Conflicts

The Philippine Drug War was the intensified anti-drug campaign waged by President Rodrigo Duterte's administration from 2016 to 2022, combining aggressive police operations, extrajudicial and vigilante-style killings, mass arrests, and political intimidation directed at suspected drug users and dealers. The government framed the campaign as crime control, while human rights organizations and international investigators documented thousands of deaths in police operations and vigilante killings and described patterns of unlawful killing and impunity.

The War on Terror is the U.S.-led global counterterrorism campaign launched after the September 11 attacks. It is not a single battlefield war; it is a strategic framework linking Afghanistan, Iraq, al-Qaeda, ISIS, drone warfare, intelligence reform, detention policy, homeland security, partner-force operations, and legal debates over the geography and duration of armed conflict. The War on Terror matters because it changed the way states organize security. It encouraged new legal authorities, new intelligence habits, new military technologies, and a new expectation that counterterrorism could be managed globally through networks of force, surveillance, and partnerships. That shift makes the conflict more than a response to one attack; it became a framework for how governments thought about non-state threats across multiple theaters. It also became a test of whether tactical counterterrorism gains could add up to strategic closure. In many cases they did not. Militants were disrupted, but wars persisted, states fragmented, and the political costs of open-ended intervention accumulated over time. The conflict's deeper significance is institutional. The U.S. built habits of emergency authorization, data-driven targeting, and partner dependence that other states studied and sometimes copied. That means the War on Terror is not just a history of operations; it is a history of how security states learned to normalize prolonged exception. The War on Terror is both a set of campaigns and a governing logic with global aftereffects.

Taiwan Strait tensions describe the long-running military-political confrontation among the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and the United States over sovereignty, deterrence, military access, and the future of cross-strait order. The confrontation is not one war but a recurring system of coercive signaling, crisis management, arms development, alliance ambiguity, and contested legitimacy, and it has been a significant point of contention since the end of the Chinese Civil War. It connects civil-war legacy, island defense, missile coercion, naval and air signaling, democratic politics in Taiwan, and the wider Indo-Pacific balance of power. Tensions have escalated in recent years, particularly since the inauguration of Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te in 2024, with increased Chinese military activity, stronger rhetoric from all parties involved, and heightened U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, while mixed signals from the U.S. government and the strategic importance of the strait to global security complicate the situation further.