Good scholarship doesn’t need to fit within a 2×2 matrix, but it sure helps make sense of things when it does. It’s in this spirit of conceptual clarity that I developed the diagram below depicting ...

States that seek to expand their territories have three basic options: (i) brute force, (ii) coercion, or (iii) fait accompli. In a brute force scenario, the aggressor first defeats the target state ...

The threat of territorial conquest by fait accompli is one of the central problem statements in U.S. defense planning. As Elbridge Colby writes, “The toughest and most important challenge for U.S.