Informing U.S. engagement with the world

The Pentagon, led by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, is purging female and minority officers from military positions and removing them from promotion lists. U.S. national security will pay the price.

Fix and Fiott argue that Europe has three options to prepare for a future of limited or conditional U.S. support: It can hope for a more European NATO, develop an EU-based defense union, or create a more flexible European defense coalition of the willing to deter against Russia and absorb future shocks to the transatlantic relationship.

Introduction  Over the last twenty years, China has emerged as the United States and Europe’s [PDF] most important foreign source of upstream inputs of critical medicines—namely, key starting materials (KSMs) and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). As U.S. and EU regulators and media more heavily scrutinized API and KSM production, a process that often involves chemical […]

Americans have already staked more than $1.4 billion on prediction markets tied to the outcome of 2026 U.S. midterm elections, and that figure is expected to exceed $2 billion by election day. Those markets hold significant potential as political bellwethers, but only if policymakers take steps to control for insider trading and improve oversight.

India has been skeptical of the U.S.-led liberal international order since its independence. Now, the United States also seems keen to abandon the order it once championed. This transition period poses a host of challenges—and a few opportunities for collaboration—for the world’s two largest democracies.

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.