Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 157 - April 12, 2026
Two things before we begin.
The Leipzig drone. In our last special edition of Strategic Brief we looked at the explosive drone that went off at Leipzig airport on the night of August 4. The angle was not the attack but the faulty detonator, and what a botched strike reveals about the defender’s dilemma when the security guarantee behind the alliance starts to fray.
Coming in October. We are launching a new paid subscriber-only strand: on-the-ground reportage on contested infrastructure, the ports, undersea cables, and logistics hubs that have quietly become the front line of great-power competition.
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Forget the decline talk.
By almost every measure that decides who runs the century, the West is not losing to China and Russia. It is winning, and comfortably.
The latest Foreign Affairs Magazine essay lays this out with numbers hard to argue with, and it reaches a bracing conclusion: the problem was never the gap. The problem is that the winning side does not act like it knows it is winning.
That should be the end of the story. It is not.
Because the argument hides one fragile assumption that, if it fails, brings the whole thing down. And because there is a second story unfolding right now in Beijing that the essay barely notices, one that flips the picture in a way its author would not welcome.
Both are where our reading breaks from the original. Both are below.
🔒 The rest of this piece is for paying subscribers.
Inside: the numbers behind the West’s quiet dominance, the single assumption the whole case rests on, and how China’s latest move rewrites who is really on the defensive.
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