Informing U.S. engagement with the world

When armed conflict disrupts a critical maritime trade route, the United States can monitor, contain, or escalate the situation economically or militarily.

When a U.S. partner state faces a hybrid attack by an unknown aggressor, the United States should draw on various available response options to protect its treaty commitments, credibility, and commercial interests.

When a coup occurs abroad, the early hours of the crisis are most crucial for preserving and promoting U.S. interests—whether countering terrorism, checking adversaries’ regional influence, upholding human rights norms, or maintaining diplomatic and economic relationships. Policy planners should therefore prepare for the unexpected.

Insurgency-related conflicts often start without warning and can last over a decade, making the pre-crisis and early crisis phases crucial for U.S. policymakers seeking to prevent national security threats and humanitarian disasters from emerging. Effective responses involve a complex set of legal authorities and international frameworks and require the sustained support of the American public and local communities.

A Council on Foreign Relations study group convened scholars and political analysts to examine the foreign policy views of several groups of 2024 Donald Trump voters: Hispanic, Black, Jewish, Muslim, evangelical, and white working-class Americans who supported Trump in that year’s election.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) means policymakers need to navigate a future defined by technological uncertainty. To help them do so, CFR asked foreign policy experts to predict how frontier AI capabilities and the governance structures that could emerge around them will affect the global order.

The U.S. weapons arsenal has been depleted and no longer has the capacity to deter a Chinese attack against Taiwan. In order to prepare for future conflicts in the South China Sea and elsewhere, the United States should undertake reforms of its defense industrial base to focus on the scaling of precise mass systems.

The U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain faces a threat equal to the “rare earths” challenge already posed by China’s exploitation of its dominance of those critical minerals. The authors provide an archetype model that policymakers and researchers can use to anticipate and mitigate a crisis.

Washington needs to pursue a Belarus policy that cautiously renews relations with Minsk, engages Moscow to reduce the risk of overreaction, and prepares for annexation despite Washington’s best efforts to prevent it, argues CFR Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Fellow Thomas Graham.

CFR’s U.S. Government Deal Tracker shows how the government is experimenting with new tools and financing structures to advance a range of strategic sectors, including critical minerals, energy, global logistics, manufacturing, telecommunications, and other technologies.

A gap in private funding for companies and projects inhibits energy innovation in the United States. This “missing middle” slows or blocks technologies that could help the energy system become more secure, affordable, reliable, and sustainable from advancing through the demonstration and scale-up stages. Recent events have made the missing middle wider.