Jane Perlez's and William Wan's articles in today's papers (the New York Times and Washington Post, respectively) stand as a minor but important milestone in elite understanding of international relations in the 21st century. Though they provide only a summary of a Brookings monograph - the product...

The Japanese military is emerging from decades of pacifism. But do the country's political leaders have the vision and the will to make the country strong again?

Unless Congress acts, this summer the Pentagon will begin making across-the-board cuts in defense programs — cuts that will eventually be so deep that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said they will end the United States’s status as a global superpower. Yet there seems to be...

Make no mistake: as defense budgets go down, so does America’s capacity to give its men and women in uniform the tools they need to defend our interests abroad—as well as our ability to sustain the world-class scientists, engineers, designers, and machinists that comprise our defense manufacturing industrial base. The military deserves better than this budget, and so does America.

Commentators tend to assume that the Japanese constitution's strict constraints on military activity form an insurmountable barrier to vigorous defensive cooperation. However, three upcoming events show that Tokyo can play a greater security role in the region without having to revise the constitution.

There are good reasons why the rhetoric from Moscow is harsher than Beijing’s. For a start, China knows lashing out at the U.S. is counterproductive.

Last year, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, also known as the “super committee,” failed to agree on over a trillion dollars in budget cuts. This failure has triggered the looming “sequestration” of an additional $500 billion in defense dollar cuts over the next 10 years, among other mechanical cuts to other parts of the budget

In this age of ballooning U.S. debt, it’s hardly surprising that many Democrats and Republicans are pushing to reduce American military spending. But a closer examination of what’s at stake reveals just how troubling the embrace of defense austerity will prove to be.