Since its founding in 1927, the PLA has transformed from a foot-soldier heavy and poorly equipped military into a modern military with growing regional power and developing global reach. However, despite its ability to assert Chinese power within the Indo-Pacific region and protect Chinese interests, the PLA’s road to modernisation is not complete. Beyond the ‘heavy metal’ achievements made in the past decade, other elements of the PLA’s development towards becoming a ‘world-class military’ that is capable of ‘fighting and winning wars’ are still a work in progress.

This winter, Russia massed more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, sparking fears of a wider war with repercussions for the entire European continent. A ground invasion of Ukraine is a war that Russia would likely win — but at a very high cost in blood and treasure.

Based on over a hundred interviews and on secret records of White House–Kremlin contacts, Not One Inch shows how the United States successfully overcame Russian resistance in the 1990s to expand NATO to more than 900 million people. But it also reveals how Washington’s hardball tactics transformed the era between the Cold War and the present day, undermining what could have become a lasting partnership.

In the early nineteenth century, at height of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain twice inflicted preventive violence on a small and ostensibly neutral European state, Denmark. On the first occasion, in 1801, it did so to break up the League of Armed Neutrality. On the second occasion, in 1807, Britain sought to pre-empt the possible seizure of the Danish fleet by Napoleon. Both operations were controversial at home and abroad, especially the latter, which involved the destruction of parts of the city of Copenhagen and considerable loss of civilian life.

Europe’s security landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade amid Russia’s resurgence, mounting European doubts about the long-term reliability of the U.S. security commitment, and Europe’s growing aspiration for strategic autonomy. Could Europeans develop an autonomous defense capacity if the United States withdrew completely from Europe?

Malign manipulation of the information environment is an urgent security threat facing western democracies. This talk examines why and how state and nonstate actors have harnessed emerging technologies – social media platforms in particular – to shape the information environment for strategic ends. Weaponization of disinformation is neither new nor warfare in the traditional sense, but digital aspects in particular have confounded western efforts to manage it.