InterAgency Journal 15-2

The through line in the Fall 2025 edition of the InterAgency Journal is the strain placed on professional ethics, institutional trust, and leadership judgment in an era of strategic competition, domestic polarization, and accelerating complexity. The authors in this issue confront that strain from multiple vantage points—strategic communication, intelligence, climate, civil-military relations, command and control, and ethics education—offering readers both sober warning and practical avenues for renewal.

This edition of the IAJ includes subjects ranging from an examination of NATO’s public diplomacy, politicization of intelligence, climate change, civil-military relations, leadership theory, to finally a three-part series of articles on military ethics and leader development.

Taken together, the contributions in this issue underscore a simple but demanding proposition: in a world of fractured narratives, contested expertise, and accelerating change, ethical leadership and interagency cooperation remain the decisive advantages of free societies.

Finally, this volume concludes with three book reviews: The Impossible Mission: The Office of Security Cooperation and the U.S. Forces Drawdown in Iraq, Implementing U.S. Arms Control Agreements: A View from the Trenches, and Bioethics and Medicine: A Short Companion.

The Simons Center thanks all its contributors for their scholarship and its readers for their continued engagement with the Simons Center’s mission.

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