Subject International Relations

Two months before Foxconn’s technicians found their travel to India quietly slowed, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sat down together in Busan. The meeting did not produce a dramatic rupture. It produced something more consequential for the countries watching from…

The most effective form of coercion may be the one that never looks like coercion. A border can be altered without a battle. A territorial claim can be strengthened without an occupation. A supply chain can be disrupted without an…

When Xi Jinping spoke at the World AI Conference in Shanghai in July 2025, his description of AI development as a “symphony” of international cooperation sounded familiar enough. Four months later, however, the language had acquired an institutional form. At…

Strategic autonomy becomes difficult to define when the technology and supply chains that make autonomy possible sit outside the country. A government can refuse to join a formal alliance and still find its choices constrained by who supplies its machinery,…

Strategic autonomy sounds strongest when a country has choices. India certainly has them on paper. It can deepen ties with the United States, maintain relations with Russia, work through the Quad, participate in multiple coalitions, and still engage China where…

A country can own the mineral, have the money to buy it, and still remain strategically dependent on someone else. That sounds contradictory until the supply chain is viewed as a system rather than as a collection of resources. The…

A country can possess a large share of the world’s resources and still have very little power over the industries that depend on them. The reverse is also true. A country can control a resource it barely owns simply by…

A country does not need to own most of the world’s resources to control the supply chain. It needs to control the part that everyone else cannot quickly replace. That distinction explains China’s unusual power over rare earths. China holds…

A country can become strategically powerful without controlling the resource everyone depends on. It can become powerful by becoming the place where the machines are built, the components are supplied, the engineers are trained and the production systems are already…