Press | 2026

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.

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

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

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).

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…

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.

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.

The Clements Center’s Defense Technology Fellows Program welcomes its first cohort this fall, connecting students in engineering, science and mathematics to defense companies, military commands and research labs that surround the UT campus. This fall, the Clements Center for National Security welcomes the inaugural class of its Defense Technology Fellows Program, a yearlong undergraduate fellowship…

In this new Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History article, Dr. Jennifer Yip (Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore; former Clements Center and Asia Policy Program Postdoctoral Fellow) traces how military supply has evolved from armies living off the land to industrial-era logistics networks spanning the globe.

UT Austin is making one of its largest investments in national security education in recent years — welcoming more than 20 new faculty and launching a Master of National Security and a Bachelor of Arts in Strategy and Statecraft. The expansion draws talent from Harvard, the CIA, RAND, and the U.S. Army, cementing the University’s…

Tom Luce, a Dallas attorney and one of Texas’s most influential civic leaders, passed away over the weekend. Luce was a former Clements Center Board member, and his work spanned public education reform, state government, and national policy. He advised Ross Perot Sr. for decades, served as chief of staff of the Texas Select Committee…

The Clements Center held its 12th annual Summer Seminar in History and Statecraft from July 12 to 17 in Beaver Creek, Colorado, bringing advanced doctoral students together for a week of seminars, discussion, and networking with leading scholars and policymakers. This year’s highly selective program comprised 21 students from universities in the U.S. and abroad,…

Robert D. Kaplan, Distinguished Senior Lecturer, The School of Civic Leadership, reviews two new books on great-power competition in The Wall Street Journal: Brendan Simms’s “The Return of the Great Powers” and Odd Arne Westad’s “The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings From History.”

The University of Texas at Austin has opened applications for the 2027–28 Harrington Faculty Fellows Program and dedicated this year’s competition to national security. The selected fellows will spend the academic year in residence at UT Austin, affiliated with the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law.  The Harrington Faculty Fellows Program, coordinated by the…

Nine students spent two weeks in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia examining the history, geopolitics, and security challenges of a region at the front edge of NATO’s collective defense. The Clements Center for National Security concluded its Summer Beyond Borders program this June, bringing nine students to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia for two weeks of lectures,…

For four weeks, UT Austin students studied the transatlantic alliance in the lecture halls, the war rooms, and on the beaches of Normandy. From a seminar room at King’s College London to the chalk tunnels beneath Dover Castle and the bluff above Omaha Beach, 20 UT Austin students spent four weeks this spring tracing the…

UT Austin students spent four weeks in South Korea and Japan tracing the history, alliances, and security challenges that define America’s role in the Indo-Pacific. From the Asan Institute in Seoul to the cliffs of Okinawa and the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, UT Austin students spent four weeks this spring studying the role of…

The sixth Texas National Security Forum brought together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners at The University of Texas at Austin in November 2025 to focus on the instruments of American power beyond the military.

Chanel Williams (MNS ‘28) joins the LBJ School of Public Affairs this August as part of the inaugural cohort of the Master of National Security program. The new program brings together students who are preparing for impactful careers in defense, intelligence, homeland security, and foreign policy. 

The United States Naval Academy has appointed Daniel Chardell, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Clements Center’s 2025–2026 class, as Assistant Professor of History. He will specialize in post-1945 U.S. foreign relations. Chardell’s scholarship examines U.S. foreign relations, the Middle East, and world order. His dissertation draws on archival research in Arabic and English, using the…

President Jim Davis appointed Dr. Paul Edgar as the Executive Director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin, effective May 15, 2026. Dr. Edgar brings to the role more than two decades of military service, nearly a decade of administration and teaching at the University…

Kaplan argues that the United States is most vulnerable in conflicts that fall between quick strikes and total war, where objectives remain unclear and escalation risks spiral. Using Iran as a case study, he warns that these drawn-out, ambiguous wars often trap policymakers in costly, open-ended commitments with no decisive outcome.

In a piece for Caracas Chronicles, Golding writes about the potential new future of the Venezuelan oil industry in light of reforms approved last week to open it to private capital and the historical precedent it rests on.

Joel Robuck was a treasured member of the Clements Center Advisory Board whose steady support and deep commitment helped shape our work for years. His genuine love for students, especially our May Term alumni, was evident in the time and energy he invested in them. Joel was an astute observer of America’s diplomatic and military affairs, and he was…