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Neller emphasized to the Marines that they should remain ready to fight at all times, predicting a "big-ass fight" on the horizon. "I hope I'm wrong, but there's a war coming," Neller said. " ... You're in a fight here, an informational fight, a political fight, by your presence." Neller later told the Marines that he expects the Pacific and Russia to be the service's operational points of focus as the nation looks beyond the fights in the Middle East that have stretched into the better part of two decades.

Russian officials, for their part, have been outspoken in opposing the presence of Marines in Norway and warning of diplomatic repercussions. Though Green did not name Russia, he referred to its displeasure at the Marines' presence nearby. "They don't like the fact that we oppose them, and we like the fact that they don't like the fact that we oppose them," Green said. "Three hundred of us, surrounded by them, we've got them right where we wanted, right? We've done this before."

To most people in the universe, “readiness” is a non-word. But for the military, “readiness” encapsulates an obsession with finding new ways to make service member’s lives suck at all times – because somehow, this will make them prepared to fight China and Russia.

In the minds of many officers and senior enlisted leaders, there is no way they can cancel training exercises to stop troops from getting sick or forgo work parties to make sure empty military installations have their garbage cans emptied and their lawns cut. And God help Pvt. Schmuckatelli, who believes the fact that all barber shops are closed means his command is not going to worry if his hair is a little longer than usual.

the cult of readiness demands that commanders and senior noncommissioned officers laugh in the face of the greatest public health crisis since the 1918 flu pandemic. Damn it, if troops cannot do a simple 30-mile ruck march in arctic conditions and then pass a snap inspection conducted by an anal retentive first sergeant, how the hell are they going to survive the coming Russo-Chinese invasion of the homeland?

One year in, Trump’s much-vaunted national security team has not managed to tame the president or bring him around to their view of America’s leadership role in the world. Instead, it’s a group plagued by insecurity and infighting, publicly undercut by the president and privately often overruled by him. Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, is regularly reported by White House sources to be on his way out, with his demoralized, depleted State Department in outright rebellion. Meanwhile, the brawny military troika of White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general; Defense Secretary James Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general; and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, a serving Army three-star general, has managed to stop the chaos of the administration’s early days while crafting a national security policy that gets more or less solid marks from establishment types in both parties. The problem is, no one’s sure Trump agrees with it.

sanctions remain in place despite, not because of, the White House, and sources tell me Trump personally is not on board with many of the more hawkish measures his team proposes to counter Putin, a fact underscored by his eyebrow-raising signing statement in December objecting to several tough-on-Russia provisions in a defense bill

The language of "principled realism" put forward by McMaster is so un-Trumpian that a top adviser who received a copy told a reporter it was simply “divorced from the reality” of the Trump presidency. “It’s the first time, maybe in history, key advisers have gone into the administration to stop the president, not to enable him,” says Thomas Wright, a Brookings scholar who has emerged as one of the most insightful analysts of Trump’s foreign policy

The Atlantic Ocean circulation that underpins the Gulf Stream, the weather system that brings warm and mild weather to Europe, is at its weakest in more than a millennium, and climate breakdown is the probable cause, according to new data.

Further weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could result in more storms battering the UK, more intense winters and an increase in damaging heatwaves and droughts across Europe.

A weakened Gulf Stream would also raise sea levels on the Atlantic coast of the US, with potentially disastrous consequences.

"We are becoming increasingly certain that the world's marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points," Bruno said, adding, "We really have no power or model to foresee" the impact.

"It's a lot worse than the public thinks,"

China has emerged in recent years, because of its economic ascent, as a neocolonial practitioner of predatory economics, which is sparking a new Great Game in the Indo-Pacific. In the words of former Maldivian Foreign Minister Ahmed Naseem, “What is happening in the Maldives is not just about democracy, it is about peace, security, and stability in the entire Indian Ocean neighborhood.”

India has played a major role in helping build the Maldivian economy, as well as in underwriting political stability in the country. India backed the authoritarian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom for several decades, even sending troops to preempt a 1988 military coup attempt

As has been the case in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, an increasingly powerful and assertive China is melding its Belt and Road Initiative with its global maritime ambitions, throwing cash around to create dependent client states, and brazenly challenging India on New Delhi’s home turf, the Indian Ocean

the grounding of Ever Given also has exposed how the complex ownership structures in global shipping might make it difficult to hold anyone accountable. The Ever Given is operated by Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen Maritime. Evergreen charters the ship from a Japanese firm; a Dubai-based company acts as the agent for the ship in ports; and the ship flies the flag of Panama

Flags of convenience, or open registries, have more lax labor and environmental regulations, and lower thresholds for safety and insurance provisions.

Last summer, the Wakashio, another ship owned by a Japanese firm but flagged to Panama, ran aground in Mauritius, spilling oil into the island’s sensitive marine ecosystem. The fracturing of ownership and operation across different legal jurisdictions and national boundaries also makes it much harder to assign responsibility for accidents such as the grounding of Wakashio and Ever Given.

China's newly-enacted Coast Guard Law allows the agency to “take all necessary measures, including the use of weapons, when national sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction are being illegally infringed upon by foreign organizations or individuals at sea." This includes the use of small arms, based on the "nature, degree and urgency" of the case and the personnel's "reasonable judgement." In the event of serious non-compliance, the use of deck guns would be permitted.  The law also empowers the CCG to halt construction or destroy foreign structures on Chinese-claimed land features, like those on the Philippine-occupied Pag-asa Island and Second Thomas Shoal. It gives the CCG broad discretion to set up temporary exclusion zones and to board and inspect foreign vessels within Chinese-claimed waters. 

As China claims the overwhelming majority of the South China Sea as its own, including large segments of the Philippine EEZ, it has significant implications for Philippine fishermen and vessel operators. 

Russia's worst-kept secret is its increasingly heavy reliance on private security contractors—really, mercenaries—to maintain a Russia-favorable global status quo and to undermine its competitors' interests. This reliance on mercenaries stems from a known capability gap

Russia's military has strictly limited ability to project ground power worldwide. It has almost no organic ability to project and sustain ground power more than a few hundred kilometers beyond its own borders. Russian strategic lift is anemic compared to Soviet-era lift. Available forces are often tied down in one of the many frozen conflicts that ring Russia's western and southern borders.

Even a strong de facto dictator like Vladimir Putin cannot deploy one-year conscripts beyond Russia's borders without incurring significant political risk

the full weight of American emissions past and present are contributing to the floods, heat waves, and other disasters that disproportionately ravage the Global South. The U.S. owes it to the world to make right on the carbon pollution that allowed it to reach the pinnacle of the world as the richest nation on Earth.

Putting meaningful resources into the Green Climate Fund, the United Nations grantmaking body that furnishes capital for international climate action, is one avenue to meet the U.S. climate debt. The new report suggests $8 billion. For context, John Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate czar, promised $2 billion. That would only fulfill the nation’s existing pledges.

Research shows that U.S. companies have reduced their emissions and pollution at home by offshoring manufacturing to poorer nations with looser regulations. In the already stifling heat in places like India and Bangladesh, that offshored pollution can become more deadly. American consumption has also created environmental crises abroad. The U.S. is responsible for more plastic pollution than any other country, which can harm marine ecosystems already under stress due to hotter waters and ocean acidification.

Many political scientists like political behavior to fall into neat boxes, whether those be typologies cleanly defining terms or spreadsheets in which every row contains a discrete observation. They recognize that there’s always phenomena that won’t fit, cleanly, but those can be the basis of future research—or relegated to the “error term,” the leftover bin for the facts that theory doesn’t explain.

When the implicit definition of democracy is democracy with American characteristics, the exceptions don’t even register as exceptions—until some event so far out of the comfort zone of mostly white, upper middle-class academics forces us to confront them as if they were brand new.

The Center for Systemic Peace’s widely used Polity scores, for instance, give the United States between a +8 and +10 from 1809 to 2016—a stable, indeed maximally scoring, democracy. That period includes the Civil War, when the losing side launched a violent conflict rather than accept the election results.

Global shipping firms under pressure to cut carbon emissions are experimenting with an age-old technology: sails to harness ocean winds and reduce reliance on costly fuels.

starting January 1, levels of air-polluting sulphur in marine fuel must be below 0.5 percent, according to new International Maritime Organisation standards — a sharp drop from today’s 3.5%

“Our 136-metre ship costs 30% more than current ships,” Zanuttini said, “but we compensate by using 80 to 90% less fuel.”Wind-powered vessels are also slower — a hard sell for some shipowners and clients who want their raw materials and merchandise to move as quick as possible.

In Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell, American force is one of many foreign policy tools that can and should be bent toward civilian protection and atrocity prevention globally; for many of her critics from the left, American force is to be dismantled; for many of her critics from the right, American force should serve core national security interests and nothing more.

In A Problem from Hell, Power argues that US policymakers did not act to stop genocide because they did not want to; in her memoir, she relates how a room full of civil servants whose thinking had been shaped by her first book found themselves in a years-long limbo over complex human disasters in Syria and Libya. Together, these cases constitute a real-time test of the “toolbox” of interventions Power first proposed at the end of A Problem from Hell; together, they reveal both the problem at the heart of her theory of foreign policy, and the still all-too-slender slate of effective policy alternatives to force across the political spectrum.

Libya and Syria serve as parallel cases through which questions about the US’s role in the world are refracted. The standard narrative is as follows: the US intervened in Libya under the guise of preventing mass atrocities, this intervention ended first in regime change and then in a failed state, and Libyans now live in enduring danger; the US did not intervene to protect civilians during the Syrian Civil War, war snarled the full region into conflict, and today Syrian civilians continue to die in unspeakable ways and uncounted numbers. At each stage, the narrative is in fact more complicated, particularly if we begin by asking whether the US did in fact prevent mass atrocity in Libya and end by noting the U.S. did in fact intervene in Syria in multiple ways, but the broad lines are still instructive for understanding public debate. Would Libyans have been better off in the absence of an American-led intervention, or would they have been worse off? Would Syrians have been better off for U.S. intervention, or would they have been worse off for it?

geographic advantage has helped make Killybegs the largest fishing port in Ireland. Last year, its trawlermen landed almost 200,000 tonnes of fish, helping to feed a burgeoning national export market for seafood. A large part of this catch is found around 420 kilometers north in the Rockall Trough, a remote stretch of the Atlantic between Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland. Here, the fish gather in vast schools, especially near the region’s namesake pinnacle: Rockall, a tiny, uninhabited, jet-black outcrop of granite crowned by a pointillist splattering of guano.

This unassuming speck on the map was thrust into the spotlight this past summer when the Scottish government accused Irish trawlermen of overfishing in its territorial waters, before announcing that its coast guard would board any Irish fishing boat venturing into a 19-kilometer zone around the islet of Rockall. Trawlermen from the town of Killybegs, who have been casting their nets in those waters since the late 1980s, were dumbfounded.

As Edinburgh and Dublin clash in distant boardrooms, Irish trawlermen continue to drop nets around Rockall, now under the watchful eye of Scottish enforcement vessels. For the moment, the outcrop’s status remains uncertain. But with Brexit threatening to cut off access to these waters to European Union trawlermen, Killybegs’s fishing community is set to be the first casualty in a maritime legal dispute decades in the making.