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Strategic Blind Spots
As the United States pursues its vision for a more stable, secure international order abroad, challenges, illicit trades, and potential conflicts have emerged under the radar of Washington and its partners. What are these “blind spots” in foreign and defense policy that have the potential to jeopardize local stability and human security, as well as the interests of the U.S. and its partners?
This portfolio explores specific challenges and flash points that have the potential to fuel conflict and insecurity and to threaten core U.S. interests abroad. The portfolio analyzes and shines light on emerging conflicts, illicit trades, actors’ incentives structures and behavioral patterns, and shifting defense priorities that can fuel and shape power vacuums over time. The Blind Spots Portfolio includes two projects, the Special Project on the Captagon Trade and the Special Project on Post-Withdrawal Security Landscapes.
The Strategic Blind Spots portfolio is directed by Caroline Rose.
Strategic Blind Spots Initiatives
Special Project on the Captagon Trade
The Special Project on the Captagon Trade was created and is led by Director Caroline Rose.
In recent years, a spike in the production, trade, and consumption of the amphetamine-type stimulant Captagon has introduced a new challenge to public health, stability, and human security in the Mediterranean-Gulf zone. The drug’s evolving formula, combined with participation from adversarial actors aligned with the Syrian regime and Iran, exacerbates insecurity and ultimately raises the risk of conflict in the region.
Syria’s decade-long civil war has enabled armed actors, including violent and organized crime groups, to profiteer from various illicit markets – a dynamic like those in Afghanistan, Brazil, and Colombia. The forecast for the impacts of the Captagon trade is serious; the expansion of production and trafficking coupled with the Syrian government’s treatment of people who use drugs and a lack of public health provisions paints a poor picture of Syria moving forward.
The Captagon trade has emerged as a major transnational challenge in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. Millions of pills continue to flood overland and maritime ports across the Middle East, southern Europe, and even as far as East Asia, pointing to growing production capacity, sophisticated smuggling tactics, and emerging demand markets. There is also growing evidence that actors aligned with the Syrian government, such as Hezbollah, Iran-backed militias, and others, have participated in the production and smuggling of the drug. These new realities have given rise to new concerns and questions about the Captagon trade’s implications for regional law enforcement, health care, security, and geopolitics.
The Captagon Trade Interactive Map
The Captagon Trade Interactive Map is the most comprehensive open-source data resource for all interdictions related to illicit flows of the amphetamine-type stimulant, captagon. Launched in October 2024, the Captagon Interactive Map pulls from open-source data compiled by the New Lines Institute Capatagon Trade Project and Observatory for Political and Economic Networks that catalogues seizures, arrests, violent clashes, laboratory seizures, and other captagon-related interventions. This tool can help support researchers identify how the captagon trade has grown in the Mediterranean-Gulf zone, in addition to capturing new patterns in production, trafficking, and consumption.Project on Post-Withdrawal Security Landscapes
As the U.S. and its partners reevaluate their defensive footprint in active and latent conflict zones and pivot efforts toward great-power competition, policymakers are bracing for a series of partial and total military drawdowns across the Mediterranean-Gulf zone. In the wake of a disorderly and sudden withdrawal process from Afghanistan, this project will confront the important question of what a “responsible” withdrawal looks like; how can the U.S. and its partners mitigate risks for local security partners and communities while achieving their aims?
This project will explore the strategic, operational, and tactical elements of military withdrawal, assessing conflict zones’ security landscapes and identifying the “blind spots” that could jeopardize responsible withdrawal processes and create future power vacuums that challenge U.S. interests.
This project will additionally assess how competing actors conduct partial and full military withdrawals in conflict zones and areas of competition, delivering in-depth assessments of the post-withdrawal security landscape and risks to U.S. interests and local human security.
Strategic Blind Spots Latest
Submissions
The New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy publishes work that combines geopolitical insight with subject-matter expertise. New Lines Institute publications examine tactical developments involving regimes, nonstate actors, local politics, ideologies, etc. Our work situates them in the strategic context of macro-level factors such as geography, populations, economics, military power, history, and culture. All our content must demonstrate analytical empathy and is geared toward advancing the cause of human security and stabilization and development on our planet. That said, we do not publish “op-ed” pieces, polemical content, or activist/advocacy work.
We welcome contributions from diverse experts with various sub-specialties to ensure that we consistently produce the highest-quality product. Our team firmly believes that expertise exists across the political spectrum and disciplinary fields; the key is to help our authors showcase it without indulging in partisan discussions. We expect our authors to focus on the how, why and (most importantly) the what next because our audience is already very familiar with the who, what, where, and when of the subjects we tackle.