North America

It is a biblical scene: the massive Philistine warrior Goliath, standing nine feet tall and heavily armed, faces the young shepherd David, who brings down the giant against all odds, overcoming fear and demonstrating courage in the face of brute size and raw power. This metaphor resonates with a reality unfolding in America today: high tech versus the people. ...

“A band-aid on a bullet hole!” That’s how Charlie McElligott, a cross-asset strategist at Nomura, described the maneuver carried out by United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on August 19. The U.S. Treasury Department announced that from September 9 to November 4, it would double the volume of long-term bond buybacks, going from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, with a focus on maturities of between 10 and 30 years. ...

Predictions of American decline have become increasingly prevalent. The United States has run persistent trade deficits for decades, but its public debt now exceeds its annual economic output. Meanwhile, and new centers of industrial and technological power continue to emerge across Asia. Yet despite these developments, no country has so far replaced the United States as the main organizing power of the international economy. Conventional explanations explain this in terms of U.S. m ...

Thanks to the AI investment boom, the U.S. economy has performed well at the macroeconomic level. However, it is on an unsustainable fiscal and debt path. Mr. Trump’s fiscal policy in his second term has aggravated this trajectory. In turn, Mr. Trump’s tariff-based trade policy has failed to address what he sees as U.S. economic problems associated with the trade balance. Besides explaining why this has been the case, and what its implications are for the U.S. economy and the r ...

The inventory is worrisomely low The US military has fired off more than 1000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly ten times the number it currently buys each year. The Pentagon used more than 1200 Patriot interceptor missiles, "more than three million dollars a pop", and more than 1000 precision strike, ground based missiles, "leaving the inventories worrisomely low." US commanders were forced to ration interceptors by letting unguided or less destructive missiles hit empty or no ...

Global imbalances are back—and this time the risks look different. The 2008 financial crisis showed how persistent current-account deficits and surpluses between major economies can fuel financial instability and trigger sudden, severe reversals of capital flows. After almost two decades, many thought that episode had been resolved. It had not. New imbalances have built up, with a familiar cast: China, Germany, Japan, and oil exporters running large surpluses, and the United States ...

The early March 2026 Pentagon briefings were tuned towards triumph and surrender - unconditional. The white flag of defeat was visible on the Iran horizon, and America's commander in chief needed only a few more weeks to declare "their military is gone. Wiped out". His secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, added to Trump's assessment his own, the Iranian navy was "decimated, destroyed and defeated", the naval fleet of the enemy rested on the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Iran's defense indu ...

It is a golden object—shining, impressive, 36.8 centimeters tall, crafted from 18-carat gold and bronze. A replica of a monumental four-meter-high work of art standing in Geneva’s Ariana Park, near the United Nations Office, it bears the title Reflections and Dreams, created by Azerbaijani artists Salhab Mammadov and Ali Ibadullayev. Hands rise from the earth, supporting a globe, reaching toward eternity. ...

The meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing this week goes far beyond the traditional framework of a bilateral encounter between the world’s two largest economies. In many respects, it is a symbolic moment in the transition toward a new international order—one increasingly shaped not only by great-power competition but also by the Global South’s growing political consciousness and strategic relevance. ...

Trump’s Strategy of Overriding Constitutional SafeguardsPerhaps bearing in mind that only a minority of voters in the United States support U.S. military action against Iran, President Donald Trump has called the war a “short term excursion” and a “little journey” that may be over “pretty quickly”. The war is thus not a war, although Trump has said the U.S. will take Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong”, and the U.S. military has admitted to attacks on 14,000 Irania ...

The commercial and geopolitical interdependence between China and Latin America makes any U.S. claim to promote a "decoupling" between them impractical. Digital technologies and critical minerals will be in the crosshairs of the North American National Security Strategy  ...

PrefaceThis series of policy briefs, Pan-Atlanticism: The Atlantic Basin in a Multipolar-Transnational World, assesses the strategic significance—and potential—of the Atlantic Basin, when viewed and engaged with as a distinct and coherent region for international cooperation or governance, and as a potential arena of strategic competition, within a shifting structure of international power that is now moving from unipolarity to a new multipolar reality.The series began by tracing th ...

Sous Trump II, la conflictualité s’affirme moins comme un simple effet de la polarisation partisane que comme un principe d’organisation de l’exercice du pouvoir. À partir des prises de parole présidentielles, ce Papier montre comment des enjeux distincts, tels que l’immigration, la fraude, la sécurité, les controverses culturelles ou les rivalités internationales, sont intégrés dans une même architecture discursive orientée vers la restauration de l’ordre. La conflictualité y appar ...

The February 20 United States Supreme Court decision against President Donald Trump’s use of the U.S. International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to establish tariffs has led him to resort to other legal instruments. So-called U.S. reciprocal tariffs on countries set out in April 2025 were based on IEEPA, as were tariffs that allegedly punished countries for allowing fentanyl into the U.S. Trump tried to evade the constraints presented by other legal instruments that could f ...

Divergent regulatory regimes for data, driven by different motivations, ranging from privacy protection in the European Union to information control in China, could eventually produce distinctively different, and possibly contradictory, bodies of data. Artificial-intelligence models trained on those datasets could produce differing and possibly even conflicting outputs. To the extent that AI outputs start to shape human perception and to influence decisions, in governments and ...

The U.S.–China technological rivalry has become a central axis of global economic and geopolitical competition. While the United States continues to lead in frontier innovation—most notably in advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI)—China has consolidated strengths in large-scale implementation, manufacturing capacity, and control over critical segments of global supply chains. These advantages are especially visible in clean energy technologies and in the processin ...

L’arrestation du président vénézuélien Nicolàs Maduro a suscité la sidération internationale en interrogeant sur le respect du droit international ; puis, fort logiquement, cette opération a conduit à maintes analyses tant sur les arguments politiques, sécuritaires et géostratégiques avancés par Washington que sur les ambitions sous-jacentes ayant présidé à cette décision sans réel précédent dans l’histoire récente. Outre la lutte contre le narcotrafic, c’est bien évidemment la ...

The arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolàs Maduro caused international astonishment, raising questions about respect for international law. And, quite logically, the operation led to numerous analyses, both of the political, security and geostrategic arguments put forward by Washington, and of the underlying ambitions behind this decision, which has no real precedent in recent history. In addition to the fight against narco-trafficking, it was of course the oil issue that came first ...

The candidate could not have been more controversial—or more celebrated. Born in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, once ruled by Idi Amin, who famously declared himself “Conqueror of the British Empire” and “King of Scotland,” Zohran Kwama Mamdani, 34, is of Indian descent. His father is an academic, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, his mother, Mira Nair, is an influential filmmaker. Zohran arrived in the USA on a visa at age seven. No doubt the agents of the feared ...

The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean—the most significant since the Cuban Missile Crisis—comes at a moment when a new world order is taking shape, its contours still unclear, and in which the U.S. seeks to be more assertive in the Western Hemisphere. This disposition toward South America and the Caribbean was underscored by the recent publication of the new U.S. National Security Strategy, in which the Monroe Doctrine is explicitly invoked. This Policy Brief situates the devel ...

The return of President Donald Trump to the White House at the start of 2025 was expected to signal an American retreat from international engagement, especially in regions of traditional security interest, such as southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. To the surprise of many observers around the Mediterranean, and perhaps to the dismay of some in the Trump administration’s ideological orbit, this has not happened. If anything, the second half of 2025 has seen a high d ...