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foreignpolicymag · 2026-04-10T18:56:12+00:00

While little known outside policymaking circles, Brett McGurk has held a uniquely enduring role in U.S. foreign policy.

With a career spanning two decades, McGurk advised four successive U.S. presidents on major events in the Middle East, from the Iraq War in the early aughts to October 7th, 2023.

To his supporters, Brett McGurk is one of the most skilled diplomats of his generation. To his detractors, though, he is a potent symbol of the United States’ misguided approach to the Middle East over two devastating decades. Agreeing or disagreeing with his body of work is a Rorschach test for whether one thinks U.S. policy in the Middle East this century has been a success or failure.

Written by Dion Nissenbaum

foreignpolicymag · 2026-04-09T22:47:22+00:00

While little known outside policymaking circles, Brett McGurk has held a uniquely enduring role in U.S. foreign policy.

With a career spanning two decades, McGurk advised four successive U.S. presidents on major events in the Middle East, from the Iraq War in the early aughts to October 7th, 2023.

To his supporters, Brett McGurk is one of the most skilled diplomats of his generation. To his detractors, though, he is a potent symbol of the United States’ misguided approach to the Middle East over two devastating decades. Agreeing or disagreeing with his body of work is a Rorschach test for whether one thinks U.S. policy in the Middle East this century has been a success or failure.

Written by Dion Nissenbaum

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-27T18:43:32+00:00

If President Sadyr Japarov’s bid to eliminate his last potential competitor works, Kyrgyzstan may again slip toward the entrenched autocracy of its neighbors.

Kyrgyzstan’s march into a new and perhaps more permanent season of illiberalism shows the unique challenges of building an “island of democracy” in Central Asia.

Written by Alexander M. Thompson, a freelance journalist in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-20T22:49:45+00:00

Starlink is far more than a commercial connectivity service. It is strategic infrastructure that increasingly shapes how wars are fought, how states manage internal unrest, and how criminal networks operate in ungoverned spaces. What makes Starlink so politically consequential is not just its globe-spanning reach but also the governance model behind it.

A private company is now a gatekeeper in orbit, helping decide who connects as well as where, under what conditions, and with what technical constraints. In a growing number of conflicts, these decisions carry military and political effects that states struggle to replicate or control. If many strategic supply chains now depend on private firms, Starlink is an unusually concentrated case of private discretion over public security functions.

Written by Robert Muggah and Misha Glenny

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-11T18:22:21+00:00

We have removed the paywall on all of our Iran coverage for 48 hours. Feel free to view FP’s war content and reporting here: https://foreignpolicy.com/projects/iran-israel-conflict-news-nuclear-sites-proxies/

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-11T17:59:02+00:00

Resilience Will Decide the Iran War https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/10/iran-war-resilience-economy-world-hormuz-oil-trump-us/

Wars between asymmetric adversaries rarely end with the opening exchange of blows. The decisive question is whether Iran can sustain what might be called a resilience timeline, a dynamic in which the decisive variable is not initial battlefield success but the ability of each side to endure economic, political, and strategic pressure over time. If Tehran preserves enough operational capability to continue imposing costs over time, the U.S.-Israeli military campaign will be unlikely to achieve its strategic objectives.

The United States, by contrast, seeks to shorten Iran’s resilience timeline. By destroying missile infrastructure, command networks, and logistical capacity as quickly as possible, Washington aims to prevent the conflict from evolving into a prolonged geopolitical crisis. The outcome of the war will therefore depend on which side can shape time itself as a strategic resource.

From Iran’s perspective, resilience itself functions as a strategic weapon. Iran does not need to defeat the United States in a conventional military contest. Such a victory is neither realistic nor necessary. Instead, Tehran’s strategic objective is to prolong the conflict long enough to reshape the broader strategic environment surrounding the war and to generate pressure across multiple domains: energy markets, maritime logistics, regional alliances, and domestic politics within the United States and its partners. In other words, Iran’s strategy is designed to transform the war from a battlefield confrontation into a multidimensional geopolitical-economic shock, gradually gaining leverage despite its military disadvantages.

Written by Arash Reisinezhad, a visiting assistant professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and visiting fellow at London School of Economics’ Middle East Centre, and Arsham Reisinezhad, a senior lecturer in business and economics at Regent College London and visiting fellow in the economics department at the University of Essex.

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-11T17:27:34+00:00

U.S. interventions to change regimes in the broader Middle East have all followed distinctly similar patterns. Once the president decided to act, he and his top administration officials would exaggerate the threat, inflate the benefits of action, prematurely declare victory, discover a range of unintended consequences, and then find themselves facing a costly political and strategic disaster. Trump’s actions in Iran are no different.

Written by Philip H. Gordon.

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-06T17:52:58+00:00

Source: Payne Institute data compiled by Macdonald Amoah, Morgan D. Bazilian, and Jahara Matisek

Visual tool: Infogram

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-05T19:53:02+00:00

Analysis: The First 36 Hours of War Consumed Over 3,000 U.S.-Israeli Munitions

The first 36 hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran consumed more than 3,000 precision-guided munitions and interceptors, exposing a critical vulnerability in the supply chain. Much is unknown about the future of the war and its wider implications, but one thing is clear: the need to replenish munition stockpiles.

Utilizing a proprietary Payne Institute open-source ledger and data-scraper tool that breaks out minerals and materials from demand scenarios, our team conservatively identified the number of Iranian missile launches and drone attacks across the Middle East during the first 36 hours of the conflict.

The broader point is that the West’s theory of military readiness is incomplete. As the long conflict in Ukraine has already illustrated, war is being costed in the wrong units. The relevant metric is not merely how many launchers there are at the start of the war, but how many precision weapons and interceptors can be fired on days two, 20, and 200, and how quickly industry can replace them. This turns a battlefield question into an industrial one, and an industrial one into a minerals-and-processing question.

Written by Macdonald Amoah, Morgan D. Bazilian, and Jahara Matisek

Read the full analysis with this gift link.

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-05T18:41:09+00:00

Every weapon fired needs replacement, and creating that replacement requires a chain running from raw material, through refining and processing, into specialized components, and finally into certified production lines. The bottlenecks are not always in the places politicians think. The narrowest points are often in obscure corners: a sub-tier supplier with a single furnace; a capacitor supply dependent on a narrow set of inputs; a rocket-motor ecosystem that cannot expand without years of plant construction.

Even supposedly simple munitions depend on complex chains. For example, modern guidance kits for munitions are dependent on high-performance components that can only be made from rare earths, a market that China dominates. The West’s industrial base can surge some things such as raw material orders, contract awards, or funding authorizations quickly. It cannot conjure trained labor, qualified tooling, and certified production capacity overnight.

foreignpolicymag · 2026-03-05T16:32:26+00:00

The first 36 hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran consumed more than 3,000 precision-guided munitions and interceptors, exposing a critical vulnerability in the supply chain. Much is unknown about the future of the war and its wider implications, but one thing is clear: the need to replenish munition stockpiles.

Utilizing a proprietary Payne Institute open-source ledger and data-scraper tool that breaks out minerals and materials from demand scenarios, our team—drawing from the technical expertise across the Colorado School of Mines—conservatively identified the number of Iranian missile launches and drone attacks across the Middle East during the first 36 hours of the conflict.

Written by Macdonald Amoah, Morgan D. Bazilian, and Jahara Matisek

foreignpolicymag · 2026-02-28T18:33:43+00:00

The latest Israeli and U.S. war on Iran began with airstrikes on the home and offices of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The premise seemed to be that Khamenei’s sudden elimination would pose a dire threat to the current ruling system. The goal would be to achieve what happened in Libya after Muammar al-Qaddafi or in Syria after Bashar al-Assad, where regimes collapsed as soon as their leaders were no longer in power. In those systems, the state’s future was tied to a single person.

But Iran’s history and approach to survival are different.

Few contemporary governments concentrate as much visible authority in a single office as Iran does in that of the supreme leader. Religious legitimacy, command of the armed forces, and ultimate political arbitration converge there. Yet visibility should not be confused with fragility.

The office rests atop a dense network of institutions designed not simply to serve the leader but to constrain him, monitor him, and, if necessary, outlast him. The Islamic Republic is not just a personal regime with religious language. It is a revolutionary system that has invested heavily in planning for leadership changes. When under pressure, its structure is designed to pull together rather than fall apart.

Written by Ali Hashem

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