Today, Frank Dikötter describes the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and the steps the US and its allies must continue to take to counter the aggressive aims of this regime; Rose Gottemoeller explores how new military technologies are changing the logic of nuclear deterrence; and Michael McFaul compiles the political, military, and technological evidence that, more than four years in, Ukraine is winning its defensive war against Russia.
Confronting and Competing with China
Senior Fellow Frank Dikötter, a renowned historian of modern China, joins Uncommon Knowledge to discuss his new book, Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity with host Peter M. Robinson. Drawing from tightly controlled Chinese Communist Party archives and Soviet Comintern documents, Dikötter systematically dismantles decades of romanticized Western myths—originally popularized by journalist Edgar Snow—surrounding the rise of Mao Zedong. He details how the Chinese Communist Party was a deeply unpopular, marginal movement that was heavily armed by Joseph Stalin rather than gaining organic peasant support, eventually taking the country through the devastation of civil war and the Red Army’s strategic handover of Manchuria. Shifting to modern-day geopolitics, the conversation explores how the “enforced amnesia” around this history shapes the systemic constraints of China's current single-party state. Dikötter analyzes the vulnerabilities behind the CCP’s economic facade, Xi Jinping's relentless military purges, the critical importance of arming Taiwan, and why the West must counter a regime built on deep-seated political paranoia. Watch or listen here.
Arms Control
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“Countries have long assumed that the possession of nuclear weapons was the surest guarantee of their security,” Research Fellow Rose Gottemoeller writes at Foreign Affairs. But ongoing wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have revealed the limits of this logic, according to the arms control expert. Nuclear powers Russia and Israel have both experienced attacks deep inside their territory, demonstrating that attackers are unhindered and undeterred by target states’ possession of nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan also traded serious blows in 2025. “In all these cases,” Gottemoeller says, “the possibility of nuclear escalation and retribution did not prevent conventional and hybrid warfare.” While traditional nuclear deterrence still holds in major great-power relationships (such as the US-Russian case), Gottemoeller explains that the proliferation of new and cheap military technologies has opened the door to new types of conventional attacks on nuclear states—bringing into question, for currently non-nuclear powers, the value of gaining nuclear weapons in the first place. Read more here.
Russia’s War on Ukraine
Today, “in the fifth year of Putin’s barbaric invasion, the assumption that time is on Russia’s side seems to be increasingly inaccurate,” Senior Fellow Michael McFaul argues in this viral post at his Substack. “The longer this war drags on, the more likely it is that time may, instead, be on Ukraine’s side.” The distinguished scholar explains that Putin failed to achieve regime change in Ukraine and ended up galvanizing Ukrainian identity with his invasion. Ukrainian defense innovations slowed Russian advances and now increasingly enable counteroffensives against the invading force. Ukraine has also developed the capability to strike deep inside Russia, imposing significant costs. So, McFaul concludes, “Ukraine will survive this war as a pro-European independent democracy, with most of its territory governed from Kyiv rather than Moscow.” But the “final contours” of the end to the conflict “are still not yet defined.” Read more here.
Energy Policy
In today’s dangerous era of great-power competition, how can the United States turn its extraordinary energy abundance into a decisive strategic advantage? In this short video, Senior Fellow Adm. James O. Ellis Jr. argues that America, now the world’s top producer and exporter of oil and natural gas, must move beyond risk aversion and actively wield its energy resources, technologies, and know-how to enhance national security and support allies around the world. By embracing pragmatic policies that transcend politics—from boosting domestic liquified natural gas and oil production to advancing nuclear and geothermal innovation—Ellis says the US can forge powerful partnerships and secure prosperity and stability for the free world. Watch here.
Politics and Foreign Policy
Visiting Fellow Matt Turpin writes in his weekly China Articles newsletter about the threat that domestic partisanship can pose to effective national security and technology policymaking. Last Friday, he reports, “the Commerce Department imposed an ‘emergency’ export control directive on [leading AI firm] Anthropic’s latest models,” which led to Anthropic’s suspending “all access to their newest models everywhere” to ensure compliance. “The timing and the circumstances of the suspension don’t inspire confidence, especially after the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon earlier this year and the way in which the courts rejected Secretary Hegseth’s designation of the company as a ‘supply chain risk,’” the national security scholar writes. If partisan motivations played any role in the export control decision, Turpin argues, that would be “really bad for a technology sector that is so critical to the country.” Read more here.
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