Press

In War on the Rocks, Clements Center assistant professor Iskander Rehman revisits Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus — once the most widely read book in 18th-century France after the Bible, now largely forgotten — and makes the case that it’s still the sharpest manual we have on the pathologies of concentrated power.

Robert D. Kaplan, Clements Center Visiting Faculty Fellow, writes in The New York Times on the long history of American misjudgment about China.

Joseph Ledford, Clements Center Director of Research and Assistant Professor of Security Studies, has published “Americas First, Authoritarians Last: The Trump Corollary as a Great-Power Competition Strategy” in The Future of Conservative Internationalism, Volume VII, the July 2026 essay collection from the Reagan Institute Strategy Group.

Jesse C. Johnson, Clements Center Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Government at UT Austin, and Yasuki Kudo, Clements Center Graduate Fellow, published “Foreign policy alignment in asymmetric alliances” in International Interactions, co-authored with Andrew G. Long (Kansas State University).

Longhorns gathered at Mike Myers Stadium to climb the steps in honor of the victims and first responders on the 25th anniversary of attacks.

Sept. 11 fell right in the middle of Dirk Ringgenberg’s 24-year service with the U.S. Army. 

In UnHerd, Robert D. Kaplan, Clements Center Visiting Faculty Fellow and Distinguished Senior Lecturer in the School of Civic Leadership, argues that 9/11 was “one of the great head fakes of history.” The attacks pulled the United States into a generational struggle in the Middle East during the same decade that China built its navy…

Recipients of the Clements Center’s Student Professional Development Fund spent the 2025–26 academic year and the following summer working in congressional offices, think tanks, international organizations, and intensive research programs in seven countries, from Washington, D.C., and Honolulu in the United States to Armenia, Albania, Kosovo, Panama, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The fund supports…

With President Donald Trump signaling intent to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un again by year’s end, Distinguished National Security Fellow Gen. (Ret.) Vincent K. Brooks (Ret.) joined Victor Cha and Mark Lippert on The Capital Cable.

Marking the Atlantic Charter’s 85th anniversary, Charlie Laderman revisits the 1941 Roosevelt–Churchill meeting at Placentia Bay and asks how much charters and declarations really matter in an era of great-power conflict.