As the year winds down, I’ve been thinking a lot about where we’re headed next — not in a sensational way, but in a practical one. People ask me all the time, “What do you think 2026 is going to look like?”
And my answer usually disappoints them. Because I don’t think it’s going to be defined by one big event. I think it’s going to be defined by pressure. Pressure on systems. Pressure on governments. Pressure on families. Pressure on people who are already stretched thin. And when enough pressure builds up in enough places at the same time, things start to move — sometimes in ways no one intended.

The World Feels Unsettled Because It Is

One thing that’s hard to ignore right now is how much unrest there is everywhere you look. More than half the countries on Earth are dealing with some form of conflict — not always open war, but violence, insurgency, civil disorder, or proxy fighting. That’s not normal, and it’s not sustainable. What’s different now is that most of these conflicts aren’t clean or contained. They overlap. They spill. They bleed into other regions and other systems — economics, energy, migration, politics. It creates a sense that nothing is fully stable anymore, even if daily life looks mostly normal.

Ukraine 

I keep coming back to Ukraine, not because it’s the only war that matters, but because it shows us how modern conflict actually works. I’ve been there. I’ve talked to people who are living through it, not watching it on a screen. What strikes you immediately is how normal life continues even under extraordinary strain. Russia has taken ground. That’s true. But it has paid an astonishing price to do it. Hundreds of thousands of casualties. Massive equipment losses. A constant drain on manpower and money. And increasingly, a war economy that’s cannibalizing the rest of the country. At the same time, Ukraine has focused on something far less visible than territory: Russia’s ability to sustain the fight. Oil facilities. Logistics. Supply chains. These are slow, unglamorous targets — but they matter. The lesson here isn’t who’s winning today. The lesson is that wars are no longer decided quickly, and they’re rarely decided cleanly. They grind. They exhaust. And they punish countries that mistake endurance for strength.

Iran

Iran is another place where pressure is building. Economically, things are very bad. Prices have skyrocketed. Infrastructure is failing. Water shortages alone would destabilize any country, let alone one already struggling under sanctions and mismanagement. Socially, the protests are telling. They aren’t just symbolic. They’re persistent, and they’re widespread. When people chant that they can’t all be arrested, that tells you something important has shifted. History suggests that governments under that kind of internal strain don’t usually become more restrained abroad. They become more unpredictable. That’s why I don’t think the tension between Iran and Israel is finished — regardless of what gets said publicly.

Israel

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Breaking news this Saturday: three Americans are dead in Syria tonight, three more are wounded, and the attack—described by U.S. Central Command as an ambush carried out by a lone ISIS gunman—has once again dragged the Syrian war back into the American consciousness for a few brief hours, which is usually all the time the public gives it before the news cycle moves on and the families are left to carry the weight alone.

CENTCOM says two of the dead were U.S. service members and one was an American civilian contractor, and that the attacker was engaged and killed as well, with names being withheld until next of kin are notified, which is the right thing to do; but even with those official facts in hand, I want to slow the pace down a little bit and do what I always try to do here—put this in context—because in a place like Syria, the story you get in the headline is almost never the story that explains why this happened.

I’m not interested in reporting tragedy like it’s a scoreboard, and I’m not interested in repeating a paragraph of breaking news without the background that makes it intelligible; I spent eight years in the military, and I’ve spent more than twenty years following the U.S. military across the globe—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria included, with more than a dozen trips into Afghanistan, roughly fifteen into Iraq, and seven or so into Syria—so when Americans die in a place most people couldn’t find on a map, I feel a responsibility to show you what the map actually means.

The desert isn’t empty—ISIS hides in the “nothing”

The reported location of the attack is Palmyra—Palmira on some maps—an ancient city in central Syria that sits on the edge of a brutal expanse of desert, the kind of wide open, sun-blasted country where outsiders assume nothing lives and nothing happens, when in reality it’s exactly the kind of terrain insurgents love because “nothing” is a perfect disguise, a perfect place to move, cache weapons, blend into small villages, disappear into wadis, and wait for opportunities.

Palmyra also sits inside territory controlled by Syria’s new administration under Ahmed al-Sharaa, and if that name makes you pause, it should, because this is where Syrian politics gets complicated in the way only Syria can do: al-Sharaa rose through jihadist ranks, he has a history tied to insurgent warfare against Americans in Iraq, he was captured and held for years, and he later returned to Syria and consolidated power with strong Turkish backing—so when you hear phrases like “new Syrian administration” or “transitional government,” don’t imagine a Western-style democracy that suddenly appeared out of the sand; imagine a patchwork of militias, alliances of convenience, old enemies wearing new uniforms, and a leadership class that wants international legitimacy while carrying a past that cannot be scrubbed clean with a new suit and a new flag.

Now layer on top of that the reality that ISIS is not gone from Syria, not even close.

U.S. estimates have long suggested there are still roughly 2,000 to 3,000 ISIS fighters operating in and around the central Syrian desert, and there are far more than that if you include facilitators, family networks, financiers, and the enormous number of ISIS-linked detainees and relatives held in camps and makeshift prisons; and while that fight has mostly slipped out of the American public’s view, it continues quietly, relentlessly, week after week, because the moment pressure is relieved in a place like this, the violence doesn’t fade—it regroups.

Why American troops are still there—despite everything

The United States currently has about 900 troops in Syria, a number that matters because it tells you how thin the margin is between “containment” and “collapse,” especially when the enemy has deep local roots and decades of practice living off the land and off the grievances of the people around them; and those American troops are there for one primary purpose: to keep a lid on ISIS so we don’t wake up one day to another wave of mass executions, terror-state governance, and regional destabilization that forces the world back into a far more expensive war.

That’s the mission, and it’s not abstract; when ISIS surged the last time, the human cost was staggering, and it wasn’t paid by politicians or pundits—it was paid by Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish fighters, civilians, and yes, Americans too—and the reason our presence in Syria still functions as a deterrent is that in a powder keg region, a small, capable American footprint has a way of discouraging ambitious actors from taking the final step that turns instability into open war.

But here is the part that doesn’t get said out loud very often: the mission in Syria is increasingly tangled up in partnerships that are, at best, uneasy and, at worst, morally and strategically risky.