Bryan Rooney

This report assesses how China may react to expanded or varied U.S. military activities in the Indo-Pacific. It provides a framework of key factors likely to determine Chinese responses and identifies the characteristics of U.S. military activities that may either enhance deterrence of Chinese aggression or increase the risks of an escalatory Chinese reaction.

This report describes a wargame intended to aid U.S. Indo-Pacific Command operational planning by allowing players to explore the extent of operational risk that climate change could impose on the joint force in the Indo-Pacific region in the 2040s.

To prepare for challenges it could face in future decades, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) operates a strategic foresight initiative, Project Evergreen. Researchers designed an analytic game, Paratus Futurum, for the initiative in which players assess demand for USCG missions and the service's capacity to execute them in 2040 and beyond. This report documents the researchers' findings and recommendations for coming iterations of Paratus Futurum.

This report's authors examine the contributions of overseas campaigning instruments to U.S. strategic goals. The authors conducted statistical analyses of the relationships between these tools and deterrence, access and cooperation, and partner stability and developed rough-order-of-magnitude cost estimates for these instruments to provide the foundations of a decision-support tool to inform U.S. Department of Defense campaign planning.

After the Ukraine war ends, U.S.-Russian relations will remain hostile. But future U.S. policymakers will also need to balance competing demands and might therefore consider a peacetime limited less-hardline approach toward Russia. Using four historical case studies, the authors found that such approaches can lead to durable but narrow gains without emboldening the rival. But such policies may not prevent later deterioration of the relationship.

The authors evaluate the potential economic benefits of U.S. alliances and a forward military presence, a topic debated by scholars of grand strategy. A new statistical model provides evidence that U.S. alliances increase bilateral trade in manufactured goods, which has a modest but positive effect on overall U.S. economic welfare. Decisions about U.S. military engagement should be based on a range of factors including such economic benefits.

Strengthening U.S. security relationships is a core element of the Biden administration's foreign policy. But some analysts have argued that these relationships cause the United States to adopt its partners' interests, incentivize allies and partners to engage in reckless behavior, and risk dragging the United States into conflict. Others dismiss these concerns. In this report, RAND researchers assess the evidence for these competing claims.

Some U.S. policymakers are interested in a new approach to the U.S. role in the world: a realist grand strategy of restraint, under which the United States would cooperate more with other powers, reduce its forward military presence, and end some security commitments. The authors explain how U.S. policies toward key regions would change under such a strategy, identify unanswered questions, and offer next steps for developing policy implications.