilcullen’s “Theory of Competitive Control” suggests that an actor stays in power by providing a reliable normative system. In 2026, the U.S. and its partners are breaking that system by targeting the Houthi “business model.”

The Russia-China-Yemen Nexus: Recent OFAC actions in March 2026 targeted a network led by Sa’id al-Jamal, which used crypto to buy weapons and sensitive commodities from Russia and the PRC. By sanctioning the specific digital wallets used for these transactions, the U.S. has made it nearly impossible for Houthi operatives in Hong Kong and Turkey to “off-ramp” their funds into the local currencies needed to pay for drone components.

Oil Revenue Sabotage: The Houthis were generating over $2 billion annually through illegal oil sales facilitated by UAE-based front companies like Arkan Mars. The 2026 “DeFi Compression” has targeted the exchange houses in Sana’a that laundered this cash. Without this liquidity, the Houthis can no longer offer the high “hazard pay” that kept their maritime militias active during the 2024–2025 campaign.

The “Squeeze” in the Bab al-Mandab

The impact on the physical blockade is visible. While the Houthis signaled a resumption of attacks after the February 28 strikes on Tehran, the operational tempo has dropped significantly.

The Hodeidah decapitation: Beyond finance, the August 2025 and early 2026 Israeli strikes on the Hodeidah port—specifically targeting the “Judicial Custodian” networks that manage stolen assets—have broken the internal supply chain.

The “Byzantine” Proxy Choice: The Houthi leadership is currently divided. One faction wants to join Iran’s war fully to maintain “Axis of Resistance” credentials, but another faction—feeling the weight of the “DeFi compression”—fears that a renewed blockade will invite a total decapitation of their remaining political structure.

From Asymmetry to Exhaustion

Kilcullen argues that the West usually loses because it plays a high-cost game. In 2026, the tables have turned. By using “Legal Statecraft” to target the Houthi’s digital and financial “littoral,” the coalition has forced the Houthis into the high-cost position.

They are losing their best leaders.

Their digital assets are being frozen in real-time.

Their regional “allies” (the dragons) are finding it too legally risky to facilitate their trades.

That is the essence of defeating legalistic exploitation: you don’t break the law; you use the law to make the enemy’s existence too expensive to maintain.

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Decoding Military Historian Antulio Echevarria

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Luke Ford

Antulio Echevarria occupies a different intellectual niche from David Kilcullen or Frank Hoffman. He is less a practitioner of counterinsurgency and more a Clausewitzian historian of strategy. His work tries to clarify what modern conflict is, rather than inventing new buzzwords for it.
Echevarria provides a necessary corrective to the obsession with novelty in military circles. He argues that the West suffers from a strategic culture that treats war as a light switch, either on or off. This binary view creates a self-imposed paralysis. Where Kilcullen or Hoffman focus on the tactical adaptation of the insurgent, Echevarria focuses on the intellectual rigidity of the state.
He distinguishes between a change in the character of war and a change in its nature. To Echevarria, the nature of war remains the interplay of chance, reason, and passion. Only the tools change. By inventing terms like “hybrid war” or “gray zone,” planners risk treating these as distinct phenomena that require separate doctrines. This compartmentalization plays into the hands of rivals who view the entire spectrum of statecraft as a single, unified struggle.
His analysis of the American way of war runs deeper than most. The United States, he argues, possesses a way of battle but lacks a way of strategy. The American military focuses on the destruction of enemy forces. This leaves a vacuum when the enemy refuses to provide a target for a decisive strike. The obsession with “shaping the environment” often masks a lack of clear political objectives.
His skepticism extends to technology. Where many see cyber warfare as a revolution, Echevarria sees another form of the same coercion states used through blockades or subversion. A cyber attack is only strategic if it achieves a political shift. Most do not. They remain at the level of harassment.
The sharpest part of his argument concerns the “threshold.” Western planners spend years trying to define exactly when an act of aggression becomes an act of war. Rivals use that effort against the West, treating the threshold as a playground. By the time a Western legal team decides a line was crossed, the rival has already moved it.
The remedy, Echevarria argues, is not more technology or better definitions. It is a return to classical strategic thinking, which means accepting that peace is never absolute and that competition is the natural state of international affairs. The struggle is already underway. Waiting for a war to start is itself a strategic failure.
Several threads run through his work with particular force.
On the gray zone, Echevarria pushes back against the idea that gray-zone conflict represents something genuinely new. States have always pursued objectives through pressure, coercion, and limited violence short of full-scale war. The “gray zone” is a new Western label for old strategic behavior, not a new phenomenon.
On legalism, he argues that Western countries conceptualize war through legal categories inherited from international law and diplomatic practice: peace, armed conflict, ceasefire, postwar order. Rival powers are not constrained by that mental framework. They blur those boundaries deliberately. The real vulnerability lies not in Western military weakness but in Western conceptual habits.
On positional competition, he argues that rival powers often aim not to defeat the West militarily but to accumulate small advantages that gradually shift the balance of power. Territorial claims backed by coast guard forces, proxy militias shaping regional politics, cyber operations eroding institutional trust, economic pressure creating political leverage. Each move is limited. Together they alter the strategic landscape. The goal is positional advantage, not decisive victory.
On coercion and deterrence, gray-zone competition blends both tools. Coercion pressures an opponent to change behavior. Deterrence discourages a forceful response. The gray zone sits between them. A rival applies pressure while keeping actions below the threshold that would justify a major military response.
Because Echevarria is a Clausewitz scholar, politics remains the center of gravity in his reading of all this. For Clausewitz, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Echevarria extends that idea outward. In gray-zone conflict, the “other means” simply expand beyond conventional military force to include political warfare, economic pressure, information operations, and proxy violence. All are instruments of strategic competition.
His conclusion is that Western countries need to stop thinking of war as a discrete event and start seeing strategic rivalry as a continuous process. The contest is not decided in a single battle. It is decided by which side gradually shapes the political environment to its advantage.
He applies this Clausewitzian lens to the South China Sea, treating it as a theater of positional competition rather than a series of isolated maritime disputes. Beijing, he argues, is not merely building islands. It executes a long-term strategy of strategic preclusion, shutting out American options before they can be exercised. Coast guard vessels and maritime militia apply coercive pressure to smaller neighbors like the Philippines and Vietnam. Advanced anti-access and area-denial systems on the artificial islands deter American intervention. The two work together to move the goalposts without triggering a conventional battle.
The West, he argues, loses ground in that theater because it views it through a legalist prism. The United States focuses on Freedom of Navigation Operations to uphold international law. China focuses on the physical reality of control. From a Clausewitzian perspective, law is one more instrument of politics. If a rival creates a fait accompli on the water, the legal argument becomes a secondary concern.
He also uses the South China Sea to critique the American military’s desire for an end state. There is no end state there. There is only a continuous process of maneuvering for leverage. The United States, he argues, must stop waiting for a decisive moment and learn to compete with its own non-kinetic tools, integrating economic partnerships and persistent maritime presence into a single strategic whole rather than treating them as separate diplomatic and military tracks.
His critique of the Joint Concept for Competing follows the same logic. He argues the document fails because it frames strategic competition as a space between war and peace, which introduces a bias toward softer qualities of statecraft and obscures the violent and governing aspects of rivalry. More than eighty percent of wars since antiquity occurred between established rivals. By treating competition as something distinct from war, the doctrine ignores that competition is often the primary cause of war.
He also rejects what he calls the “competition continuum,” the cooperation-competition-conflict model the military favors. That model encourages planners to think in terms of shifting between states rather than recognizing that rivalries often aim at the total termination of a competitor’s political regime. Carthage ended. The Soviet Union ended. Competition does conclude, and it often concludes through the collapse of one side’s capacity to compete.
For Echevarria, the Army must move from a way of battle to a way of war. That shift requires more than new equipment. It requires overhauling professional military education and doctrinal logic. Military professionals focus on winning battles while policymakers focus on the diplomacy that precedes or follows them. That split creates a vacuum. Victory is not a military event. It is a political outcome, and leaders need to think about the aftermath before the first shot is fired.
He also criticizes the formulaic approach to strategy. The equation Strategy = Ends + Ways + Means encourages leaders to treat strategy as a balancing act of resources rather than an art of outmaneuvering a living opponent. He wants officers to recognize that tactical success can sometimes be politically counterproductive, and he wants theory and concept to become central to War College curricula rather than optional electives.
On artificial intelligence, Echevarria sees a tool that might deepen the very way-of-battle bias he has spent his career critiquing. AI can accelerate the first grammar of war, the mechanics of moving, shooting, and communicating. It does nothing to solve the problem of the logic of war. Military planners often view AI as a tool to eliminate the fog of war. From a Clausewitzian perspective, that is a fallacy. AI might process data faster, but it also increases the pace of interaction with a living opponent, creating new forms of friction that are more complex and less predictable than the old ones.
He also worries about what he calls the “unequal dialogue” between military advisors and civilian leaders. AI-enhanced analytics might make military advice appear more objective and scientific than it is. If a general presents a plan backed by an algorithm, a civilian policymaker finds it harder to question. Echevarria fears this shifts power toward the military, allowing tactical grammar to drive political logic rather than the reverse.
Most AI applications in the military focus on targeting, precision, sensor-to-shooter links, and autonomous platforms for kinetic strikes. Those tools reinforce the belief that war is a series of engineering problems solved through more efficient destruction. They neglect the socio-cultural and political dimensions of conflict. There is a risk of what he calls “high-tech paralysis,” where the West possesses the most efficient killing machine in history but cannot translate that efficiency into a favorable political peace.
Finally, AI relies on historical data to predict future outcomes. In a strategic rivalry, that is dangerous because it assumes the future will resemble the past. It discourages the creative imagination and talent for judgment that Clausewitz considered essential for a great commander. By outsourcing judgment to machines, the Army risks producing leaders who can optimize a battle but cannot conceive a strategy.

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Decoding Counter-Insurgency Expert David Kilcullen

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Luke Ford

David Kilcullen does not fit neatly into the usual categories. He is not a think-tank hawk pushing for the next intervention, and he is not a pure academic writing for journals nobody reads. He came up through the counterinsurgency wars of the 2000s, served as an adviser to General David Petraeus during the Iraq surge, and left that experience with a durable skepticism about what military force can actually accomplish. That background shapes everything he argues.
His central claim is that the West is losing a war it does not know it is fighting. Western strategic thinking still operates on a linear model: peace, then crisis, then war, then settlement. Countries like China and Iran rejected that sequence long ago. They work on a continuous conflict spectrum, using cyber operations, economic pressure, information warfare, proxy forces, and political subversion to reshape the strategic environment without ever crossing the threshold that would trigger a conventional military response. Kilcullen calls this conceptual envelopment. The West does not lose because its enemies are stronger. It loses because its framework for understanding conflict is too narrow to see what is happening until the damage is done.
The term he uses for how adversaries stay below that threshold is liminal warfare, drawn from the Latin word for threshold. Russia, Iran, and China all operate in the space between peace and war, close enough to cause real harm but never far enough across the line to justify a conventional response. This creates what Kilcullen describes as a symmetry of frustration. The West holds a hammer of conventional military superiority, but the nail never protrudes far enough to strike.
Iran is his primary case study. Through Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, Iran keeps kinetic conflict away from its own soil and inside liminal space. Tehran provides the technology and the strategic direction while proxies pull the trigger. This arrangement makes it nearly impossible for Western powers to strike Iran directly without appearing to be the aggressor in a conflict they technically started. Kilcullen also argues that the 2003 invasion of Iraq removed the primary regional counterweight to Iranian power, a wound the Middle Eastern order has never recovered from. Iran has since pursued a strategy of hollowing out neighboring states, turning Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen into what Kilcullen calls feral zones where it can project influence without the burden of formal governance.
The Houthi maritime campaign in the Red Sea illustrates how far this logic extends. The Houthis use inexpensive drones and missiles, often costing a few thousand dollars, to threaten commercial vessels worth hundreds of millions. Western navies respond with interceptor missiles that cost millions each. Kilcullen sees this cost inversion as a form of economic attrition the West is currently losing. The United States-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, in his reading, treats the symptom rather than the system. It targets the missiles rather than the broader Houthi-Iran network that produces them. Conventional deterrence assumes an adversary fears a decisive blow. The Houthis do not. For them, being at war with the United States raises their domestic legitimacy and their standing in the regional resistance alliance. The Western military response strengthens their political position rather than weakening it.
China operates differently but draws on the same logic. Where the Houthis swarm and disrupt, China slices. Each move in the South China Sea, whether building an artificial island or using fishing vessels to block a Philippine resupply mission, is calibrated to stay small enough that it does not justify a war. The Maritime Militia, civilians in blue uniforms operating fishing boats, exploits Western legalism in the same way Iran’s proxies do. If an American destroyer fires on a fishing boat, the West becomes the aggressor. The massive military advantage the United States holds remains effectively unusable because there is no clean, legally defined act of war to respond to.
Kilcullen’s prescription draws on Byzantine history. The Eastern Roman Empire survived for centuries against stronger enemies not through decisive battlefield victories but through defensive depth, alliances, economic leverage, intelligence networks, and patience. It focused on outlasting adversaries rather than crushing them. Kilcullen argues the West needs a similar pivot. The goal should not be to win every local encounter but to build enough resilience that liminal attacks lose their strategic value. If Western domestic systems can absorb disruptions in the Red Sea or the South China Sea without triggering political or economic crises at home, adversaries discover they are spending resources for diminishing returns.
That resilience framework points toward offshore balancing. Rather than maintaining expensive, high-profile presences in every contested littoral zone, the West empowers regional allies to serve as the primary buffer. The military shifts from direct actor to backstop. Local partners, who have permanent stakes in their regions, bear the forward burden. That lowers costs and forces adversaries to contend with actors who will not disengage when a news cycle moves on.
The honest tension in Kilcullen’s thinking is political rather than intellectual. His strategy requires democratic societies to accept permanent, low-level competition without a decisive victory to point to. It asks for patience, ambiguity, and sustained discipline across decades and across administrations. Democratic publics tend to prefer short wars with clear outcomes. Kilcullen’s framework offers neither. Success, in his model, looks like the stable political order continuing to function despite sustained pressure. That is a hard thing to sell, and he knows it. His work is widely admired among strategists and difficult to translate into policy for precisely that reason.

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